2018s
Different ways of knowing
The Book of Life from the School of Life is an ever-expanding treasure trove of wisdom. In this entry, entitled Knowing Things Intellectually vs. Knowing Them Emotionally the focus is on different ways of how we ‘know’ things:
[…]
Therapy builds on the idea of a return to live feelings. It’s only when we’re properly in touch with feelings that we can correct them with the help of our more mature faculties – and thereby address the real troubles of our adult lives. The article has threaded through it the example of having an abusive relationship as a child. Thankfully, I didn’t experience that, but it does make a great suggestion that finding the source of one’s anxiety and fully experiencing the emotion at its core might be helpful.
Slack's bait-and-switch?
I remember the early days of Twitter. It was great, as there were many different clients, both native apps and web-based ones. There was lots of innovation in the ecosystem and, in fact, the ‘pull-to-refresh’ feature that’s now baked into every social app on a touchscreen device was first created for a third-party Twitter client.
Twitter then, of course, once it had reached critical mass and mainstream adoption, killed off that third party ecosystem to ‘own the experience’. It looks like Slack, the messaging app for teams, is doing something similar by turning off support for IRC and XMPP gateways:
Slack’s business model is to record everything said in a workspace and then to sell you access to their record of your conversations.
They’re a typical walled garden, information silo or Siren Server
So they have to close everything off, to make sure that people can’t extract their conversations out of the silo.
We saw it with Google, who built Gtalk on XMPP and even federated with other XMPP servers, only to later stop federation and XMPP support in favour of trying to herd the digital cattle into the Google+ enclosure.
Facebook, who also built their chat app on XMPP at first allowed 3rd party XMPP clients to connect and then later dropped interoperability.
Twitter, although not using or supporting XMPP, had a vibrant 3rd party client ecosystem which they killed off once they felt big enough.
Slack, like so many others before them, pretend to care about interoperability, opening up just so slightly, so that they can lure in people with the promise of “openness”, before eventually closing the gate once they’ve achieved sufficient size and lock-in. I’m definitely on the side of open source people/projects here, but it’s worth noting that the author uses the post to promote the solution he’s been developing. And why not?
There’s a comment below the post which makes, I think, a good point:
So I don’t think it’s as malicious as the author implies (Bait and Switch) as that requires some nefarious planning and foresight. I think it’s more likely to be business/product evolution, which still sucks for adopters and the free net, but not as maleficent. Just, unfortunately, the nature of early tech businesses maturing into Just Another Business. Indeed.
Source: Opkode
The security guide as literary genre
I stumbled across this conference presentation from back in January by Jeffrey Monro, “a doctoral student in English at the University of Maryland, College Park, where [he studies] the textual and material histories of media technologies”.
It’s a short, but very interesting one, taking a step back from the current state of play to ask what we’re actually doing as a society.
So Monro is thinking about these security guides as a kind of ‘literary genre’:
We live in a digital world where everyone’s seemingly agitated and angry, all of the time:
Source: Jeffrey Moro
Memento mori
As I’ve mentioned before on Thought Shrapnel, next to my bed I have a memento mori, an object that reminds me that one day I will die.
My friend Ian O’Byrne had some sad news last week: his grandmother died. However, in an absolutely fantastic and very well-written post he wrote in the aftermath, he mentioned how meditating regularly on death, and having a memento mori has really helped him to live his life to the fullest.
Ian suggests some alternatives:
Back to Ian’s article and he turns to the Stoic philosopher Epictetus for some advice:
Source: W. Ian O’Byrne
Microcast #005
[audio src=“http://188.166.96.48/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/episode-005.mp3”][/audio]
Thinking through an approach to building Project MoodleNet that came to me this weekend, using Google search, Amazon filtering, and the Pinterest browser button as mental models.
Links:
Issue #295: A wee problem...
The latest issue of the newsletter hit inboxes earlier today!
💥 Read
🔗 Subscribe
Living an antifragile life
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s new book is out, which made me think about his previous work, Antifragile (which I enjoyed greatly).
As Shane Parrish quotes in a 2014 article on the subject, Taleb defines antifragility in the following way:
Parrish quotes Buster Benson who boils Taleb’s book down to one general, underlying principle:
Source: Farnam Street
The end/beginning
“Often when you think you’re at the end of something, you’re at the beginning of something else."
(Fred Rogers)
Archives of Radical Philosophy
A quick one to note that the entire archive (1972-2018) of Radical Philosophy is now online. It describes itself as a “UK-based journal of socialist and feminist philosophy” and there’s articles in there from Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, and Richard Rorty.
Source: Open Culture
Do the tools you use matter?
An interesting post from Austin Kleon on whether tools matter. It was prompted by the image accompanying this post, which met with some objections when he shared it with others:
If you are just starting off and I tell you exactly how I work, right down to the brand of pen and notebook, I am, in a some small sense, robbing you of the experience of finding your own materials and your own way of working. It’s been interesting seeing Bryan Mathers' journey over the last five years. I’ve seen him go from using basic apps which work ‘just fine’ to reaching the limits of those and having to upgrade to more powerful stuff. That’s a voyage of discovery, but along the way it’s absolutely useful to find out what other people use.
Kleon points out that we can do better than tool-related questions:
Note to self: update the version of this I did back in 2011.
Source: Austin Kleon
Is your smartphone a very real part of who you are?
I really enjoy Aeon’s articles, and probably should think about becoming a paying subscriber. They make me think.
This one is about your identity and how much of it is bound up with your smartphone:
This is known as the ‘extended mind thesis’.
Source: Aeon
Microcast #004
[audio src=“http://188.166.96.48/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/microcast-004.mp3”][/audio] Is it really a ‘skills gap’ that we should be talking about? What’s the real problem here?
Links:
Masterpieces
“Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
(Virginia Woolf)
Microcast #003
[audio src=“http://188.166.96.48/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/microcast-003.mp3”][/audio] What technologies are going to be used with Project MoodleNet?
Links:
30,000 hours of sleep
“Those who research world-class performance focus only on what students do in the gym or track or practice room. Everyone focuses on the most obvious, measurable forms of work and tries to make these more effective and more productive. They don’t ask whether there are other ways to improve performance, and improve your life.
This is how we’ve come to believe that world-class performance comes after 10,000 hours of practice. But that’s wrong. It comes after 10,000 hours of practice, 12,500 hours of deliberate rest, and 30,000 hours of sleep.”
(Alex Soojung-Kim Pang)
Teaching kids about computers and coding
Not only is Hacker News a great place to find the latest news about tech-related stuff, it’s also got some interesting ‘Ask HN’ threads sourcing recommendations from the community.
This particular one starts with a user posing the question:
Please share what tools & approaches you use - it may Scratch, Python, any kids specific like Linux distros, Raspberry Pi or recent products like Lego Boost… Or your experiences with them.. thanks. Like sites such as Reddit and Stack Overflow, responses are voted up based on their usefulness. The most-upvoted response was this one:
I approached it this way, I bought a book on Scratch Jr so I could get up to speed on it. I walked her through a few of the basics, and then I just let her take over after that.
One other programming related activity we have done is the Learning Resources Code & Go Robot Mouse Activity. She has a lot of fun with this as you have a small mouse you program with simple directions to navigate a maze to find the cheese. It uses a set of cards to help then grasp the steps needed. I switch to not using the cards after a while. We now just step the mouse through the maze manually adding steps as we go.
One other activity to consider is the robot turtles board game. This teaches some basic logic concepts needed in programming.
For an older child, I did help my nephew to learn programming in Python when he was a freshman in high school. I took the approach of having him type in games from the free Python book. I have always though this was a good approach for older kids to get the familiar with the syntax.
Something else I would consider would be a robot that can be programmer with Scratch. While I have not done this yet, I think for kid seeing the physical results of programming via a robot is a powerful way to capture interest. But I think my favourite response is this one:
The key is fun. The focus is much more on ‘building something together’ than ‘I’ll learn you how to code’. I’m pretty sure that if I were to press them into learning how to code it will only put them off. Sometimes we go for weeks without building on the robot, and all of the sudden she will ask me to work on it with her again. My son is sailing through his Computer Science classes at school because of some webmaking and ‘coding’ stuff we did when he was younger. He’s seldom interested, however, if I want to break out the Raspberry Pi and have a play.
At the end of the day, it’s meeting them where they’re at. If they show an interest, run with it!
Source: Hacker News
Microcast #002
[audio src=“http://188.166.96.48/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/episode-002.mp3”][/audio] What’s Doug working on this week?
Links:
Building a bridge
“I learned that a long walk and calm conversation are an incredible combination if you want to build a bridge.”
(Seth Godin)