https://www.zylstra.org/blog
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A lovely novella and the 2022 debut by francophone Swiss author Fanny Desarzens (1993). I read the German translation, titled Berghütte (mountain cabin), Galel (the name of one of the characters) is the French title. Three men, with few words between them, share a deep friendship which unfolds every summer against the backdrop of the mountains. Their winter lives in the valleys down below are not worth a mention, even though they know where the others live and work during these months. Only up…
It’s been a while since my last post in the Books category early February, 32 fiction books further by my count. Recently Cory Doctorow pointed to the work of Welsh / Canadian author Jo Walton on the occasion of the publication of her latest novel Everybody’s Perfect, and I read some of her work these past two weeks. Among Others (2012) turned out to be a beautiful and moving coming of age story, about living with trauma and grief. The escape that reading offers, and the many pointers to pre…
Over the past month or two, after our return from Portugal I’ve been slowly improving and overcoming my burn-out. I’m at a point where I am eager to do certain things again, notice E and Y and my love for them much more again, can get energised from facilitating a workshop with a client, started to do more around the house again. I’ve certainly not put the burnout fully behind me but it definitely feels different. Different from not just the past two years, but also from the burnout build-up in…
Favorited Ikigai Collective by David Orban Yes, this type of exploration is important. Without a set purpose as goal, but certainly not without purpose as an experience and source of meaning. I don’t think I have the bandwidth at the moment, and I certainly do not fit the criteria to increase the little group’s diversity, but I definitely get the tinkering angle. Also because we have to take away these tools from those who gatekeep them, and bring them down to individual and group level, make…
European Data Protection makes it illegal to transfer person identifiable data to outside the EU. Unless there is equivalence in data protection, or an agreement with guarantees and oversight deemed adequate. For the USA this is the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (DPF). This framework depends on the existence of the independent oversight body FTC, and the Data Protection Review Court (DPRC) which serves as redress mechanism. The arrangement is in place since 2023. Earlier agreements, the Safe…
In a session today there was some discussion about agentic skills. A skill is mostly a markdown text file often named, yes, skill.md with a natural language text plus some front matter, describing some specific workflow or bit of knowledge or capability. Somebody external opined that such skills were a good way of codifying organisational knowledge, which might be useful ‘because of the ageing demographics’ on the work floor and people retiring. Would agentic skills succeed where process…
In a session earlier today the deployment of a tool was discussed in an organisation’s information environment that is otherwise fully dominated by Microsoft products. After a presentation a director asked “if we add this tool to our (Microsoft) mix, aren’t we working in opposition to our wish for more digital autonomy and digital sovereignty”? The answer was “well you are already using Microsoft tools everywhere so sourcing this one tool from someplace else won’t change your autonomy in any…
Bij de Open State Foundation (waar ik voorzitter ben) zoeken we een nieuwe directeur! Herken jij je in het profiel (PDF), en ben je net zo bevlogen als ons team om digitale transparantie bij de overheid te bevorderen en onze democratie te versterken? Dan horen we heel graag van je! Nadrukkelijk ook als je vindt dat je niet alle ‘vinkjes’ zet. Open State Foundation is geregeld een waakhond die aanslaat, die laat zien dat het anders moet en kán, en even goed een betrouwbare partner van overheden…
In reply to Setting up Webmentions by Alex Hyett It’s always good to see a blogger adding Webmentions to their site. Cross-blog conversations are to me what blogging is about. And Webmentions are a useful piece of plumbing to make it so. If your set-up works, then this should show up at your end. Blog on!
Last week I spent a few days in Switzerland. I went to Zürich on Thursday to meet up with a few people, having a pleasant chat with Beat Döbeli about his 30 year old PKM system Biblionetz, and a nice dinner with long time open data friend André Golliez, who chairs the Swiss Data Alliance. The next day, after mining the Orell Füssli book store for new publications by Swiss authors, I took a train to nearby Thalwil on the lake shore. This was the starting point for a weekend hanging out and…
The Open State Foundation has its office on the old naval yard in the heart of Amsterdam. Right next to the national maritime museum, in the 17th century warehouse of the Dutch admirality, and across from the 1960’s former Base Commander’s home our (as I’m a board member there) offices are surrounded by other small organisations, start-ups, assorted innovative efforts, a tech academy, a hostel and a microbrewery. Normally it is easy to forget that the area is also still in active use by the…
Elke eerste zondag van de maand is het Doei!-dag, voor een dikke doei aan Big Tech. Er zijn drie grote intrinsieke problemen met BigTech: 1) grote techbedrijven zijn data-graaiers. In grote techbedrijven gaat het in plaats van digitale dienstverlening bovenal om het verzamelen en verhandelen van data. Data over jou. Om er advertenties mee te verkopen en je gedrag mee te beïnvloeden. In weerwil van Europese privacywetgeving. 2) grote techbedrijven zijn silo’s en de-facto monopolisten. Ze houden…
Favorited The Archivist In Me Turned This Blog Into a Book by Wouter Groeneveld On occasion I’ve mentioned here that one way of ensuring longevity of this blog is to publish it as one or more books with a proper ISBN, and have the national library store their two obligated copies. We did this in my student association with our monthly magazine (with an ISSN not ISBN) and year books too. My website is part of the national library’s web archive, but Wouter description is still of interest to me.…
Trains at Atocha station Madrid I spent the week in Ciudad Real in Spain, under an hour by high speed train (~200km) south of Madrid. I was there for a plenary meeting of CEN/CENELEC’s joint technical committee (JTC) 25 that works on European standards for data management, data spaces, and cloud & edge. The need for these standards originates in the European Data Act. The event was hosted by one of the committee members at the University of Castille-la Mancha. It was a very warm week (up to 35…
There is a lot of sloppy journalism out there. Obvious questions not asked, basic facts not gotten straight, numbers literally not adding up, tens to thousands of orders of magnitude errors. The perennial sensationalist phrasing and populist use of emotion laden words as supposedly neutral wording. And then there is ignorance of basic knowledge becoming a lens through which things become overly mysterious. The Guardian writes (archive link) about a new Stephen Hawking biography, in which for…
This weekend we took a train to Rotterdam. We decided to spend a day there, as our Canadian friends Peter and Lisa were coming up from Bruges in Belgium, which was the last stop on their cycling holiday. Before meeting them and after coffee the three of us strolled to and through Museumpark and visited the Depot of the Boijmans van Beuningen museum. The museum itself is closed a decade or longer for renovations to their 19th century building. Next door a new depot was built, which is a unique…
We spent a week and a half in Portugal this spring. Traveling together is something we do well with the three of us, and something I find healing. Although I found it hard at times to be in the moment, and to not let myself get irritated over small things. It was Y’s first ever flight. Coincidentally my first flight was to Portugal too, albeit to Porto, and when I was 19, not 9 as Y is. It was as uneventful as it should be. After picking up our rental car we drove north to Caldas da Rainha for…
As I mentioned in my previous post The Long Walk, I struggle to get out of the house and away from my laptop to take short walks in the neighbourhood during the day. We live at the northern edge of Amersfoort, and across the small Laak river in easy walking distance there’s a polder at the provincial border. The polder is old. The Laak river was canalised as early as 1200 and in the mid fourteenth century dykes were put up further north to keep out the Zuyderzee (now IJsselmeer, as it was…
It is now two years ago that during a day trip E and I had a conversation about my wellbeing in which I broke down in tears and we came to the conclusion there and then that I was burnt out. A good moment to take stock of where I am at. What came before In the spring of 2024 I sought out the help of a psychologist, which was very useful to see what I can do myself to rebalance. In parallel it became clear what the root cause was, and that it was external. My friend and business partner Frank…
In reply to Stop and think by Paolo Valdemarin This made me stop and think. My company contains a well above average number of actual philosophers, 50% of our team. Some with PhDs. Usually combined with practical technical knowledge. Not sure if it gives us a better handle at the future though. Yet, ‘holding questions’ is something I have returned to a lot in the past months. One of my recent little LLM experiments focuses on it (it’s called WittgenstAIn III), and it routes a question through…
In the past week I’ve started three personal experiments that use AI (in this case Claude Code). For each, the experiment lies in automating steps in my cognitive work that are useful or necessary but not the actual cognitive work itself. They’re helper activities, supporting the main task. For two of the three that is the clear focus, the third is slightly different. The three experiments are: Filtering on interests in my feed reader, let’s call it ‘Weak-tAIs’. ‘Slopsidian’, lifting concepts…
Since the start of last year I have not been spending any money at Amazon. I’ve been happily buying my reading elsewhere. Today for the first time I ran into a genuine bump. I noticed that Canadian SF author Dennis E. Taylor released a fifth book in his fun and entertaining Bobiverse series last year, and that a 6th and final title in the series is planned for this year. There seemed to be none of his books available other than at Amazon, and the FAQ on his site explains why: he is signed up…
Favorited Headless Everything For Personal AI by Matt Webb I see this being adopted around me too. Not just CLI’s though, also more APIs, pulling in data sources from elsewhere. And most interestingly: I see adoption by people who did not program or treat their computer as their personal toolbox they can adapt before. Until generative AI lowered their barrier to entry. Going from 0 to using the command line (which coincidentally is what it was until 30 years ago anyway). Even without AI, CLI…
My grandfather Klaas Zijlstra (1905-1993) was a farmer and cattle raiser. He grew up in Fryslân and always wanted to be a farmhand it seems (his father was a housepainter). There was ambition too, from leaving school at 12 and moving out on his 16th, he sought out farmers to work for that had a […]
Uit de Haagse krant van woensdag 25 juli 1928: Tegen radio-gerucht Raad van Amersfoort neemt maatregelen De Gemeenteraad van Amersfoort heeft een verordening aangenomen, waarbij verboden wordt radio-luidsprekers in werking te hebben met geopende deuren of vensters. Is dit waarom je bij rampen ramen en deuren gesloten moet houden alvorens de regionale radio aan te […]
Earlier this week I started reading an ebook and was a bit irritated because the book did not show me a table of contents. This seems to be a regular thing in ebooks. Already earlier I have complained here about why ebooks, or perhaps mostly e-readers, make so little use of the affordances of digital […]
Favorited AI Policy and Human.json by Claudine Chionh Favorited Adding human.json to WordPress by Terence Eden Claudine Chionh and Terence Eden both mention human.json, a data file that lists people and sites you know are written by humans, as opposed to generated by AI. A rekindling of FOAF? In these days of needing to assume […]
Favorited # I used AI. It worked. I hated it. by Michael Taggart An excellent post by Michael Taggart on how it felt to him to make a much needed bit of code with the help of Claude Code. The results worked, but he hated how it made him feel. He explores those opposing outcomes […]
Favorited If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem – you have bigger problems by Andrew Murphy Good blogpost on how ‘speeding up’ code production (x lines committed this week, yay!) by using AI, will likely cause more trouble in an organisation. Because the theory-of-constraints bottleneck in an organisation will never be […]
My website is now part of the web archive in the Dutch Royal Library. It took some experimenting to get it in there. Blogs will be blogs and the amount of links in mine choked the harvester it seems. Since 2007 the Royal Library have been archiving websites, and now stores some 25.000 websites. My […]
