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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…
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…
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 […]
At PKM Summit this weekend one thing that stood out was that many have started creating their own tools, and were using vibecoding to create them. While the term agency turned out to be unknown to almost all participants, that is of course what such tools create. The ability to do things, individually or as […]
