Posts tagged "technology":
On Attaining European Technological Sovereignty
Europe is in a bind. While we posses advanced manufacturing and research, we have somehow been unable to adequately transform these advantages into a prominent tech industry1. With the large investments in large language models (LLMs) since the release of ChatGPT a number of years ago there are increasing pushes for Europe to do something, to the extent that Europe can be considered a single entity. What exactly to do is of course in contention, otherwise it would likely already have been done, but the discussion regarding the lack of a European tech industry compared to the USA has been occurring for much longer — especially since China has proven it is possible to build such an industry without American help.
Continue ReadingEmail as social media
It is apparent to everyone that social media is distinctly a different experience today from how it initially developed. It has become a form of mindless consmption instead of a social space where one interacts with other genuine individuals. The concept of content, once merely used on Madison avenue, has become so ingrained in the social media environment that those who would otherwise call themselves enternainers, artists, or journalists have now come to regard their field as mere content creation, as producing things merely meant to get you hooked so that you will look at more advertisments. This has been accelerated due to LLM’s ability to quickly create things that are “good enough” to look at, read, or otherwise consume. Consumption has become the only reason to interact with social media. But it is becoming increasingly clear that alternatives are not only necessary, they are already here.
Continue ReadingLand Value in the Digital Realm
Adam Smith divides the economic forces into three areas for, the profit obtained from labour, that from capital (or stock), and that obtained from land. The value extracted from land is here the natural resources of the earth, the sunshine and rain that lands there (allowing for agriculture), the timber that can be cut down, or the ore to be mined. But there is another value that can be obtained from the land. In the movie Up (2009) the protagonist Carl Fredricksen refuses to let his villa be demolished despite the large amount of development occurring around him. Since he owns the land that the house is built on, the construction companies can not develop it, even as it is surrounded by soon-to-be skyscrapers. Mr Fredricksen is offered “twice [as much as the] last offer”, showcasing the value of the land. But Mr Fredricksen has not exploited the land at all, he has simply continued living in his house as the area was developed. So where has this value come from? It has come from the labour and capital of others, in its proximity to services provided by the rest of society. This is the observation made by Henry George, one of the great (but quite overlooked) economists of the 19th century. The value of land is then partly the natural resources in and on the land, but the value of the land is also a social construction originating from how much the rest of society wishes to make use of that land.
Continue ReadingCommon lisp and Github workflows
Github has a functionality where the README file in a repository with
the same name as your username will be displayed on your
profile. Since I am a fan of the indieweb’s POSSE1 practice, I’d
like to use that space to advertise the writings on this website.
Deepseek is not a Chinese OpenAI
This is part of a series of posts written during or shortly after my visits to the mainland of the People’s Republic of China in the summer of 2025.
Continue ReadingFunctional Life Without Side-Effects
Programming languages (and their users) are often grouped into two main intellectual schools of thought: Object-oriented programming (OOP) and functional programming. These two schools both claim to offer ways to manage the increasing complexity that comes with the development of larger and larger programs. Functional programming states that this complexity can be managed by following these principles:
Continue ReadingEmail as a Revolutionary Medium
In an increasingly interconnected and technologically sophisticated world, our capabilities for communication and diversity of ways to do so also increases. This is often approached as a problem, with each method merely remaining due to network effects, but I believe that this multitude of means are a strength and not a weakness. I do however still see what I deem as a misuse of tools, and I shall endeavour to explain, and hopefully convince you of, my ways of structuring communication in different spheres.
Continue ReadingAbout the website
I think every personal blog that is somewhat custom built should have documentation written on its design philosophy and implementation. I see this as an extension of the free-software ideal; you should not only be allowed but also able to extent and modify another program to your needs.
Continue ReadingDiplomacy Today: A backstabbr and AI powered newspaper
Diplomacy Today is a python program and corresponding flask
application that serves and hosts an early-twentieth-century-style
newspapers generated from the turn orders of a game of Diplomacy
hosted on backstabbr. The idea, and a large portion of the core code,
are not my work, and I deserve none of the credit for it. But the
original program seems to have been abandoned last year, and was
perhaps only used for one game. But that is the beauty of free
software, I have taken nraw’s original code and iterated upon it over
the course of, so far, four games. It now contains more features and
improved polish that builds upon the basic functionality of a GAI
generated in-universe newspaper. I attempted to rewrite the program in
chez scheme as a learning exercise, but ended up not using it as
python has some nice libraries that I couldn’t bother to reimplement
in scheme.