"In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face."
"America would be better off if its elites could act responsibly without being terrified. If CEOs remembered that citizens are a kind of shareholder, too. If economists tried to model the future before it arrives in their rearview mirror. If politicians chose their constituents’ jobs over their own. None of this requires revolution. It requires everyone to do the jobs they already have, just better."
"If only we could learn the right lessons from the successes of the past, we would not need to learn from our failures."
ante scivi, nunc intellego!
"One of the differences between digital preservation and preserving traditional formats of records is that digital records don't just survive by accident. We need to make a conscious decision that they're worth keeping. We have to think about that when we create them in the first place in terms of the standards that we use. We have to make a commitment to keeping them alive in a way we haven't had to in the past."
Mark Kermode reviews Melania
"It's a heist movie about a crime family breaking into the seat of power and stealing the cutlery whilst destroying democracy."
"I mean, I have seen A Serbian Film, I have seen Cannibal Holocaust. I have never felt this depressed in my life in the cinema. I thought it was absolutely repugnant."
I love Mark. Been a fan of his for well over a decade and hope to meet him some day at some film festival, somewhere.
"Fortuna est quae fit cum praeparatio in occasionem incidit."
This Is a Problem
"There is an ancient Indian saying that something lives only as long as the last person who remembers it.
My people have come to trust memory over history. Memory, like fire, is radiant and immutable while history serves only those who seek to control it, those who douse the flame of memory in order to put out the dangerous fire of truth.
Beware these men for they are dangerous themselves and unwise. Their false history is written in the blood of those who might remember and of those who seek the truth."
The sad fact about technological innovation - especially of the digital kind - is that it is much less about the new thing being good than it is about the old thing being bad.
"Wherever you walk, you walk like you belong! That is my challenge to you. Walk like you belong! Because you do."
"I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective – the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income."
Could the reason for modern tech making us lazier and dumber be the fact that "lazy and dumb" makes for the perfect customer?
Lazy people are less likely to provide for themselves so they are more dependent on someone else providing for them and dumb people can't judge the quality of what they're buying. So you can sell them anything, of whatever quality and they'll just keep paying for it.
#obvious?
"The fact is, we're moving in uncharted waters. We're dealing with one of the fundamental assets of society - that is - recorded information. There's a real risk in taking something that works and transforming it in a way that's more responsive to fads and to technological wizardry without thinking through the fundamental implications that those changes will make on the system that is at the heart of civilization."
Jon Stewart Is a National Treasure
Some of the funniest, most powerful political satire I have ever seen. Every American should watch this.
Posting this here as a copy in case Paramount (Comedy Central's parent company) decide to eventually pull it.
Mark my words: The next great domestic policy achievement of the second Trump presidency will be the changing of the national anthem from "The Star-Spangled Banner" by John Stafford Smith and Francis Scott Key to "God Bless the U.S.A." by Lee Greenwood.
The United States of Roy Cohn
- Rule one: attack, attack, attack!
- Rule two: admit nothing; deny everything!
- Rule three: no matter what happens, you claim victory and never admit defeat!
Brute Force One
It seems that "drugs" is now officially the new "weapons of mass destruction". Too bad we didn't get to see Reich Minister of the Reichswehr, Herr Peter von Hegseth parade a vial of cocaine in front of the United Nations.
Looking Back at 2025
After all said and done, 2025 has been kind of amazing. I was really hoping for some forward momentum after a period of what I can only describe as struggling to find my footing in life and this year really delivered.
The Sustainable Podcast
This past summer me and my good friend and colleague from the Technology Governance and Sustainability programme - Max Peacock - spent five days in an underground recording studio at TalTech discussing everything from AI to education and gaming:
Let Static Be Static
I've been using the Django framework for all sorts of projects since version 1.4 and think it's an exceptionally well crafted system for building web applications. Django is so versatile, easy-to-use and well-documented that it's all too easy to reach for it even for uses cases that don't really call for it. Like Servo's documentation site - which is really just a collection of static pages.
Without Django, it would have been much more tedious to maintain the structure of the site and Django's nifty admin-interface gave me all the CRUD I needed out-of-the-box. But in the long term, running that entire Python stack was complete overkill and a waste of resources. It was also quite fragile:
So after years (actually, over a decade) of running that app, I spun it up one last time in dev mode (./manage.py runserver) and set wget on it (with a helpful hint from T0nylombardi on SO):
$ wget2 -m -k -K -E -l 7 -t 6 -w 5 https://docs.servoapp.com/
Uploaded the resulting directory to my web server, updated my virtualhost config, shut down the dev server et voilá - I had the whole thing running just as before for a fraction of the cost.
Todays web could use a tsunami of migrations like these. We have way too many sites out there running on massively complicated stacks just to serve static pages. The MVP trophy for this belongs of course to WordPress. There's just no justification for all the added complexity, maintenance, energy use, compute resource strain, monetary cost and security risks of a dynamic web app when all you want to do is publish some HTML pages. Especially when those pages update once a year (yes, I'm looking at you again, WordPress).
I've always thought the real dystopia wasn't about machines replacing humans as workers, but machines replacing humans as customers. Looks like we're slowly getting there...
When hackers scrape Spotify, it's "anti-copyright extremism", but when OpenAI scrapes the planet, it's "fair use". Funny how that is...
