Rolandt

The structure of the code in TidyBlocks is dictated by three things: The architecture of Blockly. Our experience generating JavaScript directly from blocks. Our desire to write comprehensive unit tests. Rather than describing these at a high level, let's have a look at a simple pipeline that loads a data set, filters it, and generates a plot: ...

Some tech giants will testify before the U.S. Congress this week about monopolistic behaviour, among other antitrust issues. On the verge of that hearing, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney accused two of those giants, Apple and Google, of being a “duopoly.”

Epic is the company behind Fortnite, a popular battle royale game that has spread like wildfire in part thanks to its massive availability. Gamers can download Fortnite on just about anything, from a PC to a traditional console to their mobile phone or tablet. However, the mobile market is where the problems lie for Epic.

In an interview with Bloomberg TV, Sweeney said Apple and Google charge way higher fees for access to their app stores than what it costs to run them. Sweeney used Epic as an example, noting that its game store on PC charges a 12 percent fee and generates a five to seven percent profit margin.

Apple and Google take a 30 percent cut of revenue from paid apps that use their stores. That includes upfront purchases as well as in-app transactions. It can also include subscription-based revenue. The practice has come under fire in recent years as businesses, both large and small, have taken issue with it. That includes Epic, which notoriously dodged the Google Play Store to get Fortnite onto Android phones — an impossible practice on Apple’s iOS.

However, earlier this year, Epic decided to launch Fortnite through the Play Store as well. In part, the change was because of Android security measures that Epic says put apps from outside the Play Store at a disadvantage.

“You can’t have a tech monopoly dominating all interactions between consumers and businesses on a scale of billions of users,” Sweeney said in the interview.

Sweeney also offered a solution to the problem. He said that unbundling different services offered by tech companies would create more choice in the market. That could mean allowing competing stores, like Epic’s, to list in the rival stores.

“They don’t allow competing stores,” Sweeney said. He likened it to a town allowing a Target but blocking all other stores from coming in. “That’s totally un-American and uncompetitive.”

Source: Bloomberg

The post Epic CEO calls out Apple, Google app store practices ahead of antitrust hearing appeared first on MobileSyrup.

The Town of Oakville, Ontario has announced that more than $66 million CAD has been pledged to go towards making transit more modern and eco-friendly.

Specifically, the Government of Canada is investing more than $26.5 million, the Government of Ontario will provide more than $22.1 million and the Town of Oakville is contributing over $17.6 million.

This funding will go towards 14 different projects “that will modernize Oakville’s transit system and create a more sustainable community,” says the Town of Oakville.

These projects include:

• Replacing 57 diesel buses with zero-emission battery-electric buses over the next six years, plus rolling out 16 new electric buses to the fleet
• Installing 32 charging stations for these vehicles
• Introducing Wi-Fi to 107 conventional and 20 para-transit buses
• Launching a new mobile app for general users to track buses and check arrival times, alongside a version for para-transit users
• Upgrade roughly 249 bus stops with full accessibility (landing pads, walkways, ramps and curbs)

The full list of projects can be found here.

Image credit: Town of Oakville

Source: Infrastructure Canada

The post Governments to invest over $66 million into modern, green Oakville transit appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Most technology platforms hire white hat (ethical) hackers to undertake regular penetration testing (simulated cyber attacks) to identify and fix potential threats.

But your community doesn’t just face cyber attacks, it faces social attacks too!

As you grow you face the constant threat of bad actors joining your community to manipulate and cause harm.

Maybe we need ‘white hat trolls’ too?

Can a ‘white hat’ troll join your community, spam other members in private messages, share fake news, and lower the quality of conversation in the community without getting caught? Are your systems for preventing manipulation of bad actors as robust as you think they are?

It’s harder to run a white-hat test of your moderation systems, but the results might just be as valuable.

Let's be absolutely clear. Essentially *every* building, whether residential, enterprise office, public venue or industrial, will need good WiFi coverage, increasingly based on #WiFi6.

Most laptops, TVs, screens, voice assistants, tablets, consumer appliances & other non-smartphone devices will be WiFi-only. Only a handful will have cellular radios too - the economics & manufacturing/distribution complexities don't work for including 5G as a default in most electronic products.

Almost every building will *also* need decent indoor public 4G/5G broadband coverage, especially for employees' and visitors' phones. In most cases this will need to cover all major MNOs' networks, as well as public safety systems such as critical-communications LTE. (Wi-Fi Calling doesn't work ubiquitously on all phones / mobile networks on enterprise Wi-Fi, so there will always need to be a cellular network for reliable basic telephony).
*Some* buildings will also need indoor private 5G for ultra low-latency machines or other connected devices. For industrial sites this will mostly be isolated local networks. For others it may be delivered by MNOs via local coverage or network-slicing, or by some form of neutral-host wholesale model.

The main competition for indoor 5G is actually indoor 4G, not WiFi for which there is only a narrow overlap in use cases. WiFi will almost always be needed as well as cellular, with very rare examples where it's absent - for instance outdoors on campus sites.

Our turn to host quiz night this week, so rather than use Zoom, I thought I’d give Jitsi a spin.

Installation onto a Digital Ocean box is easy enough using the Jitsi server marketplace droplet, althugh it does require you to set up a domain name so the https routing works, which in turn seems to be required to grant Jitsi access via your browser to the camera and microphone.

As per guidance here, to add a domain to a Digital Ocean account simply means adding the domain name (eg ouseful.org) to your account and then from your domain control panel, adding the Digital Ocean nameservers (ns1.digitalocean.com, ns2.digitalocean.com, ns3.digitalocean.com).

It’s then trivial to create and map a subdomain to a Digital Ocean droplet:

The installation process requires creating the droplet from the marketplace, assigning the domain name, and then from the terminal running some set-up scripts:

• install server: ./01_videoconf.sh
• add LetsEncrypt https support: ./02_https.sh

Out of the can, anyone can gain access, although you can add a password to restrict access to a video room once you’ve created it.

To local access down when it comes to creating new meeting rooms, you can add simple auth to created user accounts. The Digital Ocean tutorial How To Install Jitsi Meet on Ubuntu 18.04 “Step 5 — Locking Conference Creation” provides step by step instructions. (It would be nice if a simple script were provided to automate that a little…)

The site is react powered, and I couldn’t spot an easy way to customise the landing page. The text all seems to be provided via language pack files (eg /usr/share/jitsi-meet/lang/main-enGB.json) but I couldn’t see how to actually put any changes into effect? (Again, another simple script in the marketplace droplet to help automate or walk you through that would be useful…)

Four of Canada’s preeminent folk musicians—Stephen Fearing, Connie Kaldor, James Keelaghan and Shari Ulrich—sing Hard Times Come Again No More in support of Unison Benevolent Fund.

Brilliant.

Mask wearing is a lot more popular than you think.https://t.co/lOvdCdaKZN Percent saying people should wear masks in public: All Americans: 70% Democrats:…

Renée @ReneeStephen
Me to coworkers: I'm taking Thursday off to complete the, I'm told, rather excruciating process of turning 40. Cowo… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Tuesday night: time for another round of deliveries with the Toronto Bike Brigade.

Today I was routed up and down some laneways between Dovercourt and Ossington. It’s always fun to see things that are tucked away in unfamiliar neighbourhoods. This sweet little house, for instance.

I also stumbled upon what looks like the temporary home for the University of Toronto Schools.

After I was done with deliveries, I decided to ride back west along Bloor because of this tweet from Albert Koehl, posted this morning.

And now what we’ve been waiting for (for a very long time) … first signs of a Bloor West bike lane — part of an east-west spine for people on bikes. Installation starts next week. pic.twitter.com/F7nsm8fFym

— Bells On Bloor (@BellsOnBloor) July 28, 2020

Between Ossington and Dufferin, there are many of these temporary spaces created as part of the CafeTO initiative.

Just west of Dufferin are the first signs of preliminary bike lane markings. Construction on this stretch of Bloor is supposed to formally start August 4.

Here you can get a sense of the typical width of the bike lane, along with the buffer. Curbs with bollards will be the separation along most of the westward extension.

The buffer gets wider under the railway bridge just east of Symington. The original design shown at the public consultation showed curbs with bollards here as well, but there were plenty of people hoping for more robust protection like the concrete curbs that have been used recently along Richmond.

The buffer gets narrow again as you ride up the hill towards Symington.

No marks under the second bridge as of early Tuesday evening.

Nevertheless, it is really exciting to see the first signs of new bike lane construction along Bloor.

Ed Hardy, writes, in Congress, keep your mitts off the App Store. It’s fine. [Opinion]:

When Apple CEO Tim Cook takes questions from Congress on Wednesday, he’ll surely get an earful of software developers’ complaints about how the App Store operates. Chief among the criticisms will likely be the fact that Apple charges a percentage of revenue earned from in-app sales.

It’s not just a percentage of revenue from in-app purchases. It’s percentage of every paid upfront app, too. And the percentage is 30% for most cases.

Hardy continues:

There’s not a bit of justification for any of these highly publicized complaints. They come from companies that want to have their cake and eat it, too.

There’s plenty of justification. If you offer a Mac app outside of the Mac App Store, you can expect to pay about 5% to your payment processor. This option is not permitted for people writing iPhone and iPad apps.

It’s incredibly dismissive to accuse companies of wanting to “have their cake and eat it, too.” What companies want is to be able to pay their people and keep making the things they think are cool or good.

The next section of Hardy’s piece is called “The App Store does business like a grocery store.” But…

The App Store does not do business like a grocery store

Hardy writes:

…take a trip to your local grocery store. Suppose it’s a Kroger. You’ll find store brands — products made by Kroger — on the shelves next to products made by outside companies, like Procter & Gamble. I hope you’re not surprised that if you buy a Procter & Gamble product, Kroger takes a share of the revenue.

That’s exactly what Apple does with the App Store.

If I make and distribute toothpaste, I can offer the exact same product via Kroger, Safeway, and Albertson’s — and I could sell it from my own website and via Amazon.

That’s a lot of choices I have for selling my product.

But if I write an iOS app, I can sell it via the App Store and through no other method.

This is not at all how grocery stores work.

Hardy continues:

To be fair, it’s not just Spotify who’s complaining. The CEO of Epic Games (maker of Fortnite) whined about the App Store just last week. And the developers of premium email app Hey engaged in a very public spat with Apple in June, accusing Cupertino of acting like “gangsters.” But none of these companies’ criticisms hold up.

For whatever reason, developers are often accused of being whiny. Oh, those whiny developers who like to have their cake and eat it too. How dare they complain about Apple policies. Betcha I’m being a whiny developer right now.

No. Again: developers want to make great apps and be able to continue making great apps.

Hardy:

To demonstrate why, let’s continue with the grocery store analogy. Kroger built its store into a successful business. But suppose the companies who make the products sold in that store wanted to keep using it, without sharing any of the revenue with Kroger. That would be completely unfair. Kroger is paying upkeep on the store, but these other companies don’t want to contribute.

We’ve demonstrated that it’s not like a grocery store.

But let’s talk about fair share.

Apple — certainly among the wealthiest of companies in human history — is taking 30% of developers’ paychecks in order to show services growth. This is not about upkeep on the store: this is about profit for Apple. And not just profit but a specific category of profit.

And the rules aren’t remotely fair. Facebook — another fabulously wealthy company — certainly profits from its iPhone app. Does it share any of this with Apple? No. Instead, apps from smaller developers (because they are almost all smaller than Facebook) are subsidizing Facebook.

If there’s a fair share to be paid, the largest apps get away without paying it. Instead, companies like Omni subsidize Facebook. Fair?

* * *

The next section is called “Selfish developers want to use the iPhone ecosystem without paying their share.”

This is total bullshit and insulting. (Developers are always whiny and selfish, of course.)

This isn’t about paying a share into some commons run for all of our benefit. Apple isn’t just asking for us to help cover costs.

No.

This is the only game in town for iPhone and iPad developers, and we have no choice but to subsidize apps like Facebook. We have no choice but to contribute to Apple’s services growth.

Hardy:

Of course, the analogy isn’t perfect, because it underplays Apple’s role. It didn’t just build a grocery store — it built the entire town. There would be nowhere for Spotify and the rest to sell their products if the iPhone never existed.

This is kind of the thing with platforms. There would be nowhere for Spotify to sell their iPhone app if there were no such things as iPhones. True.

The major reason these software developers have a business is because Apple makes iPhones that people carry with them everywhere. Without them, there’d be no Spotify. Fortnite would be a PC-only game.

I think the argument here is that, without Apple, the smart phone revolution wouldn’t have happened so quickly. That may be true! But it’s not argument in favor of Apple’s 30% cut.

Hardy:

These companies love to play on the idea that a 30% share of revenue is an egregious price to pay to be on the App Store. However, a recent study found that Apple’s percentage falls in line with other software stores (.pdf). And Procter & Gamble wouldn’t blink to hear that Kroger charges 30% extra for one of its products.

All of the various app stores are charging too much. They all point to Apple as precedent.

* * *

The next section is called “Consumers benefit hugely from the App Store.”

In some ways, sure. It’s also worth remembering that the more money Apple takes from developers, the fewer resources developers have. When developers have to cut costs, they stop updating apps, skimp on customer support, put off hiring a graphic designer, etc. They decide not to make apps at all that they might have made were it easier to be profitable.

Suppose the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee — where Apple CEO Cook will answer questions Wednesday (as will the leaders of Facebook, Amazon and Google) — mistakenly thinks there is some justification for these developers’ complaints. Regulations that forced Apple to change the way the App Store worked would benefit a few big-name software companies, but they would hurt hundreds of millions of Apple users.

We have no way to know that — we don’t know what that regulation would look like or who it would benefit.

I do not want to see Congress regulate app stores. I want Apple to make better choices here — better for Apple, Apple customers, and developers.

But if Congress lowers the cut to 10%, or says that App Stores must allow for side-loading, it’s hard to see how customers would be hurt.

(That said — again, I’d really prefer not to see federal legislation. It shouldn’t be needed.)

Hardy:

True, Apple rules the App Store with an iron fist. While it sometimes acts in opaque and arbitrary ways, firmness is absolutely necessary in a world full of unethical developers who’d happily flood the App Store with crapware designed to steal user information. No one wants that.

Developers: whiny, selfish, and unethical.

Any time I hear about iron fists and the necessity of firmness, in any context, I get pretty nervous. But let’s set that aside.

App Store review is not filtering out apps that steal user information. No. This is done by sandboxing and other technical restrictions. Apps can’t steal user information. Apple — to its immense credit (it’s one of the things I love about Apple) — continues to lock this down.

The App Store has nothing at all to do with it, though.

Hardy:

Letting companies avoid this process would release a wave of malware on iPhone users everywhere. In a world where everyone’s phones are networked together, introducing another way for criminals to spread nefarious software is a horrible idea.

This is horribly, terribly untrue. Again: the App Store doesn’t prevent malware. Other technical limitations, built in to the platform, prevent malware. Apple does a great job with this and deserves all kinds of credit.

The second sentence in Hardy’s paragraph is just pure scare-mongering with no grain of truth.

* * *

The next section is called “Cupertino deserves its fair share.”

Hardy:

Cupertino deserves a cut of the action for the hard work it does policing the App Store. (And don’t forget about the enormous cost of operating and maintaining the servers that power this $519-billion-a-year economic engine, to say nothing of building the software tools developers use to create apps for iOS and macOS.)

Again: Apple isn’t asking us to cover costs plus a little something extra — no. Apple considers revenue growth in services to be of paramount importance, and this is one if its favorite ways of making that services money.

This isn’t about fairness at all. If it were, you’d think Facebook might pay some share.

Apple doesn’t “police” the App Store for the benefit of customers. Submissions are checked to be sure they adhere to Apple guidelines — in other words, reviewers make sure that apps are making money in approved ways and giving Apple its cut.

It’s also understandable that software developers want customers to pay them directly, rather than sending payments through Apple. And admittedly the company does make exceptions for certain services, like Amazon Prime Video, that bring customers to Apple’s ecosystem.

However, Cupertino’s general policy on payments means customers can feel safe shelling out for software and services within the Apple ecosystem. We know some shady firm won’t steal our credit card info. Even the best-intentioned companies get hacked, and I trust Apple’s network security far more than I do some random developer’s.

Again: this article mentions fairness a few times, and I hope it’s clear by now that the App Store isn’t exactly fair.

That thing about security and credit cards is more scare-mongering. If side-loading were allowed, most developers would use reputable systems like Square and Stripe and so on, where the developers never actually see credit card info at all.

(Developers are, by the way, whiny, selfish, unethical, and random.)

Maybe Apple’s 30% cut seems steep for digital products. But, as Ben Bajarin, head of consumer technologies at Creative Strategies, points out, the App Store seemed like a bargain to developers when it launched in 2008. At that time, developers typically surrendered 50% of the retail prices on software sold through physical stores. And small devs couldn’t even gain a toehold.

This is enormously untrue. I know because I was one of many small developers who were there.

We used Kagi as our payment processor at the time, and I think we paid around 5% for our storefront and payment processing and everything. Completely reasonable, and we were perfectly happy with it.

We were also a two-person shop — my wife and I — and you can’t get much smaller than that. Did we gain a toehold? Hell yes! We did great!

There were a lot of small companies operating that way. Hardly any of us were selling boxes through retail stores in the 2000s — we were already selling over the web by the mid ’90s.

Nobody saw this as a bargain. The developers I knew — small developers with nice toeholds! — were shocked and astonished, because we were used to paying 5-10%.

Perhaps Apple should shave a few percentage points off its take from App Store revenues to keep everyone (including Congress) happy. But third-party developers absolutely should pay a share of their revenue to support the iPhone ecosystem. Everyone benefits from it, including the companies that are whining. They just don’t want to admit it.

The traditional way of supporting a platform is to write good apps for that platform. That’s it. A platform with more and better apps will attract more people to that platform. (It’s not the only thing, but it’s a real thing.)

But Hardy — and Apple, apparently — has forgotten that simple truth.

And they haven’t realized that current App Store policies actually hurt the situation: we don’t have the quantity and quality of apps we should have. Which hurts that very ecosystem.

The NY Times profile quotes me saying “We don’t really have an Amazon problem. What we have is a deep, societal problem with an unacceptable imbalance of power and wealth.” But the URL contained the string “amazon-critic-tim-bray” and the HTML <title> says “Tim Bray Is Not Done With Amazon”. I feel like I’m being pigeonholed and I don’t like it.

I am totally not some sort of anti-Amazon obsessive. And I am done with Amazon; even though I’m doubtless on a dozen internal enemies lists, I have no real interest in giving the company, specifically, a hard time. I’m mad at the structure of 21st-century capitalism; the fabric of society is in danger of breaking. I’m enjoying the privilege of having an audience for my criticism and can’t see any reason to limit it to one corporation. Because the problem is so big that any of them, even Amazon, is rounding error.

There’s also the fact that I admire many things about Amazon:

1. It’s by far the best-managed place I ever worked, including the places where I was the CEO.

2. The people I worked with in AWS were, on average, decent, honest, and smart.

3. The climate pledge is admirable. (Haven’t seen much action recently, and I guess Covid is a not-terrible excuse, but come on, the climate emergency’s not going away.)

4. The company is working hard on Diversity & Inclusion. The results are meh (like all over the tech biz) but the energy and funding are there.

5. Amazon.com has improved the world by showing what well-done online shopping is like. The world likes it. It remains to be seen what the world is like when there are a lot more parties offering really great online shopping.

6. AWS has improved the world of IT by showing what well-done cloud computing is like. The IT world likes it. Public-cloud competition is stiffening, but AWS is a really good choice for almost anyone’s needs. Its lead over the competition is well-earned. I’m doing a bit of consulting here and there and have found myself recommending AWS more than once already.

Except for that thing

The firing-whistleblowers thing I mean. They shouldn’t have done that and there’s no excuse. I still think quitting was the only thing to do. But I feel no need (nor, apparently, does Amazon) to relitigate that issue.

Well, and one other thing: Amazon’s absurd and cruel down-to-the-last-ditch-and-beyond resistance to unionization. There’s no way that’s reasonable. I’ve gotten to know some fine, inspiring people working that front and I’ll support them going forward, any way I can.

The rest of the things

There’s lots more to complain about but little of it is specific to Amazon, it’s all about 21st-century-capitalism, like so:

1. Warehouse workers’ lives are often shitty. In fact, life for the US working class these days is shitty, and it’s not by accident, it’s by design. It was called the Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal consensus, and it was wrapped up with lots of high-flying rhetoric about this freedom and that dynamism and those flexibilities, but you don’t have to be that cynical to see it as good old-fashioned class war. It’s obvious who’s winning.

2. Big Tech sells technology to loathsome customers, for example carbon-vomiting oil extractors and overempowered child-caging immigration officials. Of course, possibly the bug is that these sorts of organizations are allowed to have oceans of money. Fix that and remove the temptation!

3. Big Tech emits a whole lot of carbon into the atmosphere and facilitates the emission of much, much more. Humanity can’t afford this and it has to stop.

4. Big Business in general and Big Tech in particular is waaaay too powerful; the millions poured into lobbying have fabulous ROI.

Break ’em Up

I’m strongly convinced that the structure of Big Business in general and Big Tech in particular is too concentrated in ways that are damaging along multiple axes. Check out Anti-Monopoly Thinking and Large Companies Considered Harmful; this is not a new opinion.

Let’s start with Google. It feels the most urgent because the Google/Facebook ad cartel is rapidly destroying publishing business models that have been essential to civilized human dicourse.

Next I’d go after Microsoft who are still, all these decades later, using the cash and incumbency advantages of their steely grip on the business desktop and email server to invade other business sectors. Which is to say, Slack has a gripe. This one is particularly maddening to me because Microsoft has been doing this shit since I was carving code on stone tablets.

By the time you’d launched those campaigns I suspect Amazon would wake up, smell the coffee, and spin out AWS already. Then we’ll see what the retail business is really like given the violent contrast between the galactic revenue growth and the negligible profit margin.

Media Friction

I’ve had a certain amount of friction with the journalists who found me interesting after my May 1st exit from Amazon. Because there was this great, simple, story that they’d like to have told: Plucky engineer leads geek revolt against Jeff Bezos, Richest Man In the World.

That struggle story — Man against company, or Man against Billionaire — is a crowd-pleaser. The actual struggle that interests me is against the current horrifying imbalance in global power and wealth, which is kind of abstract, doesn’t have a chiseled cartoon-villain billionaire in the cast, and is frighteningly large in scale.

Seriously; basically every reporter I’ve talked to has tried to get me to say awful things about Amazon and in particular about Jeff Bezos. But at my last job they taught me to think big and, with all his billions, Jeff is rounding error in the big picture. He’s not the problem; the legal/regulatory power structures that enable him and his peers is.

Amazon is a perfectly OK company, to the extent that planetary-scale sprawling corporate behemoths can be perfectly OK in 2020. Which is to say, not OK at all.

But once again, no one company is the problem. The problem’s the entirely-fixed great global card game illustrated by that graph, above. The problem’s the fact that in one of the world’s wealthiest economies, we have ever-growing homeless camps where they’re dying of opioids faster than Covid. (That’s maybe not the worst part, but it’s the one I see with my own eyes.)

We can do way better as a society than the greed-fueled planet-destroying worker-crushing hamster-wheel we’re spinning right now.

That’s why I’m making noise.

mkalus shared this story from DmitryOpines on Twitter.

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In the past 2.5 weeks I have focused some time on building better notes. Better notes, as in second order notes: processed from raw notes taken during the day. Below are some experiences from that note taking.

My intention

This in order to build a better thinking aid, by having an easy accessible collection of my own ideas and concepts, and interesting viewpoints and perspectives of others (and references). It isn’t about collecting factual info.

I want to build a more deliberate practice this way, to enable a flow to create more and better output (writing, blogging, idea development etc.), in which more ideas are turned into something I apply or others can apply. In past years I have regularly stayed away from reading non-fiction books as I felt I had nowhere to go with the thoughts, associations and ideas reading something normally generates. No deliberate practice to digest my readings, resulting in it bouncing around my head and a constant nagging notion ‘I should be doing something with this’. Getting it out in atomic notes is a way of letting those associations and ideas build a network of meaning over time, and for me to see what patterns emerge from it.

In turn this should make it easier and faster for myself to create presentations, e-books, and blogposts etc. To have those writings start within me more. Only doing responsive writing based on daily RSS feed input feels too empty in comparison. And more importantly to not reinvent my own concepts from the top of my head everytime I e.g. put together a presentation (making it very slow going).

Curent state

I’m now at 140 notes. Which is about double the number I expected to be at, as I estimated earlier some 4 notes per day should be possible. Notes get linked to eachother where I feel there’s a connection. The resulting cloud is shown below.

(The singular points around the outer edge are not part of the thinking tool, they’re ticklerfiles from my GTD notes. Similarly there is a series of daily logs that aren’t part of the thinking tool either, but may point to notes in it. I don’t count or discuss those notes here.)

Two tactics helped me generate notes more quickly to incorporate more of my own previous thinking/writing.

1. Daily I check my old blog postings made on today’s date in previous years. This presents me with a range of postings during the week (not every day), for me to process. Sometimes it will be easy and short to capture key notions/ideas from them, other times it might be a trip down the rabbithole.
2. I go through presentations I made earlier, and lift out the concepts and ideas from the slides. I’ve done four sofar, one on Networked Agency, MakerHouseholds, on FabLabs, and on Community building / stewardship.

Doing just those two things resulted in the cloud of linked notes above. Especially going through presentations is a rich source of notes. I tend to build new stories every time for a presentation, so they often represent my current perspective on a topic in ways that aren’t documented elsewhere. With these notes I am turning them into re-usable building blocks.

What’s additionally valuable is that making the notes also leads to new connections that I hadn’t thought of before, or didn’t make explicit to myself yet. The first time happened early on, at about 35 notes, which was a linking of concepts I hadn’t linked earlier in my mind. In subsequent notes processing my SHiFT 2010 keynote ‘Maker Households’, that connection was fleshed out some more.
Another type of linkage isn’t so much previously unlinked concepts, but linking across time. A blogpost from a year ago and one from last month turned out to be dealing with the same notions, and I remember them both, but hadn’t yet perceived them as a sequence or as the later post being a possible answer to the earlier post.

Garden of Forking Paths

I call my collection of notes my Garden of Forking Paths. It refers to the gardening metaphor of personal knowledge management tools like wikis, commonplace books etc., often named digital garden, like my public wikisection here.
The fantastic title “Garden of Forking Paths” comes from a 1941 short story by Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges titled El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan. It foreshadows the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and has also been referred within hypertext fiction and new media. In 1987 it was worked into Victory Garden, an early hypertext novel, published by Eastgate. Eastgate is Mark Bernstein’s company, an early blogger I first met 16yrs ago, that also creates the Tinderbox software, an amazing tool I use almost daily. Such a rich layering of connections and meaning, both contentwise and personally, are precisely what my notes collection is about, which makes ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ the most fitting title I could hope to find.

The set-up now

My current set-up for taking notes currently is based on using the tool Obsidian. This is a closed source app, but my notes are stored as regular text files, so can be accessed, edited etc through the file system itself. Obsidian provides bidirectional linking, and builds a connection graph on the fly (as shown above). I mentioned Tinderbox, which is also very useful for storing notes. In this case I’m not using it. Though notes in Tinderbox would be available as XML through the file system too, they aren’t easily human readable as the mark down notes I am creating now are, and thus access through the file system is of limited use. While Tinderbox is very useful at visually presenting information, that visual presentation is created by myself. What I am looking for is the emerging patterns from such visualisation, which Tinderbox can’t provide.
Obsidian not being open source is only slightly problematic to me at the moment, as it provides a view on a collection of text files, and nothing is lost except the visualisation if the application falls away. However, an open source alternative exists, which is Foam. However that in turn builds on the only pseudo-open application VS Code by Microsoft, unless I would compile VS Code myself. I may well go that way, but currently I’m experimenting and I’m not sure I want to spend that effort right now. The text files can be used in Foam, so that’s not a barrier. I did install Foam and VS Code, and will try it out in the coming days, although I haven’t fully figured out how to work with it.

Next to Obsidian I use Zotero to keep references to books, documents and snapshots of webpages. This removes these types of material from Evernote, which I count as a positive, without diluting the notes collection as something that are just my views and other things in my own words. In notes I point to references in Zotero where appropiate. It allows notes to be properly referenced, which is valuable when using them to write material based on them.

The note taking process

The process for note taking has several inputs, which currently aren’t all in use:

1. old blogposts, which I look at daily
2. old presentations, which I’ve been doing
3. notes resulting from feed reading, which I am doing
4. notes from primary notes (made during conversations etc.), which I’m not yet doing
5. notes from reading books / texts, which I haven’t done yet.

The first two inputs are my key way of building up notes capturing my existing notions, ideas, concepts etc. This is a way to create a repository of existing thought, and that’s the phase I am now in. Especially presentations are a rich source, but can take a lot of effort to process.

Notes as output from feed reading is currently limited but I expect this to grow over time. The same is true for notes from primary notes and from reading books, both I expect to pick up pace over time, once the first wave of ‘braindumping’ is over.

There is another part of my book reading-to-notes process that is already in place, however. That is the part which pertains to Zotero. I am reading non-fiction books on a Nova2 e-ink tablet. Both highlights as well as notes I make during reading, can be easily exported from it, and I add those to Zotero alongside the metadata of the book itself. The same can be done for notes made on a Kindle (find your Kindle notes here). This keeps those annotations as raw material available in Zotero, and allows me to more easily process them into proper notes, capturing a concept or perspective. I have read a few books this way, but haven’t gotten around to processing my annotations from one yet. It’s next on my experimentation list.

My intention, reprise

At the start of this posting I wrote note taking in this way should make it easier and faster for myself to create blogposts and other written output. This post was written re-using notes, which sped up the creation time considerably, so that part of the experiment seems to be working. A true test will come when creating a new presentation I think, outlining a narrative using existing singular notes. The current set-up supports that much in the same way Tinderbox supports it: it’s easy to create a note that contains references to other notes and/or embeds them, turning them into a readable whole, even as you’re still shifting singular points around.

For those of us whose urethras are ensconced in labia, peeing without access to a standard toilet can be messy, at best.

But no matter our genitalia, we all have to eliminate our waste somewhere (including, as a last resort, outdoors). Over a period of several weeks, I tested a combination of 20 pee funnels, urinal pouches, and portable toilet seats. I then asked a colleague who has a penis to test the urinal pouches, too. Here’s what we would get.

This workshop is an initiative from Mozilla’s Environmental Champions in Mozilla’s Sustainability Program and will be facilitated by Michelle Thorne and Fieke Jansen.

The world will cross the 1.5 degree warming threshold in 2024, quicker than previously estimated, forecasts the UN World Meteorological Organization. We have three and a half years to dramatically cut our emissions. We need sustainable systems, and we need them now. 

We describe sustainability as a healthy environment, economic well-being, and social connection. We are particularly interested in reducing the internet’s significant emissions while advocating to keep this global public resource open and accessible to all. It is essential that the internet advances healthy, sustainable practices. 

Increasingly, our online lives are affected by artificial intelligence systems. If we want a healthy internet—and a healthy digital society—we need to make sure AI is trustworthy. For AI to be trustworthy, we need AI that is demonstrably worthy of trust. Privacy, transparency, and human well-being are key considerations, and there is accountability for harms.

We must meet the moment of the climate crisis now—in the era of AI. This means bringing together two currently separate conversations: mitigating climate change and addressing the civil rights concerns in AI systems. We must shift from a discourse on greenhouse gases and melting ice caps to a civil rights movement with the people and communities most vulnerable to climate impact and technology at its heart. The movement for climate justice and the call for trustworthy AI need to be linked. Independently, they have made great gains by positioning harms not as solely environmental or technical shortcomings but as justice issues: bans on facial recognition, ad tech reform, landmark surveillance cases and youth climate lawsuits to name a few. 

To link trustworthy AI to climate justice, we must expand our understanding of human well-being and AI harms. Research demonstrates how AI intensifies energy consumption and AI systems developed by major tech companies (Amazon, Microsoft and more) are used to speed up extraction of oil and other natural resources. Tech companies are announcing ambitious climate plans, often following pressure and mobilization from their workforce. But none of these efforts take full account of the harms caused by their AI systems. 

Our proposal

To understand the environmental harms caused by AI and situate these in a larger context of internet health and the climate crisis, we are convening an interdisciplinary group. We seek to demand AI systems that are trustworthy and sustainable. “Collective liberation and ecological sustainability,” as described by Sasha Costanza-Chock in their book Design Justice, will be a guiding vision.

With these findings, we will develop a stronger call for sustainable and trustworthy AI that translates into policies and organizational agendas. We will pursue constructive approaches along the way, such as sustainability engineering and sustainability by design, aiming to create blueprints for others to build on.

We will focus this first convening on the policy window in Europe as the European Commission defines its AI strategy, climate agenda and COVID-19 recovery plans. This moment offers a strategic opportunity to advance trustworthy AI and climate justice in the summer of 2020. 

If you would like to share your perspective on these issues or host similar conversations, please email me at michelle at mozillafoundation dot org or Mozilla’s sustainability program at sustainability@mozilla.com.

Image: “Soap bubble”, mezzotint by M. Rapine, after an image by Alexandre-Blaise Desgoffe; plate VI in Le monde physique (1882). Source: Public Domain Review.

There has been discussion that density increases mortality during pandemics, and  the suggestion that suburbs are in fashion again  because they are more “healthy”. The idea is that travelling everywhere by vehicle and retiring to a large leafy house with lots of space may enhance needed Covid pandemic physical distancing.

New York City Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver shares this article from the Australian Times  by Jim Sallis and Deepti Adlakha that contradicts the idea that suburbs are safer. They conclude that the idea of density as unhealthy is “oversimplification and misleading when it comes to COVID-19.”

By researching thirty-six of the most dense global cities these researchers found a “near-zero” correlation between density and Covid morbidity and mortality. I have previously written about the work in Taiwan and Singapore where a centralized governmental approach took the pandemic very seriously from the outset and have had minimal cases and deaths. Taiwan has had 7 Covid deaths, while Singapore has had 27.

The researchers in this city study conclude that it is not density but  the “lack of space – both private living space and wider neighbourhood public space” that is the problem. The top five most-crowded neighbourhoods in the United Kingdom have seen 70% more COVID-19 cases than the five least-crowded neighbourhoods, even after controlling for local deprivation. It’s not how many people live in a certain area that matters, but the conditions they live in.”

Urban density, instead of being an enabler of a bio-medical emergency actually has “protective benefits”. Inhabitants living in higher densities walk more to services shops and schools  and two decades of data show this increased walkable accessibility lowers incidence of heart disease, diabetes and obesity.

In cities public health needs to be enhanced by well built and separated sidewalks and cycling facilities that “have a double benefit, both reducing the spread of COVID-19 by reducing any crowding in the streets and lowering the risk of deadly chronic diseases” by enabling exercise.

What is also crucial is the inequality and inequity of low income communities, where higher living densities means there is  less personal space to follow physical distancing guidelines. These units often without balconies and with less frequent access to public outdoor space “compound the issue of overcrowding – the risk of coronavirus infection may be up to 20 times higher when indoors than outdoors.”

Where public space is not readily available the importance of  wide properly installed accessible sidewalks and protected lanes for cycling is vitally important. Cities like Calgary and Winnipeg have already designated parts of the street network for walking and cycling only, and in the case of Vancouver, lowered speed limits on some shared streets.

So for residents in cramped housing without private outdoor space, local parks could offer respite and decrease exposure to infectious diseases.

While it is clear that “extreme crowding” in housing should be mitigated, access to public space, parks bike lanes and a superlative pedestrian network is also key. The authors point out that that this space and access should not be an add-on but be an “essential component” of walkable communities, which by their design and use “protect people from chronic diseases.”

The YouTube video below outlines the talk that Dr. Sallis gave to America Walks on this research.

Images: TheTinyLife.com; BeamUSA

• ongoing by Tim Bray · Not an Amazon Problem
  "That struggle story — Man against company, or Man against Billionaire — is a crowd-pleaser. The actual struggle that interests me is against the current horrifying imbalance in global power and wealth, which is kind of abstract, doesn’t have a chiseled cartoon-villain billionaire in the cast, and is frighteningly large in scale.

  Seriously; basically every reporter I’ve talked to has tried to get me to say awful things about Amazon and in particular about Jeff Bezos. But at my last job they taught me to think big and, with all his billions, Jeff is rounding error in the big picture. He’s not the problem; the legal/regulatory power structures that enable him and his peers is."

  Tim Bray on monopolies and multi-millionaires, but really, on capitalism. Symptoms, causes.

  (tags: timbray business capitalism )

PT: It’s been awhile since we’ve seen Daily Scot (né Bathgate) on this blog – even though on some weeks he does text a daily observation.  Here are some:

 

DS: A great idea from TransLink, for those with bikes who would like to rack them on a bus but are too intimidated to do it for the first time:

 

DS: Port Moody must use the suburban planner’s manual: shared asphalt walk/biking path when there is a wide road begging for a separated lane.

 

DS: Turks and Caicos meets Coquitlam.  Fun colours on the North Road border as it takes on a population closer to the West End.

 

DS:Corten steel is back.  Victoria does it!  LeFevre & Co. are the developers – do great work and restored a lot of heritage buildings over the years.

 

DS: Every helmet is missing on these Mobibikes.  Is that because of Covid?

 

 

Rice is one of the world’s most versatile foods: You could eat a different rice dish every day for weeks without getting bored.

If that sounds appealing, you might appreciate a great rice cooker, which can turn out perfect, plump grains with almost no effort.

After more than 150 hours of research and testing, during which we’ve cooked approximately 275 pounds of rice, we recommend the Zojirushi Neuro Fuzzy NS-ZCC10. It makes the best white rice, across all grain types, of any cooker we’ve tested, and it also turns out great brown rice.

I coined Pollard’s Law of Complexity nearly 20 years ago, to try to sum up what I thought was the most important practical learning from my years of study of complexity theory. Here’s how I worded it:

POLLARD’S LAW OF COMPLEXITY

Things are the way they are for a reason. To change something, it helps to know that reason. If that reason is complex (and it usually is), success at truly understanding and changing it is unlikely, and developing workarounds and adapting to it is probably a better strategy. Complex systems evolve to self-sustain and resist reform until they finally collapse.

To the extent we’re talking about changes to human social systems (including political, economic/financial, educational and health care systems), this law is further subject to Pollard’s other law:

POLLARD’S LAW OF HUMAN BEHAVIOUR

Humans seem to have evolved to do what they must (the personal, unavoidable imperatives of the moment), then do what’s easy, and then do what’s fun. There is never time left for things that are seen as merely important. As a result, social, political and economic change happens only when the old generation dies and a new generation with different entrained beliefs and imperatives fills the power vacuum. Despite this, we have evolved to be a collaborative and caring species, and we are all doing our best — in fact we cannot do otherwise.

Over the years, these hypotheses that I’ve pretentiously called laws, have been subject to two main criticisms. The first is that they devalue and demoralize true change initiatives, and overlook laudable successes in movements for change. While I applaud these apparent advances, both John Gray’s Straw Dogs and Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress make, I think, a very strong argument that such ‘advances’ merely corrected obvious and untenable aberrations in the Human Experiment, and also that such advances are tenuous, offset throughout history by equally giant steps backwards, and often subject to revocation when times get tough or violent. I apologize if I come across as a defeatist or doomer, but from my study of history and prehistory, that seems to be the way things work.

More recently I’ve been challenged on the Law of Complexity on the grounds that its wording seems to be validating or supporting “the way things are”. When I say “things are the way they are for a reason”, I’m not passing a moral judgement; I’m not saying it’s a “good” reason.

In a recent discussion with Stuart Ramsing, something he said made we wonder if I was missing something. He said “We shouldn’t put too much trust in the assumption that just because something currently exists, that it necessarily makes sense.”

Things that currently are “the way things are” but which at least today don’t make sense, might, for example, include:

• 1. things that happened by accident (eg the evolution of feathers to keep birds warm and cool — their original evolutionary purpose — that later by exaptation enabled flight, once it emerged that they could also serve this purpose), or
  2. things that were arbitrarily imposed through coercion by those with power (eg colonial ‘national’ boundaries, fiat currencies, interest-bearing debt, and even slavery, which still exists in many places and in many forms) when they either never really made sense, or no longer make sense; or
  3. things that were once considered at least ‘good enough’ but are now anachronistic (eg four-way intersections, the imperial measurement system, daylight saving time, anthems at sporting events) yet remain because of the inertia of the existing system.

So suppose we were to differentiate, in the Law of Complexity, between (a) things that are the “way they are” as a result of having emerged for an obvious and understandable reason and (b) things that are the “way they are” by accident or coercive imposition, or which are now anachronistic. And if it’s one of the latter,  is it likely to have the same positive (reinforcing) feedback loops keeping it entrenched that more naturally emergent aspects of the way things are, do?

An example of a “naturally emergent” “way things are” might be our current addiction to fossil fuels, which is sustained by several positive (reinforcing) feedback loops. We observe for example that when improvements are made in auto fuel efficiency, drivers of those more efficient vehicles tend to drive farther than they would have in gas guzzlers, reinforcing the seemingly insatiable appetite for fossil fuels and defeating the promising intervention of fuel-saving innovations or standards.

We can “make sense” of this entrenchment and addiction (though we might wish it were otherwise) by studying and understanding driving and buying behaviours and propensities. The consequences of this self-reinforcing system are highly undesirable, and possibly disastrous, but we can understand why the system is so hard to change. It will cease to be a problem when our socioeconomic system permanently collapses in a few decades, but in the meantime we are unlikely to be able to significantly change it. Rather than beating our head against the wall pointlessly, we might be better to focus our energies on other change initiatives. (I can hear objections that we might solve this by just banning fossil-fuel-powered vehicles, but I could describe a whole series of reinforcing feedback loops that explain why we haven’t already done so.) Simple “solutions” to complex predicaments are almost invariably flawed by failure to understand why things are “the way they are”.

So let’s look at our civilization’s systemic racism and xenophobia as an example of something that is “the way things are”, but which on the surface doesn’t make sense. It’s too easy and too simplistic to argue that this exists solely because of greed or pathology (though that may in part be true).

Just this week, Tom Cotton, an overtly racist US senator who’s running unopposed for re-election in November, declared that slavery was a “necessary evil” and announced plans to prohibit an anti-slavery program called the 1619 Project from being taught to schoolchildren. He’s the same guy who authored the NYT editorial calling for sending in the military to quell the BLM protests (it seems he’s now got his wish). How can this attitude still prevail to the point the Democrats couldn’t even be bothered to run a candidate against him, four centuries after the start of the slavery he doesn’t want American schoolkids to even know about?

A survey of millennials in 2017 suggested that, unlike African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinx Americans, half of white millennials did not think Trump was a racist, and a similar number thought BLM protestors were “not very different” from white nationalists (this was shortly after the Charlottesville shooting and car attack by white extremists). Even more white millennials thought the confederate flag was a source of pride, and opposed removing confederate statues. And this was across the US, not just in the south. So if a Tom Cotton Jr were to run for office a generation from now, he’d probably be a shoo-in too, especially as every generation tends to get more conservative as they get older (the boomers who stopped the Vietnam War are now the most conservative and hawkish voters in the US).

Like their parents and grandparents, millennials get their political views from their peers and their parents. Although they are more likely to grow up in communities with more BIPOC neighbours and classmates than previous generations, this survey suggests white millennials are not mixing with and sharing political thoughts with BIPOC millennials. As long as that continues, systemic racism is likely to continue unabated. No matter that much of it may be unconscious.

Four centuries this has been going on. And still it is entrenched. It seems we’re not going to change it with wars, with laws, with education, or with information. If we want to end systemic racism we have to smash the system that produces it — the police system, the prison system, the military system, and the patriarchal political/corporatist system with its “old boys” network. The alternatives are just to adapt to it and work around it (for another four centuries?), or to just wait until it collapses due to its dysfunction and unsustainability (which will happen soon, but for many, understandably, not soon enough).

Is this systemic racism and xenophobia across generations, which really makes no sense, “the way it is” for a reason? And if so, what is that reason? And, since it makes no sense, is it more readily changeable than existing problems and abominations that we can at least understand the rationale for?

I think there might be some clues in the ease with which laws that discriminated against LGBT+ persons have been overturned. There was no reason for them; they never made sense. Just about all of us know someone who has suffered from these arbitrary laws. So why did this happen so easily so quickly (so far; there could of course be backsliding, and that fight is far from over) when after four centuries racism still seems intractable?

Ibram X Kendi argued back in 2017 that systemic racism remains because racists see racism and the oppression of Blacks as being in their self-interest:

Protesting against racist power and succeeding can never be mistaken for seizing power. Any effective solution to eradicating American racism must involve Americans committed to anti-racist policies seizing and maintaining power over institutions, neighbourhoods, counties, states, nations – the world. It makes no sense to sit back and put the future in the hands of people committed to racist policies, or people who sail with the wind of self-interest. An anti-racist America can only be guaranteed if principled anti-racists are in power, and then anti-racist policies become the law of the land, and then anti-racist ideas become the common sense of the people, and then the anti-racist common sense of the people holds those anti-racist leaders and policies accountable.

This makes sense. You could put the word “capitalist” in place of “racist” and it would equally make sense (that’s not to in any way equate struggles against racism with struggles against capitalism). And yet there seemingly was no similar need for a seizing of power in order to radically and quickly change prevailing attitudes against homosexuality. Is that because the LGBT+ community is seen as less of a threat to the self-interest of the rest of society than the BIPOC community? If so, how can racism be so prevalent and so extreme even in cities like Dubuque, Iowa that are 97% white? Where exactly is the threat to them?

Perhaps it’s all about fear. I’ve argued before that anger is usually a mask for fear, and fear is endemic in our modern society, likely rooted in a mix of trauma and reactivity stirred up by fear-mongers through the enormous power of the media, both mainstream and social. They can make us fear things we normally wouldn’t even know about (like “murder hornets”). It’s profitable. It’s effective. It’s “the way things are”. Most of us now probably vote out of fear of the person or party we vote against, rather than for anyone. Trump (from NYC!) and other fear-mongers have found it pathetically easy to prey on the fears that many in small towns, and even some in suburbs, have of the “big city”, by simply wildly exaggerating its dangers.

If fear is what underlies racism, what is it that racists are afraid of? They are, perhaps, afraid of people who aren’t “like” them, people who are strangers to them and whose beliefs and motivations they don’t understand. They may be afraid of what seems to be out of control, or out of their control. They’re afraid of failure, and even the admission of failure. And they’re afraid of loss, and of not having enough, in our collapsing civilization of created scarcity.

Like most fears, these fears don’t make much sense, particularly in as far as they underlie racism, yet they are “the way things are”. Are they still subject to Pollard’s Depressing Law of Complexity?

I would reluctantly suggest they are. On a small scale we can combat and overcome fears by helping people see that these fears are unwarranted. All kinds of issues have been resolved by amazing representative assemblies of people who initially largely feared and hated each other, but who, through familiarity, came to appreciate and support each other’s positions. But these kinds of initiatives simply don’t scale. We can’t systematically make people unafraid, especially when the media are busy stirring up new fears and anxieties. While the humanist ideal that if we just got to know each other better and see each other’s circumstances we’d soon all be on the same page, may be completely valid, it is just an ideal, and one that is completely impractical in a world of 7.8B struggling and damaged people.

And while the humanists’ solution is hopelessly idealistic, Ibram’s seizing-of-power solution, which is equally valid in theory, is equally unlikely in practice. It may happen in a few places on a small scale (the toppling of racism-glorifying statues and the prohibition of flags and other symbols that promote hate, for example), but in a complex society of millions or billions, there are just too many reinforcing feedback loops sustaining the status quo to fundamentally change it.

A guaranteed annual income for all is a terrific, necessary, affordable idea, but, even if it were to happen, it wouldn’t solve the global intractable problems of racism and xenophobia, which are arguably getting worse each year rather than better as the stresses of civilizational collapse deepen. That’s no reason not to strive for a guaranteed annual income (and free decent universal health care and education, and a bunch of other no-brainer initiatives that could make the world a safer, saner place to live). But we should be sanguine about what we expect these things to accomplish.

This is what I mean in Pollard’s Law of Complexity when I talk about adaptations and workarounds to “the way things are”, instead of hoping to fundamentally change them.

That is not of course to excuse or defend racism or xenophobia, which are outrageous, insidious and tragic. It’s simply to say that even though they don’t make sense, they are intractable parts of entrenched global systems that are the way they are for a reason — not a good reason, but a reason.

So as we work to make things better at scales and in ways that are achievable, we can perhaps take solace in the knowledge that as our global civilization’s collapse accelerates, everything is going to change, in ways we cannot imagine. And then, things that were “the way things were”, whether for reasons sensible or senseless, will cease to be so, and we’ll have the chance to start again, and maybe, next time, come together to make things not only “the way they are” but the way they could be, for all of us remaining.

 

An Open Letter to NPA Park Commissioner John Coupar, from Peter Ladner.

 

Peter Ladner:  John, I hear you’d like to be mayor. But as cyclists know, if you tilt too far to one side, you can fall over and crash. To borrow another cycling metaphor, it’s all about balance.

Now that you have gone out on a dangerous limb to oppose safe cycling and walking for all in Stanley Park, I want to propose a slam-dunk opportunity for you to show some balance.

As a former NPA politician myself, I learned, as I’m sure you have, that canny politicians figure out where the parade is headed, and then step out in front and “lead” it.

Be careful limiting yourself to support from people stuck in their cars.

No doubt you’ve heard that so many seniors and others have taken up e-biking that you can’t find one to buy these days. They describe e-bikes as “life-changing” (no more hills— ask Angus Reid!) as they add to the numbers of people who have already made cycling the most popular form of recreation in our fair city. The Cycling Lobby is working feverishly to get more kids riding safely to schools. Don’t make their parents your political enemies!

Also, bike shops are booming and can’t find enough employees. Jobs!  Economic development!  Caution: never be against those.

But before I share my win-win proposal with you, let me share a few thoughts about what you are calling “the Stanley Park transportation disaster”. At first I thought there might have been another storm that blew down hundreds of trees and blocked roads. Especially when I saw your colleague Tricia Barker describe the situation as “horrible” and “devastating”. And I saw your retweet of someone saying traffic changes have “spoiled our beautiful park.” This could cause a person to get worried.

Then I realized what you were actually talking about was the discovery of the park by more than 400,000 (by now) cyclists taking advantage of the new protected lane(s) through the park – even while it’s accessible for everyone else now that one lane has reopened for cars.

Granted, quick and easy access from the North Shore is closed and 30 percent of parking spaces are blocked, but that isn’t stopping people from the North Shore from accessing the park, or drivers from finding parking spaces.

You and Tricia Barker – and some of my (literally) old NPA colleagues – are urging people to sign a craftily-worded petition to “Keep Vancouver’s most beautiful park accessible to all.” Everyone wants that, so it’s easy to get people to sign (29,000 and counting so far: let’s get more!).

I regret to tell you I’m not signing because I think you might twist my signature into meaning I support restoring two lanes of car traffic. I said “crafty” because that is nowhere spelled out in the petition, just the ominous threat that keeping a protected bike lane “could mean limiting access for people who choose to, or must, access the park by car”. I’m afraid I’ve lost a little trust in you, so I’m leery.

But how lucky we are there is zero data to show that anyone has been limited in accessing the park, or restaurants (operating at 50 percent capacity), or available handicapped parking spaces!

If you have this data, share it please.

 

Yes, we could do better. One simple example: the bicycle bypass through the parking lot at Prospect Point Café could easily be shared with cars that could then use some of the now-closed parking spaces, without ever crossing a bike lane. Join me in supporting that!

Entrance to Prospect Point parking lot, with plenty of room for shared lane

I fear that you can only deny facts for so long before someone calls your bluff and your credibility disappears – and with it could go some votes!

I find it sad that you have embraced the fictions that seniors and disabled people are being denied access to the park, and that the park is (going to be) so congested that its restaurants will be ruined. Honestly, do you not find it amazing that detouring tens of thousands of cyclists past her business’s front door, not COVID restrictions eliminating tour buses, not her refusal to embrace this new mother-lode of customers, is what makes Prospect Point owner Nancy Stibbard “very,very sad”.

What is very, very sad to me is hearing someone say their business may die because tens of thousands of new customers are now forced to go to it, but a few traditional customers may not be able to park their cars.

I have been past the Prospect Point Café several times since it reopened and have never seen the available parking spaces full.  Of course maybe the parking lots aren’t full because business owners are saying they’re too full, convincing car-bound customers not to come.

That is sad.

I have seen lineups of cyclists coming in to buy things. Cyclists outnumber car drivers by, maybe 10:1.  (I could be wrong.  It might be 20:1.)

A lawyer friend of mine (also a friend of Wally Oppal, who I see has suddenly become an expert on Stanley Park traffic flows), once warned me that launching a lawsuit (which Mr. Oppal has been rumoured to be part of) can backfire badly. You have to play up your victimhood.

In this case, instead of pivoting to serve and embrace cyclists, Stanley Park businesses and their allies are crying about lawsuits, gridlock, lack of parking, inaccessibility and even human rights violations.

You can’t cycle there unless you’re a “beyond seasoned cyclist”, warned poorly-chosen spokesperson Nigel Malkin: “This is not something where families and children are going to be able to ride around.”

Just between us, John, he’s wrong.

Last Friday I counted 68 duffer cyclists – families, children, seniors on e-bikes and others not wearing lycra or riding nice road bikes – peaking the hill at Prospect Point. This compares to 34 speedy people in lycra. That’s twice as many non-elite cyclists. A friend counted on another day and reports that he was passed by, or passed, 42 duffers compared to 15 people wearing lycra shorts. That’s almost three times as many non-elite cyclists who really like to stop and rest at the top of the hill.  I’ve written elsewhere about my five-year-old grandson regularly riding up the big hill with his mom.

Basically the anti-bike lobbyists are telling car-bound customers how terrible the park is so they’ll have a case for pushing aside cyclists to make room for tour buses that have disappeared!  Now that’s a recipe for business disaster.   As a seasoned business executive, John, you should be counselling these people, not Wally Oppal channelling his buddy Bruce Allen!

But I have digressed. A lot.

 

Here’s my plan for your redemption – not in Stanley Park but in Kitsilano. Tricia Barker can use this too, since you are both unflinching champions of safety and accessibility for seniors in our parks. (Me too, by the way!)

Here it is: Push for pedestrian safety in Kits Park by taking away the designated cycling routes that go along the crowded beachside path and through the parking lot, mixing dangerously with pedestrians up to Yew and along Cornwall. Dust off the engineering study that proposed a protected perimeter bike lane along Ogden, Arbutus and beside Cornwall.

As you know, this was named as a priority by your two successors as park board chair, so you can be seen as a Great Unifier. You will also, of course, be unifying support from seniors and everyone else who just wants to walk and cycle safely in our parks. Some cyclists may even overlook your Stanley Park “disaster” misstep. That’s a lot of votes!

 

In the unlikely event you don’t take me up on this, I’ve got a Plan B (politicians have to be flexible!):

Double Down! Renew your support for Kits Park as is, including the bike ride for families and seniors on their new e-bikes, weaving through cars backing up in the parking lot. Then designate this, the last remaining dangerous section of the Seaside Greenway, as a Heritage Alley.

It will inevitably be fixed, by a future park board or even, God willing, this one.  But you can get credit for celebrating a remembrance of how cyclists used to mix it up with pedestrians and parking cars, endangering both of them, before hundreds of thousands of cyclists became visible to all politicians.

Call it the Kits Parking Lot Pinball Parade, or maybe The Hadden Park Defence Militia’s Last Stand.

It may be worth a few votes.

 

sqlite-utils 2.12

I've been experimenting with ways of improving BLOB support in Datasette and sqlite-utils. This new version of sqlite-utils includes a "sqlite-utils insert-files" command, which can recursively crawl directories for files and add their contents to SQLite with configurable columns containing their metadata. I was inspired by Paul Ford who has been creating multi-GB SQLite databases of images and PDFs. It turns out that when disk space is cheap this is a pretty effective way of working with interesting corpuses of documents and images.

Via @simonw

This in-depth post with videos gives you all the information you need to choose between the Garmin Edge 530 vs 830 vs 1030 Plus. The brand new Garmin Edge 1030 Plus now offers some exciting new features, including masses of free maps. But the upgraded Edge 830 and Edge 530 offer a lot of premium features for less money. So, how to decide? We hope that this very in-depth post will help you with this choice. First I have a chart that compares the most important features of these three bike computers. Then I discuss the differences between the three bike computers. Finally, I offer some advice on which Garmin Edge GPS bike computer to buy, based on your needs and preferences.

The post Garmin Edge 530 vs 830 vs 1030 Plus Bike Computers: In-Depth Comparison, Reviews and Videos appeared first on Average Joe Cyclist.

Alessandra Heaton, ProductHunt, Jul 27, 2020

This is a curated list of different GPT-3 projects using the AI to create resources (the page calls it GPT3 throughout, without the hyphen, but I checked and it's GPT-3). There's only one item listed under 'education' - Replit Code Oracle, which "demos a use case where you can ask what a code does, and it will provide more context around it." Which isn't very 'educational'. I don't expect this list to be useful for very long, because it's haphazardly put together, but it's useful for now.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Garmin has confirmed it was the victim of a cyber attack that encrypted some of its systems on July 23rd.

The cyber attack led to an outage of the company’s services for several days. The services, such as customer support and website functions, started to get back to normal on Sunday and Monday.

“We have no indication that any customer data, including payment information from Garmin Pay, was accessed, lost or stolen,” Garmin said in a press release.

“Additionally, the functionality of Garmin products was not affected, other than the ability to access online services. Affected systems are being restored and we expect to return to normal operation over the next few days.”

Garmin indicates that it does not expect any material impact to its operations or financial results because of this outage. The company has not revealed whether it paid anything in response to the cyber attack.

It’s important to note that any data captured during the outage should be preserved, and that not all Garmin users have regained full service as Garmin Connect access is still “limited.” Garmin outlines that everything should be back to normal this week.

Source: Garmin

The post Garmin confirms cyber attack, working to fully restore affected systems appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Occasionally I like Mondays. I'm not sure about today. This is the last week we'll be in HQ, so Charlie and I are there to pack up. It was fun to see him again after all this. We went out for lunch.Salt and pepper squid is the new chicken satayWe talked about what's happened. We're both really sad that it's come to this, as if there's really not much we can do about it. It's odd. We have

sleep issues Searching the web for “why did my computer wake from sleep” is a fun pass time that I enjoy repeating every so often. Eventually, I get bored with the repeated thousands or so websites telling me to run powercfg /lastwake and powercfg /waketimers in an administrator command prompt and give up. It’s like […]

The Canadian Broadcast Channel (CBC) has launched an expanded ‘Being Black in Canada website that features the stories and experiences of Black Canadians.

Additionally, it highlights the narratives that matter to Black communities, such as relevant news pieces, the successes of individuals and historical content. Also, the site showcases profiles, opinion pieces, video, audio and more.

The website is launching alongside a one-hour CBC special called Being Black in Canada that features news, current affairs and arts content hosted by Asha Tomlinson. This is also now available on CBC Gem.

Additionally, Being Black in Canada will tackle anti-Black racism and feature Black Lives Matter activists, as well as Black community members who are pushing for inclusion. Furthermore, this special includes interviews with the cast and creative team of the original miniseries The Book of Negroes. The Book of Negroes is receiving an encore broadcast this week as part of its CBC’s Emancipation Day-related special programming.

This miniseries airs July 27th and 28th on CBC TV and CBC Gem.

CBC has been publishing content under Being Black in Canada since 2013 when it was part of its Black History Month program for CBC News.

Image credit: CBC

The post CBC launches expanded ‘Being Black in Canada’ website appeared first on MobileSyrup.

David Bowie and Cher sing duet of “Young Americans” and other songs on 1975 Variety Show. Wow.