David Ing @daviding@qoto.org

When there is a larger threat from outside, attention is drawn away from internal struggles within.

#RobertReich puts a historical perspective on current affairs in the USA.

> Putin has brought a fractured Nato together. Maybe he’s bringing America back together too. It’s the thinnest of silver linings to the human disaster he’s creating, but perhaps he’ll have the same effect on the US as the old Soviet Union did on America’s sense of who we are.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/24/democrats-republicans-russia-ukraine-invasion-putin

P.S. I am Canadian.

For those who are critical about "design thinking", #KarelVredenburg makes the strong distinction between design and pseudo-design.
https://www.karelvredenburg.com/home/2021/10/9/cr2h7dllvanrttb1tn8cfx1zjuhqol

"Why Science Does Not Know: A Brief History of (the Notion of) Scientific Ignorance in the Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries" https://journalhistoryknowledge.org/articles/10.5334/jhk.40/?s=09

Post normal science by Jerome Ravetz, because we can't ever completely eliminate ignorance.
Silvio Funtowicz wrote:
> Ravetz abandoned the modernist claim to successively eliminate ignorance & replace it by knowledge; he argued instead for the
"management" of uncertainty and ignorance, that is, for strategies of "post-normal science" to render ignorance "usable".
https://twitter.com/SFuntowicz/status/1467126642254528522?t=vTmTXGHQRlWNxIFAFpUDKw&s=19

Living with the parents longer has been a trend in the USA, as compared to the 1980s.

> It's a scenario that's not uncommon in the U.S. with the Pew Research Center publishing a study in 2018 that found just 24% of young adults were financially independent by age 22 or younger, compared with 32% in 1980.

https://www.newsweek.com/internet-backs-man-convinced-niece-break-off-engagement-because-fiance-poor-reddit-1644212

Signs that Canadians are still cautious about the pandemic for Halloween 2021.
> But the online poll suggests fewer than half of Canadians will open their doors to trick-or-treaters due to COVID-19.
> Of the 56 per cent who checked no, half said they would typically dole out candy on Halloween but will not this time “given the current pandemic.”
https://nationalpost.com/pmn/news-pmn/canada-news-pmn/poll-canadians-still-reluctant-to-hand-out-halloween-candy-due-to-pandemic

> That’s the trouble about marriage. Women always hope it’s going to change the husband. Men always hope it won’t change their wives—and both are disappointed!

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/01/17/marry/

Generation Gap. Going on the road has been replaced by being on the screen. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/first-person/article-students-dont-really-get-on-the-road-anymore-classic-road-lit-is/

Open source licenses cover derivative works. Machine learning based on pre-existing work should carry the downstream license. That is the responsibility of the human being initiating the machine learning algorithm, and you can't blame the machine. https://twitter.com/kellabyte/status/1411449622288076801
> I heard GitHub is training their co-pilot with other peoples copyrighted source code thus allowing copyrighted source code to be injected into other peoples products.

There was a time I felt GitHub was on the ethical side of things but that’s starting to fade.

For those of us who take freedom of movement for granted, #HassanAlKontar writes about acceptance into Canada.

> only a few countries – including Germany, New Zealand and Canada – actually help people escape their misery and resume their lives. Others, especially Australia, are jailing, deporting and locking up asylum seekers. Australia signed the UN refugee convention in 1954, yet they have been detaining asylum seekers on the island of Nauru for seven years now, without a hearing or access to a medical care, fresh water or electricity. Other countries are separating children from their parents. But Canada, which created the world’s first private sponsorship program in 1978 to allow citizens to come together to sponsor a refugee and directly save lives, launched the #WelcomeRefugees initiative, resettling more than 25,000 people in Canada in 10 days. Whoever came up with the campaign should be thanked forever.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-safe-flight-what-a-former-syrian-refugee-has-learned-to-love-about-his/

Those who are more nostalgic about the days of shareware can look to the Internet Archive.

https://archive.org/details/tucows

For those who remember the rushing sound of a 2400bps modem connecting over an analog telephone line, the old BBS download sites have been obsoleted.

https://www.engadget.com/tucows-downloads-has-finally-been-shut-down-103036388.html

Did the board of MEC understand how a cooperative really works? #MaxFawcett suggests that they forgot.
https://thewalrus.ca/what-we-can-learn-from-the-fall-of-mec/

What kind of world are we in, when a camera lens needs a software update to work with a new camera? (I am not a user of either system)
https://petapixel.com/2020/10/01/sigma-shares-caveats-for-using-its-ef-lenses-on-the-canon-eos-r5/

Very long article, oriented towards policy change. Issues should be familiar to everyone on this platform (and appreciation of that is probably why you are here).
#CoryDoctorow on Surveillance Capitalism
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59

A small wording shift, yet I really like the idea on belonging rather than just including.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-want-a-more-diverse-work-force-move-beyond-inclusion-to-belonging/

On the post-pandemic world, #MargaretAtwood says:
> "this is like being in 1952, except with birth control and the internet".
https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/opinion/2020/07/17/margaret-atwood-on-post-covid-hopes-plus-baking.html

Instead of using a text editor or Notepad on my computer for everyday work, I now use #Zettlr as a persistent scratchpad, a new page each day. The feature of creating #Markdown often helps in copy-and-paste to other applications. I haven't exercised #Zotero citations, yet, but probably will, shortly.

> Roam let’s you manage knowledge, but not really write documents, and Zettlr let’s you write documents, and, to a much smaller extent let’s you manage knowledge! https://twitter.com/thejonotron/status/1279130965273501701?s=19