Recently updated blogs

Crazy amounts of money continue to be spent in San Francisco to shift the city rightward. We saw it in March with the purge of progressives on the Democratic County Central Committee after a heavily funded campaign by moderates under the ‘Democrats for Change’ slate. Astroturf (fake grassroots) groups like GrowSF, TogetherSF, StopCrimeSF, Neighbors for a Better SF (backed by a Republican mega-donor), Families for a Vibrant SF, and Committee …

Programming note: Bits about Money has been a bit irregular recently.I’ve recently booted up the Complex Systems podcast. It is now up to more than a dozen episodes, including interviewing my dad on real estate development (which is something of a BAM deep (curb) cut). The podcast features Bryne Hobart and other guests you’d probably enjoy on a weekly basis. Since I am more of a writer and very plausibly …

We held a YC event a couple of months ago where Brian Chesky from Airbnb gave a passionate talk about his experience running Airbnb over the last 17 years. He believed that as Airbnb hired more professional managers, he lost a close connection with the details of the end product and the company suffered as a result.It clearly touched a nerve with a lot of people present. It was uncomfortable …

Our latest version of WriteFreely is out now! This is a minor update, but with some important bug fixes, especially around navigation and federation. Note: The official release binary will not work on older systems, e.g. Ubuntu 18.04 or earlier. See #1064 for more information and a way to work around it. Download v0.15.1 now, or read on to see what’s new in this version. User-Facing Changes Fix “subscribed” date …

Of course they do, and of course they don’t. This originally published 2016-10-07 by Springer-Nature at their “Science of Learning ” research community. By re-publishing here I assert my rights as author and release the text under a Creative Commons (CC-BY 4.0) license. Putting a student at the centre of their own learning seems like fundamental pedagogy. The Constructivist approach to education emphasises the need for knowledge to reassembled in …

I disappeared again – I’m sorry. I’m trying to decide whether I’m done with this whole blogging malarky – there are aspects I miss – but I get overwhelmed with the effort it takes me now. So, if I do stick around, I might need to change the kinds of posts I publish and focus less on the long review posts I used to write, and would prefer to write …

Traveling in Kham • Jashideley! • Burial in the sky • Kangding, the gateway of Tibet • The Love Song of Kangding • The monastery of Tagong • The Buddhas of Drakgo The city of Drakgo, in Chinese Luhou, is located on the road from Tagong to Garzê, on the banks of the Xianshui, i.e. Freshwater River, which runs along the road. The name of the city seems to come …

A month’s worth of movies to help you stay awake Every October, I put together a big schedule of horror films to watch, focusing mostly on ones I haven’t seen before. The schedule, a mix of theatrical screenings and home viewings, is published for posterity and for the sake of anyone who might like to join me. This year I seem to be nostalgic for the age of Satanic panic, …

My teenage years played a show at New York’s Pier 17.

Hello, and welcome to another edition of Weeknotes, a stream-of-consciousness post about life, work, media and everything in between. Here’s what I’ve been up to: Life I have very little to report when it comes to my life at the moment. Other than passing my driving test, I’ve mainly just been catching up with friends and family before we scoot off to Mexico in a few weeks. I always feel …

My fairly banal, basic, but beautiful command line setup

There is a positive feedback loop that happens when you make a tool for people, how people that use it inform what you build, and in turn what you build informs their creative decisions. We will talk about how building these alternatives helps to create a better overall culture where everyone can participate. Let's leave behind monopolies, enshitification, and present tech controversies to discuss building better avenues of participation with …

First record we have is circa 1815, William Haddon was the victular. John Briggs, circa 1827 – 1846. The Bulls Head was up for auction in 1842, whilst John Briggs was in occupation. Thomas Sarson, circa 1846 – 1867, Susanna Sarson, Thomas’ wife would die there aged 63 in 1863. Thomas Wade circa, 1867 – 1869. Amos Wall circa 1869 -1874. George Lawrence, 1874 -1877. Anne Bent in 1977. The …

A review of A Winter in Zürau and Partita by Gabriel Josipovici Gabriel Josipovici has said that as a critic he is conservative but as a novelist he is radical. The second claim may not be controversial but the first will come as a surprise to those who remember what he said about the big-name contemporary novelists in What Ever Happened to Modernism?. This novel and non-fiction combination offers an …

I have Google Takeout setup to periodically export to GDrive as a series of 10Gb .zip files. I’ve been meaning to get these over to S3 for a bit in part for backup purposes, and in part because I wanted to futz with the photos. I’m quite confident I’m not the first person to want to do something like this. But we’ve reached an awkward and unfortunate moment in the …