What stands out to me reading this, is that I feel I have an intrinsic preference for the emergent area of the triad. And can quickly loose interest towards the design corner, and specifically the built parts. While I see others flock to those other types of containers exclusively because it provides them with something to hold on to, to declare something must be just so. When blogs went from emerging conversations across previous boundaries to becoming a marketing instrument for established concerns and how social software became ‘the socials’ in the communication ‘mix’, that sort of thing. And my disappointment about the reductive aspects of that, because it then usually completely ignores the emergent. While recognising that it indeed takes all three in concert, I could easily look down on the built and also the designed, as if that if we were really aware we wouldn’t be needing it, or design and construction would emerge naturally from it as well. I am also thinking of what fun it is to be thrust into a scripted / structured setting and then succeed in emerging something miraculous despite it, and the natural high such an occurrence usually gives the participants.

In facilitation practice, the language tends towards designed and built containers. We talk about holding space, we talk about the boundaries, the physical space, the beautiful question, the method. The role of the facilitator is often defined as a person that designs and holds containers.

Complexity however bids us to pay attention to what is happening. When humans meet, containers emerge, almost instantly.

Chris Corrigan

Your post resonates a lot, Peter. In my journey of the last years overcoming burn-out my inability to rest, other than sleep, stands out. There’s always things to do, work, at home. Simultaneously so much time ticks by procrastinating as well, the pretence of activity. Not a rest, but then used to tell myself that I already took time off. There’s also the echo of the deep past where if I did nothing it was not the dolce far niente, a sweet idleness, the Italians hold up as ideal, but something I’ve come to call amaro far niente, a bitter idleness, which has its own lures even if unhealthy in the end. Locked inside myself to the point of complete inaction. I’ve come to avoid idleness because of it, but have to relearn it. Work to do …. or rather rest to take.

The lifestyle, which I lived for more than 25 years, had great benefits. It also rendered me unused to the idea of a vacation with idle time: on the working road all the idle moments got swept up in escape to the work bunker, so the days were, in essence, fun family activity, work, eat, sleep. The idea of rest didn’t really enter into it.

Peter Rukavina

On many occasions using a CMS, I have thought about providing the actual web pages as static html. Because it is so very fast to load. And for most of this blog here, the only reason to have a CMS is back-end related. A CMS makes it easy to maintain consistency, create lists of posts or pages from whatever criteria, quickly change looks and lay-out, manage menu options, etc. All those dynamics mostly are aimed towards me, to make it easier to post something. But the same dynamics is then used to present a web page to you. Even if for almost anything on this site that is not needed, because the content itself is static. So why isn’t the site?

I’d rather cut the machinery to make a posting or site from the resulting posting and site. The machinery then can sit on my local device, and the results can live on a web server. It makes the website less vulnerable as well, not just faster.
That’s what static site generators mostly do, the machinery locally with the content in some repository, after which a script transforms it into static web pages and places them online.

Having seen E make this change, gives me static website envy.

There are some things to consider before starting a project like that. There are some interactive aspects of this site that I need to keep working. Sending and receiving Webmentions, and allowing comments for instance. On the back-end I want to be able to keep posting through micropub, so that like now I can post from within my feedreader or my local notes directly to my site.

Three men, with few words between them, share a deep friendship which unfolds every summer against the backdrop of the mountains. Their winter lives in the valleys down below are not worth a mention, even though they know where the others live and work during these months. Only up above the treeline, underneath the peaks and in the wide silences between them, is where they feel alive and free. Until something happens to one of them, which forces them to seek each other out down below too, as uncomfortable and strange as it may feel.

I came across this title in Zürich on my way to a weekend in the mountains with friends myself. I read it through the Kobo Plus subscription.
The silence and calm of the mountains has always appealed to me, since I first visited the Alps as a kid in 1979. Despite my fear of heights. At one point, in late February 1995, when after a 10 day stay I left the Swiss Alps by train and saw them receding in the distance I thought to myself “I’ll never see those again”. A scary and jolting thought in my then very depressed state and a stark memory that has stayed with me. Luckily, after 1995 I did visit the mountains again, even if not as often as I’d really like. In short, I can relate to the characters in Berghütte.

Montafon, Austria, summer 2025

Among Others (2012) turned out to be a beautiful and moving coming of age story, about living with trauma and grief. The escape that reading offers, and the many pointers to pre 1980 SF works were also woven nicely into it. Makes me revisit older SF works, and had me buy some more of Vonnegut’s work I realised I haven’t read as far as I remember.

My Real Children (2014) recounts two versions of a woman’s life, bifurcating from a ‘now or never’ demand made by her fiancée after she has graduated at Oxford shortly after WWII. Neither life is in our timeline as such, but close enough to it. Both lines end with dementia, in which she can’t keep both of them apart anymore. Really enjoyed this, and the dread of dementia resonates, given my own paternal family’s history.

Also have read Lent (2019) by Jo Walton, which is a completely different and fantastic story again, set in Renaissance Florence, that I highly enjoyed too.

Now reading her most recent book, published this month, Everybody’s Perfect, letting you peek behind the masks Venetians wear.

Over the past month or two, after our return from Portugal I’ve been slowly improving and overcoming my burn-out. I’m at a point where I am eager to do certain things again, notice E and Y and my love for them much more again, can get energised from facilitating a workshop with a client, started to do more around the house again. I’ve certainly not put the burnout fully behind me but it definitely feels different. Different from not just the past two years, but also from the burnout build-up in the years before it, and previous cycles of similar introspection.

I notice that it is easy to let that sense of feeling better entice me back into the routines that brought me to this in the first place (next to the clear external factors that were in play).

That however is something to avoid.

Two years ago while working with a psychologist I figured out what to focus more on in order to align the way my mind works better with what I do (wrt exploration, peers, criticism and creativity). A few weeks ago I briefly crossed paths for the first time in over 30 years with someone I knew in a phase of deep psychological turmoil and depression for both them and me which ended in something I now qualify as unhealthy codependency but remember mostly as bizarrely intense yet also fondly. This led me to again read the journals I kept in that time. That reading, next to showing me details driving home how bad that time really was, reinforced the notion that there are habits, reflexes and resonances in play, some since I started primary school even, that still have an influence even though they are no longer of use to me. They get in my way periodically and in this burnout they do too. It’s also not the first time I conclude this, I basically do so every decade since I realised these things first when I was 7 or 8 years old. When I was 17, 25, 33, 46, and now in my mid fifties.

So it’s a key need to not fall back into old patterns without a proper look at if they still serve me, or stopped serving me. To not simply enter the next cycle as before until I run headlong into the next brick wall.

One mundane thing I am letting fall by the wayside is managing tasks. I have kept lists ever since I learned to write, have a natural tendency to take notes. The oldest handwritten (diary) note I still have is from July 1977. For most of the 5 decades since I also made many lists of things to do, for 2 decades using the Getting Things Done (GTD) method.

Capturing tasks is easy enough, I do that as they pop-up and while reflecting, and tag them according to the project they belong to. Resurfacing them again, or actually using the resulting lists structurally has always been more of a struggle. To be sure, GTD doesn’t necessarily focus on tasks, just on next actions, definitely a different thing, within projects within different areas of responsibility.
Areas of responsibility are broad, too broad I feel to give a sense of intuiting what is needed now within them. Projects feel to me like external entities demanding my attention even if I defined them myself, and I can get quite obstinate in the face of external demands for attention. Tasks by themselves always feel like the wrong level of granularity, they’re usually too atomic, making it hard to distinguish between them or feel their relevance. Looking at lists of tasks is also the best way to bore me and to avoid starting.

Last month, visiting friends and the mountains, I picked up a book in Zürich titled "I think I’m thinking too much" by Nina Kunz. The blurb and table of contents promised more than this collection of columns delivers, but one of the little chapters talked about what roles in life you use as blocks for your self-perceived identity. Just the work angle? Or other parts? And how do your identity stories affect setting priorities in the areas of your life?

I started listing the roles I have for each of the areas of my life, and quickly realised they are a much better fit than projects assigned to those areas. A client project is one single project in my work area in the sense of e.g. my company and billing, but I can have up to half a dozen different roles in some of them. Similarly for areas outside my work there are different roles in all of them, and unlike projects roles feel personal, mine, not like an external obligation. Naming them already creates a sense of agency, things I can show up for. Additionally I can decide which roles I want, where projects just exist or don’t in the shape of demands and expectations.
Listing the roles I immediately noticed that which activities are relevant in them comes entirely naturally to me simply by mentally stepping into a role.

Looking at the patterns and habits I see recurring over time, that no longer serve me, I realised they’re activities within roles too, and some of those roles are no longer mine, haven’t been mine for decades, or should never have been mine in the first place. Activities, very different from tasks, and overlapping with but not the same as GTD’s next actions, lend themselves well to the ‘more of this, less of that’ approach in complexity management. It is a useful instrument for breaking/building habits, for types of activities to do or delegate, and for roles themselves to accept or not. Accepting a role or not is especially important, because I tend to spot unfulfilled roles much earlier than others, and easily take them on inadvertently without others noticing.

That’s what I am moving into now. Dropping the notion of tasks and projects, explicitly adopting and releasing roles and activities, and sensing my way forward with the more/less of this/that heuristic. This way I’ve broken two habits that have been bugging me for many years (one self-harm related, one mobile phone related) in the past few weeks, and I think I’ve figured out how to make that stick over time, and the current respite from them is a reward in itself.

All of this is not just about recovery or ability to move forward again. It’s also a matter of acknowledging loss and grief, as it has been in each of the cycles mentioned. ‘You know grief‘ a friend remarked to me a few years back, recognising it in me as they went through theirs, and others over decades wondered how I could recognise their trauma so intuitively. The past weeks have brought insights into those things, insights that differ from previous cycles. Different because of the agency they assign to others over the course of my life, not just focus on the (in)adequacy of my personal agency.

Thinking in roles shook that loose. And it makes me drop mundane task management. I’ll count either as progress.

Yes, this type of exploration is important. Without a set purpose as goal, but certainly not without purpose as an experience and source of meaning. I don’t think I have the bandwidth at the moment, and I certainly do not fit the criteria to increase the little group’s diversity, but I definitely get the tinkering angle. Also because we have to take away these tools from those who gatekeep them, and bring them down to individual and group level, make them smaller than us. So we can create networked agency together. Will think of David and his Ikigai collective while I tinker. And perhaps find a few fellow tinkerers myself.

For the past three months, every Thursday evening, a small group of people from four continents has met for an hour to show each other what they built that week. No agenda beyond that.

David Orban

Earlier agreements, the Safe Harbor Agreement (until 2015) and the Privacy Shield Agreement (until 2020), both were struck down in European courts as inadequate (the Schrems I and Schrems II cases).

The DPF always has been a sham. Because in reality it was clear that there was no practical adequacy in any way, let alone that it could be properly enforced. “But there’s independent oversight! The FTC!” has been used as plausible reason to change nothing in practice. Notions of data protection in the USA never aligned with the very different premises of the EU GDPR, and wrapping it in the DPF does not change that. Not even when paying no attention to the intelligence elephant in the room.

The semblance of a functional redress mechanism was already gone when the Trump regime fired most of the DPRC members in early 2025, leaving a single Republican in place where three people are needed for a decision. This placed the framework ‘in doubt’. Harsh words, I know.

The death of the DPR has now been made official by the Supreme Court as it destroyed the independence of the FTC by declaring statutory removal protections unconstitutional. That will wreak havoc in the USA itself no doubt, giving the executive control of all heretofore independent oversight bodies (except for the Federal Reserve to add a bit of inconsistency).
Doing away with the FTC’s independence removes the last pretence of a functioning EU – US Data Privacy Framework.

NOYB, the NGO run by Max Schrems (of the epynomous Schrems I and II verdicts) has called upon the European Commission (PDF) to face the facts and withdraw the adequacy decision about the DPF. It has also announced another lawsuit to ensure the DPF will not remain in place if the EC does not choose to act.

Would agentic skills succeed where process descriptions, intranets, 1990-2010 knowledge systems, quality assurance systems all failed when aimed at documenting the actual knowledge present in an organisation?

I doubt it.

Deep knowledge is relational, chunky, only its underlying facts and heuristics can be codified. And people will resist codification, for different reasons. Such as recognising the futility of it, or recognising its aim of making the people with knowledge superfluous. Or both.

Are skills different enough from earlier systems aimed at codification to gain some willing cooperation from knowledge workers?

They might be.

Unlike the earlier systems, a skill is small and its aim is not explicitly ‘codifying everything’. Smaller than you, an information object in itself. And you get to combine such objects into a chain or bundle as a small workflow. They are a much smaller ask than the others were.
Additionally skills can be deployed by yourself in your own work. For processes, QA, KM it was mostly all done for others, for the hand-offs between actors and mostly seen as external to one’s own work. Why would you write down and maintain what you would not use yourself?
That is where skills can have a different impact. And in terms of ease of use, it helps that such skills are in natural language, as it allows you to handwave the parts where you can’t express your own actual knowledge in any precise detail. Which will be often.

So skills will be likely an easier sell to do some codification.
Still the push for skills is to be small, niche and specific. I’ve seen lots that are actually deterministic, in other words can be automated, except perhaps for the decision when to call a skill and with which inputs. Meaning they codify something different than knowledge.
Such codification will not likely form a coherent whole either. Also because skills are regularly aimed at something that is not within the scope of existing knowledge, a helper function next to current knowledge work.

So, no, I don’t buy the ‘skill codification as knowledge transfer’ suggestion to sell skills with.

I disagree. This is the pitfall of “it’s only worth changing if we can get from here to a mythical ideal situation in a single easy step, otherwise we’ll stay put”.
Indeed, opting to source a single tool outside of the walled garden you’re in does not change anything about you being in that walled garden as such. But adding a tool within the walled garden does make it harder still to leave that walled garden in the future. It increases your cost of leaving once more.

You have to begin somewhere if you want to move out of monopolies under foreign jurisdiction outside your democratic control, that can determine what’s on your screen and in your inboxes. Not adding to the problem is one step easily made, because it does not require you to change anything in your current way of working, just to apply different decision criteria upfront when adding something.

Open State Foundation is geregeld een waakhond die aanslaat, die laat zien dat het anders moet en kán, en even goed een betrouwbare partner van overheden om te zorgen dat het anders gáát.

Ik initieerde ooit met James Burke in 2008 de allereerste bijeenkomst van wat daarna Hack de Overheid ging heten, en later met Het Nieuwe Stemmen de Open State Foundation werd.
In 2017 schreef ik een impactanalyse op verzoek van Open State Foundation en een fonds, en merkte hoe goed en enthousiast het team is en welke mooie dingen er worden gedaan. Daarom stelde ik me beschikbaar voor het bestuur, en ben ik nu zo’n 8 jaar voorzitter.

Onze huidige directeur Serv Wiemers neemt na 6 jaren afscheid. Hij kwam middenin het eerste corona-jaar op een moment dat veel werk was komen stil te liggen. Niettemin had hij het schip (we zijn gevestigd op het Marineterrein in Amsterdam naast het Scheepvaartmuseum met de replica van de Amsterdam, dus een passende metafoor) spoedig op koers, en sindsdien hebben we een hele reeks mooie resultaten geboekt.

Ik kijk er naar uit kennis te maken met wie de volgende directeur wil en kan zijn!

It’s always good to see a blogger adding Webmentions to their site. Cross-blog conversations are to me what blogging is about. And Webmentions are a useful piece of plumbing to make it so. If your set-up works, then this should show up at your end. Blog on!

Last week I spent a few days in Switzerland. I went to Zürich on Thursday to meet up with a few people, having a pleasant chat with Beat Döbeli about his 30 year old PKM system Biblionetz, and a nice dinner with long time open data friend André Golliez, who chairs the Swiss Data Alliance. The next day, after mining the Orell Füssli book store for new publications by Swiss authors, I took a train to nearby Thalwil on the lake shore. This was the starting point for a weekend hanging out and hiking with two friends who live in Switzerland, in the Arosa region above Chur, in the Canton Grisons.

The area is old, settled since neolithic times, and Chur was the Roman provincial capital already in 15 BC, and still is the cantonal capital two millennia on.
My friends and I go back much less than that, but still we’re slowly and steadily nearing 40 years of friendship.

The Arosa valley historically must have been very much an isolated and hard to reach place. Even now Arosa feels remote, at the end of a 28km stretch into a valley, with endless bends and curves, a road hundreds of meters above the valley floor of the steep ravine through which the melting water forces its way down to the Rhine valley. In the 19th century a railroad opened the area up for guests seeking clear mountain air, and in the 1920s a first road was built suitable for cars. It’s been a ski resort for almost 100 years already.

The weather was nice, sunny, 18C and almost no wind. Arosa was between seasons, the skiing most definitely over, the summer season not yet started. The cable car was running again for the first week, allowing us up to the Weisshorn (2653m). We had intended to walk down, but there was still too much snow on the first part of the route directly under the peak. Instead we took our time to enjoy the view. It was clear, as it often is in spring after dust and particulate matter has rained out, and you could see very far. To the north, over 30km away the peaks of the Rätikon on the Swiss Austrian border, where I spent many summers as a teen and as a student, clearly stood out. In the other directions you could see for 30 to 40km too. I let the quiet of the mountains seep into me. Just seeing them brings me rest, despite my fear of heights. Afterwards we took the cable car some 600m down to the middle station and from there walked through the alpine meadows, where flowers were blooming, beautiful orchids, small spring enzian in their amazing deep blue, and many other dashes of colour, despite patches where it was clear the snow had melted away only very recently.

We enjoyed the one pub, bakery and few restaurants in Arosa that were open, and their friendly and welcoming service. And each others company, catching up, talking.
Heading back on Sunday afternoon, I stayed one more night in Zürich, before heading home on Monday,

Normally it is easy to forget that the area is also still in active use by the Dutch Navy, for which parts of it are unobtrusively shut off to the public. During summer people swim in the former harbour basin, there’s a sauna lodge at its edge, and floating gardens, just steps from surveilled fences.

This morning it was very obvious that this is still an active navy compound.
Four artillery pieces were shooting across the harbour basin, right as I traversed the pontoons across it with my bike to reach the Open State’s offices. Despite the serious looking military police cordoning off the otherwise public street, it was clear it was a ceremonial thing. The cannoneers wore gala outfits with lots of gold tresses.
The noise was enormous though as I moved towards my destination under their fire.

Turns out the Emperor of Japan is on a state visit and in Amsterdam today, and the firing was a salute.
It also explains the very visible large police presence at Central Station when I arrived from home and picked up a bike there.

Four guns firing over the harbour basin, seen from the harbour basin’s other end, at Marine Terrein in Amsterdam.

Elke eerste zondag van de maand is het Doei!-dag, voor een dikke doei aan Big Tech.

Er zijn drie grote intrinsieke problemen met BigTech:
1) grote techbedrijven zijn data-graaiers. In grote techbedrijven gaat het in plaats van digitale dienstverlening bovenal om het verzamelen en verhandelen van data. Data over jou. Om er advertenties mee te verkopen en je gedrag mee te beïnvloeden. In weerwil van Europese privacywetgeving.
2) grote techbedrijven zijn silo’s en de-facto monopolisten. Ze houden je in hun silo door nog resterende verbindingen met andere digitale diensten of platformen of het open web stelselmatig af te breken en onmogelijk te maken (verticale integratie, en walled gardens). Hun de-facto monopolistisch karakter maakt dat ze hun diensten vervolgens kunnen uitkleden of nog meer richten op data-graaien, omdat je toch nergens anders heen kunt, en andere bedrijven die via hen iets verkopen afknijpen. De verkakking (enshittification) van digitale diensten.
3) grote techbedrijven staan meestal onder invloed van vreemde mogendheden waar jij geen democratische controle over hebt. Daarmee wordt het een pressiemiddel ten koste van jouw vrijheid van handelen. VS-bedrijven moeten toegang bieden aan hun overheid, en die overheid ook een uit-knop toestaan. (Eerst met de Patriot Act van 2000 en nu met de Cloud Act van 2018). Recenter coöpteren ze ook graag Europese toezichthouders en mengen ze zich in binnenlandse democratische processen. Chinese tech-bedrijven zijn integraal onderdeel van het Chinese surveillance en repressie-systeem, en component van het buitenlandse beïnvloedingsbeleid.

De eerste twee redenen zijn voldoende aanleiding voor ieder individu en bedrijf om af te zien van BigTech ‘diensten’, de derde maakt het ook urgent voor alle Europese overheden. Als digitale autonomie (ik bepaal hoe digitale gereedschappen voor me werken en welke ik gebruik) en digitale soevereiniteit (ik bepaal wat ik doe, niemand heeft aan mijn digitale gereedschap een pressiemiddel) je lief is.
De oplossing is overigens niet om gelijksoortige grote bedrijven in Europa te hebben. Die zijn dan net zo problematisch namelijk. Om dezelfde intrinsieke redenen als hierboven, en om de eveneens aanzienlijke problematische externaliteiten die BigTech ook veroorzaakt, t.a.v. klimaat, uitbuiting, haat en geweld.
Je moet er dus ‘gewoon’ helemaal vanaf, en niet op zoek naar een kloon maar dan met een EU vlag. Je moet overstappen naar alternatieven, en iets is pas een alternatief als het ook echt anders is. Qua omvang, financiering, besturing, structuur, functionaliteit en principes.

In ons huishouden zijn we in 2014 begonnen met Doei! zeggen tegen BigTech. Vooral vanwege de eerste reden (al waren enkelen in mijn netwerk toen ook al zeer stellig over de 3e reden). E is dan ook een van de mensen die in navolging van het Duitse Digital Independence Day (dat november vorig jaar startte) op de FOSDEM conferentie in januari bedachten dat een Nederlandse tegenhanger nodig is: Doei! dag.

Doei is technisch makkelijker gezegd dan psychologisch gedaan. Je bent gewend aan hoe het is, hoe je het nu doet. En als je verandert van software, platform of alleen al het uiterlijk van iets, vinden we dat snel erg lastig. Dus is wat hulp en aanmoediging welkom. Dat doet Doei! dag met recepten. Elk recept is een stappenplan om beetje bij beetje BigTech te vervangen door digitaal gereedschap dat alleen jou ten dienste staat. Bijvoorbeeld Signal gaan gebruiken (al is het een Amerikaanse non-profit, op deels Amerikaanse cloud infrastructuur van Amazon) in plaats van WhatsApp (van Meta).

Elke stap weg van BigTech is daarin beter, dan wachten op een perfecte overgang. Natuurlijk zit niet ‘iedereen’ op Signal, en voor je gevoel wel op WhatsApp. Maar sommigen wel, en met iedere overstap wordt de muur om WhatsApp heen doorlatender. Denk aan Hyves, dat was kort na 2010 binnen een paar maanden leeg, terwijl ‘iedereen’ er ‘op’ zat. Nog ‘even’ wachten op het perfecte alternatief en zeggen ‘maar ik weet wel dat ik eigenlijk iets anders moet gebruiken’, is hoe je brein de inspanning die iedere verandering is probeert te voorkomen. Je brein zegt eigenlijk ‘ik wil alleen veranderen als het geen verandering meer is’. D.w.z. je wacht op het redden van je digitale autonomie tot iemand anders dat voor je regelt. Niet heel autonoom, digitaal of anderszins. Je claimt je digitale autonomie door zélf kleine stapjes te zetten, en dat te blijven doen.

Mijn ervaring is dat bijna elke stap vooraf lastiger lijkt dan het meteen nadat je hem gezet hebt bleek te zijn.

Ik heb in 2014 bijvoorbeeld flink zitten puzzelen over hoe ik uit Gmail weg kon, gaf er ook presentaties over, en meteen nadat ik mijn e-mail anders was gaan doen vroeg ik me af waarom ik het niet veel eerder had gedaan.

Ik heb begin vorig jaar besloten dat ik geen e-boeken meer wil kopen bij Amazon. Dat was best even zoeken, waar koop ik die boeken dan wel, en hoe houd ik overzicht (dat ik bij Amazon ook niet had, ik dacht dat alleen maar), maar uiteindelijk was het eenvoudig, en ik ben nu ruim een jaar niet eens meer op hun site geweest. Ook als ik nieuwe boeken zoek, kom ik niet bij Amazon op de site, en in zoekresultaten negeer ik als vanzelf Amazon en Goodreads links. Ik ben veel blijven lezen, en doe dat nu gevarieerder dan voorheen. Ik heb bovendien nu ook meer plezier in het online neuzen naar nieuwe boeken, veel meer een verlengstuk van zoals het ook in een goede boekwinkel kan voelen.

Op mijn laptop (Apple! Maar mijn dochter heb ik een Linux laptop gegeven….) komt alle software die ik dagelijks gebruik van buiten BigTech, en van alle BigTech social media ben ik af. In mijn bedrijf heb ik dat ook grotendeels zo ingericht. Mijn telefoon is nog grotendeels BigTech afhankelijk (een Fairphone met standaard Android van Google nog, al heb ik een collega een ontgooglede mobiel gegeven) maar hopelijk ontvang ik later dit jaar een telefoon van Jolla met Linux (en dan kijken hoe goed bijv bank apps daarop draaien).

Het is ook niet alleen een individuele zaak, al helpt ‘stemmen met je voeten’ echt. In organisaties, op systeem-niveau, en in inkoopprocessen van overheden en bedrijven moet ook iets veranderen. Daarom ben ik bijvoorbeeld in mijn werk nu ook actief in hoe Europese en internationale standaarden voor datatransacties in data spaces en cloud en voor soevereiniteit in cloud platformen worden geformuleerd. Want alleen wie daar meedoet heeft invloed op die standaarden (terwijl iedereen ze moet gaan gebruiken). BigTech zit er áltijd, die hebben daar (overigens zeer kundige) mensen voor en weten dat ze zo de hele markt kunnen beïnvloeden. Ik zit er daarom ook, want tegengas is nodig op de uitgangspunten en aannames die BigTech hanteert.

Perfect is het dus niet/nooit, systemisch niet, en individueel niet. Zo zit ik ook nog wel op LinkedIn (van Microsoft), al heb ik de tijdslijn daar uitgezet voor mezelf toen het inhoudelijk een soort Facebook-kloon begon te worden. Maar dat ik me nu langzaam drukker begin te maken over de hardware die ik gebruik, in plaats van alleen de software en online diensten, is een teken dat ik en ons huishouden al flink wat stappen hebben gezet.

Stap je mee?

Doei!

On occasion I’ve mentioned here that one way of ensuring longevity of this blog is to publish it as one or more books with a proper ISBN, and have the national library store their two obligated copies. We did this in my student association with our monthly magazine (with an ISSN not ISBN) and year books too.
My website is part of the national library’s web archive, but Wouter description is still of interest to me. He did some curation, do not much, and no editing. The paper version is likely more browsable than the website, even if a web viewer is called a browser. Sadly enough he had it made through Amazon, so should I go down this route still, finding a way of doing it with local (i.e. EU) partners only is step one.

This was a lovely month project that rewarded me with a physical artefact of an ever-evolving digital medium, solidifying words, sentences, and paragraphs in a way that perhaps might even envy The Internet Archive. As a hopeless sentimental person, flipping through the book, looking at the figures and reading the text makes me happy. And also embarrassed as there are plenty of contextual and grammatical mistakes in solidified as well.

Wouter Groeneveld

I spent the week in Ciudad Real in Spain, under an hour by high speed train (~200km) south of Madrid.

I was there for a plenary meeting of CEN/CENELEC’s joint technical committee (JTC) 25 that works on European standards for data management, data spaces, and cloud & edge. The need for these standards originates in the European Data Act. The event was hosted by one of the committee members at the University of Castille-la Mancha. It was a very warm week (up to 35 degrees) with intensive long days, but also nice to visit somewhere I hadn’t been before (photos on Flickr).

Group picture with local and national dignitaries immediately displayed in the University’s hallways

Flags of countries represented in the room (the meetings were hybrid)

Turns out, Ciudad Real is situated in the crater of a volcano, a maar. From the center of the town the roads all go up the slopes of the crater. Ground water is said to be warm and somewhat fizzy. The surrounding region has many volcanic structures.

Although Ciudad Real is at the heart of Don Quixote country, I did not see windmills (except as souvenirs in the nearby Almagro).

A mural of Don Quixote, on the streets of Ciudad Real

Despite the heat cool heads prevailed at the meetings, as is needed for the always consensus based development of standards.
It was good to meet several people face to face, also discussing informally what standardisation needs are connected to the notions of digital autonomy and sovereignty. As a result I joined the ISO JTC1 SC38 on cloud computing and distributed platforms, that have a working group on these topics.

11th century Castillo de las Guadalerzas and olive trees, from the train back, halfway between Ciudad Real and Madrid

The next plenary meeting will be in Oslo in October.

There is a lot of sloppy journalism out there. Obvious questions not asked, basic facts not gotten straight, numbers literally not adding up, tens to thousands of orders of magnitude errors. The perennial sensationalist phrasing and populist use of emotion laden words as supposedly neutral wording. And then there is ignorance of basic knowledge becoming a lens through which things become overly mysterious.

The Guardian writes (archive link) about a new Stephen Hawking biography, in which for the first time also the diaries of his father, and letters and journals from his mother were available as source. The article contains an image of his father’s diary entries for early January 1963. The image caption reads:

"Extract from diaries kept by Stephen Hawking’s father, who wrote many entries using a secret code that the biographer Graham Farmelo has cracked."

Secret code? Ooh, mysterious and intriguing! And the biographer cracked it! Roll over, Bletchley Park!
Let’s see if I can ‘crack’ it too.

Extract of a diary page by Frank Hawking of 3 January 1963, taken from the full page published by The Guardian in the link above.

Actually it’s easy. The snippet above is from Thursday 3 January 1963 and reads

St(ephen) wants a tape recorder for his 21st. They seem to be expensive (35GBP) and not very useful but as things are I would refuse him nothing. Later I went into London

Hawking’s 21st was a week later, was already ill, and soon after his diagnosis was that he would not live for more than 2 years (this is the ‘as things are’), and hence the ‘refuse him nothing’.

The code is no code of course, it is Greek script, used to transliterate regular English. Anyone could spot that it is Greek script, and anyone who had a year of ancient Greek at school knows how to do this. Pretending it is code to crack just tells me you’ve never bothered to register that there are other scripts and what they look like.

Writing your diaries this way is an easy way to increase the likelihood that someone finding it will not immediately be able to easily read it. It’s a small instrument to maintain some privacy and shield the people you name. Or to feel a little bit more protected so as to not self censor. So that for instance the first line of the day’s entry, which precedes the one above "This morning at five AM we made love. Later I went to Mill Yard (?) in Hobbe’s car." felt safe to write.

The article further down actually quotes Hawking senior, explaining it is Greek script used this way. So then the caption is perhaps not ignorance but only sensationalist. Still. A main Dutch news site repeated the Guardian while removing context, and at the same time promoting the image caption that Hawking senior wrote in code and the author had cracked it to a full paragraph at the end, so the ignorance propagates because its sensationalist implication is sticky.

I used transliteration myself this same way a lot in my twenties, and still do regularly. Whenever I am writing something private in public on paper I use Greek script (although I’m sure E and Y would tell you my handwriting is bad enough to serve as privacy shield all by itself). In primary school I taught myself cyrilic and used that, but that doesn’t map all that well onto Latin script, so many varieties of s related sounds in cyrillic. (I also tried to learn stenography on my own in primary school but couldn’t get to grips with it). Greek script, which I was taught in secondary school, maps much better, except it doesn’t have a v or w (Hawking sr. writes the w unchanged, and replaces the v with a reclining F as is common, which I use for the w actually as I write the v as I would an f, using φ) nor an h (which is solved by a diacritic sign on the next vowel that ancient Greek already uses.). I also have Greek and cyrillic enabled on my laptop’s keyboard, both because I need it sometimes, if rarely, for work purposes, and because sometimes I use them to make private notes on my laptop too when I am in public.

Not secret but private. No ‘code’, no ‘cracking’ other than learning to read someone’s handwriting, just transliteration.

The caption should have been "Extract from diaries kept by Stephen Hawking’s father, who wrote many entries using a secret code using transliterated Greek script, that the biographer Graham Farmelo has cracked could easily read after getting used to Hawking’s handwriting.

This weekend we took a train to Rotterdam. We decided to spend a day there, as our Canadian friends Peter and Lisa were coming up from Bruges in Belgium, which was the last stop on their cycling holiday. Before meeting them and after coffee the three of us strolled to and through Museumpark and visited the Depot of the Boijmans van Beuningen museum. The museum itself is closed a decade or longer for renovations to their 19th century building. Next door a new depot was built, which is a unique feat of architecture: a large mirrored bowl reflecting the full Rotterdam skyline, with a tree park on the roof. The depot is open to the public, with temporary expositions, and guided tours of the actual storage spaces for a dozen or so people at a time. Pixel Pioneers was the title of the temporary exhibition, featuring early digital game designs, digital art, and a special focus on the works of Geert Mul. Het already started exploring media art before the web, treating collections of images as databases and working with the patterns across them. We previously saw some of his work at Dutch Design Week I think. The Depot’s rooftop park is a thing worth seeing in itself, and we had drinks and a snack there.

The Depot building reflecting the Rotterdam skyline.

By then Peter and Lisa had reached Rotterdam too, and we met up at café Heilige Boontjes for a drink, and exchanging small gifts, before finding a place to eat in the Witte de Withstraat. We were early for dinner, it was a school night for Y after all, so had no trouble finding a spot. It was great to see Y talk with Peter and play a game of hangman with Lisa, both in English. She had practiced her English before our trip to Portugal earlier this month, because she wanted to be able to converse with our hosts Bev and Etienne, and made good use of the experience she gained now.

Continuing our conversations we walked back to Rotterdam central station where Peter and Lisa fetched their luggage and we took a train home.

It is a bit surreal to meet friends from across the Atlantic for just a few hours. By definition that seems too short to do justice to the scarcity of such meetings and the geographic distance involved. At the same time it is also somewhat miraculous that such connections and meetings even exist at all, a triumph for blogging as Wouter characterized his own lunch last week with Peter and Lisa. Indeed every in-person meeting since Peter and I first met in 2005 was carried by all our blogging in between that preserves shared context. Within that 20+ years of shared context it makes perfect sense to meet even if only briefly, whenever the opportunity arises.

We spent a week and a half in Portugal this spring. Traveling together is something we do well with the three of us, and something I find healing. Although I found it hard at times to be in the moment, and to not let myself get irritated over small things.

It was Y’s first ever flight. Coincidentally my first flight was to Portugal too, albeit to Porto, and when I was 19, not 9 as Y is. It was as uneventful as it should be. After picking up our rental car we drove north to Caldas da Rainha for the first leg of our trip. My sister and her husband moved there for retirement after the pandemic, and this was the first time we visited them in their new habitat. I had planned to do so already a long time ago, but I never got around to planning a trip in time. This time we used Y’s two weeks of spring vacation, and actually planned ahead. We stayed in a nice AirBnB just outside Caldas, in the green hills, where we had a full floor of a much larger residence to ourselves, including the use of both an indoor and an outdoor swimming pool. The weather wasn’t very warm so Y enjoyed the indoor pool. We enjoyed the company of my sister and brother in law, explored the coast, visited Obidos and enjoyed several restaurants and coffee places in Caldas.

Obidos castle

We drove south again for a long weekend in Lisbon after three nights. It was the May 1st weekend, so a busy weekend in the city, and on May 1st itself public venues were all closed.
Lisbon was fun to visit, despite the barely tolerable Novotel, with a day spent in and around the São Jorge castle, in Belem and the earth quake museum, plus a morning at LX Factory. We also spent a day in Sintra, going there by train taking into account the parking issues when we visited the area in 2010 during an extended stay due to the Eyjafjallajökull ash clouds preventing our scheduled flight home.

A nice lunch with a view from S. Jorge Castle across Lisbon and the Tagus

We drove over the red 25 de abril bridge across the Tagus river (no shots were fired this time) further south to Sesimbra. Sesimbra is a fisher village and a popular seaside spot for Lisbon’s population, facing due south on the Atlantic coast. There we spent a few relaxed days with Bev and Etienne Wenger-Trayner, enjoying walks at the beach, the gorgeous view from their home across the Atlantic, and shared meals. Y and I played chess on the terrace, and Y used the English she practiced at home beforehand very well conversing with Bev and Etienne. We finished with an awesome dolphin watching tour from Setubal, where Y could almost touch them (and was splashed by them) laying on a net off the bow of a catamaran. We spent 30 minutes surrounded by a large group (over 15) of dolphins and their beauty and gracefulness overwhelmed me. Thinking back to a similar dolphin trip last year with my company team during the long goodbye of Frank I shed a few tears.

Up and close encounter with dolphins.

After a very nice goodbye dinner with Bev and Etienne at the cosy O Zagaia restaurant in Sesimbra, we drove back to the airport the next morning. This time we crossed the Tagus over the 17km long Vasco da Gama bridge, before returning the rental car at the airport.

Unplanned we did quite a bit more than we thought. My sister provided a filled programme. In a hotel like in Lisbon there’s mostly no other choice than to keep moving. Staying with our friends in Sesimbra provided the relaxed environment I realise I actually crave more of.

Chilling in Sesimbra at the home of friends ]]> https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/05/portugal-in-spring/feed/ 3 https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/05/a-short-walk/ https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2026/05/a-short-walk/#respond Thu, 14 May 2026 17:53:04 +0000 https://www.zylstra.org/blog/?p=26411 As I mentioned in my previous post The Long Walk, I struggle to get out of the house and away from my laptop to take short walks in the neighbourhood during the day.

We live at the northern edge of Amersfoort, and across the small Laak river in easy walking distance there’s a polder at the provincial border. The polder is old. The Laak river was canalised as early as 1200 and in the mid fourteenth century dykes were put up further north to keep out the Zuyderzee (now IJsselmeer, as it was dammed in the early 1930s after the last flood and dyke breach in 1916). Between the Laak and the dyke land was made dry (the Laak runs up to a meter above the polder). Breaches over time created pockets of wetlands behind the dyke. Close to our neighbourhood some of those wetlands that earlier disappeared due to land consolidation were reconstructed recently. Prime bird territory. A few weeks ago as we cycled through the area godwits swooped around us with their distinct cries.

The Laak river is the boundary between the city and a greener area that further north becomes the protected nature preserve Arkemheen

To get me out of the house more, E gifted me binoculars for my birthday this week. As the weather was nice, sunny but with cold winds, we took a short walk this afternoon to the polder edge where a shielded observation point has been built. It was beautiful out there as the silenes were colouring the wetlands purple. Lapwings were present, various types of ducks and geese, a black headed gull was doing some cool moves in the strong wind before dive bombing into the water to catch something.

Purple swaths of silenes in the wetlands

It is now two years ago that during a day trip E and I had a conversation about my wellbeing in which I broke down in tears and we came to the conclusion there and then that I was burnt out. A good moment to take stock of where I am at.

What came before
In the spring of 2024 I sought out the help of a psychologist, which was very useful to see what I can do myself to rebalance. In parallel it became clear what the root cause was, and that it was external. My friend and business partner Frank fell ill, and in hindsight I had been carrying a lot of weight to fill his gap for a long time already, since mid 2022. His condition required most of my and my team’s attention and only after his passing last September did I get around to working on my own recovery.

Nominally I stopped working last September, or at least that was what I and my company communicated. That meant I needed to hand over internal tasks, which took a long time. When we started the company in 2011, and there was just the four founders, I took on some agreed internal tasks. Finance and taxes, IT, suppliers. Gradually that workload grew as our team grew. What you end up with is de facto processes for all those tasks, that only exist in my head and where all the parameters that feed into a decision also only existed in my head. And mostly as tacit knowledge. It needed time to make that work explicit so it could be delegated. And for some things we needed to bump into constraints after that delegation to figure out what exactly it was I did for some tasks. Only around Christmas I had the feeling that delegation of tasks was mostly done. Meaning that only early this year I thought I could properly let myself rest. I also felt I started slowly improving.

Where I am now
That’s not completely true though in practice. Responsibilities keep on having weight even after they’re delegated, and I find I don’t have the energy or bandwidth to show up for them. Also because if I’m needed to show up, it is for anomalies, and that’s the type of thing I have no resilience for yet at all. My voluntary board roles I can’t properly fulfil either, but there’s also no real way to delegate parts of it. So I have announced to some of them I will step down this year.
Yes, I’m slowly getting better in the sense that my mood at home is mostly ok, the grumpiness mostly gone. But as soon as I’m exposed to outside expectations or things get out of the ordinary (like having the kitchen renovated) that quickly is too much for me. As a result I felt like curling up under the covers for most of last month for instance.
I did keep working on client projects all that time since last September. My main client engagement has been a place of relative quiet in the past few years, where I could focus on the content, and where the colleagues let me my space and time. Having clients like that has been amazing and important for our company last year. Lately however I found myself struggling to be fully involved. I felt increasingly disconnected and somewhat lost. That may not be problematic to the client (yet) at this time, but it does feel awful to myself. Similarly I feel I’m losing connection to my company and team, but at the same time I don’t have the energy for it, and when I do connect I immediately feel what an emotional drain it is.

All in all there’s no novel stress, but there is a lack of joy, and the regular work means I don’t create proper time to rest and relax either, and any type of anomaly throws me off the rails immediately. I still get disproportionally mad at myself about simple things like forgetting to bring something from the supermarket twice in a row, or like when recently I went for ice cream with Y and had forgotten to bring my wallet.

Where next
It’s been a long walk, these past two years. And the walk will still be a good stretch longer I know. We made a trip to Portugal, visiting family and friends, and exploring Lisbon the past two weeks. That took me away from things, most of the time. Now that we returned our new kitchen will finally be ready, allowing hopefully a more normal rhythm at home again too.

I’ll keep seeking to reduce my tasks and responsibilities. I still haven’t learned to stop at times, step away from the laptop, go for a walk. The long walk of the past years has seen way too few walks I know. The shape of my days hasn’t changed one bit the past two years I must admit. Although the stress has been removed, and some of its content has been switched out to allow for more exploration, overall it feels like Groundhog day usually. Going through work like motions that aren’t effective in any way when I should really stop. Most of all I need to learn what it is to sit still and far niente, dolce or not. I’ve realised I really don’t know how to do nothing for more than a minute.

Returning from Portugal I noticed the soles of my walking shoes have worn through. So I need to replace them. The long walk is far from over.

This made me stop and think. My company contains a well above average number of actual philosophers, 50% of our team. Some with PhDs. Usually combined with practical technical knowledge. Not sure if it gives us a better handle at the future though. Yet, ‘holding questions’ is something I have returned to a lot in the past months. One of my recent little LLM experiments focuses on it (it’s called WittgenstAIn III), and it routes a question through several philosophical schools of thought as lenses, to hold a question not just longer but also differently.

I started asking myself: how good of a philosopher is this guy? If I were shut in a room thinking about the future, is he somebody I want with me? That’s the test now. Anyone can execute. Fewer people can sit with a hard question long enough to find a better one.

Paolo Valdemarin

In the past week I’ve started three personal experiments that use AI (in this case Claude Code). For each, the experiment lies in automating steps in my cognitive work that are useful or necessary but not the actual cognitive work itself. They’re helper activities, supporting the main task. For two of the three that is the clear focus, the third is slightly different.

The three experiments are:

• Filtering on interests in my feed reader, let’s call it ‘Weak-tAIs’.
• ‘Slopsidian’, lifting concepts and argumentation from papers into Obsidian notes, and linking them iteratively.
• Explore questions with pre-existing ‘recipes’ that take a specific philosophical perspective. Perhaps I should dub this type of language game ‘WittgenstAIn III’.

It started from an automation task, which I mentioned here: manipulating non-fiction e-books. I have a script that I can point to an e-book in my Calibre collection, and then will populate a note with elements from the book: foreword, index and literature list, content overview, all if present, and for each chapter of the book the first and last few paragraphs. This is what I look at and skim whenever I want to gain a first impression and understanding what a book is about, and what questions it addresses or what it proposes. All very Mortimer Adler. From it I can then decide which parts of a book to read more closely, which parts likely contain things I am already familiar with or fall outside my current interest in the book. From those skims I jot down things in my note for the book. This quickly turned out to be useful to me, because it removed the wall between the e-book and my notes by bringing parts of the e-book into my notes temporarily where I could more quickly go through them in preparation for ‘proper’ reading (although in fact it is part of reading).

It got me thinking what other helper activities in reading and filtering I could identify.
Helper activities are tasks that support a main task by making it easier or providing guard rails. Checklists are an example, they ensure that you don’t skip important steps. In most cases nothing will immediately go wrong if you don’t do the helper activity but if you do them the main task gets a little easier to do well. A lot of helper tasks can be regularly automated, like the e-book excerpt script above. Others less so because they contain elements of processing actual texts, like the three experiments I describe here. There perhaps using a model like Claude Code can be of value (and hopefully soon, through local model deployment).

A brief description of the three experiments:

Weak tAIs
I order my RSS feeds by social distance for reading. Part of the reasoning is that I want to be well informed about what close ties write, but I am aware that interesting information likely comes from a wider social distance. This practice has been in place for some two decades and enormously valuable all that time. The most interesting stuff usually comes from the third layer, a folder named ‘c150’, in my feedreader: close enough to know who the author is, and engage in interaction if I want, disconnected enough for them to encounter things I am less likely to have already seen myself. That is the The Strength of Weak Ties (1973) as Granovetter called it.

I also keep a list of current interests, a bit like Feynman’s dozen or so currently favourite problems. For each interest I have formulated a few aspects:

• what is conceptually interesting to me in a topic (e.g. my interest in EU digital and data policy conceptually is that it forms a geopolitical proposition externally, while being a quality improvement instrument internally that takes rights and societal values as yardstick),
• am I theoretically interested or more practically,
• do I have a knowledge fundament for the topic or am I a newbie,
• is there a link with any long term goals,
• can it be put into a specific context or tied to a specific issue/question,
• can I shape or create an enduring practice around it,
• can I build a bridge to outputs, like blogposts, presentations, or client proposals

My feedreader tracks just under five hundred people writing on the open web. That can easily amount to two thousand postings in a week. I can have several intentions to start reading, one of them is to find and read material relevant to my list of current interests. A reading intention does not do away with items, it’s not a filter to remove material. It’s essentially just a view on the entire set of incoming items in the feed reader that I usually construct in my mind. What if I can construct those views on my screen too?
The ‘c150’ social layer, the weak ties, what do they write about that connects to the fields of interest from my list? Such filtering does not lend itself to text based search based on fixed terms. I usually skim titles for first impressions, and click opportunistically through the postings. What if I can have a model weigh the postings and compare them to my list of current interests, to mark them for my attention? In aid of that one specific reading intention.

That’s what the first experiment does: label postings that seem to fit my interests, and express why. So that I can skim the folder of weak ties by interest, and read those items first if my intention is to explore those interests. I limited it to the c150 folder as feeding all rss feeds into the model is consuming a lot of time and tokens, so I started with the part most likely to bring useful results.
The labeling works now as part of my feedreader. I am not yet convinced of the quality of it though. The motivation for the labels usually is along the lines of "it fits interest X but not in the way you’re looking for", which to me means it actually doesn’t really fit.

Slopsidian
This week I read an article about AI documenting its own actions and output in a wiki, and saw one or two similar efforts described. I applied that to a different helper task, which is the preparation of reading a paper and helping me to decide to dig deeper. This is similar to skimming a non-fiction book, but more involved. Can AI reliably pull from a paper the concepts used and introduced, and the line of argumentation? Saving them both in a single note for the resource, and in separate notes for each of the concepts? Additionally can it logically link concepts from different resources? This is what an ‘ingestion skill’ now does for me. I let it store the output it generates in a folder that I can also open as an Obsidian vault, hence the name Slopsidian. The papers come from my Zotero collection, meaning I previously saved them. That original step of curation also means I have a line or two about why I thought them interesting at the time. Feeding that curating decision and the paper into the ingestion skill allows a second order look at a paper. What are the concepts discussed, and, reading the output, do I think some of those are of interest to me? If so, I can look at the paper more closely and do my own note making and paraphrasing and placement in my actual Obsidian collection. Lifting out concepts works rather well, the linking is less useful in the first experiences (too obvious, not sparse enough) and can seem forced when you look at why some concepts get linked.

WittgenstAIn III
The third experiment is a bit more on the edge I think. Here the probabilistic language games that LLMs are have more of a free rein. Part of the university courses on philosophy of science I did 25 years ago was using different philosophical schools of thought as lenses to approach a question. Not to answer the question, that is hardly ever the point after all, but to holding it, and holding it differently. Plato’s essentialism, Kant’s transcendence, dialectics (Hegel), phenomenology (Husserl), Wittgenstein II’s analytical method, hermeneutics (Heidegger), deconstruction (Derrida), and Rorty’s pragmatism. For each of these, for over 2 decades, I’ve had a recipe in my notes to apply to a question.
I put together a ‘language game’ in which I pose a question, which a ‘router’ prompt tries to match to one or more of the 8 recipes, or to a combination of recipes chained together (e.g. first look at a question from an analytical perspective and then feed the results in to a deconstruction exercise.)
My existing multi-step recipes are followed, and output is generated for each of those steps, into a resulting note.
I read those resulting notes, lift out what catches my eye or what resonates and I use it to flesh it out more, for me to hold the question still longer. Models are language games of a sort, so hence the name WittgenstAIn III, a third iteration, extending the second Wittgenstein’s language games to and with AI.
The output here makes me more uncomfortable than the other two. Reasoning is being mimicked, with the usual overconfident wrongness we’ve come to expect from generative AI, and that works out in odd ways sometimes. Still there is utility that can be lifted from the output. It is a good kickstart for exploring questions to quickly see if a recipe might yield something or not, judging by my first attempts in this experiment. It does certainly lower the threshold, as helper task, to engage with the recipes. I’ve used it more in the past days than in the past months. Part of that is the novelty of the experiment, and that may wear off quickly, but perhaps it carries the kernel of more habitual use.

The German translations are available as epubs through Kobo, and there’s the paper editions in the local bookstore. Not sure yet if I’ll read the German ebook version, as I don’t know if Taylor’s subtle ironic style translates well into German. More likely I’ll visit the local bookstore.