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My General Standpoint

Since I hadn’t yet written about it here (but made allusions to it on mastodon): I am concerned about and disappointed in the US, especially its tech sector. A snarky reader could point out that disappointment in the tech sector is a universal experience and that snarky reader wouldn’t be wrong. However, it seems correct to assume that big tech - and all big (software) tech is US tech at this point - is bad.¹

• all big tech companies are trying to exploit labor in various forms
• all big tech companies are trying to skirt regulation to keep the market fair and open
• all big tech companies are actively exploiting their relationship to their customers in various forms
• all big tech companies don’t do enough for the environment nor do they give us options to buy products that are environmentally conscious[
• all big tech companies invest heavily in generative AI and market this tool for frivolous use cases
• the CEOs of all big tech companies bent the knee to a criminal after the election

But not only big tech, also many smaller and medium-sized tech companies are based in the US and many of the tools that we use are US-based. And apart from us giving money and data to these US-based companies and therefore their economy, we as non-US customers don’t matter in the same way as US-based customers. Also do our laws clearly not matter as much. And our values also don’t matter in the same way.

Now, everything is a lot more complicated than that. Just because things are made in Europe doesn’t mean they are better, more ethical, safer or will respectfully engage with consumers/users. But a shift to Europe still means something. It’s about control or at least access. If I’m unlucky with a piece of software that is made in Europe, I do have different ways to enforce laws. I can try to find other users that have similar concerns and we could try to enforce or improve a given situation within the EU together.

In practice, this is not an avenue I’d want to ever go down, but it’s still better to have it available, than to sit here on this side of the Atlantic and let people with their own problems and interests just take my money and data and otherwise don’t care about me.

Giving my money to Europeans also feels better. It pays salaries of fellow European workers or entrepreneurs. It also breaks the pattern that money and data for software just has to go to the USA: Even if that’s not literally true in 100% of the cases, it seems to be the default. It doesn’t have to be the default.

There’s also an opportunity here to reevaluate the landscape in terms of what is available as a self hosted solution. Is there maybe even a local first or local only option that suffices? In other words: Is there an open source tool or an app (as opposed to a service with a subscription) that could be used?

So, most things in my setup can be replaced by something less invasive and more under my control. It’ll take some work and it’ll take some getting used to, but changing the things I use to get work done is certainly possible. This might not do a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it certainly makes me feel a little better and makes me live more according to my own beliefs and values.

Exceptions, Exceptions everywhere

So with that said, it’s not that easy or reasonably possible to just get rid of big tech altogether, as we all know. I certainly will also not just switch to worse apps just because “US bad”, although I’ll use my momentum to reevaluate and to shake things up a bit.

That being said, one bit tech company I just can’t let go is Apple. All my personal devices are apple devices and even though I hate their rent seeking practices in the app store and some of their other behaviors (and their recent ads, too), but by comparison it still seems to me the least bad option in consumer electronics. It’s a little bit harder to say how committed they actually are to their stated goals: accessibility, education, caring for the environment, inclusion and diversity, privacy, equity and investments in a fair supply chain (all taken from the footer of the apple website under the heading of Apple Values), but be that as it may: Apple actually does give me the option to buy carbon neutrally produced products for example² and it still seems to me that what they say about privacy is not just empty talk.³

I am also fine with using indie apps and services that are simply indispensable to me. Due comes to mind. And obviously Obsidian. Good Apps.

And finally I’m willing to try new stuff. In a move almost diametrically opposed to the tone of this post, I recently started to use TickTick for example, even though it is US/China-based.⁴

Decisions, so far

I have not made many moves, yet. But two come to mind:

Jetbrains in, VSCode out (mostly)

Jetbrains is a company based in the Czech Republic that was founded by three Russians back in the day. That sounded an alarm at first. And to be honest I had my gripes about some of the UX with PHPStorm over the years (1, 2) so I never bothered to check it out further. However three things happened:

1. I am working on pretty big legacy php projects now, that make PHPStorm mandatory because Intelephense/VSCode can’t handle the code base anymore.
2. For a side project I started to use Laravel way more than ever before and fell in love with it. And falling in love with Laravel made me realize how good Jetbrains' Laravel Idea plugin is.
3. I noticed that even though Jetbrains had connections to Russia, they ceased operations there, relocated all the people in their Russian locations and made clear their stance against the war in Ukraine.

Having to switch IDEs for recreational programming and work - especially since working with Laravel in PHPStorm using the idea plugin is just so great - felt more and more cumbersome and so I kinda sorta just started to customize and use PHPStorm as my main IDE.

Because my setup consists of two machines - a beefy “devbox” running linux and all the projects; and a MacBook Air as the client from which I do “remote work” through ssh on the devbox - 100% of my work is done “remotely”. That means I either use VSCode with their various remote extensions or use Jetbrains Gateway.

Whereas VSCode works with 1Password’s SSH-Agent, Jetbrains Gateway does not and has the added annoyance that even when using a more conventional ssh-key makes you enter its passphrase twice for some reason. I’ll have to look into that a little more, but for the time being I will use VSCode for source control and for more dev-ops-y tasks that require to edit a file here and there, but I’m not working on a specific project adding features.

Why even move away from VSCode? Isn’t it open source? It is. And it is remarkable that Microsoft of all the companies has made a product that is just great in almost all aspects. But: It’s still Microsoft and that always bothered me. I have to use various Microsoft enterprise products throughout my working day and still deal with Microsoft induced bs in my free time in the form of tech support. Their recent moves vis-a-vis Microsoft Recall are questionable at best. Microsoft is very often not the least worst option and even though their free open source editor is one of the best you can get (but what about emacs), it is actually not the best IDE for PHP-based development.

Intelephense, a 3rd party language server and vs code extension for PHP is great and impressive. AFAIK it is still developed by only one person! But it can’t handle big repos and it lacks refactoring tools that you get when you use PHPStorm. A little earlier I pointed out that the Laravel Idea plugin for PHPStorm is amazing and there just doesn’t exist a comparable alternative for VSCode.

This is not a post about why PHPStorm is better than Visual Studio Code for PHP development, but there is another “social” point worth mentioning: In my circles almost everyone - certainly everyone at my current job - is using PHPStorm anyways. My company provided me with a license for it and all the documentation on how to setup a new project is basically written for PHPStorm users. When working together with another developer, it can be difficult to not get derailed by the different ways things work in vscode vs. PHPStorm. Especially when I am the one who needs help, I don’t want to be asked all the time “why don’t you just use PHPStorm…” as if that would solve the problem (it almost never does). I don’t want to deal with that anymore.

All of these things added up to me using vscode less and less. It depends a little on the project, but as it pertains to this blog post, I am actually quite happy that PHPStorm is based in the EU and that it became my main driver.

Actual in, YNAB out

YNAB - or You need a budget - is an US-based budgeting app that I have used (and at times loved!) on and off for years at this point. It has been much cheaper in the past and they recently raised prices (again). Well, fortune would have it that I was made aware of a pretty comparable open source solution that is called Actual Budget. Is it more rickety and less pretty than YNAB? Yes. But does it have basically the same feature set PLUS a bank account syncing feature that works with my bank (which is something YNAB still doesn’t offer) and costs much less than YNAB? Also yes.

I love that actual can be run super easily through the Malta-based hosting service PikaPods. It’ll cost me the equivalent of 16.92$ (so ~16€, but I don’t know if that includes VAT or not…) instead of 109$ (+ VAT; so 103.21€ + 25,5% = 129.53€) per year. So after thinking about it for a couple of months I made the switch. The world didn’t implode and I’m still budgeting.

Parting words

Sometimes something happens in the world and it somehow changes my whole approach to certain things. The very disappointing and worrying US-election and the (only slightly but still) better situation here in Europe - he says living in a country run by rightwing government that at this very moment dismantles the social democratic base that makes Finland so livable - made me reevaluate my setup: The apps and tools I use and what I’m willing to spend for them - be that time, money, brain cycles or all of the above.

I imagine that this’ll continue and that I will continue to change apps and services in a way that makes them more Eurocentric. As I said above, this is more about potential control (and actual control if switching to something self hosted) than anything else, but I would lie if it wasn’t also in part about a loss of trust.

Really good video about how #dog #training is different from testing: www.youtube.com/watch

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.@manton And I also noticed that footnotes are broken on my main blog/list page: e.g. this reference here blog.martin-haehnel.de is used in two different blog articles.

I did some research and this forum post seems to suggest that there is no solution for goldmark based hugo: discourse.gohugo.io/t/does-go…

However I would imagine that pandoc can handle this. Can I somehow use pandoc to render markdown with micro.blog?

.@manton I’m back with a question about this again: help.micro.blog/t/changin…

Would be possible to use the excerpt of a blog post instead of a static blog description/about me?

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Holy crap. Youtube Premium (Family) just got 10€ (or about 55%) more expensive in our region.

Instead of 17,99€ they now want 27,99€.

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Any indie bookstores in #finland #suomi interested to partner with libro.fm (an audible alternative)? I’d be a customer asap.

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There are many reasons not to take advice.

Period.

Life is incomprehensibly contextual. Still all of us find ourselves reaching for advice from time to time. It is important in those moments to recognize who you’re taking advice from.

Why is this important: Because advice is never only advice. Listening and following or even considering advice can be a way to lend credibility and power. It allows bad people to use that gained credibility to maybe say or do some other stuff with more authority than they are due otherwise.

I see this sometimes in programming circles, where blowhards and hustle culture type people’s opinions are shared and sometimes praised for telling truth to power. I say: resist the urge to engage with their arguments! Especially publicly. Seek kinder people. Seek people that have an interest in being more than just - to stay with the example - a 10x programmer who tells it like it is and doesn’t give a shit about your softie feelings. Most principles of being a good worker or a good person or a person you want to be - or however you want to phrase this - are not available only through a funnel of selfish individualist assholes.

Sometimes considering advice from bad people is unavoidable, because you are forced to see it. Resist the urge to engage with it. I speak from experience when I say that even a negative opinion expressed about what was shared - say in a thread in the work chat - will give credence to more than just the plain advice you’re (seemingly) discussing. Try to share advice from good people instead.

Now, there are at least two more things to consider here:

1. What even is a bad person?
2. Why not try to understand their points and meet in the middle?

Being a bad person is a relative term. I’m sure I am and have been a bad person in other people’s eyes and so - likely - have you. I think it is also a term used to label people with bad values. What are bad values though? Again, it’s somewhat relative. Or rather: It’s a question of priority. For example: Do I value safety over opportunity? Do I value individual expression over piety? There are many values and possible orders (and stabilities of those orders, from unchanging to ethical situationalism). The whole of socially accepted values within a group are what we call morality. Accordingly, you can be more or less moral relative to the current status quo in a social group and its approach to values or what is deemed good and bad.

All this is to say that as an active participant in the world you want to be a part of, that is, the imagined or real community of people you share values with, it is imperative to reflect those morals actively. Because every day you will be confronted with people and acts that need to be evaluated. Some will not pass muster. Others will make you reconsider, some will make you want to run away or start a fight.

So what is a bad person? Spoken from this “position from nowhere”: it is a person who actively threatens the morality of the group(s) you’re socially - by choice or not - belong to. People who try to renew or further a groups moral makeup have creds to do so. Bad actors just try to shake things up.

But spoken from my actual position, instead of a theoretical non-position: It is a person who puts self interest over everything, individualism and personal gain, over the betterment of all, a person who actively fights the institutions of social democracy, a person who shits on worker’s rights, a person who denies queer people or those of color their right to exist. But also people who, on a much smaller scale, think that kindness and empathy is for dumb softies. I say: Do not listen to these kinds of people even if their advice seems plausible.¹ It comes from a bad place.

The second question, about why not to meet in the middle and have calm discussions with bad people, is easier to answer: There simply is no need. The world of ideas is what should be discussed, not opinions. If you talk about other people they should be interested in positive change (i.e. make the world more aligned with what is good) and the discussion should be about empowerment and enablement. Only on the surface is it ever interesting to dissect a bad person’s opinion and sift through the shit to find a couple of pieces of gold. Engaging in this kind of behavior is not good use of time.²

There is plenty of good advice going around about the big things so here is my small piece: If you’re going to be on social media in the next weeks and months and years, block and mute freely rather than getting into spats and squabbles. Preserve your energy for the work. Keep your powder dry. —@kissane

Didn’t work exactly as I wanted (cc: @matt@isfeeling.social any chance for square image templates?), but I do love the Stellaris soundtrack to make my mind be interested in something else then just what’s happening right now. May want to give it a try if you own the game. Lots and lots of great scifi music (6 hours +).

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.@manton Is there a way to control what’s in the “description”(?) of a blog post shared to mastodon? I mean that “Follow on micro blog” part.

It has been a weird, unproductive day at work. I had a hard time concentrating. I was thinking about how AI critique often makes a strong case for humans as opposed to non-human actors and I was wondering what somebody like Bruno Latour - an enormously important figure in my time as a student of history of technology and science and beyond - would say to that. Himself a staunch believer in the co-construction of scientific facts not only by humans but also by non-human actors.

I found out that he died:

“Latour died from pancreatic cancer on 9 October 2022, at the age of 75.”

And I hadn’t even known. At one point I knew a lot about Latour’s work. Closely reading it, applying to a field study of non-academic sociologists on twitter, way back when. That study failed to produce anything, really, but whatever: I spent almost five years positively swimming in “ANT” (actor-network theory) as my framework for describing my “subjects”.

I once saw Latour speaking in the Humboldt University in Berlin. I had to search for it a little, but I believe it happened on 2016-05-12¹:

163. Bruno Latour † Philosoph, Paris On a possible difference between earth and the globe (12. Mai 2016)

I asked him, since he tried to abstain from criticism and instead engage in rediscription of what was more less established (the process of making science), why he wasn’t doing it for the humanities as well. And indeed he was a merciless critic of the epistemic practices and traditions in the humanities at large as well as in the social sciences. Whereas he would go out of his way redescribing the actual physical work that is done to produce a scientific fact, he would merely criticize the work in social fields and not look at how these fields construct knowledge. (And so on.)

I still remember how, in the middle of commenting I suddenly got very excited - there I was, commenting in front of a large audience - on a specific issue that - let’s be honest - had only tangentially to do with the main topic of his talk, but clearly showed that I had lived in this mans thoughts for many years. It was exciting. And the closest I ever came to talk to him.

I also remember his answer. I put my question in a way that asked for patience with the humanists: As “subjects” of an academic anthropology, why would we take what humanists do as the only expression of the humanists process? Why not take the time to look? Latour answered, that he felt, that he had given enough time to the humanists and related my comment to his then new project modes of existence. And that was it.

I still remember that there could’ve been a little more said and done. And I’m also sure that the a - possibly new? - field of an antropology of the humanities would be interesting - has anybody tried to do field work in this way? I’m sooo out of academia… - but I also remember how I somehow knew that this was possibly my only chance to actually make that small, human connection to a person that had opened up the world for me. I’ll always be grateful for his amazing ability to make me rethink everything and get excited about the process of doing the hard epistemic groundwork in the hard way, because that’s how you end up with new insights.

I think that Latour was… is so important to me is because I found him. During my studies we had read the Berlin Key essay, but it was me who took on the ANT head first, by myself, out of sheer intrinsic interest. And I guess because Reassembling the Social had recently become available for purchase and was a perfect entry point for me.

Thank you Bruno Latour.

The following is a rant fed and sustained by worries about the hollowing out of workers rights and democracy as a whole.

It’s not important at all, but it’s interesting to note that Apple has made another recent ad that’s as bad as the hydraulic press one where they destroyed all the instruments. In this one, it shows their AI tool being used by someone who didn’t do their work to fake their way through a meeting. Apple ads used to always show their users as experts or creative thinkers. Now they’re workplace liars. www.youtube.com/watch

— Anil Dash on Threads

And (this one’s a quote Post, I have embeded the quoted post, so it’s easier to read here):

Been trying to explain for years that all of this — the hyper-investment in AI, the “gig economy”, the constant layoffs and attacks on workers rights under the guise of attacking DEI — it’s all a pretense to undermine labor. It’s the single, unifying principle behind all of it.

RE:

Perplexity CEO offers to replace striking NYT staff with AI tcrn.ch/4f3cdyh

techcrunch.com/2024/11/0…

— Anil Dash on Threads

It’s hard not to see the first post as another example of undermining labor. It’s not the expert workers that matter anymore. In the eyes of companies, we’re are supposed to be consumers. But what really eats at me with the recent Apple Intelligence ads is that they are funny to me. They are well acted and written and could almost be comments on the idiotic and soul-crushing AI hype, if it weren’t for the appalling twist, where AI saves the day.

I mean, look at this ad:

Isn’t this actually super sad? Instead of resolving this situation together - “Honey, I’m so sorry, but I forgot your birthday…” (You gotta face the fucking music!) - AI is used to LIE TO YOUR PARTNER. And afterwards the protagonist is portrayed to feel good about themselves. What a genius!¹

And AI is not used here to enable experts to do better work, which is the only use case for AI that makes even a modicum of sense. Instead it is used to show us how inept we are and how we need AI to feel like geniuses (because we are not).

This Apple Intelligence ad where an executive presents a document in a meeting that they haven’t read based on AI summarized key points reminds me of the Google ad where a dad asked an AI to write a letter on behalf of his kid to their favorite artist.

These are both examples where it provides negative value for AI to perform the task instead of a human. I don’t want coworkers regurgitating ChatGPT summaries of documents instead of sharing their perspectives.

www.youtube.com/watch

— Dare Obasanjo on Mastodon

I would like to claim that things are not so dire in Europe. Maybe there isn’t anybody trying to replace striking workers with AI agents (yet), but right-wing governments destroying social democratic foundations exist here, too.

As a fellow immigrant to Finland sumarizes in the Guardian:

I feel a sense of unease as Finland’s prime minister Petteri Orpo’s rightwing coalition government has set about slashing welfare and capping public sector pay. Even on two teachers’ salaries my partner and I have felt the sting of inflation as goods have increased by 20% in three years. With beer now costing €8 or more in a city centre pub, going out becomes an ever rarer expense.

Those worse off than us face food scarcity. A survey conducted by the National Institute for Health and Welfare found 25% of students struggling to afford food, while reductions in housing benefit mean tenants are being forced to move or absorb the shortfall in rent payments. There are concerns that many unemployed young people could become homeless.

Healthcare is faring little better. […]

The current government, formed by Orpo’s National Coalition party (NCP) last year in coalition with the far-right Finns party, the Swedish People’s party of Finland and the Christian Democrats, has been described as “the most rightwing” Finland has ever seen – a position it appears to relish.

I do not want that mix of hyper-capitalist tech-bro authoritarianism that is so en vogue across the pond with about half of the people over there (it seems). Quite the opposite, I do believe that regulated markets and organized workers and a strong social net leads to a strong middle class which in turn leads to prosperity and more equality for all.

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Changelog

• 2024-11-04 - Created this note

Note

Being a lighthouse keeper or an archivist or a programmer working on a legacy project. If find there is a certain amount of romanticism attached to being a maintainer of things. Jobs like this are often somewhat unthankful and invisible, but nonetheless important. They can also be incredibly rewarding. Take these snippets of an article on the deep sea cable industry:

Shipboard life lends itself to a strong sense of camaraderie, with periods of collaboration under pressure followed by long stretches — en route to a worksite or waiting for storms to pass — without much to do but hang out. — The Invisible Seafaring Industry That Keeps the Internet Afloat