@degrowthuk@mstdn.socialDebates on Degrowth: what drives us to keep growing?
Editors' note We are delighted to publish this article by Marga Mediavilla on a systems approach to degrowth. It serves to summarise a number of the issues in the Prospects for Degrowth series and also represents an echo of the methodology used in the report which was a major influence on degrowth thinking, the 1974 Limits to Growth report by Donella Meadows and colleagues.
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems
@brichapman@mastodon.socialGrief is not a weakness. It’s a form of love.
On my Substack, I write about how we move through sorrow into action—without numbing out or giving up.
https://substack.com/@bricchapman
@khalidabuhakmeh@mastodon.socialRE: https://hachyderm.io/@jeremydmiller/116376329442402250
A really neat blog post about structural concurrency approach using Wolverine but can apply to systems thinking in general
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systemsI've started reading "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graebar, and it makes me think a lot.
One thing I'm particularly thinking about is my parents' generation. How they keep criticizing all the social support ("there is no money for that", "undeserving people get it"), combined with taking advantage of any social support they can get without much effort ("others use it", "we deserve it"). And of course criticizing subsequent generations (because my parents had it so rough, with all the social support given by the quasi-socialist People's Republic of Poland, and now everything is so great under late-stage capitalism and people "are just lazy and don't want to work").
@karlauerbach@sfba.socialDave Farber - Grandfather of the Internet - is reported to have died.
I was never his student, but I learned my way of thinking about networks, as distributed systems rather than collections of connected machines, from his early DCS work (via my friend and Farber student, Frank Heinrich.)
I had the good luck to interact with Farber many times. I have several hours of unpublished video in which we discussed the history of the internet (and other matters) - I remember that day: We…
@rberger@hachyderm.ioThis was written by an old friend and I found it pretty packed with good info. It’s also an example of using NotebookLM for research and content development. I found this inspiring enough to give it a try. I’ve found that it is a “Centaur" enabling tech that helps one to create on their own the overall content and leaving details to the NotebookLM tooling.
——
SLOs Can’t Catch a Black Swan: A Classification Framework for Thinking About Incidents -Geoff White
"Your SLOs can be green, and your systems can still be falling over. That doesn’t mean SLOs are broken. It means they were never designed to describe every class of risk we encounter in complex systems.
I’ve released version 1.0 of SLOs Can’t Catch a Black Swan as an open, living framework hosted on GitHub.
This is not a book you read once, and it’s not something you consult in the middle of an outage. It’s a way to think more clearly about incidents—across the incident lifecycle.”
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/slos-cant-catch-black-swan-classification-framework-thinking-white-ybc0c/?trackingId=ShCzMMVCQTChcTi8xT19tg==
@brichapman@mastodon.socialFeeling overwhelmed doesn’t mean you’re broken. It means you’re paying attention.
This space is for anyone trying to engage with a collapsing world without collapsing themselves. 💖 https://substack.com/@bricchapman
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systemsI'm thinking that people had it tough in medieval castles. Just imagine your phone falls into the WC… not much will be left of it all the way down.
#shitpost
@paul@social.van.buu.re“Not every problem is a coding problem. Access to code generation pulls us toward solving policy challenges with new lines of code, and to focus on problems that are legible to machines. This capture of the imagination of policy, industry, academia, and media habituates us to dehumanization.”
https://www.
@rberger@hachyderm.io“The barrier to creating software has genuinely dropped. That is not hype. What it means for professional engineers is not that their skills are less valuable, but that the skills that matter have shifted up the stack, as they have in every previous transition.
The developers who thrived after the move from assembly to C were not the ones who could write the most clever assembly. They were the ones who understood what the machine needed to do and could express that intent clearly in a higher-level language. The developers who thrived after the move to managed languages and frameworks were not the ones most resistant to garbage collection. They were the ones who saw the freed-up cognitive capacity as an opportunity to solve harder problems.
The developers who will thrive in the agentic era are the ones who understand this as another step in the same arc and invest accordingly. Not in resisting the tools. Not in deferring to them uncritically. In developing the judgment, clarity, and systems thinking that make the tools maximally effective.
That means writing better specs. Investing in test infrastructure. Developing genuine architectural understanding rather than surface familiarity. Building the taste to evaluate output rigorously. Practicing problem decomposition until it becomes second nature.
The era of programming as primarily a keystroke activity is over. The era of programming as primarily a thinking and judgment activity has been accelerating for decades and just shifted into a higher gear.”
#AITransition
#
https://addyosmani.com/blog/factory-model/
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systemsI'm still thinking about a longer blog post about LLMs, and one of the things I keep thinking about them is how they not only cause direct harm to the community, but also make people more suspicious of one another. And then I've been pointed out this text:
"I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me."
"""
I am a writer. A writer who also happens to be Kenyan. And I have come to this thesis statement: I don't write like ChatGPT. ChatGPT, in its strange, disembodied, globally-sourced way, writes like me. Or, more accurately, it writes like the millions of us who were pushed through a very particular educational and societal pipeline, a pipeline deliberately designed to sandpaper away ambiguity, and forge our thoughts into a very specific, very formal, and very impressive shape.
"""
#AI #LLM
@UP8@mastodon.social🥕 Why Mars astronauts need more than just space greenhouses
#mars
@penguin42@mastodon.org.ukSo I look through my pile of 8" floppies for @… thinking I'll have a few random ones to send him, and I find a motherload of Perq floppies!
#retrocomputing
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systemsWhile working through another last rites slew, I was thinking that back in the day there were a number of developers who believed they should add a lot of packages to #Gentoo, in the name of giving users a choice. Like, they were projects whose sole purpose of existence seemed to be to find every piece of software that roughly fit a specific topic, get it to build and package it for Gentoo.
Of course, the long-term effect of that is that there's a lot of unmaintained, often broken packages. "The choice" doesn't really work. Sure, users have a lot of packages to choose from — but they have to actually figure out which of these packages are actually useful (if any).
A few years ago attempting to remove packages also faced some verbal opposition. You shouldn't remove unmaintained or outdated packages, because they still work. You shouldn't remove packages that sometimes fail to build, because some flag combinations still work. You shouldn't remove packages that don't build at all, because the user can visit Forums and find some workaround to make them build 🤦. Or they'll have an ebuild handy to start working on it. And anyway, you shouldn't be removing stuff at all, but fixing it instead.
Sometimes the arguments were straight dishonest too: people literally said we need more packages to lure new users in. Like, it didn't matter to them that the packages didn't really work and that the people trying to use them will get a nasty surprise. They wanted people to say "hey, Gentoo has this software we need, let's start using Gentoo".
@brichapman@mastodon.social🛰️ I'm on Bluesky!
You can follow me at:
@brichapman.com
https://bsky.app/profile/brichapman.com
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systemsWhen you see someone with a "I don't like people" pin, and you're thinking "good that I identify as a cat".
@brichapman@mastodon.social🛰️ I'm on Bluesky!
You can follow me at:
@brichapman.com
https://bsky.app/profile/brichapman.com
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systemsI recall that a long time ago, someone told me I'm acting like a cat. Curious it didn't get me thinking; though I guess I didn't really know any cats back then.
@curiouscat@fosstodon.orgExcerpts from The Deming Library Volume XXI, Dr. W. Edwards #Deming Dr. Russell Ackoff and David Langford demonstrate that educators can begin a quality transformation by developing an understanding of the properties and powers of systems-oriented thinking...
