Monthly newsletter is out. This month’s message is short since there are so many links to photos of plum blossoms and castles and Tokyo!
2024
Had this Korean roast today. Nice and light. Very smooth to drink! Had it at a small weekly pop-up. The owner travels lots and brings back all sorts of beans which he serves. Just spent 3 months in Sri Lanka, India & Nepal and has some assorted beans from there too. ☕️
Networking our networks
Wednesday, February 28, 2024
The HN Tokyo Meetup. As one Kansai person told me: “I can tell it’s a meetup for people who are into frameworks.” Last week I went up to Tokyo on my annual pilgrimage to meet with old friends and make new connections. I timed my trip to coincide with the monthly Hacker News Tokyo Meetup. These social events regularly see a hundred or so hackers, entrepreneurs, and tech enthusiasts of all kinds come out to drink and be merry.
Wednesday, February 28, 2024 →
Blue sky at the train station. Today in Osaka was warm with a perfect sky. Spring is coming! 🌱🌼🌸
Wednesday, February 28, 2024 →
Osaka Castle from Genpachi Bridge. In a couple of weeks all those trees will be pink with cherry blossoms 🌸🌸🌸
"we all can't be Buddhas"
Tuesday, February 27, 2024
I am posting this publicly so that I can reference it in links going forward. There might be a more common way to express this sentiment, this is just the way that I often do in conversation. It is something I came up with in discussing intentional communities with my wife a while back. Oftentimes, communities will tear themselves apart simply over battles over who is “pure” enough to belong. We see this political infighting in all sorts of communities at all sorts of scales.
Just watched DUNE for the first time since the theatre. I think I like it a lot more on the second watch. It is actually really well put together, quick pace… Just all the slomo and prophesying slow it down. Looking forward to seeing the second part in the next couple of weeks.
I haven’t been sick for quite a while. So I suppose I should not feel so betrayed, so wronged for being sick on this long weekend 😷 But it still sucks 😞
Wednesday, February 21, 2024 →
Back in the big 大
The HN Tokyo hntokyo.io meetup last night. About a 100 people on the PARCO rooftop in Shibuya. Gorgeous view. Tons of new friends made. The startup scene in Japan is so different compared to when I struggled in 2009-2010. Lots of interesting projects and successes!
Today I met @jamesvandyne in person! He showed me around his lovely office and then we went for a taco lunch 😏
We had a fun conversation about working in green tech, his CMS project Tanzawa, and all the cool innovation happening now on open social. The web is getting weird again! 🤘🥳
On the Shinkansen 🚅 bound for Tokyo. Meeting some old friends and new over the next few days as I do my annual working holiday in the big city. I am taking this time to do some strategy work, and also to attend the Hacker News Tokyo meetup for the first time. HMU if you see me there!
Good time connecting with the wider community of devs in Osaka. We talked about all sorts of topics including using CoPilot in multilingual environments. Then had a good hour of networking before heading back to the station and off for drinks and more conversation meetu.ps/e/MRJGJ/1…
Enjoying @emilydingwrites@mastodon.world latest newsletter #MovableWorlds The writing is evocative and the accompanying little clips & photos really set the mood. It just makes me want to sit down and write! I wish my newsletter could be so well crafted… movableworlds.co/p/finding…
The Heritage Foundations playbook for a Republican 2025 presidency will throw gas on the #ClimateCrisis turning everything including dishwasher cycles into a Culture War. Just scan the headers on this review of the 900 page document 🤯
Listening to this podcast talking about using profilers to not only carbon-optimize your site, but also Linux, and your house 🏡 pca.st/episode/6…
GitHub's Innovation Graph
Monday, February 12, 2024
Rest of World has a piece on the fastest-growing countries for software development featuring GitHub’s Innovation graph. I got a peek at this last year at the GitHub booth at the IGF2023 in Kyoto. One of my favs is Economy collaborators which represents international collaboration on projects. It is the sum of git pushes sent from one country to another. This is some real CIA Factbook or Atlas of Economic Complexity-like stuff but for software development.
Had a call with a friend I knew from Kyoto. We went to China together in 2004. I saw him once in Oakland in 2013. We occasionally have catchup calls, but have not met in person in a long time. I have a few friends like this. They are all great and I am lucky to have them. 🥰
Blue sky in Osaka
(We are here to see the plum blossoms, but they are not quite ready yet)
Leopard print 🐆 on the subway doors is 💯 🎯 Osaka
Big day today: the keys 🔑 have been handed over! We moved to Osaka in October and put our Kyoto apartment up for sale. Sold in December, and the new people took possession today. An 18 year long chapter is now over.
Speaking of Dungeons & Dragons, We have a long-time group doing the Strahd campaign… the DM commissioned cute voodoo dolls of our characters!! 😍😍😍 Amazing! #DnD
I know people are hatin' on AI/LLMs but they’ve improved my ritual spellcasting efficiency significantly! 🧙♂️😜
A wide-ranging and thought-provoking ep about crypto, AI, VCs, ZKs, quadratic funding, democracy, anarchism… Audrey drops the inspiring line “bridging polarity to plurality” 🎯
🙏 🥰
(Attached is a fuzzy photo of a server rack in a church alcove that I took at the Internet Archive more than a decade ago)
Started reading: Global Digital Data Governance: Polycentric Perspectives by Carolina Aguerre, Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn, Jan Aart Scholte 📚 #InternetGovernance
More on Decentralization
Sunday, February 4, 2024
Of course a couple days after writing my post consolidating thoughts of decentralization I found a piece by Nathan Schneider in my Omnivore called: What to do once you admit that decentralizing everything never seems to work This further makes the point that the centralization-decentralization debate is nuanced, and Schneider quotes another scholar saying we must go “beyond the centralization-centralization dichotomy.” Schneider discusses entrepreneurship, co-ops, blockchain, and more, introducing three characteristics of applying the decentralization principle:
“Live in a small apartment rather than a big, drafty house… Fly rarely… Work less… exercise … Tax the rich… basic income… capital toward home care and nursing homes, not arms…neighborhoods dense and walkable…” etc
Started reading: Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell 📚
Today at lunch I popped down to Namba Yasaka ⛩️ for a bite 🦷
More pix 📸 www.flickr.com/photos/sa…
(The plum blossoms are out!)
