Wilbert Kraan

Stepping into the fediverse @Wilmz@mastodon.social

That’s my escapism sorted for the next week or two: the @routedurhumENG from Saint-Malo to Guadeloupe. @pipoceanracing for the IMOCAs @GoodchildSam for the Ocean50s And Armel Le Cleac’h there on his flying sea monster in the Ultim class.

Good update on the latest in the perennial language determines / influences thought question. Still wonder about the causal link, though; isn’t it what a community considers important that influences language rather than v.v.? bbc.com/future/article…

Going to a workshop on our database preservation work for #DigitalPreservation day. Not sure how we’ll be able to sort the wheat from the chaff in those enterprise beasts while the folk who know them are moving on at pace.

hang on, catching up on the new twitter business model

Ah. Oops. “Are you excited for the Chinese government to find ways to threaten Tesla’s huge business in that country over content that appears on Twitter?”

@samsterby Oh, and VanMoof bikes; nearly as visibly spendy and recognisable as a Bentley

@samsterby Make boxbikes / bakfietsen a status symbol. Worked a treat in the Netherlands.

Ghost encounters

@JeremyBarraud @dkernohan Ah, like Allende’s project cybersin? He’d have my vote. theredphoenix.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/cybers…

I now have the backing of over 100 unnamed Conservative MPs as the next party leader.

Did you know about Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund? sovereigntechfund.de/en.html It's finally doing something about the problem illustrated in this xkcd: so much of our digital infrastructure is reliant on open source tools that are only kept going through good will.

@scottbw @samsterby ‘Trivial’

@samsterby The first edit I do when reviewing my documentation is removed any occurrences of 'just', 'simply', and 'easily'

@nevali Irgendwie kommt es mir vor dass es ‚Bundesfeieramt‘ sein sollte. Sowas hat es total geben können, gibt es aber nicht.

@nevali Liest sich wie ‚nen DIN für konzentriertes Dad‘s Humor

@zeynep I guess “cheap cruise missile’ doesn’t sound as dramatic?

Kamikaze is a historic term with real connotations, shouldn’t just be thrown around. Drones shouldn’t be attributed sacrifice or will, it hides reality and responsibility. Besides, these don’t seem fancy, just drones with phones taped to it, perhaps. Terrible, but not kamikaze.

This is all terrible, but what on earth is a “kamikaze drone”?? I These are drones being used like missiles. It’s a machine, it’s not committing suicide. It’s wrong to attribute a “sacrifice” or even will to a drone with some sort of GPS taped to it? Guided drones, at most.

@psychemedia While all of that is true, in a PR system, a coalition partner would have pulled the plug on the whole charade long before it got this bad.

Nonsense tweet... the current government was selected by leader selected by a few tens of thousands of a biased, self-selecting population, from a shortlist created by three hundred or so people with a personal agenda of saving their job.

@ostephens There’s the Flesch-Kincaid readability tests that are widely used in the US. On the word level, they simply go by how many syllables a word has. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch–Ki… There are online Flesch-Kincaid readability calculators: textcompare.org/readability/fl…

@ldodds Trolling the libs is all they have left.

@rossmackenzie It’s some ways off, but it’s clear there’s a big one heading your way. Take care!

@wilm I hadn’t looked that far forward yet!

Monday morning. Quendale Bay. #Shetland #breezy