Julian Oliver @JulianOliver@mastodon.social

I'm mighty stoked and excited to let you all know about a new boutique consultancy my partner and I have launched.

It's called Nīkau, and it's got a lot to give. https://nikau.io

Top mid-winter hardhike in rainforest country - a conservation run. You can see the coast in the distance. A 700m climb on difficult terrain, my disappointed legs have joined a union and are conspiring to strike.

I've used GNU/Linux almost exclusively since 1998, on servers since 2k.
Since, modern civilisation has come to depend deeply on GNU/Linux, so much so GNU tool command syntax can't be changed because it would break scripts everywhere

One of many examples is `wc`, a tool for counting words/lines/bytes/chars in files. Here, the author chose the -m flag for characters, rather than -c, -c for bytes rather than -b, resulting in a dissonance felt by millions akin to exceptions in any natural language

Great short read from Emily M Bender, Prof. Linguistics, Washington Uni on the real danger of Google's LaMDA - a mass ontological capture of our relationship to knowledge, deepening Google's self-framing as the all seeing and 'computationally-neutral' source for information https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/14/human-like-programs-abuse-our-empathy-even-google-engineers-arent-immune

Fine visit to a local forest of Nīkau, the world's southernmost palm species. I see them often on my hikes, & grew up with them near, but never before so many in one place

Vending Private Network, by @danjavasiliev and myself, opens tonight at the Weizenbaum institute, alongside some great works.

https://www.weizenbaum-conference.de/exhibition2/

https://criticalengineering.org/projects/vending-private-network/

Incidentally, this piece was banned from an exhibition in Moscow last year on the grounds it employed non state-approved VPNs (our own).

Found this quite interesting, that the 'Russian Influenza' that wormed and looped through the bodies of Europeans 1889-1892 left them with nerve disorders and a "strange fatigue" reminiscent of long covid https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/05/the-great-coronapause-is-over-but-history-tells-us-that-complacency-can-be-a-killer

Weapons in the right, infrastructure the left. So have always churned the arms of Imperialism (source: The Guardian)

The 2022 Computing Within Limits workshop looks absolutely excellent. It kicks off June 21. Registration is free https://computingwithinlimits.org/2022/

This is very clever, using EM propagation via an electrostatic gun to interact with (control) touchscreens at a distance. The "ghost touch injection" PoC only works to 4cm presently, but offers unique attack vectors if built into surfaces, or perhaps pocket-to-pocket confined social settings https://thehackernews.com/2022/05/attackers-can-use-electromagnetic.html?m=1

A PSA that I'm turning down all invites to show my project HARVEST (https://julianoliver.com/projects/harvest), hereforward and indefinitely. Reasons given in today's email to a curator in China.

Beautifully done self-monitoring hand-rolled all day solar GSM+LTE repeater, seen on one of my regular bush climbs, providing connectivity to folk in the deep valley below

Vending Private Network (2018), made by @danjavasiliev and myself, will be exhibited alongside some great pieces at the Weizenbaum Institute

https://www.weizenbaum-conference.de/exhibition2/

Seems this did in fact happen

Some good threat modeling posted by Otago University as to how my home country might fare during global thermonuclear war, some of which is applicable to planetary boundary traversal.

Much more could be said as regards the relative sovereignty of our communications infrastructure, where swathes of core infra (even in the gov sector) heavily resource platforms, assets and other services hosted off-shore.

https://blogs.otago.ac.nz/pubhealthexpert/sustained-resilience-the-impact-of-nuclear-war-on-new-zealand-and-how-to-mitigate-catastrophe/

Degrowth is of course preoccupied with this but has a serious branding problem, casting as negative to many/most under the sign of infinite economic growth (false positive). Doughnut Economics is another but gets it very right from the get-go.

If you haven't already:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doughnut_(economic_model)

Euro-Asiatic bows. I will have this on my wall one day, but with the actual bows

Spent the good part of today on a little conservation mission in this ridiculously gorgeous native lowland Black Beech forest (Māori: Tawhairauriki, Latin: Fuscospora solandri). 1000s of little seedlings were teasing through the leaf litter of their parents, soaring above

Enjoyed playing Civilisation this arvo