jan.krutisch.de2024-03-11T17:58:36+01:00https://jan.krutisch.de/Jan Krutischjan@krutisch.deArchiving a Web Application2024-03-11T00:00:00+01:00https://jan.krutisch.de/en/2024/03/11/archiving-a-web-application.html<p>Last year in June, we sunset Artdoxa, an online arts platform I more or less worked on from its humble beginnings and have been the sole developer of for the last 11 years or so. The reason we took it offline is that while there were a couple of active users still using it, we never managed to get it to pay for itself and its owner (and quite frankly me as well) didn’t want to maintain and operate it at a loss.</p>
<p>When we finally took it offline, we had agreed on me spending a bit of time to try to create an archived version, fully functional in read only mode. This is what I am currently working on.</p>
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<p>Your first instinct might be to just create a static version and still have a bit of time reserved this week for trying that, but it is “Web 2.0”-ish enough to get complicated with a ton of views that load subviews via jQuery-backed Ajax-requests.</p>
<p>So, the question is, how do you archive a Rails application in a way that you can hopefully start it up in 20, 50, maybe 100 years from now? (Not that I personally believe that computers in their current form make it into the 2100s)</p>
<p>While something like Docker would be an obvious choice, it is kind of problematic - It is still a bit of a moving target so regardless of if I use Docker under the hood to make the app run, I still probably need to seal Docker into a VM that pins the version of Docker.</p>
<h2 id="virtal-machines-but-how">Virtal Machines, but how?</h2>
<p>My second idea would be something like VirtualBox, which would be good, because there are virtual machine image formats that can be exchanged between different VM hosts. But VirtualBox on its own has a very specific isssue: It is CPU dependent. Does that mean that I simply create two images, one for Intel, one for Arm? What happens if both of these CPUs are obsolete in 20 years from now? Given how bullish some people are on Open Source CPUs like RiscV, I don’t think it’s completely unwarranted to worry about that.</p>
<p>It seems to me that right now, targeting qemu is the best bet. We can use qemu-kvm on intel machines that quite frankly will probably be around for a long time and actual emulation on other CPU architectures where the emulation tax will probably be less and less of an issue.</p>
<p>Today, I, because I am more familiar with it, started to work on a VirtualBox VM and made the web application run on that, but I did choose vmdk as the virtual hard drive file format as it is the most compatible and should be usable in qemu.</p>
<h2 id="browsers">Browsers</h2>
<p>Now, the other thing that’s kind of an issue is the actual web browsers, because while most browsers are reasonably backwards compatible, given the current state of the web browser landscape, I don’t think it’s reasonable to bet on that for the next 100 years. So the idea is to make the image actually boot a graphical user interface and start up Firefox. There is the slight issue of expiring and self signed certificates but I guess that can be part of the documentation.</p>
<h2 id="the-challenges-ahead">The challenges ahead</h2>
<p>An interesting problem is that we’ve hosted the images of the artworks shared on Artdoxa on Amazon S3, as one does, but since we did try to cut down costs, we have migrated the bucket to Glacier deep archival - Instead I am working with a local copy of the files. A copy that is roughly worth half a terabyte. Which makes for a somewhat unwieldy VM disk image. Especially if I want to store it on a disk that is supposed to be read on as many future and past operating systems as possible. If you’re currently thinking “oh no, he isn’t…” - Yeah, I am running this off of a FAT disk. Luckily, vmdk has a dedicated FAT mode where its splitting up the disk file into chunks that are 2GB in size at most. I am currently copying the files into the VM using SCP and it is fun to see the image files growing and growing, but let me tell you one thing: A FAT backed vmdk is not exactly the fastest hard drive emulation you can imagine. So I’ll let this run over night I guess.</p>
<p>The Artdoxa homepage had a fun little gizmo: The artwork of the day, calculated on a simple algorhythm that would include views and likes, I think. As a hommage to our sunset, I decided it would display the artwork of the day of the 21st of June for ever but I need to clean up the database a bit to remove the few days the background job ran on after I switched off the website. I don’t want to know how many forgotten servers run cron jobs for applications that are long gone and happily send out emails to irritated users :)</p>
<p>I am still debating if I should try to make this archive available publicly. This would mean that I would need to scrub personal details out of the database, though, so I will most definitely only do this if I can find some extra time. I guess a static version would lend itself much more easily to that.</p>
<p>Tomorrow I will try to turn this VirtualBox image into something I can run in qemu or, failing that, take the lessons I learned today and do everything again.</p>
<p>It is a fun challenge and I am quite happy that am able to spend some time on this to do it right.</p>
Sublime Text on Ubuntu the right way2024-03-04T00:00:00+01:00https://jan.krutisch.de/en/2024/03/04/sublime-text-on-ubuntu-the-right-way.html<p>Recently, I went back from using Visual Studio Code almost exclusively to using Sublime Text for most of my editing work. I’m a paying customer (And have been using the most excellent Sublime Merge as my git GUI of choice all the way through, as I found the VS Code git integration a bit lacking). Also I have to set up this new machine (More on that in another blog post) and so I am going through all of the tools I need and figuring out how to best install them on this machine.</p>
<p>For years now the official instructions on how to install Sublime Text and Sublime Merge are somewhat wrong. The reason is that Ubuntu (And, I believe, Debian as well) have changed the way the GPG keys are supposed to be stored and referenced for third party repositories. I am still not 100% sure why this change, that actually makes installing software from third party repositories so much harder, was neccessary, but there are probably good security reasons for it.</p>
<p>In any case, by taking inspiration from the <a href="https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/">official Docker instructions</a> I was able to cobble together the instructions to do this in the “official” way on modern Ubuntu.</p>
<p>I thought it would be useful to have a version available that explains this line by line and thus make it applicable to other cases.</p>
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<p>Let’s start with setting up the necessary tools (it’s very likely you have these packages installed, but better be safe than sorry):</p>
<div class="language-bash highlighter-rouge"><div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight"><code><span class="nb">sudo </span>apt-get update
<span class="nb">sudo </span>apt-get <span class="nb">install </span>ca-certificates curl
</code></pre></div></div>
<p>Next, we’re using the <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">install</code> command as a slightly nicer version of <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">mkdir -p</code> to create a keyrings directory that will hold our gpg key</p>
<div class="language-bash highlighter-rouge"><div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight"><code><span class="nb">sudo install</span> <span class="nt">-m</span> 0755 <span class="nt">-d</span> /etc/apt/keyrings
</code></pre></div></div>
<p>Next, let’s actually download the key and make it generally available</p>
<div class="language-bash highlighter-rouge"><div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight"><code><span class="nb">sudo </span>curl <span class="nt">-fsSL</span> https://download.sublimetext.com/sublimehq-pub.gpg <span class="nt">-o</span> /etc/apt/keyrings/sublime.asc
<span class="nb">sudo chmod </span>a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/sublime.asc
</code></pre></div></div>
<p><em>Quick note</em>: SublimeHQ does not provide instructions on how to validate the GPG key. But if you’re well versed with gpg, you should be able to figure that out.</p>
<p>Next comes the interesting part: The actual apt source configuration, which will contain the path to the keyring file, so that apt knows how to validate the sources.</p>
<div class="language-bash highlighter-rouge"><div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight"><code><span class="nb">echo</span> <span class="se">\ </span>
<span class="s2">"deb [arch=</span><span class="si">$(</span>dpkg <span class="nt">--print-architecture</span><span class="si">)</span><span class="s2"> signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/sublime.asc] https://download.sublimetext.com/ apt/stable/"</span> | <span class="se">\</span>
<span class="nb">sudo tee</span> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sublime-hq.list <span class="o">></span> /dev/null
</code></pre></div></div>
<p>After that, we can just update apt and install the packages:</p>
<div class="language-bash highlighter-rouge"><div class="highlight"><pre class="highlight"><code><span class="nb">sudo </span>apt update
<span class="nb">sudo </span>apt <span class="nb">install </span>sublime-text sublime-merge
</code></pre></div></div>
<p>I’ll try to make SublimeHQ update their instructions but I am not very helpful that this will happen quickly.</p>
Redesign, Schmedesign2023-05-26T00:00:00+02:00https://jan.krutisch.de/en/2023/05/26/redesign-schmedesign-iii.html<p>If you have read my blog before, you may have noticed I have completely overhauled and stripped down the design of this page. I am not 100% happy with it but the branch was lying around for so long that I finally pulled myself together, fixed the worst stuff and just hit the button.</p>
<p>There are a few things still missing but this should be good enough for now.</p>
<p>And yes, this is the third post with this headline. The <a href="/en/2011/06/18/Redesign-Schmedesign.html">first one is from 2011</a> and the <a href="/en/2014/10/22/redesign-schmedesign.html">second one is from 2014</a>.</p>
Bluesky and Mastodon, a braindump2023-05-08T00:00:00+02:00https://jan.krutisch.de/en/2023/05/08/bluesky-and-mastodon.html<p>In my <a href="https://jan.krutisch.de/en/2022/11/07/twitter-and-mastodon-a-braindump.html">last article</a> about Mastodon (and Twitter), I was very hopeful for the future, because I felt like we’ve been moving into the right direction. The fediverse felt (and still largely feels) like a very internet approach to social media. Decentralised, federated, very Email like and with a strong incentive to embrace that decentralised nature.</p>
<p>I am a little less hopeful today, but my thinking is still very much in flux.</p>
<p>So let’s talk Bluesky for a second. It seems like most of its promises of interoperability are largely unsubstantiated at this point. People have been mostly raving about its superiour (over Mastodon) onboarding process (which is much easier if you don’t have to take federation into account) and the cool vibes (which seems to be largely credited to a very deliberate slow onboarding and vetting process. Again, much easier if you’re in full control).</p>
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<h3 id="that-bluesky-thing">That Bluesky thing</h3>
<p>For me, unless Bluesky truly becomes federated and it will be possible to run your own servers (which seems increasingly unlikely right now looking at the way the service is built and run), it is not interesting.</p>
<p>Sure, there’s a certain FOMO even for me and if my whole peer group would go there, that pressure would increase, but given that this thing has been founded by one Jack Dorsey who (I think) neither ever fully understood what Twitter was to people, nor particularly cared, I have doubts that Bluesky will not, in the end, end up with similar issues as Twitter. Given it’s current setup one wonders how this service is supposed to finance itself in the long term (Sure, that’s a problem many Mastodon instances face as well).</p>
<p>Currently, I think there are simply too many open questions and the viability of decentralisation is an unanswered question with some people being very sceptical about that aspect.</p>
<h3 id="a-few-thoughts-about-onboarding">A few thoughts about onboarding</h3>
<p>There’s an ongoing discussion in the Fediverse (particularly the Mastodon part) about the question if the added pressure by Bluesky should lead to changes that makes onboarding easier. At the same time, Eugen aka Gargon and his company are widely criticised for doing exactly that with their Mastodon mobile app, because it leads mainly to signups at mastodon.social, an instance that is probably already too big to fail and is defederated more and more because the moderation team is having issues battling spam (and also, it seems the moderation team has a rather lax approach to moderation as such at times).</p>
<p>This is all a bit of a pickle. And while I think that the onboarding could indeed be improved, I sometimes wonder if that is even the right approach. Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to make the eternal point of the Linux-Nerds (“Linux is hard by design, it keeps out the noobs”) here - I want the Fediverse to be a place that can be enjoyed by the widest variety of people possible (Except for Nazis, of course). But I also think that we should expect, or rather foster a decent understanding of decentralised, federated technologies. We almost completely lost email to Google and Microsoft, and we should make sure people understand why that is a bad thing and what a better internet could look like and that does require some basic understanding of knowledge of how networks work, what domains are etc. etc. So to me it is as much a question of UX and design as it is a question of education.</p>
<p>Surely, these aren’t the only issues with onboarding on the fediverse. Finding an instance that suits you can be super hard and I think making moving between instances a more streamlined, more complete experience would be a change that would help a lot of people because it would release the pressure of having to find <em>the right</em> instance at first try.</p>
<p>And of course, there are other issues with the fediverse, too. There are two things that dampen my mood a bit right now:</p>
<h3 id="black-mastodon">Black Mastodon</h3>
<p>The first thing is that we somehow managed to completely alienate large parts of Black Twitter (that seems to migrate to Bluesky now with large invite chains) - I must admit that even though I have read a lot of takes on why that is, I still don’t fully understand it, but a few things stand out: It is completely out of the question for black folx to mark descriptions of racist experiences with content warnings, which collides with a lot of written or unwritten rules about what to mark with content warnings on existing instances. At the same time, black people did have a ton of racist and otherwise negative experiences that have been improperly moderated, probably by instance moderators either not caring about or not being properly educated about antiracism and how to moderate specificially towards its goals.</p>
<p>The reflexive and rather unreflected response of “well, then create your own servers and run them as you like” is dismissed as being basically segregation. I can see that viewpoint but I feel conflicted about that. To me those kind of instances that have specific rules for specific discourse are more about creating a safe space than about creating a separation. Nevertheless, it is not me to judge on that. If black folx don’t feel that servers run by black folx are a solution, then they aren’t a solution. And lastly, something I am really curious about is that black twitter seems to heavily rely on quote tweets. Quote toots are probably coming but there was a reasoning why they weren’t part of the original Mastodon feature set.</p>
<p>There is a certain culture clash happening here in the fediverse and it looks to me as if one of the things that’s happening is that there are different groups of minorities and underprivileged folx that have developed very different strategies to cope with discrimination in social media that are very much at odds with each other. Intersectionality is hard, I guess. Says the privileged white dude.</p>
<h3 id="weaponised-defederation">Weaponised Defederation</h3>
<p>The second thing that worries me is the increased use of defederation as a weapon to force other instances into certain behaviour, specifically explicitly stated as such.</p>
<p>Defederation is clearly the correct measure if an instance is willing to tolerate trolls, nazis or spammers and such. But in all other instances, defederation should be the last resort when trying to settle a conflict. Defederation because you disagree with a particular phrase in the TOS of an instance (unless that phrase is “we like Nazis”) or defederation even just because you disagree with a perfectly reasonable take of someone is a very slippery slope. As a left leaning german I have a very nuanced stance on “free speech”, but we should always default to federation and not defederation.</p>
<p>We can, should and must have discussions about how we run, moderate and govern our instances and there must be room to criticise other instance’s takes on things. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences. But defederation is the end. It cannot be the beginning. It cannot be used as a weapon, as a threat.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, large parts of the current fediverse are run by left leaning groups and people and why should the fediverse then be any better than the political left as a whole. And one thing we do best is finding our differences long before we search for our commonalities. I hope we will be able to overcome this at some point, but right now, my hopes are weak.</p>
<p>As for my hopes for the fediverse as a whole, I am a little more positive. Maybe something like Bluesky will and must be more successful than the fediverse. But the fediverse exists and there aren’t many reasons why it should disappear again just because there are alternatives that draw in more people.</p>
<p>(Header image is the upper part of a very boring but also very calming picture of the baltic sea shot during a gorgeous sunny but cold day on board of a Finnlines ship on our way back to Travemünde last October)</p>
Twitter and Mastodon, a braindump2022-11-07T00:00:00+01:00https://jan.krutisch.de/en/2022/11/07/twitter-and-mastodon-a-braindump.html<p>An ongoing critique of Twitter peope about people on Mastodon is that on Mastodon, one only talks about Mastodon. Totally predictably, throughout the last few days, this increasingly was the case and is probably normal for a period of heavy growth. To be fair, with recent events even Twitter became much more self aware and meta.</p>
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<p>As I didn’t want to add to the constant stream of “Mastodon this, Twitter that” on either of these platforms, here’s a (hopefully) short blog post that sums up my thoughts, because, guess what, I have many of them.</p>
<p>Much has been said about the fact that “Mastodon is and cannot be Twitter”. And of course, that is, indeed, a fact. There are so many organisational, technical and economical differences that comparing the Fediverse to Twitter is a bit like comparing the early AOL or Compuserve to the internet.</p>
<h3 id="mitter-is-not-twastodon">Mitter is not Twastodon</h3>
<p>This is not the post where I go and try to refute all the criticisms from people on Twitter about why Mastondon won’t work as a Twitter replacement (for them) - I often don’t agree with their conclusions - interestingly sometimes from people whose thinking I deeply admire. I am not yet sure what to make of that and am fully prepared to be proven wrong in the mid/ long term, but the discussion is so complex and people have so many different perspectives that I find it a bit impenetrable for me right now.</p>
<p>But maybe it’s the entirely wrong question to ask. A lot of what I see on Mastodon is people trying to not recreate what they had on Twitter recently but more what Twitter was maybe 8-10 years ago. And with that I don’t mean the constant downtimes due to overloaded instances, but rather having a cozy, safe space to converse with friends, colleagues and people simply sharing your interests. On many instances where I follow people, having that safe space, but really also having that coziness, is valued very highly and prioritised over other values such as allowing free speech at all cost. Instances that focus on right wing or nazi agendas are blocked. People are encouraged to use Content Warnings (A very early on Mastodon feature that is still discussion quite controversially from what I can gather) liberally, even for things that feel mundane as a Twitter user such as talking about politics. Mastodon people want to have the option to simply not read the stuff that made Twitter what Twitter is in 2022. As I said in my <a href="/en/2022/10/28/the-end-of-an-era.html">earlier</a> post, a lot of us consciously turned our Twitter feeds into that endless feed of dispair, because it gave us a better understanding of how the world works. (Your mileage may vary and people also quite obviously managed to turn their feeds into a constant flow of misinformation and thus created their own realities. It is not always super easy to distinguish between those two versions.)</p>
<h3 id="lets-be-different">Let’s be different</h3>
<p>Mid/ long term it will hopefully end up being a more balanced version of that, where it is easy, when times feel especially hard, to focus on the cozyness, on the safeness, but also be able to listen to underprivileged folks, let them tell their stories (and vent their frustrations about their struggle) and have that widening of our own perspectives which made Twitter valueable for me after the cozyness had left. This does need work and support from us privileged folks to create and maintain safe spaces for everyone, not just us.</p>
<p>For me myself it means a couple of things. I noticed on myself that my twitter writing became, with exceptions, very much focused on “hitting the target”. It is pointed, tries to be witty and funny, but also often deeply sarcastic. I did get an adrenaline kick every time I hit a nerve and got a ton of likes and retweets and that is (probably for the better) not something that is easily translatable to the fediverse. That probably doesn’t stop me from being sarcastic from time to time, or trying and failing to be funny, as that is actually a big part (especially the failing part) of my offline personality as well. A. Pun. Must. Be. Made.</p>
<p>But I think I will refocus my writing on Mastodon to be more about my personal journey, about the things that happen in my day to day life. Basically answering the question over and over again the early Twitter interface asked you.</p>
<p>I will probably shift my political commentary towards more longer form writing on my blog (or keep it on Twitter for as long as it keeps on existing and functioning) and only tease it (with appropriate CW’s) on my Mastodon account.</p>
<p>This will also mean that I will probably try to curate the list of people I follow here on Mastodon in a similar way to optimise for a more healthy diet of all the things I mentioned before, prioritising people who liberally use content warnings, but also trying to get the list to be as diverse as possible, because nobody needs another white male privileged circle jerk.</p>
<h3 id="are-we-like-winning">Are we, like, winning?</h3>
<p>All of this will need work. But there is a huge upside. If we all together manage to get this working in the long run, we, for probably the first time in a long time, to wrestle something away from the corporate internets. The fediverse is largely, in the best possible way, anarchic. It is only commercial in the sense that someone needs to pay someone for the servers. There are no economical incentives past that. Nobody (as far as I know) runs a Mastodon server to make a profit.</p>
<p>That does feel like we’re starting to finally pull back into the right direction. Maybe it’s actually the start of something. And that is what makes me really, really excited about all of that and I know I am not alone.</p>
<p>Friends, present and future, let’s go.</p>
<p>Love,</p>
<p>Jan</p>
The End of an Era?2022-10-28T00:00:00+02:00https://jan.krutisch.de/en/2022/10/28/the-end-of-an-era.html<p>So Twitter is now officially the playball of a billionaire with a history of questionable business practices, a strong anti union stance and a self proclaimed free-speech-absolutionism.</p>
<p>Sounds like a plan. Not necessarily a good one, but a plan.</p>
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<p>When twitter and jaiku (Anyone remember jaiku? For my peer group, for at least a couple of months, it was our place to go instead of the early twitter) became a thing, it felt great. I just looked it up, that was 15 1/2 years ago. What a ride. Let’s see how much longer we’ll be able to hold on to the saddle.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s easy to overvalue how big the coincidence of Twitter and the Smartphones evolution was. The ability to connect to people from all around the world on topics that were interesting to us and to be able to have that at the palm of your hand felt magical, not going to lie.</p>
<h3 id="what-does-this-even-do">What does this even do?</h3>
<p>Somewhere in the early tens it became relatively clear that Twitter management never had a great idea of what Twitter actually is or was for it’s users. With the help of 3rd party clients and Tweetdeck, we managed to evade most of the ads and the dreaded Algorhythm, but it became harder and harder, with more and more features not being available through the official APIs. On my mobile phone, today, I use Fenix, an Android client, to read, but will check the official Twitter app occasionally to look through my notifications, for example.</p>
<p>It was also clear, that Twitter was not really great at “Content Moderation”. As anyone who runs any form of online community will attest, the way you govern your user’s content does, far more than other measures, determine the vibes and the levels of civility in your community. Twitter’s community guidelines are a bit of a mess, are weakly enforced and misused.</p>
<p>For me, twitter became less and less enjoyable to use. Sure I got my occasional kick out of a well performing tweet (which is something I still cannot predict in any way. I know I am funny sometimes, maybe, but even that is not a great predictor).</p>
<h3 id="thats-your-fault-idiot">That’s your fault, idiot!</h3>
<p>A lot of that is my own making. I started to follow a lot of people who represented minorities, feminists, a lot of people from black twitter, I started to follow climate scientists. Because that’s one of the great things of a system like Twitter: You can make your own newsfeed. You can get infos about events that are under- and misrepresented by the mainstream media. I know I may sound like a Republican on Fox news, but it’s true for me at least - I used twitter to widen my perspective. On the parts that mattered to me. Voices that mattered to me.</p>
<p>With that came a lot of darkness. Darkness, of course, that is the daily lives of underrepresented folks. The constant onslaught from conservative media, right wing politics and, let’s face it, outright fascists, who only seldom get booted from the twitters. Seeing the daily struggle of folks who just want to live their lives but have to fight instead. Who are, in some cases, institutionally oppressed but still were brave enough to share their experiences of twitter.</p>
<p>I am incredibly grateful to all of these voices, their bravery, their insistence of having a place at the table and being able to share their views. I think I can safely say that I would not be the person I am today without this experience.</p>
<p>Still, this change in who I followed on twitter (it was just personal friends, professional colleagues and the occasional artists I was into in the beginning) did have quite the impact on how twitter felt for me. On one hand, it was still nice to be validated in your world views - I probably share more political views with most people I follow on twitter than I do with my physical peers - and to learn so much about other experiences - At the same time, my growing depression about the general state of the world also ows a lot to my twitter feed.</p>
<h3 id="and-then-all-my-friends-left">And then, all my friends left</h3>
<p>Unfortunately, at the same time as I stacked my feed with all these diverse voices giving me the heebie jeebies about the state of the world, all the old voices, the friends, the colleagues slowly disappeared. Either that or they got drowed out by the rest. Not 100% sure, but of course a lot of people have left twitter over the years, probably for their best.</p>
<p>Just to clarify once again, because I feel like the stuff I wrote so far could be misinterpreted: I don’t want to say “Please don’t follow a diverse crowd, it will make your life miserable”. In the end, all of the stuff that drags me down on twitter is happening in real life too. The Climate change is real. Racism is real. Misogyny is real. Long covid is real. ME/CFS is real. etc. etc.</p>
<h3 id="whats-next">What’s next?</h3>
<p>I have no idea what happens to twitter now. What’s clear is that Mr. Musk with his free-speech-absolutionism needs to walk a fine line between his desire to bring Donald Trump back to the platform and losing a ton of ad revenue from companies who are not really interested in having their ads displayed in a cesspool of hatred, bigotry and, you know, the rest, unless he wants to turn the birdsite into an even less profitable hole to pour money into (With, I would assume, a lot less users). But who knows what that man wants. Apart from getting old in his own mars colony that is.</p>
<p>I wanted this article to be about my journey on twitter and not about the alternatives - That shall be an article for another day. But, should I be even less active on twitter in the future because of the things to come, you can find me at <a href="https://ruby.social/@halfbyte">@halfbyte@ruby.social</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[EDIT]:</strong> Shame, completely forgot the image credit for the header image. I found it on Wikimedia Commons, but you can find the original <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/49937499@N08/4667375844">on flickr</a> and it’s been published by the Lousiana Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency, I believe after the Deepwater Horizon disaster (The photos are weirdly dated to 2007 but I believe that to be a camera set to the wrong date. Bobby Jindal, who is mentioned in the image description took office in 2008). I chose this photo because it was one of the few CC licensed photos of birds in oil slick, which was my first association when thinking about the current state of twitter (and, you know, the rest of it all).</p>
One of the fundamental questions2021-08-12T00:00:00+02:00https://jan.krutisch.de/en/2021/08/12/one-of-the-fundamental-questions.html<p>As I write this, almost every single country on this planet is dealing with some sort of “environmental” disaster. Floods and wildfires, both “fueled” by weather patterns pushed to the extreme by, let’s just get this out of the way, human made climate change. The extremes of 2021 may be a very seldom outlier on the historic scales of humankind, but if you have read the IPCC report carefully, we can almost guarantee it won’t be an outlier for very long and the extremes of this year will feel muted to us in the not so far distant future.</p>
<p>Well, let’s talk about something different, something more fun, shall we?</p>
<p>The corona virus is a global pandemic that has caused, so far, around 4 million deaths (that we know of) globally. It has disrupted our lives in a way only very few events can, and I would go as far to say that it probably has affected more humans (absolutely) than any other previous event. Okay, that’s easy. In 1918, we had probably around 1,6 Billion people - We’re now close to 8 Billion.</p>
<p>So, what do these events, apart from the horror and pain they stack on top of each other, have in common?</p>
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<p>Well, lots of things but I want to highlight something very specific today: They both highlight very elegantly a problem that to me is one of the fundamental questions at the heart of our modern democratic, capitalistic societies. A question that is not very often discussed or even asked - and if so, it is done in specific circles and the discussion never really reaches the main stream discourses.</p>
<h3 id="your-losses-my-gains">Your losses, my gains.</h3>
<p>The question is this: Are we okay, as a society, with the fact that dramatic losses and costs, such as rebuilding cities after floods, keeping companies (and citizens) afloat during a ranging pandemic, vaccinating close to 8 Billion people, keeping an expensive fire service to fight wildfires (as you can imagine I could go on forever) will always end up being paid by the general populace via taxes, while private companies (and even individuals) are able to benefit by enabling online shopping when physical shopping is not possible during a pandemic, selling gasoline guzzling SUV monsters, sell life saving masks and other PPE at a premium when they are scarce, buying up land (with people living there) cheaply to produce more dirty coal that can be burnt in power plants they will get a huge payout for when they eventually will have to shut them down (as you can imagine, I could go on forever).</p>
<p>In essence, the old adage: Socialize losses, privatize gains.</p>
<p>The official answer, for the last 50 years at least, has been more or less an unequivocal yes. It has produced, with the help of a bunch of other questionable policy decisions, a rather small number of really powerful multinational corporations. It has produced a large number of nation states that seem to be always at the brink of defaulting, with broken, decaying infrastructure. Among other things…</p>
<h3 id="change-is-needed">Change is needed</h3>
<p>I did ask this as an openended question, but of course, if you ask me personally, I would reframe the question as “Why are we okay with this?”. There are of course good answers to this reframed question. Good in the sense that they explain the why very well. Probably less good in answering it if I, again, reframe it a tiny bit: Why are we <em>still</em> okay with this.</p>
<p>It is my belief that, unless we start asking this question again and start, as societies, to answer it differently and the pull through with the implicated actions that should follow a “No, we are not okay with this”, things will not get better.</p>
<p>I’ll let y’all figure out what “implicated actions” should mean. For now, let’s not involve guillotines, that’s just too messy and instagram would block the images anyway.</p>
<p>(I’m being too cynical here. Let’s try to fix it with laws first. Laws that don’t include capital punishment, preferably.)</p>
Fort Europa2020-03-02T00:00:00+01:00https://jan.krutisch.de/en/2020/03/02/fort-europa.html<p>The European Union is a fascinating construct. It has brought long standing peace to a region that never had more than a few decades of that at a time. It has brought together former enemies and has produced a young generation of Europeans with a complete disregard for borders and language barriers. I love this part with all of my heart.</p>
<p>From very early on, though, Europe, as much as it was about togetherness for those who are on the inside, it was also about the otherness of those outside. Frontex, founded in 2004, is the latest bureaucratic manifestation of that. In 2005, one of my favourite rap groups, swedish <a href="https://www.looptrooprockers.com/discography/">“Loop Troop”</a> (they later renamed themselves to “Loop Troop Rockers”), published an album and a single named “Fort Europa”, a strong statement of condemning this fortification of the European continent. More and more legislation, on the other hand, ate away at the human right of taking asylum, putting more and more of the burden on the victims, making it harder and harder to enter the EU as a refugee.</p>
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<p>There are many who say that this is absolutely necessary. That “opening the borders” would lead into chaos and a mass influx of people who would then in turn crush our social security systems and destabilize our society (these people usually use less chosen words).</p>
<h3 id="five-years-ago">Five years ago</h3>
<p>In 2015, germany seemingly descended into chaos when suddenly an enormous influx of refugees reached the country, after chancellour Merkel had one of her lighter moments and declared that it was the right thing to open the borders and welcome people and that we (as in we-germany) would manage (“Wir schaffen das!”). The chaos was, with some exceptions, mainly provoked by right wingers who spread fear and lies, not so much by the refugees themselves.</p>
<p>Look, I’m not going to claim that there were no problems. But organisational issues were completely blown out of context, including the infamous firing of an agency leader for being suspected to too easily confirming requests for asylum, where later research found no evidence of such, and agencies were purposefully understaffed and in general most people seem to all too happily agree that “we can’t let that happen again”.</p>
<p>And then some questionable deals with questionable country leaders (the horrendous deal with Turkey) were made and “the situation improved”, while thousands of people drowned in the mediterranean sea, but at least germany had not to worry about those pesky refugees anymore. In my home town, hastily constructed container villages became temporary winter homes for homeless people and in fear of the invigorated right wingers and to not provoke an alredy complicated situation between Russia, Turky, Syria and the USA, nobody made any attempt to fix the actual underlying problems.</p>
<h3 id="and-now">And now…</h3>
<p>Enter 2020, when Erdogan decides to cancel the deal, unfortunately with some legitimate argumentatory weight. The Syrian conflict did not relax, quite the contrary, with Russia and Assad, the Syrian dictator who hates his people, increasing the pressure on Idlib, a city near the turkish border, increasing the pressure on Turkey.</p>
<p>Cancelling the deal in this case means carrying busloads (literally) of refugees to the EU border, in this case, well, Greece. The situation in Greece, specifically on the island Lesvos/Lesbos, has been pretty terrible for a while, with refugee camps being overloaded, underfunded and now, increasingly being under threat from locals who seemingly start to lose their temper.</p>
<p>What does the EU, or in this case Greece do when met with thousands of people suddenly showing up at the border? They start shooting tear gas canisters at families with kids and in some cases, as it seems, not only that but also actual bullets. Also, Greece, claiming support of a clause in European law, “temporarily” suspends the right to seek asylum. The number of people at the border at this moment? 15k. Less than a typical footie match audience in any large European city. But taking them in would set a dangerous precendent, right?</p>
<p>And now, it would be pretty easy to blame this all on Greece, if it weren’t for some, you know, facts.</p>
<p>You see, Greece is one of the poorest countries in the EU and has been long left alone with most of the burden of incoming refugees, as the EU internally in these last five years never managed to come up with a distribution system that would fairly distribute refugees over the union.
All the while the rest of Europe has completely ignored it’s moral obligation to not only help Greece, but also help the refugees. Instead, Frontex and other authorities let people drown in the mediterranean sea, litigate against NGOs who try their best to do the job the official authorities should be doing and seem to look at the unfolding catastrophe in Greece with a sense of indifference that makes my blood boil.</p>
<p>And Turkey was promised to get some relief of their about 4 million syrian refugees, something that never happened, again, because the EU is unable to come up with a distribution basis as some countries outright refuse to take any more refugees in.</p>
<p>In contrast to the reaction one would expect from a union that prides itself in being peaceful and grounded in human rights, our politicians are already quick to ensure everyone that “2015 will not happen again” and that “the people coming from turkey must know that they won’t be able to enter the EU”. And humanity, kindness, and whatever we claim in “christian values” is forever lost at the turkish-greek border in March 2020.</p>
<h3 id="lets-take-it-to-the-streets">Let’s take it to the streets</h3>
<p>Tomorrow, on the 3rd of March 2020, the organisation “Seebrücke”, which has been fighting for years to end the deadly practices that lead to all those deaths in the mediterranean sea, will host a ton of protests all over germany and I will most definitely be on the streets tomorrow night. We need to make sure that politics understands that this is not the Europe we have dreamt of. This is not the Europe we’re envisioning. This is a disgrace and a shame and needs to stop immediately.</p>
<p>The European Union is a fascinating construct, but nothing undermines its legitimacy quite as much as these clear violations of basic human rights. If we make a difference between those who belong here, who are “inside” and those who do not belong here, who are outside, we have already lost a large part of our humanity.</p>
<h3 id="the-hole-goes-deeper">The hole goes deeper</h3>
<p>Those of you who read this and think of my European perspective as naive and also probably still quite colonialist, I need to apologise. This text is a quick outburst that does not take things like (neo-)colonialism, white supremacy and other related concepts fully into account. I know, that in order to fully understand the story of the refugees, of the conflicts in (northern) africa, we need to look deeply into our own history of exploitation, of colonialisation and all of the terrible things we as Europeans have done to the African continent. We need to stop looking at this as something that is simply caused by a mindless dictator (or a couple of them). We also need to understand that we can actually see the Syrian civil war as probably one of the first human conflicts caused by climate change. A quick outburst like this text cannot do any of these aspects any justice. And with that I hope that I can at least ensure you that while the text may be naive at times and too simplistic, maybe, this is a function of my limited time and my rage and frustration and not a function of my ignorance.</p>
<p>Header image taken from <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Barbed-wire.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></p>
The lesser of three evils2020-02-17T00:00:00+01:00https://jan.krutisch.de/en/2020/02/17/the-lesser-of-three-evils.html<p>So far, I’ve only written on my <a href="https://localhost.tumblr.com/post/175148208948/an-experiment-starts-here">various</a> <a href="https://write.as/halfbyte/my-new-desktop-computer">other</a> blog-like things about my departure from the Apple eco system. Probably about time to write a <em>“proper”</em> blog post about it, but this is not going to be <em>that</em> post.</p>
<p>During the lest few days, I noticed that I became more and more frustrated with my current setup and this brought me back to the original reason why I liked my Apple Macs so much.</p>
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<p>The frustration results from a simple truth: Mainstream web development (in my case: Ruby and JavaScript, for the most part) on Windows is terrible. Which is why I usually do all my development on Linux and both of my current work machines (A beefy desktop workstation from SilentMaxx and my Razer Blade Stealth) are running dual boot setups. In general, this is fine, but of course, sometimes it really sucks. I had to do a lot of bookkeeping lately, which I have to do, for technical reasons, on Windows. And, as things go, you can’t always do things en block and so I found myself rebooting a lot.</p>
<p>Now, in 2020, that is not as bad as it used to be, say, 10 years ago, but still, it does suck quite a bit.</p>
<p>And it’s not just bookkeeping. I run a ton of creative software (music, but also graphics) on Windows and while theoretically, I could probably replace all of these with some open source/free software alternative, I really don’t want to. the reason is quite simply that not only do I like the for-money, commercial alternatives better, but also I am not always willing to put in the extra effort to learn a new piece of software when what I have actually works fine.</p>
<p>And here’s where OS X actually was the “best of both worlds” scenario. It has no issues running unixish web development environments and all of the software I was used to ran fine on Macs.</p>
<p>Running two very different operating systems side by side comes with a ton of drawbacks - At least Windows and Linux in general share the keyboard layouts. For some time I was running MacOS and Linux in parallel and that, my friends, simply doesn’t work. On a german Windows/Linux keyboard, the @-sign sits on AltGr-Q, which, keyboard layout wise is essentially the same as Cmd-Q on a Mac keyboard, so you’re involuntarily closing apps on MacOS a lot.</p>
<p>But even between Linux and Windows, keyboard shortcuts are subtly different and that f**ks up your muscle memory on more ways than one, leading to a lot of moments of frustration where only Joy should live.</p>
<p>Additionally, while my Desktop machine has “disk” space in (at least theoretical) abundance, my notebook has only 500 GB of storage which is split somewhat evenly between the two OS’s, wasting quite a lot of space and actually leading to not super uncommon hunts for big files that can be deleted.</p>
<p>Of course, there are good reasons why I abandoned OS X, the main one being a complete lack of trust in the quality of both hard- and software of Macs lately. And I have yet to see a full turnaround even if people in general seem to be relatively happy with their 16” MacBook Pros.</p>
<p>The other big one is cost and that’s somewhat of a two edged sword, because, yes, if quality were better, the big advantage you can buy for that hefty surcharge is the above mentioned “best of both worlds” - on the other hand one thing that Apple does really, really badly is choice and that is exactly what you have in abundance at the other side of the Wintel/Apple divide. My current desktop computer is an absolute marvel of technology, is super quiet, super expandable and cost well below 2k EUR, for which you roughly get 1/3 of a base MacPro.</p>
<p>Now, there’s been slivers of hope. WSL, the Windows Subsystem for Linux, which is a super weird name for “let’s make it possible to run an actual Linux shell on Windows”, is/ was promising, but in its first, super misguided incarnation (misguided as in “let’s create a cleanroom implementation of 90% of the Linux Kernal API”), was/is wayyyyyyy to slow to do meaningful work on it. WSL2 looks as if it could change that and so some of my hope lies on the next major update of Windows 10, realistically probably appearing in April or May this year which will most certainly include WSL2. Together with Windows Terminal, an actually not terrible Terminal application currently available as an early preview, this could solve most of the issues. If it really does, we will see - Right now I can reliably send a ruby process in WSL1 into a state where Windows is unable to terminate the process and the only remaining option is to reboot.</p>
<p>Of course, there are other options, and I’ve been using a few - Running a full blown Linux VM is, given the sheer power of my desktop machine, not a huge issue. Yes, it’s not the same speed as if I were running Linux natively, but it’s still a lot faster than WSL1. But it’s also not an ideal situation with conflicting keyboard shortcuts and lots of confusion where you’re not always quite sure what window set you’re currently shuffling through. Another one would be something like Docker, or, oldschool, oldschool, Vagrant. Needless to say, I’m not a huge fan of any of those, but I should probably, for my own good, change that attitude and learn me a bit of Docker, can’t hurt in 2020, I guess.</p>
<p>Where am I going with this? To be frank: Nowhere, really, other than simply complaining about the unsatisfying status quo. Hardware wise, I’m really happy right now with what I have, my desktop machine is absolutely quiet and super powerful, my monitor is awesome (and wasn’t six grand), my laptop probably gets replaced later this year but does its job - My main gripe is with the software situation and the thing is: Apples current offering, judging by the little contact I had with MacOS 10.15 Catalina would probably drive me nuts as well. So my hope lies on Windows 10 2003 or whatever the release is going to be called, because maybe it will, by the power of WSL2, will make it possible to do most of my work on Windows, using Linux. Yeah.</p>
The climate has changed2019-02-16T00:00:00+01:00https://jan.krutisch.de/en/2019/02/16/the-climate-has-changed.html<p>I swear, I did try to write a “year in review” for 2019, but again, I was very much failing to compress a year with massive ups and downs (with a mild emphasis on downs, I think) into one cohesive blog post. So I think, what I’ll do instead is try to write several posts on the various themese that dominated 2019 and that will probably dominate 2020 as well for me.</p>
<p>This first post is, well, you may have guessed it from the title, about our climate crisis. 2019 was, after the foreshadowing by the super hot summer of 2018, the year where nobody could (any longer) deny the existence of a climate crisis. Now, of course, I was aware of <em>climate change</em> for a long time. As a studied environmental engineer and with a somewhat solid base of knowledge in natural sciences, it’s not as if I could have escaped it in any way. In fact, during all of my time at university (1996-2002) this was already an ongoing discussion. Heck, my main work experience project was a thing called “climate network” (Klimanet), a website that educated public schools on how to save energy. My diploma thesis was working on solar chargers for rural Namibia, a project meant to aide rural communities in cutting down on gas lamps and open fires.</p>
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<p>But even with all that information available to me, I have to admit that I was able to push this knowledge rather far to the back of my mind and I haven’t been a particularly good exemplar of a climate protecting citizen. For one I wasn’t (and still ain’t but more on that later) a vegetarian or vegan. But also, my okay-ish popularity as a public speaker at tech conferences lead to a pretty solid record of flights within greater Europe (and just last year, I added a flight to Singapore).</p>
<p>But also, while I did shake my head at the failures of our politicians to take the climate crisis seriously quite regularly, my actions were pretty much limited to the usual snarky tweet and the occasional blog post. That is obviously not enough given the direness of the situation. It is hard to pinpoint the exact time at which I finally realised how far into a full blown crisis we a have already descended, but I do remember that seeing the images of the wild fires in the arctic (mainly in Siberia) did throw me into mental turmoil and a sense of dread I have probably not felt before in my life.</p>
<p>I will not try to summarise the current state of the climate crisis, other people are much better at that than I am. Just so much: Given all information I currently have, I am quite convinced that we have roughly 10 years to turn this ship around and decarbonise the world’s economies. Otherwise we’ll head towards unimaginable human suffering that will lead to billions of people dying of hunger, war, famines and freak weather incidents.</p>
<h3 id="activism">Activism</h3>
<p>And so I started to look for ways to do more. Traditional politics still doesn’t really feel like an option to me and so I started to work in a movement you may have heard of, called <a href="https://extinctionrebellion.de/">Extinction Rebellion</a>. I am still not 100% sure this is the right choice and there’s tons of things I am not happy with, but I am not sure this would be different with any other movement. I am not very good at hardcore civil disobedience (which is the main protest form of Extinction Rebellion), but I am somewhat okay with community organisation and so I took a couple of background roles where I organise events and help in some other ways.</p>
<p>I also helped as a marshal during the last few <a href="https://fridaysforfuture.de/">Fridays For Future</a> protests here in Hamburg, which is a very satisfying and low effort way of helping one of the movements that gave me the most hope through this last year. The amount of pressure (albeit with abysmal results so far, but that’s not their fault) FFF was able to put on for such a young movement is super inspiring. This friday, FFF’s founder, Greta Thunberg, will be in Hamburg and I hope my marshalling job will somehow allow me to see her speaking.</p>
<p>Political activism is something that doesn’t come naturally to me and I am still somewhat struggling with it, but at least I have the feeling that I’m doing something useful.</p>
<h3 id="but-what-are-you-personally-doing">But what are you personally doing</h3>
<p>You may wonder now, what I am doing personally (apart from the activism) to help. To which I have to answer in two parts.</p>
<p>The first one is an outright rejection of the actual question. We need to stop focussing on the individual contributions. Our personal, individual impact on the emission of green house gases is not zero, but in contrast to the biggest contributors (mostly fossil fuel companies like oil drillers and coal diggers) it is almost neglegible (with two notable exceptions…). Also, consumer choice, which is alway given as an example of how people are supposed to be able to influence “the market” is much more limited than we think in many cases. Which is why the most important change needs to happen in the bigger economy and thus via political change, which is why political protest and activism is so important.</p>
<p>Now, there are two things we as individuals can actually do that do have an impact. The first one is fly less. I’ve already started to take this more seriously, with considering trains within Europe wherever possible or just outright refusing to travel if it feels not important enough given the impact that it has. For flights I have to take for one reason or another, I am trying to do a proper CO2 compensation which is only the second best thing, but it’s also not completely usesless.</p>
<p>The other thing is eating less or no meat. For a lot of people I know, being a vegan or vegetarian seems to work fine and that’s by far the solution with the most impact. For me, personally, I haven’t yet been able to go full vegetarian or vegan. That being said, my intake of animal products, whether it’s meat, dairy or eggs has been drastically reduced over the last few years. Not being super strict about it allows me to give in to my cravings occasionally while still very much minimising the impact. I know this can sound a little like a cop out (and it does have a questionable focus on the CO2 impact while largely ignoring things like animal cruelty), but given my current resources it seems to be the best I can do right now. If I can find the time, I will probably write about my current diet to explain this a bit more.</p>
<p>Image on top: Taken from <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/41284017@N08/9599182665">US Department of Agriculture @ flickr</a> and processed.</p>