The Cyber- & Meatspace Adventures of Mikael

‘I once visited Karl Deutsch when I happened to be in Berlin – at the Science Centre in Steinplatz. We chatted for a while in his office, and I told him about the opacity of large systems. I told him that there is no large system in existence that can be fully grasped by an individual, that it is too late to control such systems, because they are a consequence of their history and that history is no longer available.’ As an example he cites Globus, a program for simulating the global economy developed at around that time in Berlin.

Globus consisted of approximately ten thousand lines of code in Fortran 77. ‘These are vast programs which I don’t think anyone could ever properly comprehend,’ Weizenbaum says. The average iPhone app was about five times that length in 2013. The Hubble space telescope has two million lines of code, the Firefox browser has about ten million. Facebook has over sixty million and Google roughly two billion. But that doesn’t mean Weizenbaum was wrong. Ten thousand lines of code can be impenetrable. So can a single line!

The whole story is basically that Facebook gets so much traffic that they started convincing publishers to post things on Facebook. For a long time, that was fine. People posted things on Facebook, then you would click those links and go to their websites. But then, gradually, Facebook started exerting more and more control of what was being seen, to the point that they, not our website, essentially became the main publishers of everyone’s content. Today, there’s no reason to go to a comedy website that has a video if that video is just right on Facebook. And that would be fine if Facebook compensated those companies for the ad revenue that was generated from those videos, but because Facebook does not pay publishers, there quickly became no money in making high-quality content for the internet.

This is the Masi Giramondo and it's a beautiful thing. Custom paint job I assume (there has never been a black version for sale).

The 2018 Giramondo 27.5 fork is different. It has shitloads of eyelets on the fork leg as well as dynamo cable routing. Great bike on the cheap. Too bad the don't sell it in Europe...

This will recursively remove the audio stream from video files in a mov container.