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Updates

I occasionally share experiences and updates, or news I find interesting.

To keep up, you can use the RSS feed, or keep an eye on the social media I use: right now, that is on Mastodon and LinkedIn mainly.

Updating my updates

Right now (Summer 2025), I am moving my website to a new platform.

I am taking the opportunity to also do some digital gardening and prune some older posts that no longer link to actual websites.

My opinions and practices change over time

My own ideas, and the tools and technologies I use, shift over time. Sometimes, I update earlier posts to indicate that, but not always.

Digital gardening

If I had to pick a dominant thread throughout my life, it would be: exploring new ways to organise my notes and knowledge. As a teenager, I typed out paper index cards, to track lemmas in my parents' encyclopedia. Since then, I tried different tools and systems (like Zettelkasten).

Today, I'm starting yet another chapter, and will call it digital gardening: the trend to make more of my notes available on my public website. In my case: I combine Obsidian to take notes, with Material for MkDocs to publish them.

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Will DeepSeek democratise AI?

Will DeepSeek be a game changer like ChatGPT was? The benefits and the public release of their models could level the playing field, as Mike Pound of the University of Nottingham argues in this Computerphile video. But will it be able to challenge the current quasi-monopoly, and democratise AI? And how accurate are the DeepSeek claims anyway?

Over the years, I used a portrait photo and a landscape shot from a kayak trip as my main “brand images”. But, a while ago, I started looking at a “real logo”. Something a little abstract, but (literally?) grounded, related to path-finding, or the idea of long-term growth. And linked to the idea that IT is more like gardening (on-going), than building something (one-off).

AI for participatory urban planning

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On Thursday, the Rebooting democracy in the age of AI lecture series will continue with a conversation on AI for participatory planning, looking at the UrbanistaAI platform: a way to visually co-create the use of urban spaces.

Previous lectures in the series have featured great presentations and conversations at the forefront of AI for civic use, exploring ways it may impact democratic society, and how it may be governed.

This session may look a bit more on planning how to use AI-based tools in concrete processes. It will be great input to combine with our own experiences developing a platform for citizen dialogues.

ChatGPT as your new assistant

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ChatGPT is a hot topic. Tom Scott compared it to a “Napster moment”, when suddenly everyone started sharing music and videos, Jonathan Stark called it the iPhone effect, when everyone started using a mobile device everywhere, and Bart Lacroix compared it to the first time using Google or Spotify: “I opened [ChatGPT] in my browser as a tab and never closed it since.”

Some practical examples of using ChatGPT as a tool to run an organisation:

Adding my site to the Fediverse

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Thanks to the renewed interest in actual social media, rather than an algorithm-driven advertisement space, I find myself having interesting online conversations again.

I really wanted to use my own website and domain for further engagement.

But… experience with earlier attempts at federating networks made me cautious. Setting up and maintaining my own Jabber/XMPP and Diaspora servers was a lot of effort for little result. An excursion into the current field of microformats and protocols again suggested a lot to choose from, with very little guidance.

So after reading about Ton Zijlstra’s vision on “an operating system for the Open Social Web” (presented at the Dutch WordCamp 2022), we had a good conversation about experiences and the state of things (thanks Ton!).