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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.

An update on Wordpress as my Social Hub

How do you let people interact with a static website? At FOSDEM last month, Matthias Pfefferie discussed the changes to the social layer on the web. The new Social Web builds on earlier tools like RSS and PingBacks, with new tools like ActivityPub and the Fediverse.

The whole day at the Social Web devroom made it clear there is a lot to do still. And perhaps combining the reach of Wordpress with the little experience I have managing Wordpress sites (and a bit more in programming PHP) is my best bet to add a social layer to my now static main website.

So thanks to the wonderful world of LLM-assisted programming ("AI for software development"), I managed to develop a first version of a Wordpress plugin to enable social interactions on a static site.

Benevolent Dictator For Life?

The term benevolent dictator for life (BDFL) is popular in the open source world1, mainly as a way to acknowledge the importance of the person leading a particular project into early success and giving that person absolute rule.

But there are no benevolent dictators. Recent developments in the Wordpress world brought me back to my TYPO3 days of long ago.

  • in Ideas
  • 3 min read

Plinius, a knowledge worker's assistant

I worked on a project to process scientific articles to help researchers. To quote myself:

The main goal of the Plinius project is to build a system that semi-automatically extracts knowledge from scientific abstracts and stores it in a knowledge base. [...] A system that contains the knowledge rather than the text of abstracts of a domain could answer a researcher’s questions directly, instead of retrieving all abstracts that mention the subject at hand.

For the processing of abstracts, the Plinius project has to deal with two important processes: the interpretation of natural language, and the maintainance [sic] of a knowledge base. In processing natural language, the knowledge base will be used to limit the number of possible interpretations of a piece of text. As a result the knowledge base has to be updated with the knowledge acquired from that piece of text.

That is how I described the Plinius project, named after the first encyclopedist1, in my Master of Science thesis2 of 1993. It mentioned two main challenges:

  • Natural language processing. The project focused on abstracts of scientific articles. These usually don't contain humour, sarcasm, and so forth. This made it easier to deal with the often messy and ambiguous nature of natural language.
  • Automated reasoning. The project chose a very technical domain to make it easier to manage the ontology and logic needed to derive new knowledge, prove statements, and find contradictions.

These days, a lot of projects emerge with a similar promise: to automatically surface new knowledge. AI today (Large Language Models or LLMs) cover the first challenge quite well, and can process messy and ambiguous text.

Back in 1993, I ran into problems when doing automated reasoning using world views that are not compatible. Current AI models generate text without even noticing or mentioning such incompatibilities: they are trained to go toward a middle ground.

LLMs are good at summarising. But not at sense-making: finding and navigating divergence in world views and opinions.

I don't really know how current tools build on the progress made in semantic reasoning and automated theorem proofing over the last decades. I see the tools "plan their steps", but those steps seem to be generated by an LLM.

AI tools today help me enrich and navigate my Personal Knowledge Management system. But at its core, it still is a collection of text notes. It helps me find connections, not understanding.

Back in 1993, I saw the Plinius knowledge base as a shared product: it would help a whole field of researchers to find new knowledge in a growing stream of research papers.

Today, I'd rather have a personal knowledge assistent. A tool to help me build and test solid argumentation and work with competing world views that are valid to me. It should help me find sources to make sense of things, and to articulate and interrogate divergent conclusions.

I don't want the AI to reason for me, I want the AI to sharpen my reasoning.

  1. Gaius Plinius Secundus, or Pliny the Elder, wrote the first encyclopedia covering a vast array of topics on human knowledge and the natural world. He is also known as eye-witness reporter and victim of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that covered Pompeii. ↩

  2. Kleef, R. (1993). The part-of relation in the Plinius ontology [Master Thesis]. University of Twente. ↩

  • in Tools
  • 1 min read

Using AI in Obsidian

I have been using Perplexity for a while now. It became my AI tool of choice because it provides good links to sources.

However, it was difficult to combine it with working on my notes in Obsidian. I had to bring my notes to the AI, and then bring the answers back to my notes.

But no more!

FOSDEM 2025, 2026

FOSDEM26.png A few more weeks to the next FOSDEM conference in Brussels, an annual gathering of thousands of open source developers and users. Time to finally finish some of my notes from last year, and look ahead.

My focus is on socio-technical discussions: how do technologies and society interact with respect to access, representation, and autonomy? Two perspectives:

  • On an individual and community level: how can we reclaim "social media" to be the public space we intended it to be?
  • On a societal and global level: how can we reclaim "open source" as a technical driver for a better society?

Those perspectives touch on a tension between "free" and "open".

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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  • material-for-mkdocs-logo.svg

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.