Geospatial, movies, Earth Observation, music, tech-hype, product development, organisation design & culture, love, strategy, literature, startups, bike riding, regret and random animal encounters.
Unstructured and irregular.
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Super Humans and Super AI I had an issue with my buttondown newsletter. I wrote to support. Got an automated reply telling me they got my mail, they are looking into the issue but since they only have limited staff, working in a US time zone, it might take a bit for a proper reply. Within 1 hour, Steph is in my inbox, kindly explaining the issue and how they would resolve it. I said thank you for the quick answer Steph and for being a kind human Steph and Steph said no problem arjen, we don’t like talking to chatbots, and we don’t want to make you all deal with them either. <3 (<- I got that one from the emoji museum). ...
Launch time. Technology, Human Systems, Environment. I soft launched the new version of thishollow.earth today. New theme, new content, new streams, same me. new landing page familiar blog stream (this newsletter) new products & concepts stream new solutions page, outlining the 3 pillars (technology, human systems, environment), each with their own product show case CYNTHIA, BERT, WALTER new about page with profile, expertise,experience and how to get in touch new tech notes stream long form essay stream (TBA, in parallel from medium) scalpel stream (TBA) It’s far from finished. It’s full of errors and mistakes and omissions. But it’s something, it’s good enough and it’s live. This is part of the bootstrapping ThisHollowEarth. After bootstrapping, I will start building the products, setup a Go To Market (GTM) plan, focus on branding, visuals and design, do optimisation / tweaking / security / legal / finance and then rinse and repeat. ...
Conference time. Two conferences, serendipity, long form essays, the future. I didn’t go to a lot of conferences the past few years. Let alone speak at conferences. But then I got invited to speak at 2 conferences last spring. Many good things came from both. I made a lot of notes but reviewing them I realised they don’t make much of a coherent story. But who needs coherence? Instead I present you observations, impressions and random thoughts. ...
I have notes, so many. I have raw notes. I have useless notes. I have notes about notes. I have too many notes. And there is no time. But there is time! The years go fast, the hours go slow. There is time. We’ve got snackbars, AI, books, Den Helder, more AI, essays, and a stroll in the evening. Snackbar Maandag When walking my dog in the evening I regularly pass by Snackbar Maandag (Snackbar Monday). ...
Nothing is important stahlhartes Gehäuse Last time I mentioned Webers [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_cage](Iron Cage) and I do have to apologise. Sorry. I should have said stahlhartes Gehäuse of course. It’s a much more accurate and telling description. Because it’s in German. German is one of my favourite languages. Since German has poetry baked into the language. Every German is a poet. Wir haben uns lange, lange nicht geseh’n und es gibt so viel, so viel zu erzähl’n Aber wir schweigen, wir schweigen fast schon laut Das nicht gesagte beschreibt alles ganz genau ...