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A recent Hacker News question was one I have thought about occasionally over the years: what are good ways to capture institutional knowledge?

The comments list several tools and practices, mostly for technical teams. But this one stood out:

I think the solution is more cultural than technical. When a company develops a culture that fosters the creation of technical documentation, and encourages employees to document absolutely everything (both the how and the why), then institutional knowledge is simply a byproduct. When a company focuses much more on shipping products and de-values everything from architecture documentation to API documentation, then institutional knowledge suffers.

This happens all too often in startups that are in go-go mode all the time. Documentation, knowledge capture, instituting processes are dismissed as over-intellectualising at the cost of execution speed. As throwaway work because ‘things change’.

But it is in fact startups that would most benefit from capturing knowledge because the costs of repeating mistakes, or reinventing the wheel as a result of forgotten knowledge are higher than in mature companies.

Neurosurgeon Dr. William Penfield, after a lifetime of mapping brains, posited that the mind is separate from the brain:

His third line of reasoning was the following: He would ask people to move their arm during the surgery. So he’d be playing around with their brain. And he’d say. “Whenever you want to, move your right arm.” The person would move their arm. 

And, once in a while, he’d stimulate the part of the brain that made the arm move. And they moved their arm also when he did that. And then he would ask them, “I want you to tell me when I’m making your arm move and when you’re moving your arm without me making you do it. Tell me if you can tell the difference.” And the patients could always tell the difference. 

The patients always knew that when he stimulated their arm, it was him doing it, not them. And when they stimulated their arm, they were doing it, not him. So Penfield said, he couldn’t stimulate the will. He could never trick the patients into thinking it was them doing it. He said, the patients always retained a correct sense of agency. They always know if they did it or if he did it. 

So he said the will was not something he could stimulate, meaning it was not material.

The MIT Technology Review discusses how our existing social networks aren’t exactly fostering conversations between our personal networks

“Social media treats everyone—a friend, a family member, an acquaintance—the same,” says Courtney Walsh, a lecturer in human development and family sciences at the University of Texas who consulted for Cocoon. “I would argue that what we are doing is impersonal on social media.”

– “Why private micro-networks could be the future of how we connect”

I wrote about this nine years ago when the late Google+ launched. That blog post posited that it was hard, if not impossible, to model your personal life into Google+ Circles.

And then it also strikes me. That I can only recollect a single group for each phase should tell me something – I really _belonged_ to only one group at a time. It tells me that groups like ‘work’ and ‘family’ and ‘cousins’ and daily commute gang’ and such are really just only contexts for interactions. You can force-create + circles for them, but they’re really freeform amoeba-like shapes, and will change. Not even snap, just thin out at points and separate into other blobs without much emotional ado. Attempts to share ‘stuff’ with them on services like + will peter out in weeks. Or days.

– Doing life in software is hard

Related reading: “The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet”.

This leads us to a fun but silly thought experiment: Can an economy feel joy? Suppose we define an economy as the connections (trading, informational, formal, and informal) between individuals. So defined an economy is affected both by internal and external factors. It is able to perceive external factors including weather conditions, the actions of other economies, sources of new resources and supplies; and through the influence of these external factors it is able to both interpret and react to these factors (for example, by producing more wheat in response to a global shortage, responding to both explicit and predicted price signals).

To a certain extent it is even able to consider the reasons for its own actions – read through the financial pages of the newspaper and you’ll find a form of reflective metacognition. To be able to think about own thinking is one definition of consciousness, so sense we can say that our toy economy has a form of consciousness – although we’ve cheated slightly by making our economy include its constituent conscious minds.

– “Can an Economy Feel Joy?”

It’s something I have thought about a few times. Whether a sufficiently complex system of decidedly inanimate entities displays signs of life, or even consciousness. And if so, if it is inevitable or if that complexity must be of a certain type.

Cities are one example of a simple life form. They grow, consume resources around them, have a circulatory system without which they would not function, even have a digestive and excretory system, interact with other similar life forms for exchanges of value, and either thrive or die depending on how successful this internal and external value exchange is.

A look at how Western tech companies customise their products for the Indian customer. Includes, among others, a battery-powered Echo speaker by Amazon, a USD 3 mobile-only subscription to Netflix, and Google Assistant made available via a toll free mobile number.

From this Wired article profile of the service:

It does not plaster itself with advertising, intrude on privacy, or provide a breeding ground for neo-Nazi trolling. Like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, it broadcasts user-generated content. Unlike them, it makes its product de-personified, collaborative, and for the general good. More than an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has become a community, a library, a constitution, an experiment, a political manifesto—the closest thing there is to an online public square. It is one of the few remaining places that retains the faintly utopian glow of the early World Wide Web. A free encyclopedia encompassing the whole of human knowledge, written almost entirely by unpaid volunteers: Can you believe that was the one that worked?

– Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet

It’s not just a question of aggressive moderation. Reddit, for instance, has communities that have used moderation to keep discussions clean but at the cost of neutrality. For instance the subreddit Last Stage Capitalism makes it clear and enforces that it is for communists and is limited to anti-capitalist discussions only.

Wikipedia is unique in that it has pages for all parts of content including highly divisive topics, for instance the Kashmir Conflict, without the page itself devolving into chaos (even though the discussion view behind the scenes is divisive).

Some time earlier we talked about how Google search results are now dominated by shallow mass-produced commoditised made-for-clicks content, that the lack of discoverability of truly relevant information in the ‘long tail’ was going to be a problem in the years to come.

Today I read a tweet that mirrored accurately how I myself search, in a bid to find content real humans with actual opinions have written:

The irony is that truly human content is now found on centralised hosted communities like reddit, not on the open web where you’d expect it to.

From this What I Use interview:

My ideal setup would be one where I rely a lot less on screens, and a lot more on natural interactions with the physical environment, and perhaps voice. Humans aren’t built for sitting down all day and staring at a dumb bright rectangle, and our big spatial brains, with our bodies designed to precisely navigate 3D space, are wasted on this tiny flat world we have created for ourselves.

– Rupert Parry.

I wonder if some of the first VR computing environments will mimic, even if for fun, old 1980s office environments with actual filing cabinets you walk up to and pull files from – except that these files can be from anywhere in the world. A drawer is a search results page.

This article on Forbes delivers a call for a decentralised web where people have control over their own data and run their own applications such as email. This is in contrast to dependence on the Big Few companies that have come to dominate several layers of the modern internet: Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba. 

Over the last few days I moved my domain, my hosting and my WordPress installation from one host to another. The web hosting and configuration experience has not changed substantially in the last 18 years I have hosted my own domain and blog. It required a substantial amount of technical know-how even though it did not involve email (which runs separately on GSuite) and calendars/contacts/documents, which all live on iCloud. If I had self-hosted all of that, it would have been an even more arduous and technically challenging effort. 

I have long thought that web hosts have a huge opportunity to make it really easy for people to privately host not just their site but also their data and personal applications.

All of these exist: Nextcloud for contacts, calendars, documents. Open-source XMPP servers for chat. Photo gallery applications. Personal wikis and note apps. Your web host already offers email; use the beautiful Rainloop for webmail. SpamAssassin or Mailcleaner for self-hosted spam filtering. Mattermost for Slack-like close-group messaging, just run our own IRC server – there are well-designed IRC mobile apps. WordPress for blogging and even micro-blogging. 

Web hosts could take it further and offer hosted VPNs and DNS-based ad-blockers like Pi-hole as hosted services.

Services like Softaculous, built into self-hosted control panels like CPanel, are a great easy way to install these pieces of software, but cPanel itself needs to become much simpler.

It’s hard to overstate how much the relationship between today’s internet giants and ordinary people like you and me will change if decentralised identity, self-hosted applications and self-owned data become a reality. That alternate world though is becoming harder every passing year to even imagine, leave alone bring about.

From this WSJ article reprinted in the Mint, more on solar power in India: as a result of better tech and falling Chinese solar panel prices, India has become the only country in the world where the cost of solar power generation is lower than fossil fuel alternatives “even with subsidies removed and the cost of construction and financing figured in”. 14% below coal, in fact. According to the article the cost of solar capacity building dropped 84% in 8 years.

But as in many, many cases, the state threatens to derail the whole industry:

…companies have been hit by payment delays from India’s struggling power distributors, mainly state-owned companies that buy electricity from producers and sell it to households. India’s Central Electricity Authority estimated that as of Nov. 30, renewable-energy companies were owed some $1.3 billion in overdue bills…

Some Indian state agencies, hoping solar prices fall lower, have canceled solar auctions when they thought developers were offering to sell power at too high a price.

By early 2019, many developers were starting to pass on solar auctions, threatening the country’s aggressive development timetable. Many developers and analysts now say India is likely to fall behind in achieving its renewable-energy goals.

An environment where contracts can be unilaterally renegotiated and payments can be stopped is not conducive to business.