Thoughts and opinions of a teenager from the Netherlands.
This is my argumentative essay for the writing assignment of 6VWO. Although I ve already written about this topic at length on this blog, I wanted to upload this anyway. I m proud, and I think it also introduces some fresh perspectives. Anyway, enjoy! A little more than two years ago, ChatGPT was released to the general public (Schulman et al., 2022). Since then, the chatbot has skyrocketed in…
I think the rising popularity of ChatGPT for writing reports and research logs raises questions about the methods used in our education system. Students en masse are resorting to AI tools to generate them, because frankly, writing reports is tedious, repetitive, and uninspiring; it completely drains the fun out of any course. And I seriously doubt teachers enjoy marking them either. The widespread…
This post is a revised version of The role of generative AI in writing . However, since writing it, I might have kinda maybe sortof changed my mind . Ehh, people change ¯\_(ツ)\_/¯ A little more than two years ago, ChatGPT was officially launched. With it, the general public finally got access to OpenAI s brand new GPT-3 model that had been in development for the preceding years. The technology…
In his post On compositional window management Alexander Bandukwala explores ways in which window managers could be improved. I can t help but draw parallels to modern web browsers. Applications reimplement the window managers due to the limited feature set. Websites reimplement the web browser in the same way. I complained in the past, that I want the browser to be just a document reader . But…
You re using the internet wrong. That s quite a statement, isn t it? The power of the Web is its hyperlinked nature. It s a web , not just a repository. Yet we re increasingly searching everything on monolithic search engines like Google. That s bad. For one, it limits you to a very small portion of the Web and it s not the best part either . But also: our brain works by association: When I get…
I love building websites; I also hate the Web. I like the concept of the Web: interlinked documents with optional embedded media. Just pages of text with images and videos here and there. Think books but with interactive elements. The Web was meant to be that: a great document reader. Yet we re increasingly treating it as an SDK of some sort. A Universal Application Development ToolKit. Further…
This lyric from Olivia O Brien s song hate u love u summarizes my relationship with the Web almost perfectly: I hate you, I love you I hate that I love you Don t want to, but I can t put nobody else above you Cause, as a developer, I lóve the Web. The web browser is a blank canvas that can be used to build virtually anything. HTML, CSS, Javascript the languages used to build websites are easy to…
I m setting up RSS-only posts on my site, inspired by Dave Rupert s RSS Club , a secret society consisting of individuals that publish some of their posts exlusively using the ancient peer-to-peer syndication protocol named RSS . If you re reading this, you ve probably found this post via my RSS feed. Congratulations, you re considered a regular reader, and thus rewarded with extra postings now…
The saying goes kill your darlings . When I have trouble fitting my writing into a cohesive whole, it s often because I ve tangled up multiple concepts or ideas; essentially trying and failing to create a coherent two out of two, although related, separate concepts leaving them both underdeveloped. In those moments the best solution is to split up my text, to provide each idea the space and care…
A while back, I read Let s make the indie web easier , and it really resonated with me. OK, developers, I have a challenge for you. I ll assume that we re all on board with the 2024 indie web revival. We all want things to get weird again, right? Yeah. And, I ll assume we all agree that owning your own website is a good thing, and we all want more people to do it. But here s the thing: we need…
I ve implemented @mentions on my site, inspired by @devastatia s site. This allows me to tag fellow Webmasters when I write something referring to their work, hopefully starting interesting conversations.
Last week we were reading an article about predictive policing at school. These are my two cents. In an era of tight budgets, police departments accross the country are being asked to do more with less. To address this problem, law-enforcement agencies are increasingly turning to data and analytics to improve their ability to fight crime without substantial increase in operating cost. Known as…
It has been a few years since I learned about 0x10 c (pronounced ten to the c ) in a documentary about Notch, the creator of Minecraft. It s the game he built after he stepped down from his role as lead developer of Minecraft Minecraft s unfinished sequel. 0x10 c was supposed to be a space-themed sandbox game. It takes place around 281,474,976,710,656 AD, which is (you guessed it) 0x10 c in…
In the past I ve written about what I called two rules for any well-functioning group : Everyone behaves Everyone should have fun However, I was probably wrong. Because while small groups of people are pretty much self-organizing, as the group grows, some hierarchy is needed. In a relatively small group everyone knows everyone rules are generally unneeded, as people tend to behave properly due to…
A few weeks ago, I ran across an old article about XUL, a XML variant developed by Mozilla for use in the Firefox interface. They killed it a few years ago in favor of HTML, once again leaving behind their tried-and-tested solutions in their ever-lasting chase to be as cool and hot as Google and its Chromium project. So, to try it out anyway, I installed Pale Moon , a Firefox fork that has kept…
Since the internet went mainstream in the 90s, information has been readily available for everyone. But can it be trusted? What makes a reliable source? At school, we seem to get taught the bigger the better . Big news sites are generally considered trustworthy, while small and relatively unknown sites, like personal blogs 1 or forums, are off-limits. However, in my experience, small, specialized…
Most documents are written in Calibri or Arial, everyone uses Google, and links on the second page of Google are rarely seen. Only 5% of users actually change the settings . This is the Default Effect people don t change the defaults. Therefore, whatever ships with your product, that s what most users will use. An potential explanation would be decision fatigue : a psychological phenomenon in…
Last year, I posted my thoughts on running a tilde/pubnix . In a nutshell, I wanted to experiment with setting up a small tilde, to learn more about Linux and the internet. And after a few months of experimenting, I finally have a system that I m happy with. So today I m introducing {du}punkto , my attempt at building something . In short, {du}punkto is a small group of like-minded people who are…
This weekend I reinstalled my server. It s a cheap VPS that I m using to host a bunch of services for myself. I m sharing it with a few friends, and my girlfriend uses it to host her website. This post is both a guide to setting up a system like this, and a reference for future me, for when I m inevitably gonna reinstall the system. Preperations I started off by creating a user account for myself…
So lately I ve been watching a lot of Netflix. Generally, I m not the kind of person that consumes a lot of media. I d rather make things; I find creating things way more satisfying. However, I got a bit burned out in terms of ideas I didn t know what to build energy, and time (school am I right ✨). So, instead I spent about 20 hours of my life staring at a screen, looking at fictional characters…
Since its introduction a little more than a year ago, we ve been discussing ChatGPT a lot at school. It s an interesting topic, for sure. How can it be used in school? By students or teachers? Is using AI cheating? Will it interfere with the development of writing skills or help? Should it be used at all? Generally, we seem to have the urge to ban upcoming technologies that radically change…
Terminology like users and content is demeaning and hurtful. Artists aren t creating content to populate our datasets they re creating movies, music, essays, drawings, games, paintings. Labeling a work that someone created, out of passion and love, content , is frankly disrespectful. It reduces the creative work from something beautiful to merely another piece of content , and greatly undervalues…
A few days ago, I posted some of my thoughts regarding the new mobile phone ban in high schools in the Netherlands. I want to add a few more things: I think the fundamental problem is not the phones themselves. Why are phones distracting? Push notifications and FOMO. The phones are not the problem, social media is . And because we failed to properly regulate social media, phones are getting…
Last month the Dutch government announced that from next year on mobile phones will be banned in high school. As a student who is currently in high school, I think it s a fundamentally good development, but the media attention around it just feels wrong. The news is full of items of cherry-picked comments from teenagers who feel relieved because they finally talk to each other . But also teenagers…
Is it just me, or have search results gotten really shitty ? When I search for something, the only fucking results that I get are AI generated SEO bullshit. And I m done with it. I have been thinking about what I want a search engine to do. It should do basically this: Search Wikipedia. Apparently you can download the entirety of (English) Wikipedia in just 19GB (compressed). This is excluding any…
The dawn of the universe is a paradox. There are two ways to explain it: The universe has a beginning. Something initiated the universe, which raises the question: how did that thing get there? And if there was no thing the universe sprung from nothing how can all be made from none? The universe has no beginning it has always existed in some form or capacity. This seems contradictory: how can…
I m thinking about running my own pubnix/tilde. It would be invite-only and have a bunch of cool things: git hosting with cgit or sourcehut gemini hosting web hosting gopher hosting FTP access about 2GB of storage matrix accounts + chat portal (Hydrogen seems cool) internal message board/email? maybe a CardDAV server? I think it would be a very cool opportunity to learn a bit about Linux and the…
A few days ago, I discovered the Gemini protocol. I heard about it a while back already, but I didn t pay that much attention and failed to notice it. So, naturally, I was REALLY excited about this cool new toy. I downloaded about four different clients/browsers to see which one I liked the best (it turned out to be Lagrange ), and immediately thought about porting my website to it. Small problem…
Hi. So, you stumbled upon my blog, cool. I m a random teenager from the Netherlands, and this is my little corner of the internet. I post little notes about my life here. I made this site because I love minimalism and the initial idea of the web: a giant library of knowledge. This is my lil corner of that library as lightweight and simple as it can get. I m not trying to scream; I m just looking…
Afgelopen jaar zat ik in de derde en moest ik mijn profielkeuze maken. Op het vwo werkt het zo dat je tot de vierde klas alle vakken krijgt, en daarna een profiel kiest met vakken waarin je examen gaat doen. Ik zit nu in 4 atheneum en het profiel dat ik heb gekozen is NT (Natuur en Techniek). Dat betekent dat mijn vakkenpakket bestaat uit natuurkunde, scheikunde, NLT, Duits, Nederlands, Engels,…
Ik heb eerder al meerdere keren geschreven over social media , het internet en het belang van open standaarden . Toch wil ik het er nog één keer over hebben. Internetbedrijven hebben gewoonweg teveel macht. Er zijn wel goede alternatieven: denk aan Linux als alternatief voor Windows of macOS. Er zijn talloze voorbeelden van open-source software die net zo goed, al dan niet beter, is ten opzichte…
Ik ben bezig met het lezen van This is how they tell me the world ends . Het gaat over hoe regeringen kritieke bugs in software (zero-days) kopen en exploiteren om toegang te krijgen tot data waar we geen toestemming voor hebben. Het zette me aan het denken over privacy en data op het internet. Je ziet overal ter wereld dat er steeds meer voor digitalisering gepusht wordt. Alles moet ineens via…
Ik hoor de laatste tijd veel mensen over NFTs, crypto, dapps en web3. Maar waar gaat het nou precies over, en waarom is het juist niet de oplossing? Dat ga ik kort proberen uit te leggen. Hou er rekening mee dat dit de mening is van een vijftienjarige die niet gespecialiseerd is in crypto. Neem het dus met een korreltje zout. Dus om te beginnen, wat is crypto? Crypto is een afkorting voor…
Aan het begin van dit schooljaar had ik een kennismakingsgesprek met mijn mentor. Als voorbereiding had ik twee vragenlijsten moeten invullen. Een van de vragen daarin was welke cijfers ik verwachtte op mijn kerstrapport. Ik denk dat ik redelijke schattingen had gedaan, maar mijn mentor vond dat ik niet genoeg ambitie had. Ik en mijn ouders probeerden hem duidelijk te maken dat ambitie niet te…
Het internet is stuk . Scams, advertenties, fake news, misinformatie, verslaving, privacy schending, hatespeech, echo chambers, rascisme en discriminatie. Hoe zijn we hier terecht gekomen? Zoals ik en mijn vriend Kevin altijd bij bijna al ons geschiedenishuiswerk invullen: geld macht politiek . Durfkapitaal Bedrijven als Uber , Spotify en Thuisbezorgd.nl groeien razendsnel, maar maken al jaren…
Kennen jullie Somtoday? Voor de mensen die het niet kennen: het is een leerlingvolgsysteem voor het voortgezet onderwijs. En het is toevallig ook wat mijn school, het Lyceum Schravenlant, gebruikt. Som is noice. Je kan er je cijfers, huiswerk en leermiddelen zien. Maar ik zie ook een aantal verbeterpuntjes. Somtoday heeft voor de docenten een uitgebreid dashboard waarin ze het huiswerk kunnen…
Als je vroeger iets online wilde zetten had je alleen simpele HTML webpages. Je uploadde ze dan naar je eigen website of blog. Je was op je favoriete blogs geabonneerd via RSS en chatten ging via IRC. Dat zijn open standaarden voor communiceren, die door iedereen ondersteund worden. Maar sinds de opkomst van het zogenoemde web 2.0 zetten we alles bij Big Tech: Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon en…
Februari was voor mij een speciale maand. Ik had mezelf namelijk gechallenged om een maand lang mijn telefoon niet te gebruiken. In deze post wil ik graag mijn ervaringen delen. Maar, hoe kwam ik überhaupt op dit idee? Ik merkte dat ik de laatste tijd de iedere keer weer op mijn telefoon zat. Als ik thuis kwam, als ik wakker werd, s avonds, op school in alle pauzes en zelfs op de wc. Daarnaast…
De letters die je nu leest zijn door mij getypt, naar een Blogger server gestuurd via een glasvezelverbinding, daar opgeslagen in een database en toen ik op publiceren klikte via RSS en de homepage van mijn blog verspreid naar mijn lezers. Grote kans dat jij nu een browser gebruikt om deze post te lezen (tenzij je een RSS app gebruikt, maar dat is maar een klein percentage van mijn lezers). Een…
Facebook, Google, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube. Wat zijn de overeenkomsten? Het zijn allemaal (onderdelen van) grote bedrijven. Ze zijn allemaal rijk groot geworden met computersoftware, en allemaal dankzij de groei van het internet. Maar vooral: ze hebben grote invloed op onze samenleving door middel van social media. Tien jaar geleden dachten we nog dat het een zegen was. Nu lijkt het…