i am trying to build a jigsaw puzzle which has no lid and is missing half of the pieces. i am unable to show you what it will be, but i can show you some of the pieces and why they matter to me. if you are building a different puzzle, it is possible that these pieces won't mean much to you, maybe they won't fit or they won't fit yet. then again, these might just be the pieces you're looking for. this is summing up, please find previous editions here.

• a critique of technocentrism in thinking about the school of the future, by seymour papert. so we are entering this computer future; but what will it be like? what sort of a world will it be? there is no shortage of experts, futurists, and prophets who are ready to tell us, but they don't agree. the utopians promise us a new millennium, a wonderful world in which the computer will solve all our problems. the computer critics warn us of the dehumanizing effect of too much exposure to machinery, and of disruption of employment in the workplace and the economy. who is right? well, both are wrong - because they are asking the wrong question. the question is not "what will the computer do to us?" the question is "what will we make of the computer?" the point is not to predict the computer future. the point is to make it. highly recommended
• inside the mirrortocracy, if spam filters sorted messages the way silicon valley sorts people, you'd only get email from your college roommate. and you'd never suspect you were missing a thing. lest you get the wrong idea, i'm not making a moral case but a fairly amoral one. it's hard to argue against the fact that the valley is unfairly exclusionary. this implies that there is a large untapped talent pool to be developed. since the tech war boils down to a talent war, the company that figures out how to get over itself and tap that pool wins. highly recommended
• programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger, it's pretty damn sad that something as limited and now ancient as bash represents some kind of optimum of productivity for many real-world "everyday programming" tasks - and yet fails so miserably for so many other everyday programming tasks due to lack of data abstraction and richness. 90% of the shit that gets written doesn't even involve anything as complicated as finding set partitions. really
• we lost the war. welcome to the world of tomorrow, we need to assume that it will take a couple of decades before the pendulum will swing back into the freedom direction, barring a total breakdown of civilization as we know it. only when the oppression becomes to burdensome and open, there might be a chance to get back to overall progress of mankind earlier. if the powers that be are able to manage the system smoothly and skillfully, we cannot make any prediction as to when the new dark ages will be over
• the gloaming, short film by niko nobrain