Ursula Franklin was a scientist, author, activist and Quaker who wrote, among many things, on technology.

De-escalate speed, and also de-escalate vocabulary. Much of our vocabulary comes, again, out of production and advertising. I think we might make a pact with each other never to use the word “awesome”. I think the world was fine without the word awesome. De-escalate vocabulary, de-escalate hype.

Ursula Franklin Speaks

I consider reflecting on the ways my vocabulary and attitudes are shaped by a consumerist and technological society to be part of my spiritual practise.

Hype and marketing lead us awayh from the truth in order to influence others. I want to remember, when I am trying to be persuasive, to influence using truth, not exaggeration.

It’s good enough if things work. Everything doesn’t have to be “splendid”, “cutting edge”, “world class”. Those are responses to production. See where those things come from.

It’s very poor practice to hurry on your plants in the winter; when we have fluorescent lights all our plants get spindly and look miserable. There is nothing to speed per se.

Like efficiency, speed has a direction. It is not its own virtue; it depends on towards what we are speeding. And while there are many injustices we wish to speed away from, speed allows or necessitates us to miss details, to omit nuance, sometimes to fail to attend adequately to reality.

Filed under:quotestech

Zulip is a team chat app, broadly similar to Slack or Microsoft Teams.

When the Future of Coding community started considering Slack alternatives earlier this year, I was reminded that Zulip exists. They didn’t end up moving to it, but I got interested.

The Changelog podcast migrated their community after an interview with one of the Zulip team, so I’ve been using it near daily for the last few months.

And you know what? It’s really excellent.

I am in several Slacks, for my day job and a couple of community groups. The difference when I open Zulip is noticeable. Zulip has a snappier and denser UI. But it’s the way messages are grouped into topics that makes it really easy to ignore a bunch of messages that I don’t need to read. That makes it much faster to get a broad sense of “what’s happening” and then focus on chats I actually care about.

On a personal level, I wish groups with ideological commitments would consider supporting Zulip, a small independent company funded by its customers whose owners are intimately involved in building the product. Rather than Slack (sold to Salesforce) or Discord (raised hundreds of millions of dollars).

I really hope to see more communities and companies considering Zulip as a viable alternative to the corporate players.

Filed under:techzulip

Many people in tech are obsessed with exponential growth. But I wonder…

Are things which look like exponential growth always the spread of an idea between humans? Are they always ideas whose implementation can be easily parallelized or distributed, so that as the idea spreads, the growth of its implementation is not bottlenecked?

Where the growth of an idea was not exponential, was that because its implementation couldn’t proceed in a decentralised way? Was it because the material resources needed for its implementation weren’t already widely available, ready to be put to use?

Is the end of exponential growth (the top of the S curve) due to saturation of the idea among humans?

Filed under:tech