Let's be Fwends #140:

Thirty-Four-Thousand Steps

"I'm walking on sunshine, woooah 
And don't it feel good"

~Katrina Leskanich

Our visit to the Tour de France Femme in Rotterdam was a blast, I highly recommend visiting a bike race now and then.

Yeah, I know what you're going to say. But Peter, why travel to a bike race when all you're going to do is stand around waiting for the race to rush by in an instant, and then it's all over?

All I can respond with is that watching a bike race is not a passive occupation, and I have the activity data to prove it:

Walking more than 11km on both days while going from and to places, looking for good spots on the road to watch or just walking the time trial course from start to finish (and then some) is a proper workout in my book.

Besides the update on my vacationing (which I know you were all dying to get), I'd like to welcome you all to edition 140 of Let's be Fwends. This time with an opinion on the advantages of removal and repurposing over adding, more climate news (none of them good, I'm afraid), an update on Kim Dotcom (yes, that one) and kind of related a paper on the misuse of Generative AI.

Enjoy.

Invite, Don't Invent

I am not fond of waste. And a spectacular but often overlooked type of waste is excess motion, doing more than what is needed to do to reach the same outcomes. Accordingly, one of my favourite hacks is to remove things rather than introducing new elements to an organisation or a process. It's incredible how much (work/process steps/meetings/calls/documents) you can remove before things start breaking.

A softball-version of removal is repurposing things you already have in place. For example, instead of creating a new recurring meeting series, asking yourself instead: To which meeting we already have can I add this?

In short: Invite, don't Invent

Carbon Capture is a Lie

Gut feeling: Avoidance is always better than removal. Instead of trying to deal with the negative effects of your actions, try to not do the thing at all. Same goes with carbon emissions. It always struck me as incredibly wasteful to have a potentially humanity-ending technology on one side, and try to compensate for its downsides on the other side. Why not get rid of the technology in the first place?

And I make this argument regardless of the fact that even in best case scenarios, Carbon Capture and Storage will only be able to remove 2% of all human-made emissions.

Offsetting and capturing carbon emissions might be a necessity, but it is not enough, not by a long shot.

And whoever is telling you otherwise is simply lying to you.

Blast From The Past: New Zealand About to Extradite Kim Dotcom

Oh, remember when ICQ was finally shut down? Here's another name from a different time you haven't heard in a long time: Kim Dotcom is about to be extradited to the United States.

Although often referred to as a "hacker" is probably better described as a fraudster, con man and scammer. But with his exploitation of the Dotcom-bubble (hence his artist name), and his stance on content sharing and piracy with the founding of MegaUpload, he definitely was one of the figures who shaped an era.

Will The Gulf Stream Collapse (Anytime Soon)?

Apparently, this thing is overhyped. But it is a great read in any case, and you can learn a lot about climate, how our planet actually works, and how important oceans are. Be honest - when I say "Climate" you think "trees", right? I know I do. But I guess we should all be thinking "water", and more specifically, "ocean".

How are People Misusing Generative AI?

Okay, that's more of a judgement than an indifferent statement. In the end, who says what is use and what is misuse? But in any case, some folks at Google (and others) tried to categorise different ways people exploit the capabilities of generative AI tools and the paper is worth a read.

That's it for this edition of Let's be Fwends. I know that I'm meandering a bit content-wise; Let me know if you enjoy this, or if you'd rather have me stick to organisations, work, and technology. 🧑‍💻