https://canolcer.eu My random thoughts about technology, politics and society. en-us 2026-02-06 12:30:00 UTC https://canolcer.eu/posts 2026-02-06 12:30:00 UTC https://canolcer.eu/posts Immer wieder wird gepredigt, dass der Neubau von Wohnungen eine effektive Lösung für die hohen Mieten in Städten wie Berlin sei. Mehr Angebot ergibt tiefere Preise, ist doch logisch. Was auf den ersten Blick plausibel klingt, ist jedoch falsch. Wieso? Wenn man sich die Zahlen anschaut, ist es relativ offensichtlich: In Berlin gibt es ca. 1,7 Millionen Mietwohnungen. Pro Jahr werden ca. 17.000 neue Wohnungen gebaut. Das sind bloß 1 %. Wenn die Preise auf dem Wohnungsmarkt nur von Angebot und Nachfrage beeinflusst würden, ist klar, dass ein erhöhtes Angebot von 1 % pro Jahr kaum einen Einfluss auf die Mietpreise hat. Dazu kommt, dass die Nachfrage natürlich nicht konstant bleibt. Wenn mehr Angebot da ist, gibt es auch mehr Nachfrage, was wiederum die Mietpreise erhöht. Dieses Phänomen heißt übrigens induzierte Nachfrage und ist auch in anderen Lebensbereichen zu beobachten. So zum Beispiel bei Autobahnen: Das Hinzufügen einer Spur führt nicht dazu, dass es weniger Stau gibt. Sondern es fahren dann mehr Leute mit dem Auto, bis sich wieder ein Staugleichgewicht einpendelt. Bis also eine durchschnittliche Stauschmerzgrenze erreicht ist. Und genau so ist das mit Mietwohnungen. Wie kann man dann sicherstellen, dass es bezahlbare Wohnungen in beliebten Städten gibt? Wenn man sich die Zahlen von oben noch mal anschaut, wird eines klar: Der größte Hebel liegt im bestehenden Wohnungsbestand. Leerstand ist ein riesen Problem In Berlin stehen 40.500 Wohnungen leer. Vor allem, weil Immobilienfirmen und Investoren damit spekulieren und weil ein großer Teil davon auch illegal auf Airbnb als Ferienwohnungen vermietet wird. Außerdem stehen auch 1,5 Millionen m² Büroflächen leer, die man in 25.000 Mietwohnungen umwandeln könnte. Durch bessere Bekämpfung von Leerstand und die Umwandlung könnte man also sehr schnell sehr viel Wohnraum schaffen. Landeseigene Wohnungen sind ein wichtiger Hebel Das Land Berlin hat ca. 400.000 landeseigene Wohnungen. Diese werden im Schnitt zwar günstiger vermietet als Wohnungen im privaten Eigentum, sind aber immer noch deutlich zu teuer und werden illegalerweise auch über den ortsüblichen Vergleichsmieten vermietet. Durch die Einführung eines konsequenten Mietendeckels für diese Wohnungen hätte man den schnellsten und größten Effekt zur Senkung der Mieten für sehr viele Berliner:innen. Besseres Vorgehen gegen Mietwucher In Berlin wird jede zweite Wohnung, oft illegal, nur auf Zeit und möbliert vermietet. So versuchen dreiste Vermieter, die ortsübliche Maximalmiete pro Quadratmeter zu umgehen. So vermietete Wohnungen sind im Schnitt dreimal so teuer wie eine regulär vermietete Wohnung. Auch regulär vermietete Wohnungen werden oft illegal zu Wucherpreisen angeboten, also zu Preisen, die die ortsübliche Miete deutlich überschreiten (teilweise bis zu 50 % teurer, als eigentlich erlaubt wäre). Warum ist das überhaupt möglich? Weil die Ämter nicht konsequent dagegen vorgehen. Oft fehlt das Personal oder die Ressourcen. Durch mehr Investitionen in den Bezirken in genau diesen Bereich könnte man die Mieten für viele Berliner:innen rasch signifikant senken. Natürlich bedeutet das nicht, dass man gar keinen Neubau machen sollte. Beim Neubau ist es aber wichtig, dass ein großer Teil der neuen Wohnungen Sozialwohnungen sind. Im Moment ist das nicht der Fall. Stattdessen werden irgendwelche fancy “Executive apartments” gebaut, die dann zu extrem hohen Profiten an reiche Menschen vermietet oder verkauft werden. Große Immobilienkonzerne sind rein von Profit getrieben. Sie bauen nicht selbstlos bezahlbare Wohnungen für die Menschen, die in Städten leben wollen. Deshalb brauchen wir Städte, die genau dagegen vorgehen. Außerdem brauchen wir auch die Unterstützung des Bundes, zum Beispiel mit einer besseren Regelung des Mietendeckels. Hast du das Gefühl, dein Vermieter zockt dich auch ab? Dann mach den kostenlosen Mietwucher-Check und hol dir deine Miete zurück. Referenzen: • Zahlen und Fakten zu Leerstand in Berlin von Die Linke • Informationen zum Wohnungsmarkt in Berlin von der Senatsverwaltung https://canolcer.eu/posts 2025-08-20 18:00:00 UTC https://canolcer.eu/posts I don't need to tell you that the "strategic" consulting company McKinsey is evil and full of shit. But this one is almost funny it's so bad. So, McKinsey did a survey trying to find out how implementing "AI" (whatever that means) has helped companies be more "productive" (whatever that means). Looks like the outcome was not to their liking, because this is what thy concluded: “Nearly eight in ten companies have deployed gen AI in some form, but roughly the same percentage report no material impact on earnings.1 We call this the “gen AI paradox.”” So, McKinsey, a company is who hyping up AI and trying to charge their customers to implement "AI initiatives", is admitting that companies who deploy gen AI see no positive impact on their earnings. And because McKinsey are a bunch of dipshits, they try to seize this as an opportunity to make even more money. They call it the "gen AI paradox", and are saying: “The main issue is an imbalance between “horizontal” and “vertical” use cases. The former, such as employee copilots and chatbots, have been widely deployed but deliver diffuse benefits, while higher-impact vertical, or function-specific, use cases seldom make it out of the pilot phase because of technical, organizational, data, and cultural barriers.” What this sentence full of business buzzwords means is: "AI works, you are just doing it wrong". Here's a better explanation for the "gen AI paradox": Companies see no positive impact on their earnings because it does not fucking work. It's not a paradox. It's billions of dollars invested into hyping up a technology that's smashing face-first into the hard ground of reality. It's the sound of a bubble starting to pop. Look, I am not saying that there are zero useful things that LLMs can do. But they are far less and in between than the AI hypemen have been telling you. As Ed Zitron remarks in his amazing article The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble: The generative AI market is a $50 billion revenue industry masquerading as a $1 trillion one. https://canolcer.eu/posts 2025-08-07 11:00:00 UTC https://canolcer.eu/posts As you might guess from the URL of this blog post, I think that GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke can stick it where the sun don't shine. Seriously, what a stupid asshole. No, I am not going to link to his shitty blog post. You can search it yourself if you want to waste your time. Microsoft's fake valuation growth in the past months is hinging on their executives making up dumb shit. So, am I suprised? No, not really. Now, stop using GitHub and using something else. For example, Codeberg. https://canolcer.eu/posts 2025-07-19 13:00:00 UTC https://canolcer.eu/posts Today, I came across this interesting chart from Our World in Data. It shows a bunch of countries, plotting them on two axes: "Life expectancy at birth" and "Health expenditure per capita": [A graph showing various countries, comparing life expectancy vs. health spending] You can find the interactive graph here. In general, the more a country spends on health, the higher the life expectancy. There are some notable outliers, though. I want to highlight one: Spain and Italy spend about the third of what the US does on healthcare, but their life expectancy is significantly higher (~ 4 years higher). There are some other countries in that cluster, too. For example Japan and New Zealand, who are very "efficient" in that way. Clearly, other factors outside of spending money on health care have an impact on life expectancy. Most likely what kind of food you eat and physical fitness. What else? https://canolcer.eu/posts 2025-06-23 10:40:00 UTC https://canolcer.eu/posts How can I justify working a meaningless for-profit job, discussing irrelevant things like how to name a variable or how to structure this code or if we should build this or that feature, when around me the world is going to shit? We are at the brink of what looks like a massive war in the Middle East with dire consequences for those people living there, but also for others around the world. What am I talking about? We are in the middle of a massive war in the Middle East, already! And of course, there are the other wars and miseries that have been raging for so long, we have normalized them already: Russia's invasion of Ukraine, civil wars in African countries like Sudan, concentration camps of minorities in eastern China and all the issues in South American countries like Venezuela, just to name a few. Fascism and authotarianism is rising across the globe, refugees who've lost everything are turned away at the door as if they try to enter Berghain. Vulnerable groups like trans folks are marginalized and hated on even more. The planet is burning and flooding simulatenously because of rising CO2 levels and declining biodiversity. All this is happening for the same and only reason. FUCKING GREED. It is happening because there are a bunch of greedy motherfuckers getting their way, lying and plundering and raping the rest of us. FUCK THEM. They all deserve to rot in a prison cell for the rest of their pathetic lives. So, how can I — or you — people, who are so comfortable because they were born at the right place, at the right time, with genes that endow them with abilities that are rewarded with money in our capitlistic society, how can we justify doing some bullshit job that nobody cares about? How can we justify not spending at least some of our time helping others who are so in need? I am not talking about going to the frontlines of the war or donating kidneys. I don't have the courage. I am talking about just DOING SOMETHING USEFUL that does not make some capitalistic assholes richer, but serves the people. I, for one, can no longer justify not doing this. https://canolcer.eu/posts 2025-06-13 10:00:00 UTC https://canolcer.eu/posts Like any wannabe intellectual worth their salt, I also need to give my current two shits about AI. Of course, this is not my first post on AI, and it won't be the last. Or maybe it will, only fools think that they can predict the future. Anyways, I came across this very excellent article by Glyph the other day. I recommend that you read it. It's well-written, entertaining and includes some great observations. In the past few weeks, I also have been playing around with Claude Code a bit for programming. I have friends that say that they are 5x more productive with Cursor or Claude, but I just can't replicate this. I am not saying that they are lying, but I think they are caught in the hype. And as philosophers have been arguing for thousands of years: reality can be very subjective. Needless to say, my own usage of LLMs for coding has been mixed. I see the value for quickly writing a stand-alone script using an API or language that you are not familar with. It's much quicker than looking up all the docs and syntax yourself. And it does not matter if you understand exactly what it does or why it uses those method calls, if it's a use-once-and-throw-away script. However, working on larger codebases that I am familar with, in a language that I know very well, I just don't see the value. Sure, it can autocomplete and save you some time. But then again, if the majority of your job as a software engineer is writing boilerplate code, you might need to take a step back and think about WTF you are doing with 8 hours of your day. I don't think LLMs in programming will go away entirely. But I think that the hype cycle will die down. I don't think the "progress" will continue linearly as it did in the past 3 years, not unless there is some other break-through in AI which introduces a step change shift. From an economic point of view, I think there will be a big crash soon. None of the AI companies are profitable. I doubt that if they would charge the real cost that as many customers as now would keep using their autocomplete on steroids service. But then again, at the beginning of this post, I said that only fools think they can predict the future. And my dear reader, I am no damn fool! No, no. This is just my gut feeling as humble observer. https://canolcer.eu/posts 2025-05-30 11:11:00 UTC https://canolcer.eu/posts Large language models (LLMs), a term that is nowadays used synonymously with the term "AI", are linked to a bunch of ethical, societal, environmental and legal issues. For starters, modern LLMs like OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude only work because they disregarded copyright laws and just scraped almost everything that humans have ever written, designed and published. Artists, coders and designers never saw a single cent in royalties for their work being used. Furthermore, LLMs are very energy-intensive. Every time you ask ChatGPT a dumb question, a little birdie dies somewhere. That's on you! LLMs also enforce existing negative biases in our society, such as racism and sexism. This is a big issue, because AI tools are increasingly used in hiring and financial areas like loan applications. Finally, automation always makes obsolete specific types of jobs. In a well-structured playing field (by the government), all of society should benefit from this increased productivity, not only the capital owners with higher profits. And, people who lose their jobs should be caught by a safety net, so they don't need to worry about paying rent and buying food. Sadly, I would not describe most countries as well-structured playing fields. All this to say: There is no ethical use of AI. Every time you use a product that has AI shoved in its every nook and cranny, or you use a chatbot like ChatGPT directly, you need to be aware of this. Then, of course, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, at all. Every time you fly somewhere or eat animal products, you are trading off your own luxury and lust for the suffering of others. PS: If your takeaway of this blog post is that it's fine to use AI, since nothing is ethical anyways: stop whatever you're doing and take a long, hard look in the mirror. https://canolcer.eu/posts 2025-05-22 11:00:00 UTC https://canolcer.eu/posts OpenAI made a big deal out of Klarna, claiming that their AI is doing the work of 700 employes. They even crafted a big beatuiful case study. Klarna is a payments company. You might know them from consumer-friendly practices like ripping people off by offering small credits during checkout. Klarna is going all-in on AI. Their CEO, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, even used an AI-generated avatar to deliver the quarterly results. So cool (if you're a 14-year-old teenager). However, now, Klarna announced that the AI can't do the job of 700 customer support reps, after all. They lost a ton of market valuation thanks to the low quality crap work done by their AI. Of course, they are not just hiring back the employees. They are piloting a new, innovative, "Uber-like", flexible model where customer support reps can work from anywhere in the US, on demand. Sounds shitty and exploitative? That's because it is. Great job, Sebastian. https://canolcer.eu/posts 2025-05-22 10:42:00 UTC https://canolcer.eu/posts Technology has become so boring. Right now, everything is only about AI. AI here, AI there. It's literally impossible to read a headline about technology without the word "AI". I can't wait until this bubble is over. However, the problem is, then the next hype cycle will follow, and it will probably be even worse. But in the end, this is capitalism. The incentive is to make profits, and it's not about the road to get there. Capital owners do not care about art or technology. They just care about how they can exploit it to make more money. It's just about building products and services that nobody needs, and then spending billions in marketing to convince people to still buy it. Somewhere, some time long ago, humanity did really take a wrong turn. Was it when we invented agriculture? Yuval Noah Harari certainly thinks so in his book Sapiens... Working in tech, this is extremely discouraging and depressing. There are many days where I just want to throw in the towel and do something for a living that has nothing to do with technology. https://canolcer.eu/posts 2025-05-21 22:20:00 UTC https://canolcer.eu/posts These days, a lot of people are walking around with AirPods or similar noise-cancelling capable devices in their ears. I too, own a pair of AirPods. And sometimes, the noise cancellation can be quite useful. But I also think it's very isolating. You stand in the middle of a big crowd, waiting for your train, but you don't hear anything around you. No chatter, no train noises, no bird songs. You are physically there, but you are not really there. Being aware of this, and observing people wearing headphones, I look at them with a sense of sadness and dread. We are all together, standing next to each other, but we are far apart. Oftentimes, I also see people interacting with other people — for example, at the checkout counter — and not removing their headphones. This makes me feel deeply sad and disappointed. Imagine you are the cashier working there, and your customers don't have the courtesy to remove their headphones for a second. Just to say hi. Just to connect for two seconds. I am not the first one to notice this, not by far. But it's become increasingly evident to me that technology tears us apart. Social media is not social. We only exist and interact through screens. We work frome home. I don't need a fancy research study to understand that this might be one of the leading causes of mental health problems. We overdid it with technology. Let's get back to being human. Let's get back to touch and smell. https://canolcer.eu/posts 2025-04-13 21:44:00 UTC https://canolcer.eu/posts This is my first post written on Blogli. What is Blogli, you ask? It's an app that I developed that is powering this very blog you are reading. Why build another blogging app? A couple of reasons. First, I felt like building it. Second, I wanted something very simple without bells and whistles, and that I can self-host easily. And that is really the goal of this project: An open-source, simple, super easily self-hostable blogging software. The code is available for free to anybody who wants to use it on Codeberg, along with self-hosting instructions. Blogli is still early software. The admin part is very basic and there are some layout kinks that need I need to iron out. But, it works. PS: "Blogli" means "little blog" in Swiss German https://canolcer.eu/posts 2024-11-18 16:00:00 UTC https://canolcer.eu/posts Let’s talk about Bluesky, the decentralized microblogging application that’s currently eating Twitter and Mastodon’s lunch. Or so some say. In this post, I will explain what Bluesky is, what the problems with it are, and what we (or the team at Bluesky) can do to solve them. What is Bluesky? Bluesky is a microblogging (fancy word for something like Twitter) service on the internet. It is owned by the company Bluesky Social, PBC. For the purpose of this post, it is important to distinguish between the service Bluesky and the company Bluesky Social, PBC, and I will therefore be specific about it. What is special about Bluesky, except that it is not yet owned by Musk, is that it is decentralized and federated. Decentralized and federated means, that by following a certain set of rules (called a protocol), other apps can also interact with Bluesky. Just like you can send an email from a Gmail account to a Yahoo account. The big advantage of this for users is that they can easily switch from one service to another without losing their followers and followees. In theory, this sounds great for users. If Bluesky fucks up, you just go to Redsky or whatever. Just like you can switch from AT&T to Verizon and still keep drunk texting your ex. There are other social media that use open protocols. A popular one is Mastodon. Mastodon has been around for longer than Bluesky (since 2016, Bluesky since 2021), but has fewer users (8 million). Mastodon also uses a decentralized and federated protocol called ActivityPub. The protocol used by Bluesky is called AT Protocol, or ATProto, for short. Why didn’t Bluesky just use the same protocol as Mastodon? Great question, but it looks like the team at Bluesky “had their reasons”, and this would be a whole other can of worms I don’t want to open in this post. Crucially, ActivityPub in its earliest form has been around for 12 years, much longer than ATProto, which started with Bluesky 3 years ago. ActivityPub is developed by the internet standards body World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which has hundreds of member organizations and develops important standards like HTML and CSS. ATProto is developed by only one company, Bluesky Social, PBC. What are the problems with Bluesky? The main problem with Bluesky is that it’s not a decentralized and federated service, and it will never be one. Wait, didn’t I just say a moment ago that it was decentralized and federated? Am I full of shit? I could be, but I’m not. And here’s why: The company behind Bluesky is a for-profit company with a big bag of venture capital money ($23 million). They are the only ones developing the protocol that Bluesky uses and is supposed to allow for a decentralized network. They pinky-swear that they will stay open, but their incentive to make a lot of profit is not aligned with their incentive to create an open network. For the latter, there is no incentive, except that the current management team thinks it’s The Right Thing to do. Therefore, they will prioritize growing their own user base. This is already evident today, where all 19 million users of the AT Protocol are on a service run by the company behind Bluesky. There is no decentralization, and the situation for sure won’t get better as the pressure for the return on investment grows on Bluesky. Let’s dive into the details to better understand the problems with Bluesky. Where are all the servers? My strongest argument that Bluesky is not decentralized is also the simplest: Just look at the facts. They boast 19 million users (and growing at a rate of 10 users per second as I’m writing this), and all of them are on the server (called Relay in ATProto speak) run by Bluesky. Contrast that to Mastodon, which consists of almost 10,000 different servers, run by independent people or organizations. Now, I need to get a bit technical here to better explain the situation. Bluesky does not have servers in the same sense that Mastodon or email have servers. Rather, Bluesky has 3 main components, that, combined, are something like a server at Mastodon. The components are: Personal Data Server (PDS), Relay and AppView. Very simplified, your posts are saved on a PDS, a Relay pulls in your posts, and the AppView reads the post from a Relay. A PDS can tell a Relay “Hey, please pull in my posts”. Finally, an AppView can decide from which Relays to pull in posts. Right now, Bluesky Social, PBC, the company behind Bluesky, runs all three components. There are a few folks running their own PDS and telling the Relay run by Bluesky Social, PBC to pull in their posts, so that they can also interact with all the other people who are using the main Bluesky PDS (that’s the one you sign up to if you create a new account in the app). Here comes the issue: Relays cannot talk to Relays. If Bluesky Social, PBC decided to show ads (or do something else you don’t like), it would be very hard for you to switch to a different Relay and still be able to interact with all the other folks who stayed at the Bluesky Social, PBC Relay. Of course, if enough people decided to all switch to a new Relay (and a new AppView) at the same time, this could work. But this would be akin to everybody switching to a completly new service. Compare this to Mastodon, where you can easily switch to a new server and most your follower won’t even notice and business as usual carries on. That’s the reason why, if you look at today’s landscape, there are no alternative Relays to the main one run by Bluesky Social, PBC. Bluesky Social, PBC could change ATProto so that it’s possible for users to switch to a new Relay and still be able to interact with everybody else on other Relays. Doing this will, of course, complicate the Bluesky service, a point that is often made when comparing Bluesky to Mastodon. That it’s much easier, because you don’t need to care about servers, and you can search and find posts and users easily. Well yes, but that’s because it’s fucking centralized. There are certain inalienable trade-offs that come with decentralization, and Bluesky Social, PBC has decided to not make them but still pose as an open protocol. They cannot have their cake, and eat it, too. Now, let’s see why Bluesky Social, PBC does not have an incentive to create a truly open protocol. ATProto is decentralized, but it’s proprietary Another issue I take with ATProto is that it’s developed only by one organization, Bluesky Social, PBC. They can solely decide on the future of ATProto. They could stop developing it openly tomorrow. They can decide on what changes to make or not make. Compare that to ActivityPub, the protocol used by Mastodon and others. ActivityPub in its earliest form has been around for 12 years, long before Mastodon started, and will be around long after Mastodon is gone. It is developed by W3C, the main body that develops standards for the internet, such as HTML, CSS and XML. The W3C has hundreds of members. As I said before, Bluesky Social, PBC, currently has no incentive other than “being nice” to keep developing ATProto for the benefit of the public, and not primarily for their own benefit. I think this clearly shows the decisions they have taken so far. Bluesky Social, PBC is a for-profit company owned by venture capital The thing with for-profit companies is, well, they need to make a profit. Not only that, but their main purpose is to maximize profit and the “value” they generate for their shareholders. The current management of Bluesky Social, PBC might be motivated ideologically and think that investing money and time into making ATProto truly open is The Right Thing to do, but they will cave in the long-term. There’s an excellent article by Cory Doctorow that goes into the why’s: But in a nutshell, if your incentive as a company is to maximize profit and grow huge to make your VCs their money back, you will start rationalizing away your ideological points one by one over time. For Bluesky, this means that the harder it is for their users to switch from the servers and apps, the more money they can make. Therefore, they will keep making switching harder. As we have seen, that’s already baked into ATProto as of today. This trend will only go in one direction. How can we solve the problems with Bluesky? So, what can we do to solve these issues? You or I can’t do much, but the team at Bluesky Social, PBC could do a few things to ensure the long-term viability of ATProto as a truly open, decentralized and federated protocol. The most important thing: They can turn over ATProto to an existing standards group such as W3C to ensure that it can be developed independently of their for-profit company and by consensus of many, not driven by a single organization. Furthermore, they can try to merge ATProto with ActivityPub somehow, so that we don’t have two competing, incompatible protocols that allegedly pursue the same goal. Finally, they can become a non-profit company. Although this one is very hard to do after taking in all the investment money. And, as we have seen in the case of OpenAI, there are no guarantees that they could switch the flip and turn back into a for-profit company for later. But it would be a strong sign and commitment to the future open social media. Still better than ExTwitter To be clear: I want Bluesky to succeed and become a truly open network. However, I don’t see it happening the way things are going now. Should you stop using Bluesky? No, it’s still better than using ExTwitter – at least they are currently not owned by a fascist man-baby, and the Trust and Safety team at Bluesky seems to be doing a good job. But be aware that you won’t be able to just pack up your followers and switch to competing service on ATProto if one day Bluesky starts going south. That’s something that you can do at Mastodon. And sure, Mastodon is far from perfect and comes with its own set of problems, but at least it is decentralized. I will keep using Bluesky and Mastodon for now. I find interesting content on both. But I will not live under the illusion that Bluesky is the same as Mastodon when it comes to decentralization and openness. https://canolcer.eu/posts 2024-05-11 12:00:00 UTC https://canolcer.eu/posts Today, I watched a short documentary on YouTube about the fall of the Roman Empire. It’s hosted by the amazing British classicist Mary Beard and is very accessible, even if you don’t know much about that part of history. Mary’s passion for history is contagious. What stroke me the most was that even the Roman Empire, which was gigantic and withstood outside attackers, civil wars and epidemics for more than 500 years, some day fell. Of course, this is true for all empires, countries and civilizations in the history of humankind - except for those which exist currently. But like the Ancient Egypt, Phoenicia, the ancient Greeks, the Mongol Empire and the Roman Empire, today’s empires will fall one day, too. This is, of course, not some novel insight. But what I find interesting is to put into today’s context. Mary Beard draws this conclusion towards the end of the episode: “Today in the West, we still wonder where our boundaries lie. And what limits should be placed on inclusion. We inherited the ambivalence, too. Questioning, whether the ends ever justify the means. The tears alongside the victory parades.” What was relevant 2000 years ago in the Roman Empire, is also relevant today. In Europe, the USA and many other places, we’re seeing populist and nationalist tendencies increase. Last weekend, Europeans voted for the European Parliament and the message was clear: Right-wing and populist parties gained ground. People don’t want immigrants, who speak differently, cloth differently, worship differently and look differently in their country. Not realizing that one day, not too many years ago, their ancestors were the same exact migrants. No geographic region belongs to any ethnic group, nation or empire. They just live in it for a short period of time. It saddens me to see that the same human greed and short-sightedness, that was already present in ancient Rome and beyond, still takes hold of us today. We learned how to put people on the moon and cure deadly diseases with the pop of a pill, but we didn’t learn how to live in harmony with other humans, animals and our environment. https://canolcer.eu/posts 2023-05-27 14:00:00 UTC https://canolcer.eu/posts Everybody is annoyed by the cookie pop-ups. But the regulation behind it, GDPR, and similar tech regulations by the European Union are actually a good thing. The EU is the only major bloc that seems to prioritize consumer interests over corporate interests (unlike the USA) or government interests (China). That’s not to say that there isn’t corporate lobbying in the EU, or that the EU gets everything right. But it definitely goes in the right direction. This counter-weight role of the EU to reign in late-stage capitalism of tech conglomerates is essential for the future of tech. If it were not for the EU, companies like Meta would shit even more on consumer interests such as privacy. Just the other week, Meta was fined €1.2 billion for illegally transferring EU customer data to the US. More recently, OpenAI shit their pants and threatened to pull out of the EU if they regulate AI too strongly. This, of course, also exposes the blatant hypocrisy of OpenAI, a company owned by a big part by Microsoft; just days earlier, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman went before the US Congress to lobby in favor of regulation. It almost looks like they like regulation that would cement their market position in the US, but dislike regulation that they cannot influence and that wouldn’t advantage incumbents such as OpenAI. For all the kicks and cries of US tech companies, the EU is too big of a market to ignore. No tech company will just pull out of the EU. They might try to come across as the big bad wolves, but in the end, they will shed their wolves' clothing, and we’ll see them for what they are, sheep. So, when you get annoyed at the next cookie banner, remember that this is just one small, albeit highly visible, part of a web of regulations that is mostly doing good. https://canolcer.eu/posts 2023-02-05 18:00:00 UTC https://canolcer.eu/posts Sometimes you come across a term that perfectly sums up several related ideas you’ve been thinking about. This happened to me the other day when I saw @Unpop_Science mention “Carbon Tunnel Vision” on Twitter. Carbon Tunnel Vision refers to the fact that, when discussing the benefits of measures that can help mitigate the worsening environmental crisis, many people focus narrowly on carbon (or other greenhouse gas) emissions. Of course, greenhouse gas emissions are an important factor. But they’re only one of many. When it comes to the environment, many people miss the forest for the trees. In reality, the environmental crisis can be broken down into a series of interrelated crises that feed off each other. Of course, rising average temperatures are a well-known part of it. Another is the biodiversity crisis. For example, the average size of wildlife populations is thought to have declined by 70% since 1970. This decline is largely driven by us, humans, taking away the land and ecosystems that wildlife needs to survive and thrive. Mostly because we eat too much meat and other animal products, which is a grossly inefficient way of producing food. A third crisis to highlight is pollution. By being careless with resources, Homo sapiens causes pollution. This can be in the form of plastic discarded into rivers and oceans, the use of fertilizers in agriculture, or the many small particles released when we drive our cars (in addition to CO2, of course). It’s paramount to understand that these and many other crises enforce each other in a vicious cycle. For example, when we convert a biodiverse piece of land into an agricultural field, we not only decimate hundreds of wildlife species with one stroke, but also decrease that land’s ability to bind and store carbon from the atmosphere. This, in turn, leads to more carbon in the atmosphere and contributes to global warming. Rising average temperatures then negatively influences ecosystems, contributing to the extinction of whole species. Rinse and repeat. We live in an interconnected world with many different animal and plant species. Let’s continue to strive to reduce our carbon emissions, but also remember that transitioning to a sustainable world is much, much more than that. https://canolcer.eu/posts 2021-12-05 08:00:00 UTC https://canolcer.eu/posts My friend Sag and I have been working on Mapzy since April 2021, and finally made enough progress to publicly launch it. Mapzy is a store locator and allows you to easily add locations along with a description and opening times to a map, and then embed that map in your own website. We came up with the idea when I was still making and selling plant-based cheese. We had a couple of restaurants and grocery stores that sold our cheese, and I was looking for an affordable and simple store locator to display the locations on our website. It turned out that most store locators are either expensive and overloaded with features or look outdated. That’s how Mapzy was born. We focus on a simple set of features (more to come!) and offer a solid experience at a fair price. Furthermore, we try to be as privacy-friendly as possible. We don’t track any PII, but we still have to use Mapbox which unfortunately tracks some PII (not too bad, much better than Google Maps). Here’s a video showing the admin dashboard and how you add a location: A demo of Mapzy Mapzy is open-source and can be self-hosted for free. Our hosted pricing starts at $9/month, which includes adding up to 20 locations to your map. Like most of my projects, Mapzy is a Ruby on Rails application. We also have some Stimulus and Turbo in there. Futhermore, we use the ever-aweseome Tailwind library. Our focus now will be on developing more features and getting the word about Mapzy out. https://canolcer.eu/posts 2021-11-25 15:00:00 UTC https://canolcer.eu/posts In 2018, I experienced slight FOMO (“fear of missing out”, not a crypto) when some of my friends made considerable amounts of money almost overnight with Bitcoin and Ethereum. It didn’t bother me much that I had forgone free money. No, it was more about me not recognizing this seemingly awesome development in tech. My whole life, I have been tech-savvy and always on the forefront of cool new technology. I was the first one at my elementary school to have a Tamagotchi. I was always the one with the newest gaming consoles. Not only that, but I owned an electric scooter (like the Bird and Lime ones, but bulkier and with a 2 km range) back in 2005. Pretty fucking cool, I know. So, in 2018, I asked myself how I could have missed the rise of blockchain and cryptocurrencies? The answer started dawning on me about 2 years ago: I didn’t miss it. I just didn’t think it was interesting back then. And I still think it’s not interesting today. Don’t get me wrong, I do think that the concepts behind the blockchain are interesting. But only as an intellectual exercise, with no practical use in the real world. As for cryptos, they are not at all interesting, not even as an intellectual exercise. As my new favorite crypto hater blogger Stephen Diehl puts it, they are a pure greater-fool seeking asset that’s used for gambling, crime and all kinds of other shenanigans that don’t create any value (on the contrary, they destroy value). I still can’t believe how so many (otherwise) smart people that I talk to try to justify that the blockchain or cryptos will make the world a better place. Clearly, they just want to convince themselves that it’s in fact ok to buy crypto, while they exactly know the real reason behind it is to make a quick buck. This cognitive dissonance leads to all kinds of wild explanations why cryptos are the best thing since sliced bread. One explanation that comes up often is that cryptos will help stabilize poor developing nations. One example here is that the people of a nation with a strongly inflating currency can put their money into a stable crypto “currency”. Let’s see why this is bull crap. First, cryptos are one of the most volatile assets in the history of finance. Trading Venezuelan bolívar for crypto is like jumping from a sinking ship that still has some lifeboats left to a canoe with a big hole in its floor. Second, cryptos are not cash. Even if there were stable cryptos (please, don’t get me started with stablecoins), to buy and sell crypto, you either need access to a crypto exchange or own a crypto wallet. The set of people who have access to an ordinary bank account (e.g., to buy USD) and the set of people who have access to crypto exchanges or wallets is overlapping pretty strongly. Therefore, no person in their right mind would prefer crypto to gold, USD or EUR if they are looking for a safe place to put their money. In summary, cryptos don’t do jack shit to help a poor farmer in El Salvador. Cryptos can’t fix societal, political or economocial problems. In fact, most technology can’t. https://canolcer.eu/posts 2021-10-28 10:00:00 UTC https://canolcer.eu/posts Yesterday, I went live with Fugu. Fugu is a product analytics software that focuses on simplicity and privacy, and is open-source and self-hostable. How it works The idea is that you send your events to the Fugu API, and can then analyze your data using a set of tools in the Fugu web app. When capturing an event, you can also send along optional properties that consist of keys and values. For example, you can track a “platform” property that has different values, such as “web”, “android” or “ios”. Properties are completely user-defined. Fugu then allows you to break down your data by different property values to get a better understanding of how your users use your app. This is an early version of Fugu, and many more features and improvements are planned. For example, I will add conversion funnels so that you can see where your users drop off in your flows. I also plan to add a property value filter, that allows you to look at your data in more detail. Pricing I’ve decided to go with one pricing tier at $9/month that includes up to 1 million events per month. Fugu is aimed at smaller companies or indie hackers that don’t need complex analytics solutions but prefer something affordable and simple. Going with one price reduces some complexity and also makes every customer equally important for me. Like this, I can avoid the cluster risk of having a few large customers that make up 80% of my revenue. Privacy Fugu’s focus on privacy means that I need to implement common analytics features differently, or not at all. Consider the commonly used tool of retention analysis. A retention analysis helps you to see for how long a new user was retained after they first started using your product. The problem with implementing this tool is that you need to track unique users and attribute events to them over long periods of time. This is not a good thing to do privacy-wise, because it could enable someone who has access to this data to single out specific individuals. I’m not sure yet how and if I will be able to add retention analysis to Fugu. There might be a way to do it by grouping together enough users so tracing a set of actions back to one specific user becomes impossible. Tech stack Fugu is a web app built in Ruby on Rails with a Postgres database. For the static website, I use Hugo. The Rails app is hosted with Digital Ocean, and the static site with Netlify. To display the charts I use the excellent chart.js library. For payments I use Stripe (Checkout and Customer Portal). For analytics I use Fugu (whaaat?!) for the Rails app and Plausible for the static site. Going live with a new project is always exciting but only the first step of a long journey. Make sure to check out fugu.lol to learn more about Fugu and, if you are looking for a no bullshit and privacy-friendly analytics tool, create an account and see if it fits your needs. https://canolcer.eu/posts 2021-08-04 16:15:00 UTC https://canolcer.eu/posts In the past months, I got increasingly excited about simple, open source, self-hostable and privacy-friendly software. So, I’ve decided to start two side projects to solve some of my own problems. Both projects are still under development and not launched yet. But because they’re open source, you can already check them out on GitHub. The first one is a store finder and is called Mapzy (on GitHub). I’m working on it with my friend Sag, and we’re getting some help in the graphics department from my partner Dorena. We started Mapzy because I couldn’t find a simple and affordable store finder for our plant-based cheese company, Yeti. The second project is a product analytics software and is called Fugu (on GitHub). Fugu helps you track your web or mobile app users with events in a privacy-friendly and GDPR-compliant manner. I started it because I couldn’t find a privacy-friendly and simple event-based tracking software. I was using PostHog initially, but they quickly started adding too many features, making everything too complex. Furthermore, I was unhappy that they didn’t support privacy-friendly tracking out of the box. For both software, we’ll offer a managed version where you pay a monthly subscription fee to use. Our servers are based in Germany. This is the best solution for most people, and not really more expensive than managing your own server. However, if you have stricter privacy needs, or want to run a custom version of the software, you can always host it yourself. The self-hosted versions will always be free with no restrictions. I’ll be posting regular updates about these projects. The best way is to follow along on my Twitter. If you want to start using either of these projects already today, just email me. PS: The fundamental idea of “simple, open source, self-hostable and privacy-friendly” was strongly inspired by Marko Saric, Uku Täht and their product Plausible Analytics. Thanks guys! https://canolcer.eu/posts 2021-01-19 19:00:00 UTC https://canolcer.eu/posts There should be anti-trust laws that make it illegal for social media software to be closed and centralized. What does this mean and why is it important? Let’s start with the why. Why is this important? Social media apps such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Twitter all have something in common: They benefit from so-called network effects. Simply said, this means that the value of the service increases for each user as additional users join the service. For example, you wouldn’t use Instagram if all you had was an empty feed or WhatsApp if none of your friends were on it. A network effect is both hard to achieve and hard to destroy. That’s why it’s almost impossible for a new company with little funds to compete with existing services. And that’s why almost no users leave to competing products (even if there were any). Heck, it’s even hard to start a social media company if you have a shit ton of cash (just ask the folks from Google Plus). Companies realized that there’s no way to create a social network if you charge users, even if that amount would be something small like a few dollars. You just can’t get enough people on there to make the network as a whole valuable enough for all users. They also realized that the data they collect from people using their social network is extremely valuable to other companies, namely advertisers. That’s why almost all social networks make money by showing you ads based on your data. In the last few years, social media became insanely popular and the primary source of information for a lot of people. This development came with a bunch of problems. One such problem is misinformation. Because of inherent mechanisms that make sharing easy, information spreads super fast on social media. And so does misinformation. And because anyone can post anything, there’s a truck load of misinformation being shared and consumed. You might have heard the term Fake News. The problem is though, that sometimes real facts are also being regarded as fake and if enough users share it, people think it’s true. Of course, evil companies figured out how to automate the spread of misinformation with bots and ads and succesfully shaped public opinion to their advantage. By now, it’s clear that Russian agents meddled with the 2016 US elections through this medium. Another problem is censorship. Twitter and Facebook have always been banning accounts that post content which is against their terms of service. Stuff like child porn and obvious hate speech. Recently, they also banned the President of the United States, Donald Trump, for inciting violence in connection with the events at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. On the one hand, Twitter and Facebook are private companies and can decide who they ban from their platform. On the other hand, they have become the main publishing platform for a lot of public figures, including Trump. Therefore, many opponents of censorship on social media say that Twitter and friends should be regulated as public forums and the government should decide who gets to have a Twitter account, not Twitter itself. A third problem is power. As we have seen, it’s hard for new companies to compete with existing social media companies, and it’s hard for users to leave the platform for a lack of alternatives and existing network effects. This means that Facebook, Twitter and Google (not with Search, but e.g. with YouTube) have a lot of power. That’s why they can pull a lot of shit (remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal?), but get away with a slap on the wrist because users just can’t leave. So, what’s all this to do with closed and central and what does that even mean? What does it mean? Let’s get more technical. When saying “closed and central social media”, I actually refer to their underlying protocols. A protocol simply is a specification of how two or more parties communicate with each other. Like, what kind of data can be sent, how it is sent, what kind of responses can be expected and so on. Think of it like a set of rules. Open protocols are protocols which are defined openly for everyone to see what the rules are. Closed protocols are proprietary and not shared publicly. Centralized protocols only allow one central authority (e.g. server), whereas decentralized protocols allow for servers and services to talk to each other. The internet is built on open, decentralized protocols. For example, the Internet Protocol (IP) defines how data packages are sent around and is literally the basis for our open and amazing internet. Another one that you probably use every day is the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) - that’s how email works. There are also offline examples of open and decentralized protocols, such as the physical mail system. I can send a letter from Berlin to San Fransisco and it works, although it’s not the same company providing the service in Germany and the US. I can also call or text my friend, even though I’m with Verizon and she’s with AT&T. Closed and central protocols don’t allow this open interoperability. If I want to read and send Tweets, I have to use the central service controlled completely centrally by Twitter. If I want to watch a video on YouTube, I have to use YouTube. If I want to send a message to my group of friends, I have to use WhatsApp since that’s the only chat app they (and two billion other people) use. Compare this to email. If I have an email account with Fastmail and you have an account with Gmail, we can still communicate with each other. Imagine if Google had “invented” email and made it a centralized system, we would all need to be on Gmail to talk to each other. Pretty crappy, right? But that’s exactly the case with all social media today. If WhatsApp would use an open and decentralized protocol, let’s call it Chat Protocol (CP) other companies could also offer WhatsApp services and host their own server. Let’s say that other apps like Telegram and Signal would also use the same protocol, CP. I could easily use Signal to message my friends on WhatsApp. It would give every person the freedom to choose a service provider they like (for whatever reason). It would allow for fair competition, and remove power from one central entity. If your account gets banned from one provider, you can create a new account with a different provider and keep talking to your friends. Of course, misinformation can still spread if uncontrolled. But with a decentralized system, you would have many service providers dealing with the problem and probably do a better job than one player that needs to deal with all of the world’s misinformation. Of course, the flip side of too little censorship means that there will be more accounts with pedophiles and racists. But today, hosting providers are already quite good with taking this type of content offline (e.g. websites), so there’s no reason to think that they couldn’t do it with a decentralized social media app, too. Anti-trust laws should include decentralized and open protocols You see, there are many advantages to using open and decentralized protocols. It’s also obvious why big social media companies do not want to use them and instead create these walled gardens to maximize their profit and stronghold. I wager that, left alone, these companies will never do the right thing and open up and decentralize their networks. (One possible expection: Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter has announced that they eventually want to open up, but it remains to be seen what that exactly will turn into.) So, what’s the solution? One solution could be market-based: Just make software based on open protocols that is better and users will jump ship and start using those. In fact, these alternatives already exist. For example, there’s Mastodon, a decentralized Twitter alternative, or Matrix, a decentralized instant messaging app. But compared to Twitter and WhatsApp, noone uses these alternatives. Why? Well, of course they need to get better and improve their usability and what not, but the main reason is what I mentioned before: It’s damn hard to compete with an existing social media service because of network effects. And the more users they get, the stronger the network effects become. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t encourage people to join Mastodon and other services and support them to make their services better. I’m just saying it won’t cut it. Not by a long shot. Like with all monopolies, this is a case where the free market doesn’t automatically lead to the best outcome. My suggestion is the following: Make it illegal for social media companies to have closed and decentralized networks after a certain size. The size is up to debate, but I think it should be measured by active users. For example, all companies that have more than 50 million monthly active users need to open up and decentralize their protocol or use an existing one. There are already a bunch of anti-trust laws that regulate monopolies and concentration of market power. Why not revise and extend them to take into consideration today’s business and technology landscape?