Janik von Rotz

2023 Book List

In 2023 I read 17 books. Most of them were great, it was difficult to choose my favorites. As most of them were science fiction books, I chose a non-fiction and a fiction book. My favorite fiction book was The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem and the non-fiction book is Corruptible by Brian Klaas.

And here is the full 2022 book list:

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Noise Cancelling

Do you remember clickbaiting? In the two millennia, this was a vicious way to attract attention. The practice was simple: assign an exciting teaser to a boring article. That will get people excited and increase engagement. What was criticized by quality journalism then is the standard today.

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Convert Obsidian canvas to SVG

I am using Obsidian for note taking and writing documentation. With Canvas-Feature you can create simple visualizations and link notes from the vault. Here is an example:

As simple as it seems, there was not builtin-way to export the visualization and f.g. publish it on a website. Luckily, the canvas file is a simple JSON document and therefore can be processed pretty easy. I build a render Method in JavaScript that takes the canvas content and returns it as a SVG image.

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Hide native tabs with Tree Style tabs for Firefox

As the workspace for developers has moved almost entirely into the browser, browser extensions have become an integral part for customizing the workflow. Recently, I started to the use the Tree Style addons: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/

When using this extension, the native tab bar becomes obsolete. The following part of the post is an instruction on how to hide the native tab bar (which is a bit difficult).

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Future Words

I feel very uncertain about the near future. Climate change, migration, pandemics, rise of populism, oligopolistic capitalism i, post-fact, artificial intelligence, the list goes on. It is a lot to think about and to make sense of. However, I try to embrace what comes and avoid doom and gloom. Making up new words is one way into the future.

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2022 Book List

In 2022 I read 18 books. Some of them were good and some bad. Out of these books only two stuck with me: There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm and Undinge by Byung-Chul Han.

There Is No Antimemetics Division deals with the idea of antimemes, which is the opposite of a meme or to put it plainly is non-information. qntm is a prolific writer for the scp wiki. Scp is a database of fictional anomalous objects, entities, and phenomena. The idea of antimemes is very strange and difficult to grasp, however, qntm built a very engaing story with this subject.

Undinge is an exploration of paradigm shifts of things becoming “smart” things. Han is a contemporary philosopher and in this book he skilfully describes the problem of objects that suddenly produce data and dictate to us as humans.

And here is the full 2022 book list:

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E-ID

Die E-ID ist ein staatlich anerkannter Identifikationsnachweis. Alle Informationen zur E-ID werden unter http://eid.ch publiziert. Ich verfolge das Projekt nur am Rande, bin am Thema aber sehr interessiert. Kryptographie, Politik und Wirtschaft treffen hier aufeinander.

Bei AdNovum war ich als Identity und Access Management (IAM) Integrator angestellt. Dabei habe ich viel über Zertifikate, Infrastruktur, Kryptographie und Systemtechnik im Allgemeinen gelernt. Mit diesem Wissen habe versucht eine E-ID zu skizzieren. Die folgende Grafik zeigt wie eine E-ID konzeptionell funktionieren könnte:

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Abrupt Decay

I am an (addicted) Magic: The Gathering player. I love the game, its complexity, the story and of course its art. The card in the header image is Abrupt Decay. Inspired by its caption and artwork I wrote a short poem about decay and regress:

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Why hyperscalers are a menace

Hyperscalers are cloud service provider such as Google, Alibaba, Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. They provide infrastructure, computing power and a variety of services. Companies, states and organisations can use their services and are billed by usage.

The name hyperscaler implies that the more organisations are using their services the cheaper they become. This effect causes organisations to migrate their infrastructure and services to their hyperscaler of choice.

At first thought it seems like good practice, however, there a few issues that make these hyperscalers a menace.

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The bird is dead

The bird is dead and so is social media.

As of 27th of October 2022 Elon Musk owns Twitter. With the $44 billion acquisition Twitter went private. As I am not a big fan of Musk (he is a megalomaniac) I think the time has come to quit Twitter. For me quitting Twitter is one more step to quit social media entirely.

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