I’ve worked in academia now for a decade. I tend to test out different tools and ways of doing things. Here’s how I’m working in 2020. This is written for two audiences: for my future self and other academics who are interested in knowing how other people have solved similar problems. Hardware I have a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Mid 2014) I work on. For a six year old laptop it works great. It even has some USB connectors and a HDMI port, because it’s from before Apple decided that people don’t actually want to connect their computers to anything. This is the first MacOS device I’ve used, but since I’ve used Linux for years the Unix similarities helped me get started. Importantly, it has a working terminal emulator, with all the things you would expect from one. ...

It’s been a while since there have been blank spots on maps. If one would like to start over, away from everything, there are few options left. It doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been tried. These days, the typical person trying is an entrepreneur trying to get away from what they see as an oppressive government. The solutions usually fall into two categories: buying land or moving to sea. Sea is popular, because on international waters you’re outside national borders, and therefore outside the area national laws – and taxes – apply to. Not surprisingly, this is mainly a libertarian dream. ...

When the Google Memo came out, I wrote about issues in how computing is gendered. I wanted to explore that topic further, so I wrote this interactive, longer version of that text. You can click on the link below to explore how your preconceptions compare to history. https://jonne.arjoranta.fi/gendered-computing/

It might not be immediately apparent that to make paperclips, you need to take over the stock market. But every step in Universal Paperclips follows logically from the next. Soon you will be developing more effective trading algorithms so you can make a bigger profit. As long as you are working within capitalism, having more money means having more resources for things, including making paperclips. Of course, that is true only as long as you’re working within capitalism. ...

At the end of last year, a group of researchers thought that they had a great idea for solving a common problem in social media research. I usually try to avoid calling out specific researchers when I discuss problems in research. I’m making an exception here, because it’s hard to discuss this topic without going into the details. This is not an invitation to harass these individuals. They made a mistake, and have hopefully learnt from it. Mistaken research gets published all the time. That’s why we make more of it. ...

Posthuman studios has always been confident in how they sell their books: they licensed Eclipse Phase with Creative Commons, meaning that the files are free to legally share with others. You get everything free, and they hope that it turns into you buying their books. It’s a tactic used by some other book publishers that are convinced that the problem today is not to get buying customers, it’s to find customers in the first place. In role-playing games the challenge is still to stand out from the shadow of Dungeons & Dragons. Even if your game is not about killing orcs and stealing their stuff, you still have to convince people that whatever you’re offering is preferable to that. Giving away your books and then hoping that the people playing the game also want to buy them is a possible approach, one that seems to be working for Eclipse Phase, which is now in its second edition. ...