Notes for December 17th 2023

Song of the week:

• I have a link in my tabs this week relating to the approved refurb of Stephen's Green shopping centre. People are up-in-arms about this because the 'charm' of the current building kind-of represents old Dublin being replaced for standard-fare architecture. And while I can see that, some of 'old' Dublin is absolute garbage. Stephen's Green has charm, sure. But it's not even that old and it feels dilapidated, if not outright wrecked in places.
  • The charm that is upsetting to me is that the new building is mostly offices. Which is fine and not specifically unusual here. But the upper floors of Stephen's Green have weirdo shops and a gallery that will unlikely be able to afford tier 2 space in the new centre. That's the bit that city will miss out on. We need weird places like Asha in city centre locations.
• I also note in my tabs this week that there's a bunch of consternation around the Fediverse getting a new connected mate; in Meta's Threads network. There's a bunch of nuance to this federation but the consternation is really interesting. I understand people are upset about the way Meta have handled such things before; effectively using their power and network effect to kill the other federated servers, or just sucking down data. But this is the nature of open software and an open network. If you produce FOSS, you can't really control how it's used. A little open web forms system could be adopted by a political enemy, and there's nothing you can do about it.
• This past week has been hectic (hence really late blogging!). I feel like the year simply will. not. end. But we're nearly there. My wife & I will take a day or two next week to do some shopping and, frankly, just hang out. Then the week between Christmas & NY is off in $job, so we'll catch a breather then.