Martin Hohenberg

Willkommen

Wishlist

Gifts I’d be happy to receive – sorted by how useful they are.

A Cybernetic Middle Ages – An AI Vision from the Future

“In the age of infinite answers, the true rebel learns to question the question.”

Prelude

In the old world, power belonged to those who wrote the words. In our time, it belongs to those who summon them.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have not merely altered how we search for knowledge - they have inverted the structure of knowing itself. We no longer learn to express thought; we learn to invoke outputs. We do not read - we prompt. And most people don’t even do that.

Truck-kun: The Grim Reaper of the Isekai Age

Behind the meme of Truck-kun lies a modern archetype—a mechanical angel of death, a satirical mirror of our world’s relationship with mortality.

Falsehoods programmers believe about ...

A short list of Falsehoods programmers believe, sorted alphabetically, to be extended over time

From Agora to Banhammer: Digital Spaces Between Freedom and Control

In the early days of the Internet, Usenet was what the Greeks once called the agora: a public space where everyone could speak, and it was entirely up to the listener whether to engage—or not.

Usenet: The Digital Agora

Usenet was a decentralized discussion system. There were no central authorities, no gatekeepers, no global moderators. If you had something to say, you said it—and if someone didn’t want to hear it, they used the killfile. The killfile was simple but powerful: it let each user block specific posters, topics, or keywords. This was not censorship. It was self-curation, not imposed silence.

Clutter Is The Thief Of Productivity

When your space feels heavy, your work will too. Here’s how I helped a relative transform a draining, dysfunctional room into a focused, energizing office.

Have I Been Pwned as a Hidden E-Mail Age Indicator

Every once in a while, Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) flashes across my feed again. And each time, just out of curiosity, I plug in my old email address—my digital mainstay since 2004.

As of now, HIBP tells me that address has appeared in over 30 data breaches.

That might sound alarming. But it’s not because I’m recklessly signing up for shady services or dabbling in niche communities. It’s just… old. Two decades of online life add up.

Why Radio Is Dying (And What a Top 1000 Week Gets Right)

Modern radio is killing itself with repetition and risk aversion—yet one week each year, it proves it could be so much more. A reflection on song diversity, live moderation, and the power of real curation.

Data Retention as a Sexual Fetish: The Control Fantasy That Won’t Die

The repeated push for data retention laws in the EU reveals less about public safety and more about compulsive control. We’ve seen this story before—at Hainan, on 9/11, and now in our inboxes.

AI Detection In Academia Is Misguided

In the age of artificial intelligence, the academic world is scrambling. Not to understand, not to adapt — but to control. AI detectors are now being used to determine whether a student’s work is “authentic.” The irony is suffocating: we are turning to machines to decide whether a human used a machine.

At first glance, this may seem reasonable. Academic integrity is important, after all. But once you start punishing students for what a tool guesses might be AI-generated content—despite major AI detection providers explicitly warning against such use—you create a feedback loop that undermines the very foundation of education.

Weekly Links, CW 24

Gently down the stream is an introduction into Apache Kafka, in the form of an illustrated children’s book. It follows similar projects like the one for Kubernetes, proving that basic understanding of a piece of software is not dependant on years and years of experience and manual-reading.

Simon Martin of Raspberry fame describes how he uses a Raspberry Pi to resurrect the C64-era SID soundchip for music creation.

Mad Ned shares his story about how internal competition and badly-set incentives by management can destroy group success and employee happiness.

Weekly Links, CW 21

Attack Magazine has a great writeup about how japanese synthezisers shaped post-WW2 pop music. It’s a story about societal values, economic variables and the willingness to improve and disrupt.

In Omsk, Siberia, the annual speed grave-digging Competition was held. The race to 6ft under is to promote the trade and to attract young people to the job.

In Tokyo, Japan, the future is dying with the Nakagin Capsule Tower.

Weekly Links, CW 20

Hillel Wayne has a stellar piece about esoteric programming languages that gets a bit more into the historical side and is more obscure than what Wikipedia gives you. Everyone knows Brainfuck and Shakespeare, but ever heard of Hexagony?

Scott Alexander uses statistics and data science to show that during the COVID pandemic, suicide rates actually went down and asks the important question: why?

Henry N. Gifford bemoans the disappearance of the old Irish tradition of keening, the wailing for the dead, which may have been the inspiration for the banshee.

But does it bring value?

Some time ago, the company I worked for had hired quite a few very junior consultants to outsource some of the less interesting work to. Over the time, I developed a friendly relationship with a few of them. There was one who kept talking about whether or not an action “brought value” to a situation.

It took me some time to make the connection, but this very MBA-style line of thinking can be applied virtually anywhere.

Satellite - social media that incentivizes unifying behaviour

We’ve seen our share of social media, and it’s downfalls, from the days of Orkut and MySpace to Facebook, to Reddit and Twitter.

All of these platforms of old eventually broke down into different user camps, lack of effective monetarisation, or they became tools for political manipulation. The latter works because all of them incentivize engagement, meaning that the more reactions a user causes, the better - and that leads to echo chambers and increasingly radicalized thoughts.

rC3 - remote Chaos Communication Congress

What can you reasonably expect from an event that is organized by volunteers, distributed and unable to meet in person in the Corona-year 2020? A lot more than you would expect. The rC3 was the result of a gargantuan effort and - given it was developed over six weeks, it shows the community is strong.

The technology

And yes, not everything worked perfectly, and a lot of new things were tried that did not work out very well, we were very much seeing a prototype in production sometimes:

Don't let your Agile Coaches run wild

Robert C. Martin - himself one of the godfathers of the Agile methodology - has coined the term of “code smells”: Code that has certain characteristics that tell you you’re about to get into deep trouble. I propose the following agile smells:

  1. Your Agile Coaches start to micromanage their Jira project or the instance at whole. They get overly involved in Custom Fields, and Description Templates, and which fields need to be mandatory, in the naming of individual fields, they start elaborate discussions about the status category their statuses are in. This is a sign that they set the wrong focus and/or have free capacity - and likely that their teams are underserved.

    The 1MB Club

    The internet of yesteryear has changed - and not for the better. Thankfully, more and more people are realizing this, and deciding to promote using client-side and server-side resources more efficiently again. One of these initiatives is the 1MB club - an exclusive list of websites that use less than 1 megabyte of data of total resources on their page load.

    Achieving this is surprisingly simple: Don’t use images for everything. When you use images, use them wisely, in modern formats. Don’t use Javascript for everything, and keep away from multimegabyte frameworks. Keep those third-party cookies and ad trackers off your page. Everyone can do that, and we all would profit from a more responsive, faster network.

    The RSS revival

    Google Reader was probably the most mourned Google product of all times. When it was discontinued back in the day, for many people RSS as a standard for news aggregiation died with it. For a while, there was no web-based killer app replacement, and slowly, the many orange, wifiesque RSS symbols that once were ubiquious on websites large and small disappeared, often together with the feeds they tried to advertise.

    Why I still prefer physical books

    Anyone who has visited me can attest to this: I own a lot of books - one may say too many. People then tend to push me towards ebooks, some are even offended when they sent me a file, and find a printed copy on my desk the day after.

    I like to work with books

    Some people consider books to be holy and untouchable, writing or marking in them to be sacrilegous. Well, I don’t (with books I own myself, that is). Nothing quite makes a book more useful to me than the close presence of a text marker, or three.

    NextTrash - CLI tool to show you when the trash comes next

    I made a little thing: Nexttrash: https://github.com/MHohenberg/NextTrash

    I kept forgetting to push the trashcan out to the street for collection all the time. Even when I keep remembering, with several different trash collection types, I did not optimize purging and cleanup based on when it is most efficient to get rid of stuff - I might have remembered to take out paper trash, but I didn’t know about it three days in advance to truly fill down that bin.

    So I got my ACP-100 done

    I have been working as a Jira Administrator for quite some time now. So it was time to get certified.

    I have the big luck that my office is virtually next to a Krypterion Testing center, so that came in handy. With taxes, the test came out at around 300 USD, I also bought the Atlassian Prep course and Certkiller’s test battery… I gave myself three weeks to train, but in reality did very little prep because of involvement in business projects.

    Resurrecting the WizKid

    I was that kid in the late 1980s who dreamed in BASIC (those were nightmares, good ones were in Assembly) and who could list you ten reasons why the Commodore family of homecomputers were superior to IBM compatibles out of his head.

    Once I got my hand on a computer, I almost immediately started to learn how to program.

    Sure, there were games, but to me, computers were always about getting that grey machine do something new, teaching it to perform new tricks.

    dotfiles belong in a repository

    If you are a Unix afficiado like me dotfiles are the little configuration helpers that make the world run just right for you. Often you’ve tweaked them just right for months and months … and getting the system to work such well-oiled again after a crash will be troublesome.

    If you work on different computers, keeping them all the same is cumbersome, and that means you won’t do it consistently, causing a productivity nosedive whenever you switch machines.

    meta information for technical articles

    How often have you searched for a fix for a technical problem, found a link, only to find out - often after some unsuccessful cursing - that the text was about version Hammurabi II and the world (and your software) has moved on?

    Wouldn’t it be a good thing if you, as a human, or search engines, had a way to determine the usefulness of such a technical article before reading it?

    A fresh start

    I have been maintaining websites on and off for several years, starting at the web’s infancy in the mid-1990s. In recent years, these websites disappeared because of a variety of reasons, sometimes because I lost interest, sometimes because hosting providers disappeared, often because I lost data. For a while, I worked as an SEO consultant. Eventually, I lost interest in webmastering and writing - stuff became too complicated to “look good” - a metric that at some point in time was important to me. Around the same time, we saw the creation of the framework, often masqueraded as “content management systems”, which - badly designed - became the major way to hand control of your server to some east-european hacker collective. I now see how misguided this overreliance on graphics, on clicks and on the flashy side of the net is.