Dead Letter Office

‘I don’t know what the question is any more. Between Lucy’s generation and mine a curtain seems to have fallen.’ (Coetzee 2000, 210). In het boek Disgrace van J.M. Coetzee wordt het leven van de academicus David Lurie en zijn dochter Lucy overhoop gegooid door een aanval op de boerderij van Lucy, op het platteland van Zuid-Afrika, waar David na zijn ontslag vanwege een ongepaste relatie met een studente tijdelijk verblijft.

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Introduction In the center of the first book of Michel de Montaigne’s (1533-1592) Essais we find his famous essay on friendship. We should not ascribe the central location of this essay to coincidence, in particular not when we take the introduction of this famous essay on friendship into consideration. In that introduction Montaigne compares his Essais with the work of a painter he had employed. This painter meticulously placed his paintings on the wall.

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My personal goal for this summer break was reading more, as I really enjoy it but do not schedule enough time for it during the many hectic days throughout year. I always enjoy reading a book, but somehow the threshold for doing some project behind my pc is lower than simply sitting down in a chair with a good book. A complication for reaching my goal was however that I would go backpacking for three weeks throughout Europe.

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Although LaTeX is amazing in many aspects, I often encounter relatively small issues that somehow take way too long to fix. Today I encountered a very specific use case that gave me a headache, and I want to write up my solution so I never have to think about it again. The scenario I’m currently working on my bachelor thesis for Artificial Intelligence, which is due in a week, so I have no time to waste.

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I joined the IndieWeb! What does that mean? For the long version, I recommend reading An Introduction to the IndieWeb. Here is a super short version: 1) This web domain now is my main online identity, and I can use my domain as a way of authentication with a) “rel=me” links b) and my domain name via IndieAuth Examples: 1a: I was invited to the Mastodon instance of @arjen and verified my identity as “Edwin Wenink” by linking from Mastodon to my domain, and then from my …

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BigData Republic organized a small hackathon for the Big Data course I currently follow at university. The challenge was to build a job recommendation system using real data from one of their clients, RandStad, which is a big employment agency. To my surprise, I ended up with the highest score and went home with a nice book as a prize. I was fully convinced that the score I achieved was very low, and I know for a fact that the road to victory had way less to do with intelligence than with …

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Joran started a programmer traineeship after graduating from a theater education. I asked him to write something about how he experiences this transition - Edwin I’ve been dabbling in programming for a while now, on account of the fact that I have recently started working in it full-time. I reckoned I could be able to write an article for this website because of that, so I tried to come up with something clever to discuss until I came to my senses and realised I’m a total newb.

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For a working group I give at the Radboud University, students were asked to read “The Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job”. This article discusses the ethical considerations of people automating their own jobs, either partly or completely. What are these considerations, and how do they relate to common work ethic? On the one hand, these people fulfill their job description to perfection through the scripts they wrote. One could applaud this clever increase in efficiency and …

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I largely quit social media because it transformed from being something that helps me keep in touch with people and that stimulates social interaction, to an endless stream of promoted clickbait content. The little “real” personal content that made it to my feed, was usually dull and did not facilitate any interesting conversations. With the creation of this website I’m trying to take control of my online identity, making this domain a main hub for various dispersed identities, …

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When one starts studying logic one is likely to be surprised by the workings of the so-called material implication, p –> q (if p, then q). Unlike the implication used in natural language, which can for example indicate causation, the material implication has a more restricted meaning. The material implication is true unless p is true and q is false. This is ultimately a matter of definition to resolve ambiguities present in natural language.

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