Thought Shrapnel

Whichever operating system you’re using, having a beautiful image as your background image or screensaver is always a nice thing to have. This is a collection of every default macOS wallpaper – in 6K resolution!

Source: 512 Pixels

I’m delighted to see this article about Bonfire, a project I’ve contributed to on various occasions since it was forked from the codebase which underpinned MoodleNet.

I think Ivan and Mayel, the team behind Bonfire, have identified a really important niche in Open Science, although the technology they are building can be applied to pretty much anything.

Bonfire is inching ever closer towards a 1.0 release of its social offering, which is a landmark development for the project. But beneath the surface, there’s a bigger story going on: rather than simply being a social platform, it’s also a development framework.

As a project, Bonfire has been in development for a long time, taking on different shapes and forms throughout the years. It first emerged as CommonsPub, in an effort to bring ActivityPub federation to MoodleNet. After a long refactor and refocus, Bonfire seems to be hitting its stride.

[…] I want to take a moment to peel back the layers of Bonfire, because I think they really set it apart from other platforms. The vision for the project is incredibly unique: “we have all the pieces you need, all you have to do is assemble it.”

Source: We Distribute

It’s been almost impossible to miss the announcement from OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT and DALL-E) about Sora “an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions”. While this isn’t available to the general public yet (thankfully, given upcoming elections!) this is what’s on the horizon.

There’s a great overview and explainer from YouTuber MKBHD which I recommend. It’s important to remember that, while tech companies will point to things like C2PA as safeguards, the only real ways to protect your information landscape are: a) get your news from reputable sources, b) be skeptical about things that sound unlikely and go looking for other sources, and c) immerse yourself in new things like this so you start being able to recognise giveaway signs.

MKBHD does a good job of starting to point out some of the latter in the video above. Again, I suggest you watch it.

It’s taken The Guardian about five years, I reckons, to pick up on this phenomenon. My son and his mates were doing ‘Brexit tackles’ well before the start of the pandemic!

In one TikTok post, football content creator Kalan Lisbie, with tongue firmly in cheek, walks viewers through “how to do the Brexit tackle”. He informs us that “the first thing you need to do is pretend like you’re going to boot the ball away and not tackle. Second thing is that you want to rotate those hips and as soon as you rotate, you want to take absolutely everything … and then just clean him”. A commenter on another video notes that school football is now more like WWE.

[…]

There’s a healthy dose of irreverence in there too – you have to admit, there’s something very funny about one child barking “Brexit means Brexit!” to another in a muddy park. You get the sense they’re having fun at older generations’ expense. Ask any parent of a tweenager or older: no one is better able to comprehensively make fun of, or call attention to, adult flaws and hypocrisy.

By adopting “Brexit means Brexit” and transforming it into a symbol of almost dangerously rough play, you get the sense that children are holding up a mirror to the adult world. They’re using it as a joke, to be sure, but it’s a timely reminder that politicians’ words and political stances extend far beyond the immediate context, seeping into the fabric of our children’s lives.

Source: The Guardian

Suw Charman-Anderson reflects on something that has definitely shifted over my lifetime: writing for money. These days, we live in the ‘creator economy’ which bears as much relation to reality as the ‘sharing economy’ does to the world of Airbnb, etc.

It’s related to the idea discussed in another article that’s been doing the rounds from Vox in which Rebecca Jones bemoans the need for ‘personal branding’ in every walk of life these days.

I’ve been running my own business since 1998, and I don’t want to have to bring that sensibility to my writing. I don’t like doing ‘promo’ and trying to ‘build a platform’ – I just want to share my writing with people whom I hope will enjoy it. I don’t want to get to a point where I’m spending more time doing marketing than writing. And yet, this is what is in store. 

It used to be that success brought fame. Now you need to be famous in order to even get a shot at success. Substack was supposed to be a way out of that double bind, but it isn’t. In her blog post, The creator economy can’t rely on Patreon, Joan Westenberg points out that Patreon and Substack are just flogging Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans theory from 2008.

[…]

The creative industries, like so many others, have individualised risk and privatised profits. So even though the creative industries sector contributed £109 billion to the UK economy in 2021 – that’s 5.6 percent of the entire economy – actual creatives go largely underpaid. We have become commodities. Until we are famous, we are entirely fungible. No one likes to think that about themselves, but this is what the industry has done to us. 

[…] I enjoy writing my newsletters, and I will continue to write them in the hope that others enjoy reading them. However, they will not figure in my financial plans, whether short-term or long-term. Any income they generate is gravy, it’s not the roast. 

[…]

Much of my focus is now on conserving energy so that I have enough to spend on writing and actual paying work. This is about developing a sustainable way to live which pays the bills and leaves me enough space to be creative. I don’t want to have to sacrifice my precious writing time at the altar of building a platform, even if that makes me less attractive to publishers. 

Source: Why Aren’t I Writing?

Great post by Dave White, who works at University of the Arts, London. His point, which is well-made, is that in the world of Generative AI, we have to take an art school approach to… everything.

It’s interesting, because I can see elements of metacognition and systems thinking in all this. This kind of thing, along with the ways I’ve been using Generative AI in my own studies, make me cautiously optimistic.

Let’s say I set you the task of creating a picture of a horse, you can achieve this any way you want. The catch is that you have to explain why you have taken a certain approach, what you think the value of this approach is and the extent to which you have been successful relative to that value. (Importantly, you can also reflect on how you might have failed to do this).

You can use all kinds of tools to construct this story: theory, method, process, your identity, your cultural influences and experiences, a chosen canon of relevant work etc. This forms the narrative of your work and this can be assessed. 

[…]

[T]here are many similarities in the questions raised by Gen AI and Wikipedia because they are both technologies of cultural production which rapidly emerged in the public domain. This is a category of technology we consistently struggle with because it recategorises forms of labour and professional identities.

[…]

In the same way that copying and pasting from Wikipedia has very little value but can be very useful, so too with Gen AI. In practice this means much of what we characterised as creative work is being merged into broader notions of ‘production’, something Tobias Revell has discussed in terms of Design potentially ceasing to be a specialist field. 

[…]

Under these circumstances there is an imperative to teach beyond ‘good’, thereby equipping our graduates to swim to the surface of imitation and operate above the ever rising tide of skills-that-can-now-be-done-by-generalists.

Source: Dave White

Perhaps sadly unsurprising to anyone who has ever talked about this with women, or who has lived as a child in an area that is less-than-safe.

As an adult male, being able to walk through the world without worrying about safety is a privilege. And there are definitely things we can do to help women feel more safe.

An eye-catching new BYU study shows just how different the experience of walking home at night is for women versus men.

The study, led by BYU public health professor Robbie Chaney, provides clear visual evidence of the constant environmental scanning women conduct as they walk in the dark, a safety consideration the study shows is unique to their experience.

Chaney and co-authors Alyssa Baer and Ida Tovar showed pictures of campus areas at Utah Valley University, Westminster, BYU and the University of Utah to participants and asked them to click on areas in the photo that caught their attention. Women focused significantly more on potential safety hazards — the periphery of the images — while men looked directly at focal points or their intended destination.

Source: BYU News

If you’re reading this, and have previously subscribed to Thought Shrapnel by email, then great! Everything’s working! If you subscribe via other means, you can safely ignore this post.

Apologies for the radio silence. This has been due to some technical issues with micro.blog and also quite an intense time around buying a house and getting my MSc assignment completed.

From now on, you’ll get an auto-generated email on a Sunday containing posts I’ve published on Thought Shrapnel during the week. This should be more sustainable for me, but I recognise that it lacks a bit of a personal touch. Apologies that I can’t control what time you receive it.

This is the only post I’m publishing on Thought Shrapnel this week, so it should be the only one that is featured in the digest email.

Image: DALL-E 3

I mentioned the podcast Your Undivided Attention in a recent post. Last summer, I listened to an episode featuring Nita Farahany which I thought was excellent. I told everyone about it.

In this interview, Farahany is interviewed alongside Aza Raskin, one of the hosts of Your Undivided Attention. I’ve focused on Raskin’s answers, but you should read the whole thing, alongside listening to the podcast episode. Excellent stuff.

Aza Raskin: I think we can frame social media as “first contact with AI.” Where is AI in social media? Well, it’s a curation AI. It’s choosing which posts, which videos, which audio hits the retinas and eardrums of humanity. And notice, this very unsophisticated kind of AI misaligned with what was best for humanity. Just maximizing for engagement was enough to create this whole slew of terrible outcomes, a world none of us really wants to live in. We see the dysfunction of the U.S. government—at the same time that we have runaway technology we have a walk-away governance system. We have polarization and mental health crises. We don’t know really what’s true or not. We’re all in our own little subgroups. We’ve had the death of a consensus reality, and that was with curation AI—first generation, first contact AI.

We’re now moving into what we call “second contact with AI.” This is creation AI, generative AI. And then the question to ask yourself is, have we fixed the misalignment with the first one? No! So we should expect to see all of those problems just magnified by the power of the new technology 10 times, 100 times, 1,000 times more.

[…]

I think this is the year that I’ve really felt that confusion between “Is it to utopia or dystopia that we go?” And the lesson we can learn from social media is that we can predict the future if you understand the incentives. As Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s business partner, said, “If you show me the incentives, I’ll show you the outcome.” The way we say it is: “If you name the market race people are in, we can name the result.” The race is the result. And Congress is still sort of blind to that. And so we’re stuck in this question of do we get the promise? Do we get the peril? How can we just get the promise without the peril, without an acknowledgment of, well, what’s the incentive? And the incentive is: grow as fast as possible to increase your capabilities, to increase your power so you can make more money and get more compute and hire the best people. Wash, rinse, repeat without an understanding of what are the externalities. And humanity, no doubt, has created incredible technology. But we have yet to figure out a process by which we invent technology that then doesn’t have a worse externality, which we have to invent something new for. And we’re reaching the place where the externality that we create will break the fragile civilization we live in if we don’t get there beforehand.

Source: Social Media, AI, and the Battle for Your Brain | proto.life

I listened to an interesting episode of the Your Undivided Attention podcast a few days ago which approached questions around AI from the perspective of myth.

One of the points that was made was that we’ve lost the ability for councils of elders to stop things from happening because it’s likely to be dangerous for community cohesion. Now it’s “move fast and break things”. With AI the ‘things’ could be democracy, civilization, or perhaps even the planet.

The token gestures discussed in this article from companies like OpenAI are like spitting in the wind. I mean, it’s great that people can’t just ask ChatGPT to create something impersonating a politician, and that images will be watermarked as generated by AI. But even I wouldn’t find it that hard to generate reasonably-convincing deepfakes given available tools.

As I’ve found through work I’ve done on disinformation, people are looking for content which confirms their existing beliefs. This means that you don’t have to create things that are particularly sophisticated for disinformation to go viral. And then by the time it’s debunked, more stuff has come out. It’s a game of whack-a-mole, except (to extend the metaphor) the moles have the potential to explode.

Yesterday TikTok presented me with what appeared to be a deepfake of Timothee Chalamet sitting in Leonardo Dicaprio’s lap and yes, I did immediately think “if this stupid video is that good imagine how bad the election misinformation will be.” OpenAI has, by necessity, been thinking about the same thing and today updated its policies to begin to address the issue.

In addition to being firmer in its policies on election misinformation OpenAI also plans to incorporate the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity’s (C2PA) digital credentials into images generated by Dall-E “early this year”. Currently Microsoft, Amazon, Adobe, and Getty are also working with C2PA to combat misinformation through AI image generation.

…Given that AI is itself a rapidly changing tool that regularly surprises us with wonderful poetry and outright lies it’s not clear how well this will work to combat misinformation in the election season. For now your best bet will continue to be embracing media literacy. That means questioning every piece of news or image that seems too good to be true and at least doing a quick Google search if your ChatGPT one turns up something utterly wild.

Source: Here’s OpenAI’s big plan to combat election misinformation | The Verge

In the UK, prices of family-sized homes are closely linked to the Ofsted rating of local schools. This leads to segregation based on ability to pay. As people who are in favour of private schools have told me, this means that any arguments I make against paying for education are a bit hypocritical.

My kids have had a much better schooling and in a safer area than I grew up in. Every parent wants this for their children. But by segregating schooling based on income, we turn it into a game that middle class parents play to win.

So what’s being proposed in Brighton is huge: essentially de-coupling house prices from school admissions. I hope that it takes off, and it becomes the norm. It takes a while to see and feel the class system in England in particular. But once you do, you can’t avoid the systemic injustice of it all.

As any estate agent knows, a school judged outstanding by Ofsted will push up neighbouring property prices. This is a cruel system that drives families who can afford it to uproot themselves, makes many of those who cannot feel inadequate, and produces and intensifies social segregation.

Few would dispute this account. Not the government, which has published papers on the link between house prices and schools, nor academics or analysts: just last week the Sutton Trust published findings showing that 155 comprehensives, supposedly open to all, are more socially selective than a typical grammar. In Scotland, home addresses are assigned one secondary school so that, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies points out, social segregation there is even more marked.

Rarely does any of this feature in the discussion around raising school standards. Ministers and policy experts talk about Sats, school curricula, inspections – rather than bringing down the invisible barriers that go up for children as early as five. Which is why Brighton and Hove is worth watching. On Monday, its Labour-led council will vote to change secondary school admissions. Councillors propose to make local authority secondaries give priority to children on free school meals over pupils from the catchment area. Observers believe that Brighton and Hove will be the first council ever to do this. The move is an attempt to reduce inequality within a highly unequal city, to mix up school populations, and to give pupils access to sought‑after schools. For a city that prides itself on being progressive and inclusive, this is a big step towards living those values.

Source: The Guardian view on school reform: southern discomfort about the class divide | The Guardian

Image: CC BY-ND Visual Thinkery

I feel like this fits well with some stuff WAO has been revisiting this week around challenger brands and crafting messages for specific audiences.

The same forces that are driving the rise of populism in politics are also used by startups to grow their business.

Here’s are political strategies that businesses use to grow:

1. The power of the outsider narrative
2. Single issue voters
3. Grassroots Mobilisation
4. Narrative Control and Messaging
5. Building Alliances and Partnerships
6. Segmentation and Targeting

[…]

The key takeaway is that inspiration can be drawn from the most unexpected places. From modern politics and entrepreneurship, there’s always something new to learn, adapt, and apply to your own endeavours.

Source: The shared persuasion tactics of politics and startups

On the one hand, this is awesome. On the other, what would I use it for?

Mine’s here. Don’t expect much! I think if I wanted something like this I’d probably use telegra.ph instead. Although it does give off a Posterous vibe from ~15 years ago. (I see Posthaven still exists!)

Daft Social lets you post and share notes, links or images by email subject only. From any email account.

Source: Daft Social

Welcome to the new home of Thought Shrapnel! Excuse the mess while we unpack boxes, etc.

This interview with Kohei Saito in EL PAÍS talks about the importance of having a positive view of the future, with “a society that adapts to the limits of nature and offers universal access to education, health, transportation, internet”.

Sounds good to me.

We are in a chronic state of emergency. The pandemic was not the last crisis, but rather the beginning of more problems. We should not forget that moment [during lockdown] when, consciously, we halted capitalism. It seemed impossible. But it happened. For a short time. A good moment to establish some distance: people came back more anti-capitalist and inclined towards degrowth. Let’s remember that.

[…]

I talk about a degrowth communism: a society that adapts to the limits of nature and offers universal access to education, health, transportation, internet… Due to a variety of crises, access to these services — the common good — has been undermined for many. But without positive visions of the future, there will be more and more discontent. What we need is to build a broad movement: environmentalist, working-class, feminist, Indigenist… To propose an inclusive and emancipatory future.

[…]

The Anthropocene signifies that humans have become a geological force, with the ability to modify the planet. But not everyone is equally responsible for this situation. It’s primarily the people of the Global North; particularly, the super-rich who think they can do it all with their money, even flee the Earth. That idea of conquest originates with European colonialism, linking imperialism, capitalism and progress. We should also restrict space shuttles, like SpaceX. Spending so much money, effort and time on going to Mars seems stupid to me; we should invest that energy in saving our planet. As a philosopher, I’m an optimist. Our perception, our values, can change in two or five years. Opportunities for change are everywhere. I want to explore what they are.

No technology is neutral, and vendors are only ever going to tout the positive qualities. Take this example: it’s a way to create a camera out of any window. Huge benefits, as the article says, but also some rather large (and dystopian) downsides.

Zeiss is bringing its remarkable Holocam technology to CES 2024, which can turn any glass screen into a camera. This means that everything from the window in your car to the screen on your laptop to the glass on your front door can now possess an invisible image sensor.

[…]

The Holocam technology “uses holographic in-coupling, light guiding and de-coupling elements to redirect the incoming light of a transparent medium to a hidden image sensor.”

[…]

Using an entire pane of glass as a camera lens also opens some fascinating optical possibilities. Some of Zeiss' bullet points include “large aperture invisible camera” and “individual adjustment of orientation and size of the field of views.” Which makes me wonder, what is the maximum aperture and focal range of a camera like this?

Of course, there’s a darker potential for such technology. Given the current fear around hidden cameras in Airbnbs, the idea of every single window (or even shower door) in a rental property being able to spy on you is a little disconcerting.

An insightful and nuanced post from Stephen Downes, who reflects on various experiences, from changing RSS reader through to the way he takes photographs. What he calls ‘AI drift’ is our tendency to replace manual processes with automated ones.

What I appreciate is that Downes doesn’t say this is A Bad Thing, but that we should notice and reflect on these things. For example, I’ve found it really useful to use AI with my MSc studies and to understand (and accelerate) some of the client work I’ve been involved with.

What's important is to notice what's happening. When I use AI to select the posts I read in my RSS reader, I'm finding more from the categories I've defined, but I'm missing the new stuff from categories that might not exist yet - the oft-referenced filter bubble. Also, I'm missing the ebb and flow of the undercurrent, of the comings and goings, of the stuff that seems off topic and doesn't matter - and yet, to someone who dwells in the debris like me, it does.

This is what I’m calling ‘AI drift’ in humans. It’s this phenomenon whereby you sort of ‘drift’ into new patterns and habits when you’re in an AI environment. It’s not the filter bubble; that’s just one part of it. It’s the influence it has over all our behaviour. One of those patterns, obviously, is that you start relying on the AI more do do things. But also, you stop doing some of the things you used to do - not because the AI is handling it for you, because as in this case it might not be helping at all, but because you just start doing other things.

[…]

AI drift isn’t inherently good, and it isn’t inherently bad. It just is. It’s like that quote often attributed to McLuhan: “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” Recognizing AI drift is simply recognizing how we’re changing as we use new tools. We then decide whether we like that change or not. In my own case, it comes with some mixed feelings. But that’s OK. I wouldn’t expect anything else.

Another fantastic article by Arthur C. Brooks for The Atlantic which draws on research about how your future is likely to be happier than your past. That’s because of various psychological effects that come into play as you age.

Good news! I’m particularly looking forward to my anxiety tamping down and not being as triggered by negative situations.

Let’s start with how you will feel when you are old. By this, I don’t mean whether your back will hurt more (it almost certainly will), but rather the balance between your positive and negative moods as you age. The answer is probably better than you feel now.

[…]

A 2013 review of research reveals that older people develop at least three distinct emotional skills: They react less to negative situations, they are better at ignoring irrelevant negative stimuli than they were when younger, and they remember more positive than negative information. This is almost like a superpower many older people have, that they know negative emotions won’t last so they get a head start on feeling good by consciously disregarding bad feelings as they arise.

[…]

If you follow the typical development, you can expect to be nicer and kinder, and less depressed and anxious, when you are old.

[…]

The good news about aging is that if we simply leave things to the passage of time, life will probably get better for us. But we can do more than just wait around to get old. We can lean into the natural improvements and manage any trends we don’t like.

I always enjoy posts like this because I invariably learn something new. There’s some gems in here, some I hadn’t come across before, and some I had.

There are plenty of logical fallacies and cognitive biases amongst the ideas, which reminds me of this from Buster Benson. I’ve had a large poster of the linked image on the wall of my home office and it was always something people commented on.

Woozle Effect: “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.” - Daniel Kahneman.

[…]

Fact-Check Scarcity Principle: This article is called 100 Little Ideas but there are fewer than 100 ideas. 99% of readers won’t notice because they’re not checking, and most of those who notice won’t say anything. Don’t believe everything you read.

[…]

Emotional Competence: The ability to recognize others’ emotions and respond to them productively. Harder and rarer than it sounds.

Realistically, I’m never going to watch an hour-long YouTube video which is mainly a talking head. I mean, I’m into history, but I’m not that into it.

Thankfully, Open Culture has summarised some of the most important points. If you’re the kind of person who watches a lot of YouTube, then maybe you want to add this to your queue?

In the new video above, his­to­ry Youtu­ber Pre­mod­ernist pro­vides an hour’s worth of advice to the mod­ern prepar­ing to trav­el back in time to medieval Europe — begin­ning with the dec­la­ra­tion that “you will very like­ly get sick.”

The gastrointestinal distress posed by the “native biome” of medieval European food and drink is one thing; the threat of robbery or worse by its roving packs of outlaws is quite another. “Crime is rampant” where you’re going, so “carry a dagger” and “learn how to use it.” In societies of the Middle Ages, people could only protect themselves by being “enmeshed in social webs with each other. No one was an individual.” And so, as a traveler, you must — to put it in Dungeons-and-Dragons terms — belong to some legible class. Though you’ll have no choice but to present yourself as having come from a distant land, you can feel free to pick one of two guises that will suit your obvious foreignness: “you’re either a merchant or a pilgrim.”

Image: DALL-E 3