Thought Shrapnel

I listen to a popular podcast called The Rest is Politics. I remember listening before the US Presidential Election where the hosts could not bring themselves to believe that Trump would successfully win a second term. Why? Because he has “no ground game.” That is to say, he doesn’t have the processes set up to be able to mass-mobilise supporters to knock on doors, get the word out, and encourage people to vote.

Given the results, that’s increasingly looking like 20th century thinking. I’ve heard anecodotes of people knocking on doors and people already having talking points from following social media influencers and watching YouTube videos. If people have already made up their mind based on things they’ve seen on the small screen they carry around with them everywhere, knocking on their door every few years isn’t going to change their mind.

This is why social media is so important. This post argues that we need to be creating new spaces, not just “meeting people where they are.” It’s not an incorrect position to take. I don’t disagree with anything in the post. But how exactly? Mastodon and the Fediverse more generally could have been the ‘ark’ to which people fled after leaving X/Twitter. Instead, they flocked to another “potentially decentralised” social network, with investors and no incentive to do anything other than what everyone else has done before.

I’d like to organise. I’d like to use Open Source software everywhere. I’d like to only buy things from co-ops. However, back in the real world where I need to interact with capitalism to survive…

It’s hard to ignore the fact that progressive movements, despite their critical rhetoric, rely on the same capitalist and surveillance-driven platforms that actively subvert their goals. Platforms like Google, Facebook, The Communication Silo Formerly Named Twitter, and Instagram—behemoths of surveillance capitalism—become the very spaces where activism happens. These corporations profit from our clicks, likes, and shares, capturing our data and feeding it into systems of control that profit from inequality, exploitation, and surveillance.

This ongoing reliance on corporate-owned platforms represents a deep contradiction in our movements. By using these tools, we are feeding the beast—the tech giants profiting from our data, monetizing our activism, and undermining the very causes we fight for. In a real sense, we’ve become complicit in our own subjugation, ceding our autonomy, values, and privacy to the very corporations that reinforce the inequalities we seek to dismantle.

[…]

The phrase “you have to meet people where they live” has been an all-too-convenient defense for this complicity. But this outlook only reinforces the status quo. Shouldn’t a genuinely radical movement—especially a socialist one—work toward building new spaces where people can live, organize, and act outside of these exploitative systems?

Socialist movements throughout history didn’t merely meet people in existing power structures—they created new models of organization, new forms of cooperation, and new spaces for living and working together. From cooperatives to unions, the goal has always been to build alternatives to the capitalist way of life. Why, then, should we treat digital space any differently?

[…]

We cannot keep organizing through the tools of surveillance capitalism if we want to build a post-capitalist future. We must take control of the infrastructure itself—through open-source, community-run platforms. This is not just about technical solutions, but about aligning our methods of organizing with our values and principles.

Source: Seize the Means of Community

Image: Intricate Explorer

I discovered this article via Laura who referenced it during our co-working session as we updated AILiteracy.fyi. As a fellow Garbage Day subscriber, she’d assumed I’d already seen it mentioned in that newsletter. I hadn’t.

What I like about this piece from Casey Newton is how he points out how disingenuous much of anti-AI sentiment is. There are people doing importance, nuanced work pointing out the bullshit (hi, Audrey) but there’s also some really ill-informed, clickbaity stuff that reinforces prejudice.

Of course people will use generative AI to cheat. Of course they will use it to create awful things. But what’s new there? A lot of the hand-wringing I see is from people who have evidently never used an LLM for more than five seconds. They would have been the same people warning about the “dangers” of the internet in the late 90s because “anyone can create a website and put anything online!”

The thing is, while we can’t guarantee that any individual response from a chatbot will be honest or helpful, it’s inarguable that they are much more honest and more helpful today than they were two years ago. It’s also inarguable that hundreds of millions of people are already using them, and that millions are paying to use them.

The truth is that there are no guarantees in tech. Does Google guarantee that its search engine is honest, helpful, and harmless? Does X guarantee that its posts are? Does Facebook guarantee that its network is?

Most people know these systems are flawed, and adjust their expectations and usage accordingly. The “AI is fake and sucks” crowd is hyper-fixated on the things it can’t do — count the number of r’s in strawberry, figure out that the Onion was joking when it told us to eat rocks — and weirdly uninterested in the things it can.

[…]

Ultimately, both the “fake and sucks” and “real and dangerous” crowds agree that AI could go really, really badly. To stop that from happening though, the “fake and sucks” crowd needs to accept that AI is already more capable and more embedded in our systems than they currently admit. And while it’s fine to wish that the scaling laws do break, and give us all more time to adapt to what AI will bring, all of us would do well to spend some time planning for a world where they don’t.

Source: Platformer

This advent series is published anonymously, but Matt Jukes outed himself as the author of this one. It makes sense him doing so, as it’s about working in the open, and how it’s benefited him — but now he feels like it’s time to “shut up.” For what it’s worth, I hope he doesn’t.

I’m sharing it here, though, as there are plenty of people who I know who share as openly as Jukesie, and who might be thinking about different seasons to their careers. I suppose I’m one of them. My wife has never been comfortable about my ‘oversharing’, especially in the early days of Twitter. That’s why I’ve toned down that aspect a bit over the years

There’s something about oversharing that feels like a focus on the self. But, as I was explaining to my daughter in relation to art just yesterday, you have to find the thing that allows you to represent yourself in the world. For me, it’s writing. For others it’s drawing, painting, or singing. Without that, it’s a sad, unexpressed life.

(It’s also well worth looking at the other essays in the series, as there’s some really good writing here.)

People I’ve never met in person are familiar with my ups and downs at work, my health, my travels and my ambitions. My openness has been called brave, inspiring, narcissistic and irritating. It’s provided me with an army of acquaintances around the world, but probably no more close friends than if I’d never popped my head above the parapet and uttered (or written) a word.

I wear my commitment to working in the open as a badge of honour and have spent years advocating for others to follow suit.

The problem though, and the reason I’ve been thinking a lot about it, is that I am tired of it and really feel like it is time to shut up. I don’t know whether those peak Covid years rewired something in my head, or whether it is just a by-product of getting older, but the energy required to maintain quite so public a persona has become unsustainable, and increasingly less enjoyable. The challenge though, is that my professional identity is so entangled in my openness, I fear what would happen if I did quiet down.

This fear is my own fault. My career has become a patchwork of short-term jobs, generated by a short attention span, and held together by a loose theme and a high profile. If the profile declines, will it all tumble down like a house of cards?

Source: I thought about that a lot

I missed this when he published it last year, but this strongly-worded and reasoned stuff from Cory Doctorow still applies. He explains why he’ll only ever be found on actually federated social networks. The word he coined, enshittification, can only applied to a captive user base. It makes me think about what I’m doing on Bluesky — which I’ve already described a ‘pound shop Mastodon’.

Look, I’m done. I poured years and endless hours into establishing myself on walled garden services administered with varying degrees of competence and benevolence, only to have those services use my own sunk costs to trap me within their silos even as they siphoned value from my side of the ledger to their own.

[…]

Being a moral actor lies not merely in making the right choice in the moment, but in anticipating the times when you may choose poorly in future, and taking steps to head that off.

[…]

That’s where Ulysses Pacts come in. […] We make little Ulysses Pacts all the time. If you go on a diet and throw away your Oreos, that’s a Ulysses Pact. You’re not betting that you’ll be strong enough to resist their siren song when your body is craving easily available calories; rather, you are being humble enough to recognize your own weakness, and strong enough to take a step to protect yourself from it.

[…]

I have learned my lesson. I have no plans to ever again put effort or energy into establishing myself on an unfederated service. From now on, I will put more weight on how easy it is to leave a service than on what I get from staying. A bad service that you can easily switch away from is incentivized to improve, and if the incentive fails, you can leave.

Source: Pluralistic

I haven’t had a chance to use it yet, but this is more like it! Local models that are not only lighter in terms of environmental impact, but are trained on permissively-licensed data.

Training large language models required copyrighted data until it did not. Today we release Pleias 1.0 models, a family of fully open small language models. Pleias 1.0 models include three base models: 350M, 1.2B, and 3B parameters. They feature two specialized models for knowledge retrieval with unprecedented performance for their size on multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Pleias-Pico (350M parameters) and Pleias-Nano (1.2B parameters).

These represent the first ever models trained exclusively on open data, meaning data that are either non-copyrighted or are published under a permissible license. These are the first fully EU AI Act compliant models. In fact, Pleias sets a new standard for safety and openness.

Our models are:

• multilingual, offering strong support for multiple European languages
• safe, showing the lowest results on the toxicity benchmark
• performant for key tasks, such as knowledge retrieval
• able to run efficiently on consumer-grade hardware locally (CPU-only, without quantisation)

[…]

We are moving away from the standard format of web archives. Instead, we use our new dataset composed of uncopyrighted and permissibly licensed data, Common Corpus. To create this dataset, we had to develop an extensive range of tools to collect, to generate, and to process pretraining.

Source: Hugging Face

Image: David Man & Tristan Ferne

I see a lot of AI Literacy frameworks at the moment. Like this one. From my perspective, most of them make similar mistakes, thinking in terms of defined ‘levels’ using some kind of remix of Bloom’s Taxonomy. There’s also an over-emphasis on cognitive aspects such as ‘understanding’ while more community and civic-minded aspects are often under-emphasised.

So if you think that I’m ego-posting this page, created by Angela Gunder for Opened Culture, then you’d be correct. I met Angela for the first time via video conference a few weeks ago after she sent me an email telling me how she’d been using my work for years. We’ve had a couple more chats since and I’m hoping we’ll get to work together in the coming months.

Recently, Angela has been doing work for UNESCO, as well as on an MIT/Hewlett Foundation funded project. For both, she used my Essential Elements of Digital Literacies as a frame, understanding literacies as plural and contextual. WAO is currently working on an update to ailiteracy.fyi so more on all of this in the new year.

The Dimensions of AI Literacies were developed to address the growing need for educators, learners, and leaders to navigate the complexities of AI in education. Remixed from the work of Doug Belshaw’s Essential Elements of Digital Literacies, this approach recognizes that AI literacies are not a binary of literacy vs. illiteracy, but rather consist of a diverse and interconnected set of competencies. By considering AI literacies as a plurality, this taxonomy enables a deeper understanding of how AI can be leveraged to improve the impact of teaching and learning across various sociocultural contexts. This view helps educators design inclusive and adaptive learning experiences, allows learners to engage with AI tools critically and creatively, and empowers leaders to foster responsible and impactful AI integration across their institutions. Additionally, as AI tools and systems continue to expand in quantity and ability, this taxonomy gives strategists and practitioners a flexible vocabulary to use in navigating the rapidly evolving landscape of AI in education. Through these dimensions, educators and leaders are provided with a foundation for building a collaborative and reflective discourse on AI use, encouraging the development of skills that will shape the future of education in meaningful and impactful ways.

Source: Opened Culture | Dimensions of AI Literacies

Image: Yutong Liu & Kingston School of Art

When I worked at the Mozilla Foundation a decade ago, there was a programme called Webmaker. There were web apps and Open Source tools that the team created to help people learn how the web works in a practical, hands-on way. My work on web literacy and Open Badges underpinned it (see this white paper for example) with the aim to avoid ‘elegant consumption’.

In this post Gita Jackson points out that elegant consumption via centralised, Big Tech-owned social networks has won the day. The way to resist that is to build your own website. Learning some code is great, but these days Mozilla has a service called Solo which makes it super-easy to have your own website. There are easy ways to run your own blog. It takes more effort, but it’s worth it.

Social media erased the need to build a website to express yourself online. Sure, early social media like MySpace allowed for you to radically change the look and feel of your page—adding music and changing the background—but ultimately, it was still a MySpace page, with a comment wall and your top eight friends. On top of that, MySpace had total ownership of that page, meaning when the site was bought and sold, individual users had no say in the changes. By 2019, you couldn’t even look at your old MySpace accounts anymore because they lost all the data from prior to 2016.

This only accelerated as we moved to new social media, like Facebook, which was determined to keep all important contact information within the app. Instead of a local business making a website on Geocities, they would make themselves a Facebook page—or now, an Instagram account—because all their customers likely had Facebook accounts already.

[…]

It is clear that tech billionaires like Musk know that when they own the means of communication, they run the whole show. If you’ve made a home on Twitter, you’re basically completely vulnerable to Musk’s randomly changing whims, and also his disgusting political beliefs. He campaigned with Trump and immediately congratulated him when he won the election. Also congratulating the President-elect were Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, two tech oligarchs who also want us to use their proprietary apps and websites for everything in our lives.

[…]

To me, having my own website, even one I run as a business with my friends, gives me a degree of freedom over my own work that I’ve never had before. If you look at my work on Kotaku, there’s so many garbage ads on the screen you can barely see the words. Waypoint and Motherboard are both being run like a haunted ship, pumping out junk so that Vice’s new owners can put ads on it. I don’t have to worry about that anymore—I don’t have to worry about my work being taken down or modified or sold, or put in an AI training set against my will. I have my own website, and it is mine, and I get to own it completely. I hope someday soon I can visit your website.

Source: Aftermath

Image: Patrick Tomasso

There are risks with any kind of increased information or data presented to people without the kind of background to understand it. That’s why we have professionals.

There’s also a concern about privacy and data getting into the wrong hands. That’s why we have safeguards.

But, on the other hand, when it comes to smart watches and other health monitoring devices, we’re talking about trying to better understand our own bodies. I’ve got a Garmin smart watch which I use in conjunction with the Garmin app and also with Strava. You’ll pry it from my cold, dead hands

There was one time when I went to the hospital and the consultant was interested in what my watch had been telling me. But, as this article shows, that’s rare.

What we need is some kind of standard way of reporting this data, along with caveats about how it was collected and how much it can be trusted.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting has talked about a proposal to give wearables to millions of NHS patients in England, enabling them to track symptoms such as reactions to cancer treatments, from home.

But many doctors – and tech experts – remain cautious about using health data captured by wearables.

I’m currently trying out a smart ring from the firm Ultrahuman – and it seemed to know that I was getting sick before I did.

It alerted me one weekend that my temperature was slightly elevated, and my sleep had been restless. It warned me that this could be a sign I was coming down with something.

I tutted something about the symptoms of perimenopause and ignored it - but two days later I was laid up in bed with gastric flu.

Source: BBC News

Polly Toynbee, writing in The Guardian, argues that we need a wealth tax in the UK. In my opinion, it’s massively overdue. The only people who have benefited from the financial crisis and Brexit are those who were already well-off.

Given that you don’t get to choose how wealthy your parents are, advantages that you get in life from their wealth are a massive impediment to social mobility. Obviously.

Over the next 30 years, an unprecedented avalanche of £5.5tn will land in the laps of those who have chosen their parents wisely. The inheritocracy is ascending into the stratosphere: asset-rich parents are buying homes and advantage for their children and their children’s children, securing ever-rising privilege. Those born in the 1980s are on average due inheritances worth twice as much as those born in the 1960s. Parental income and wealth is a stronger predictor of someone’s lifetime earnings and wealth than in generations before. Inheritance is becoming an obstacle to social mobility.

No politician concerned about inequality, fair opportunities or financing the public realm can ignore wealth any longer. While wages have stagnated for 16 years, wealth has accelerated. Traditionally, policymakers have focused on fairness of incomes. But today, the possession of wealth is proving the greater distortion, with so much of it in effect untaxed. The mantra for a long time was that wealth taxes don’t work. But that can no longer be the answer.

[…]

If Labour wants to achieve things in power, it’s clear it needs more money. Wealth is the place to look.

Source: The Guardian

Image: The New York Public Library

Perhaps I’m just getting old, but this rant resonated with me. Ostensibly, it’s about a particular app shutting down, but I’m quoting the bit more generally about ‘self-hosting’ not being an option for people who do things other than spend every waking moment near a computer.

If there’s one thing I don’t want to be in my forties it’s a system administrator. As time moves on, we abstract away from complexity to provide things as a service, which as far as I’m concerned is exactly as it should be.

One of the other options Omniverse suggests for moving off of its service is self-hosting, which is akin to telling me to go fuck myself. Self-hosting is great if your hobby is self-hosting things. Mine is not. My hobbies are reading things and drawing things and sewing things and climbing up things and feeling guilty about not writing enough things. I very much appreciate that I know how to computer well enough that I could self-host if I had to, could go fork some abandoned Obsidian plugin that hasn’t been updated in 3 years to try and make yet another rotting part of my digital ecosystem rot a little bit less slowly, but that is a terrible use of my time. I already host my own Fediverse server, if by host you mean pay someone in Europe a bunch of money to host it for me and all I have to do is ban some assholes occasionally, because at the moment I have more money than I have time and I simply do not wish to spend my one wild and precious life learning how to configure goddamn Sidekiq to optimize background processing queues just so I can offer my friends a refuge from the dillweed who turned Twitter into a Nazi bar.

Also, you know what people never talk about when they talk about self-hosting? A succession plan. If I suddenly died I don’t have any provisions for making sure the people relying on my little Hometown server aren’t suddenly left up a creek without a paddle. I am not going to host a read-later service just for myself because that would be an incredibly inefficient use of time and resources even if I did have the time and inclination to do so, but I am also not going to host anything else for my friends until I figure out what contingency plans look like. It’s on my list of things to figure out for my will, which is a very long list. This long list sits on another very long list of life TODOs that I never seem to get around to. I have wanted to figure out my will for approximately eight years, and I know that because that is how long ago I got married and we were like “ha ha we should do that soon” and then simply never did. Because life is so complicated, my guy.

Source: The Roof is on Phire

Image: Christopher Gower

This is a long-ish post, the second half of which discusses Bluesky. However, I’m more interested in the first half which talks about the ‘billionarism’ ideology which seems to have infected the world. It’s an anti-civic attitude which captures human value as financial value, and sees contributing to society as a ‘cost’.

Well kids, we live in a world built for billionaires and narcissists, and we pretty much have our whole lives. I know this isn’t news to people of awareness such as yourselves, but the proof is in the pudding now, and the pudding is on fire.

[…]

A “billionaire” is somebody who infects themselves daily with the sick need to amass so much money that they no longer are constrained by societal demands and expectations, but rather are able to impose their own demands and expectations upon society. A billionaire utilizes this power in order to modify society so that even more money comes to them, leaving them even further above the demands and expectations of society, allowing them to impose their will over society to an even greater extent, and so on and so forth. It’s a grave sickness, billionairism—a self-inflicted one, I think I mentioned—and what’s worse is that it’s a sickness whose worst symptoms billionaires force the rest of us to suffer. That’s the first way that billionairism resembles narcissism.

And we should talk about what billionaires do. What they do is get themselves in proximity to the natural value generated by our natural human system—value created by humans simply by being human and living together in proximity to one another, the structure known as “society,” in other words, from which all possible value springs—and then steal it for themselves and only themselves. They capture certain parts of natural generative human value—some human enterprise or process or concept, something other that has been made possible only through the existence of human society, and has only become successful within that context by generating value for other humans—and use their unnaturally stolen value to own it, and then pervert it so that it increasingly stops providing value to others but only sends value to themselves. They then use the stolen value that they have hoarded all for themselves as proof that they are exceptionally valuable people. Meanwhile, there is a certain amount of that stolen value that they still have to give back in order to keep the mechanism of their theft going—an amount that they call “cost,” which they greatly resent—which they use as proof that they are the beneficent source of all value anyone receives.

[…]

It occurs to me that nothing damages billionaires and other narcissists like human community, which is probably why they work so hard to destroy it.

Source: The Reframe

Image: Jp Valery

I’ve got an upcoming interview for a BBC R&D research role and so have been looking at what they’ve been up to recently. As part of that, I came across an experiment called ‘Orbit’ which is a visual way of discovering new music based on listening to audio snippets.

Find 5 new tracks every day from undiscovered artists

Source: Orbit

This post by Neil Brown is a couple of years old now, but he linked to it in the wake of news that the Australian government have announced a ban on social media for under-16s.

As he points out by going through examples, this is entirely unworkable. When I tried to explain this to someone less technical, I realised that unless you enforce biometrics at every login, it’s pretty much impossible to enforce in a good-faith way. And that would be a huge privacy violation of children.

Let’s say that there a multiple countries with similar-but-not-identical laws.

• Country A, which says that the website operator is not to provide its service to people in Country A who are under 21.

• Country B, which says that the website operator is not to provide its service to people in Country B who are under 25.

• And Country C, which says that the website operator is not to provide its service to people in Country C at all.

Assuming that the website operator does not want to shut up shop totally - by applying the most restrictive rule, of Country C, to everyone - and that it does care about the laws in other countries (a big “if”, but it’s my example, so…) how does the website operator establish where the user is located at the point at which they access the site, to know which rule to apply?

tl;dr

I don’t think you can, with any reasonable degree of assurance.

Source: Neil’s blog

Image: julien Tromeur

A great use for machine learning in finding, and hopefully helping to protect, indigenous art covering miles of ground in southern Peru.

Gouged into a barren stretch of pampa in southern Peru, the Nazca Lines are one of archaeology’s most perplexing mysteries. On the floor of the coastal desert, the shallow markings look like simple furrows. But from the air, hundreds of feet up, they morph into trapezoids, spirals and zigzags in some locations, and stylized hummingbirds and spiders in others. There is even a cat with the tail of a fish. Thousands of lines jump cliffs and traverse ravines without changing course; the longest is bullet-straight and extends for more than 15 miles.

The vast incisions were brought to the world’s attention in the mid-1920s by a Peruvian scientist who spotted them while hiking through the Nazca foothills. Over the next decade, commercial pilots passing over the region revealed the enormousness of the artwork, which is believed to have been created from 200 B.C. to 700 A.D. by a civilization that predated the Inca.

The newly found images — an average of 30 feet across — could have been detected in past flyovers if the pilots had known where to look. But the pampa is so immense that “finding the needle in the haystack becomes practically impossible without the help of automation,” said Marcus Freitag, an IBM physicist who collaborated on the project.

To identify the new geoglyphs, which are smaller than earlier examples, the investigators used an application capable of discerning the outlines from aerial photographs, no matter how faint. “The A.I. was able to eliminate 98 percent of the imagery,” Dr. Freitag said. “Human experts now only need to confirm or reject plausible candidates.”

Source: The New York Times

Backup link: Archive Buttons

Last year, I leased an electric vehicle (EV) for the first time: a Polestar 2. It’s incredible; I wouldn’t even consider any other type of car in future.

I don’t have to worry about how long the physical batteries will last, but it’s something that EV skeptics, conspiracy theorists, and fossil fuel lobbyists tend to focus on. That’s why it’s good to see the management consultancy P3 conducting a study to counter some EV battery myths.

The term ‘state of health’ or SoH doesn’t have a standard definition, so it’s just used in this context to refer to EV battery capacity. The findings? Basically that EV batteries last way longer than was assumed. And, given that they can have a second and even third life after being removed from a car, there’s really no reason not to switch to an EV, pronto.

The field data suggests that the actual battery capacity is maintained longer than assumed under real-life conditions, especially with the often-cited high mileages of 200,000 kilometres and more. Based on the cell lab tests, the SoH model published by P3 in 2023 gave a much more pessimistic forecast for battery health. Up to around 50,000 kilometres, the laboratory model and the field data are roughly the same – above 100,000 kilometres. However, the trend lines diverge significantly. P3 concludes that the actual user-profiles and the control of the cells by the battery management system in the field significantly reduce ageing.

But how can the observed variation be explained? After all, some vehicles still have an extremely high SoH after more than 50,000 kilometres, while individual vehicles are still at 98 per cent after almost 200,000 kilometres – while others quickly fall below 90 per cent. In fact, the charging and usage behaviour of drivers and the vehicles themselves influence this, as do the manufacturers. On the one hand, the intended buffer (i.e., the difference between gross and net capacity) plays an important role in terms of size and utilisation of the buffer. That is because it can be used, for example, to reduce the noticeable ageing during the warranty period – by releasing a little more net capacity over time. On the other hand, the charging behaviour can be adjusted via a software update. On the one hand, this can be a higher charging power for shorter charging times, which leads to more stress in the cell. On the other hand, it is also possible that an update improves the control of the cells, for example, by optimising preconditioning to reduce stress during fast charging under sub-optimal conditions.

Source: electrive

Data, or rather organised data is an incredibly valuable commodity in the modern world. Large Language Models (LLMs) which underpin the latest generative AI applications need ever-increasing amounts of it to develop more complex functionality.

Pokémon Go was controversial when it came out because there were so many people playing it that it was causing chaos when so-called ‘gyms’ and game characters were randomly placed in various real-world neighbourhoods. Now it transpires that the makers of the game are developing the equivalent of an LLM for ‘visual positioning’ and that this might be used for military applications. FML, as they say.

Uh, so here’s something interesting. Niantic, the company behind Pokémon Go, published a long blog post last week outlining a new project they’ve been working on called a Large Geospatial Model, essentially a Large Language Model but for visualizing and mapping physical space. They’re calling it the Visual Positioning System, or VPS, and they plan to use it for future augmented reality products and robotics. The idea of mapping the whole world has been a big priority for Niantic over the last few years.

One new feature for Pokémon Go that uses VPS is called Pokémon Playgrounds and it lets a user place a virtual Pokémon on a location and other players will find that Pokémon where they left it.

Though, as Elise Thomas, over at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, pointed out, it seems almost undeniable that this will not just power fun game mechanics. “It’s so incredibly 2020s coded that Pokemon Go is being used to build an AI system which will almost inevitably end up being used by automated weapons systems to kill people,” Thomas wrote.

Source: Garbage Day

Image: David Grandmougin

I initially thought this announcement from Tuvalu was from this month’s COP meeting, COP29. But it turns out that it was announced two years ago, and the update below was announced last year, at COP28.

It’s a sad but fascinating prospect: a nation without land, preserved digitally and with services available to the Tuvaluan diaspora after climate change means their physical territory disappears beneath the waves.

This is a more extreme version of Estonia’s e-Residency programme which was launched a decade ago. In that case, the threat was from other nation states, namely Russia.

I remember quite a few years ago at the Thinking Digital conference, just as the cryptocurrency craze was beginning, someone stood on stage and predicted the death of nation states, with people instead choosing digital nationhood. I don’t think it will be as binary as that. It’s much more likely to be something akin to dual nationality.

With time running out, Tuvalu has no choice but to start planning for this worst-case scenario. At COP27 (2022), Tuvaluan Minister Simon Kofe announced that Tuvalu will become the First Digital Nation: that it would digitally recreate its land, archive its rich history and culture, and move all governmental functions into a digital space.

This digital transformation will allow Tuvalu to retain its identity and continue to function as a state, even after its physical land is gone. It will also facilitate the governance of a Tuvaluan diaspora by creating a virtual space where Tuvaluans can connect with each other, explore ancestry and culture, and access new opportunities for business and commerce in various industries. Moreover, a permanent digital replica of Tuvalu – a new “defined territory” – will aid in the fight for continued sovereignty under international law.

Since the initial announcement of the First Digital Nation, Tuvalu has:

• Completed a comprehensive three-dimensional LIDAR scan of all 124 islands and islets, laying the foundation for its digital nation and helping redefine its territory in the eyes of international law.
• Begun upgrading its national communications infrastructure with the installation of two submarine cables, ensuring sufficient bandwidth for the transition to the cloud.
• Started exploring a digital ID system, which will use the blockchain to connect the Tuvaluan diaspora and allow them to participate in Tuvaluan life, wherever they are.
• Begun building a living archive of Tuvaluan culture, curated by its people. Citizens will be invited to contribute their most treasured personal items for digital preservation, creating a living record of Tuvaluan values.
• Amended its constitution to reflect a new definition of statehood – the first of its kind in the world. The amendment pronounces that the State of Tuvalu within its historical, cultural, and legal framework shall remain in perpetuity in the future, notwithstanding the impacts of climate change or other causes resulting in loss to the physical territory of Tuvalu.

Source: Tuvalu.tv

My workflow for Thought Shrapnel is roughly: come across interesting article, save it to Pocket, revisit and write about it. There are plenty of articles that I don’t write about, and I sometimes go on hiatus from this blog for a while.

As I get older, I don’t really understand the desire to capture all of the things and link them together. It can become fetishistic, and obession. I seem to do alright in my personal and professional lives in terms of remembering stuff and combining them in new and interesting ways. And don’t particularly have a ‘system’. I just remember stuff that I’ve written about, and especially when I’ve written about it multiple times.

This article talks about the freedom of forgetting stuff. We’re loathe to let things go into the ether because we ascribe value to the things we’ve collected. However, I suppose because I’ve collected, written, and jettisoned so much stuff in my life, I’m very comfortable in getting rid of it. I don’t need a million tabs open, a bookmarks manager stuffed with links, or a meticulous system. My approach is based on curiosity, interest, and writing about stuff.

That’s the true value of notebooks, notes apps, bookmarking tools, and everything else built to help us remember. They’re insurance for ideas. They let us forget.

[…]

We need to forget, but we first must feel safe forgetting.

[…]

We didn’t need bookmarks and notes as much as we needed the safety of letting go. Anywhere we could save our thoughts was enough.

Source: Reproof

Image: Omar Al-Ghosson

I came across this blog post this morning and I can’t stop thinking about it. I wish I’d seen it when it was published a few months ago.

The author gives it the provocative title The Mainstreaming of Loserdom, explaining that it seems to have become normal for people to not only admit to having “no hobbies, no interests, no verve,” but be positively “gleeful” about it. It seems that a trend that had already been set in motion was accelerated due to the pandemic.

I needed to share the post here because I’m conflicted about it. On the one hand, I’ve never had a particularly interesting social life — at least by other people’s standards. On the other, I’m one of the people the author talks about that creates stuff on the internet.

What I think we’ve got is more people online than ever before, and so a larger sub-section of people who are, if not clinically depressed, certainly acting in a way that gives off morose vibes. They’re living life through the lens of consumption, something which our economic system incentivises. After all, it’s difficult to monetise people just hanging out having a chat. Unless it’s a podcast, I guess 😉

It was clear twenty years ago that someone who rarely engaged with their peers, didn’t really have friends, and didn’t really leave their house wasn’t aspirational: they were odd.

I know what people are going to say: not everyone drinks, not everyone parties, we have social anxiety, everything is too expensive… People simply aren’t connecting the way they used to, and I won’t be the bad guy for pointing out that it doesn’t surprise me that people are desperately lonely while also saying their favorite hobby is… staying home.

[…]

I’ll also defend myself preemptively and say not everyone has the same threshold for social interaction, which again, is fine. My issue is that I do not believe that the millions of people engaging with these posts all have very literal tolerance for social interaction.

[…]

I’ve been on the internet for twenty years: I’ve been on fanfiction.net, I’ve been on Livejournal, I’ve been on Tumblr. I was surrounded by people who spent time alone, but they were creating. They were writing, they were generating, they were knitting and sewing and painting and dreaming. The specific activity I’m talking about is a lack of any of this. The people screaming from their rooftops about how they don’t go anywhere and don’t have any friends aren’t the same people writing 70,000 words of Harry/Draco smut, I’m sorry! I know my people, and this feels different. It feels more sinister. Posting fanfiction online is a bid for community. Scrolling on your phone is not.

Source: Telling the Bees

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