Thought Shrapnel

Wow, rude.

Source: Are.na

This is an incredible read, and I’d encourage you to set aside the time to do so. I’m old so I literally printed it out to give it the attention it deserves.

Cade Diehm, founder of New Design Congress, explains where we’re at. It’s a long essay, so this post is going to be longer than your average Thought Shrapnel post.

Diehm argues that last year, there were a couple of long-standing trends which combined. Each trend had multiple sub-trends:

First, the rise of techno-authoritarianism was enabled by elite overproduction causing white-collar workers to lean right.

For nearly fifteen years, victories that civil society had considered impossible just… kept happening. Brexit was a shock. Trump 2016 was a shock. Bolsonaro was a shock. Each time, the same institutions that had failed to predict the previous “impossible” outcome confidently assured everyone that they had learned from their mistakes and could now see clearly. Each time, they were wrong in precisely the same way. The unthinkable – which was becoming very fucking thinkable even before large swathes of the ‘old country’ voted to destroy its own economy and isolate itself from the European Union – should have been at the forefront of everyone’s minds. It just wasn’t.

Meanwhile, the post-COVID and post-DOGE structural collapse of a “professionalised” civil society infrastructure (which had long since lost touch with reality) means that frustrated “counter-elites” are willing to stand and watch it all burn. They are guided intellectually by figures like Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land who normalise the idea that “democracy is theatre” and that technology should “operate beyond democratic control”.

What the first half of the 2020s demonstrated something worse than incompetence or moral failure: Civil society had become structurally incapable of seeing anything beyond its own comforts, its own reporting metrics, and its own operational assumptions. The same adversary returned, better organised, and far better prepared. What the authoritarian apparatus met was a civil society architecture that had not truly hardened in response, because civil society had lost the capacity to respond to material conditions. Civil society’s collapse displaced precisely the people who had assumed their positions were permanent.

And in that collapse, you can hear clearly the death rattle of Cold War economics, the spectacular end to Fukuyama’s short-lived End of History pinkie-promise. Some institutions fell to earth without even a whimper, their directors discovering one morning that decades of carefully cultivated influence had evaporated overnight.

Others – and I speak to you plainly from painful and intimate experience – turned cannibal. Without shame or decorum, they devoured their allies and their own children in desperate, grotesque attempts to survive another quarter. What they all have in common is a shared façade of legitimacy, resilience, and insight. Each came down with spectacular clarity, each a wingless fuselage, quietly descending to the depths of the ocean floor.

At the same time, a new tech frontier has been enabled through LLMs, crypto, and digital identity. It’s an opaque enforcement infrastructure used by elites use to create what Diehm calls a “boom‑extract‑enforce” cycle. They launch new systems, extract value through artificial scarcity, then lock people by making them too embedded (and technically complex) to contest.

But why technology, and why now? There are many reasons – thresholds of money, structure, and discipline, yes – but also because the new generation of tech is a distinct lineup: large language models, the metaverse, cryptography, cryptocurrency, digital identity, and quantum computing. Together, they form an uninterpretable frontier that simultaneously penetrates everything while remaining incomprehensible to democratic oversight.

However, as Diehm notes, all is not lost. All of this is materially fragile, dependent on vulnerable physical infrastructure, as shown by MR CHOPPY:

The technobros and the shell-shocked civil-society actor alike are incapable of seeing the contradiction they both agree on: physical infrastructure as immaterial and disposable despite its precarious fragility while simultaneously fetishising the copyable, hackable, unstable, and constantly degrading contents of the digital as resilient, transcendent, and handed down from God himself.

Also, the same elite overproduction which creates techno‑authoritarians also produces what Diehm calls “fallen angels” which are displaced insiders with capital, skills and a sense of betrayal. They are now reachable directly, without having to go via NGOs. So what he proposes is to build “post‑institutions” which can briefly described as low‑overhead, infrastructure‑independent, venue‑less, “deletable” forms of organisation. Thse prioritise discretion, direct relationships and guaranteed exit, offering alternative power bases rather than trying to revive the hollowed‑out civil‑society model.

Source: New Design Congress

Image: Tiana Attride

Well, indeed.

My little robot friend says the origin is as follows:

That line is from the 1704 pamphlet “A Defence of a Book intituled The Snake in the Grass. In reply to several Answers put out to it by George Whitehead, Joseph Wyeth, &c.” by the Anglican controversialist Charles Leslie.

Source: Are.na

I’ve been travelling to and from Huddersfield today (2.5 hours each way) for my daughter’s JPL football match. My wife and I shared the driving, so I took the opportunity to do some reading and also… get Claude to do some analysis of Thought Shrapnel (2018-2026)

For those interested, the chart at the top shows my 50 most-referenced sources, from a total of 2117 total sources. The top 50 are links below; no massive surprises! It does go to show, however, the diversity of sources that I link to here…

• en.wikipedia.org
• unsplash.com
• theguardian.com
• dougbelshaw.com
• youtube.com
• medium.com
• bbc.co.uk
• nytimes.com
• theatlantic.com
• twitter.com
• mailchi.mp
• fastcompany.com
• wired.com
• aeon.co
• moodle.com
• weareopen.coop
• theverge.com
• betterimagesofai.org
• are.na
• patreon.com
• worldcat.org
• linkedin.com
• flickr.com
• newyorker.com
• github.com
• openai.com
• arstechnica.com
• addons.mozilla.org
• downes.ca
• eff.org
• web.archive.org
• kottke.org
• bbc.com
• technologyreview.com
• hbr.org
• techcrunch.com
• vox.com
• social.coop
• openbadges.org
• qz.com
• goodreads.com
• bonfirenetworks.org
• vice.com
• garbageday.email
• creativecommons.org
• blog.weareopen.coop
• laurahilliger.com
• warrenellis.ltd
• opensource.com
• boingboing.net

I’ve also extracted ever RSS feed for sources I’ve referenced more than once into an OPML file, which you can access here and import to RSS readers (including Stream).

Last week, after seeing yet another person wax lyrical about Current (on this occasion without even using it!) I decided that I needed to do something about it.

Most RSS readers ask you to “mark as read.” Think about what that language implies. You’re granting the article a status change, like an administrator processing paperwork. Read. Filed. Handled.

Current asks you to release.

You can release from anywhere. In the river, a long swipe left on a card sends it flying off the screen. The remaining cards settle into the gap, the way water fills a space. One article, one gesture, gone.

Current, you see, while a fantastic idea, is only available for Apple devices. So I decided to create Stream which is Open Source, and cross-platform.

Terry Godier, the author of Current was gracious in his response, and subsequently wrote a blog post about it:

This morning someone posted a video showing a version of Current they had built with an LLM. My reaction wasn’t to be upset or threatened or defensive. I felt disappointed. I wish they had pushed further, or added something new. What they built lacked a lot of the character and philosophy of what I did and only approximated the look.

The hard work of building a thing now isn’t writing the code. But I don’t think it ever was.

[…]

I think it’s really great to be excited about building things. There’s an agency, a sovereignty you can feel when building and I’m over the moon that more people get to experience that.

But if I might: my advice to new builders is to trust that the bajillion dollar, bleeding edge system you’re using is capable of doing what’s already been done.

That means that you can take risks. You can ignore the prior art. You can push further and discover what your tastes are and how you might make better software, and differently shaped software. Use those new powers to build the future, not another piece of the past.

So I’m taking onboard that advice. Not only does Stream have a different approach (you need a backend to connect to) but also I’ve added accessibility features, pausing, and some other things that are useful to me – and might be useful to others

Source: Terry Godier

Image: Robert Zunikoff

A useful reminder — especially for me.

Source: Are.na

I agree with this clear-eyed metaphor from Greg Wilson, riffing off Steve Jobs' famous quotation that computers are “bicycles for the mind”. It’s certainly been my experience that LLMs have enabled me to do things that I otherwise wouldn’t have done! Check out the ‘Tools’ section of my Dynamic Skillset website, for example. And that doesn’t even list everything…

[I]f a computer is a bicycle for the mind, then LLMs are like e-bikes. They let a lot of people go distances and tackle hills that they couldn’t before, and they’re better for all of us than cars, but they’re a menace to both pedestrians and traditional cyclists, more harmful to the environment than what they’re replacing, and have given companies yet another way to hollow out local businesses. (Neighborhood restaurants know that cheap delivery services are killing them slowly, but if they don’t play, they’ll just die more quickly.)

Source: Third Bit

Image: Himiway Bikes

The widely-referenced “stochastic parrots” paper from five years ago is no out of date. In it, Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, et al. argue that LLMs remix patterns in text without genuine understanding. This has knock‑on effects for how we (should) use and trust them. It’s a familiar argument, using the same approach as John Searle’s famous Chinese Room argument about ‘black box’ symbol‑shuffling without understanding.

I don’t know Pete Wolfendale, but I have just discovered that he is an independent philosopher based in Newcastle‑upon‑Tyne, so I should probably look him up. In this post he pushes back on the idea that LLMs are “stochastic parrots” and uses that as a way into some bigger questions about what we mean by “meaning” in the first place.

I think it’s maybe worth summarising why I think post-Searlean critics of AI such as Emily Bender are wrong to dismiss the outputs of LLMs as meaningless. Though it’s perhaps best to begin with a basic discussion of what’s at stake in these debates.

Much like the term ‘consciousness’, the term ‘meaning’ often plays proxy for other ideas. For example, saying systems can’t be conscious is often a way of saying they’ll never display certain degrees of intelligence or agency, without addressing the underlying capacities.

Similarly, being able to simply say ‘but they don’t even know what they’re saying’ is a simple way to foreclose further debate about the communicative and reasoning capacities of LLMs without having to pick apart the lower level processes underpinning communication and reasoning.

While Wolfenden agrees that current systems don’t have beliefs, intentions, or a stable view of the world, nor does he think that they’re “just” meaningless text generators:

1. Grounding - a lot of human language isn’t directly tied to what we personally see or do. We can talk meaningfully about things like black holes, stock markets, or bowel cancer because we trust expert communities - not because we all have first‑hand access. So it’s at least plausible that LLMs pick up some real, socially grounded content from the human language they’re compressing.
2. Intention - while he accepts that LLMs do not have inner communicative goals, Wolfenden suggests that this is not as much of a big deal as critics suggest. He compares the outputs of LLMs to rumours - i.e. statements produced by a diffuse social process. We can still interpret, question, and trace this back to wider patterns of usage. LLMs sit inside our language community in this way, even if they are not full participants.
3. All-or-nothing thinking - Wolfenden argues that we should avoid binary thinking about minds and meaning. Humans also talk lazily, gossip, and say things we later revise. We can be asked for reasons for our views and have our views be reshaped, which is the difference between us and current models. There is still overlap here. As he says, LLMs are “in the game, even if they’re not strictly playing it.”

Source: DEONTOLOGISTICS

This post by Dave Snowden, originator of the Cynefin framework, relates to post I shared by Tom Watson about ‘loose ends’.

I have been writing recently, and will write more, about the difference between containers and landscapes: how interventions can be real within their boundaries and yet leave everything structurally unchanged outside them. The coaching session that produces genuine insight. The workshop that shifts something in the room. And two weeks later, nothing. The container was real. The landscape was unchanged.

[…]

I have written elsewhere about what a different approach might look like in practice: working obliquely, creating conditions for empathy through shared action rather than mediated dialogue, allowing conversation to arise from mutual work rather than being engineered by a third party with an agenda. The Derry Girls scene captures the failure mode with comic precision. The reconciliation workshop produces nothing. The two smiles exchanged across the room, unprompted, unmediated, while chaos erupts around the parents, are where something real briefly appears. You cannot programme that moment. You can only create the conditions that make it possible.

Source: The Cynefin Co.

Everything that’s wrong with the world, captured neatly in one cartoon.

Source: Tom Gauld

Tom was talking to me about his thinking about this post when we met up earlier this week to discuss next steps for TechFreedom, our joint project.

Essentially, the problem is that things like workshops, events, projects, and even programmes of work have an internal logic to them. This logic dictates whether or not they are designated ‘successful’. Whereas, the world is a messy and complicated place, and simply giving people opportunities to connect and think things through can have much more profound consequences.

Most of what happens in a workshop or a session is only ever useful if people can take it back into their own context and make sense of it there. A good facilitator will create rooms and spaces that support the workshop. But however well designed, the room is artificial. The real work happens when someone is back at their desk on a Tuesday morning trying to figure out what any of it means for the decision they’re actually facing.

If we resolve everything in the session with neat actions, clear conclusions, a satisfying arc, there is the potential we’ve artificially done the sense-making for them. We’ve removed the productive friction of trying to figure out what it means to me in my context outside the room. We’ve made it easy to file the experience away.

But what if we leave a question hanging, one that is genuinely & intentionally unresolved, not because we ran out of time but because we chose to? One that forces them to contextualise, to test an idea against their own reality, to keep thinking after the room has emptied.

Maybe the loose end isn’t a failure of facilitation. In some cases maybe it’s the mechanism.

Source: Tom Watson

I’m not saying that you need to be an expert on the history of every country of the world, but when there’s a major crisis going on, understanding why it’s all kicking off is at least worth understanding.

Source: Ted Rall

Source: Are.na

It’s almost a decade since one of the greatest economic harms a country has ever self-inflicted. Yes, I’m talking about Brexit.

Finally, we’re getting to the stage when our current government, which is not the one that instigated the referendum, can say that “Brexit did deep damage”. Let’s hope we get back into bed with our European neighbours ASAP. The decline in Britain over the last 10 years is tangible.

“Brexit did deep damage.” With those words at her Mais lecture on Tuesday, Chancellor Rachel Reeves made it clear that there has been an important shift within the Labour Party - one that government ministers have been signalling for some time.

“Let me say this directly to our friends and allies in Europe. This government believes a deeper relationship is in the interest of the whole of Europe,” she said, while at the same time insisting that the government was not trying to “turn back the clock” on Brexit.

Speaking in such overt terms about Brexit’s perceived harms in part reflects a belief that, as the government attempts to turn around the country’s persistently sluggish economic performance, it must be more ambitious in its attempt to “reset” the UK’s post-Brexit relationship with the EU.

[…]

Speaking at a literary festival in October, Wes Streeting, the health secretary, said: “I’m glad that Brexit is a problem whose name we now dare speak,” and indicated that he believed being outside the EU was making it difficult to deliver the economic growth the government had promised.

The deputy prime minister, David Lammy, said in a podcast that it was “self-evident” that Brexit had damaged the economy and noted the economic benefit that Turkey had derived from its customs agreement with the EU.

Meanwhile, in further evidence of pressure within Labour’s ranks to rethink its policy on Brexit, on Wednesday the London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, called for the UK to rejoin the EU customs union and single market before the next election, and then campaign at that ballot on a promise to rejoin the EU.

Source: BBC News

This is definitely not for everyone, but ContraPoints (Natalie Wynn) is awesome and always makes compelling videos. This one weighs in at a little over an hour and a half, so I’m still watching it.

Ever since studying Philosophy of Art & Literature as an undergraduate, in which we looked at why people watch horror films, I’ve understood that disgust is actually a complicated emotion. As ContraPoints explains through the Saw series of films, so-called film critics have things all wrong.

I love the provocation that Home Alone is a a more ethically problematic film that Saw because we identify with the aggressor (Kevin) rather than the victims (the Wet Bandits) in the former.

The closest I get to horror these days (or any day) is watching films like Sinners which I watched with my son at the cinema recently. Once you understand that there is an art to these things, and that they have lessons for us as humans, it opens up a whole new world.

Source: YouTube

I did not enjoy studying Formal Logic as a Philosophy undergraduate. But it stood me in good stead.

I’m pretty sure there are plenty of people who wouldn’t even understand what’s wrong with the above reasoning, and in fact it explains a lot of what is wrong with the world… 🙄

Source: X via Are.na

Yes, Claude Cowork is great, but the secret sauce is actually Claude Code which you can access via the Claude app. Even better is doing so from the command line interface (CLI).

The advantage of the CLI is that you’re fully in control of your project. The difficulty, of course, is that unless you grew up having to load computer games via DOS, and unless you’ve got a mental model of how product development works, it’s going to feel very odd.

Source: How to AI

Whatever you call it, having everything in space you control has always made sense.

Why am I doing all this? Because I got inspired by the concept of POSSE: “Publish on your own, syndicate elsewhere.” For me, ROOTS is the logical first step toward that: “Return Old Online Things to your own Site” (yes, I made this up). Why? If I do decide to delete my X account or if Blogger gets quietly discontinued, then I don’t care: it’s all on my site already. I own it. It’s all Markdown files and images that I can back up anywhere I want.

You’ll see me POSSE (or PESOS – “Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site”) in the future, too: If I post a Goodreads review, it’ll also be on my Notes and Everything pages. If I post on LinkedIn, it’ll be there, too. Everything I create and find important will eventually end up on my website.

Source: Lisa Charlotte Muth

Image: GG

An insightful post from Max Read about stylistic preferences with regards to human vs AI text. Every relevant technology changes writing and, in turn, literate culture.

In many contexts most people can (more or less) correctly differentiate between A.I.-generated output and its “authentic” counterpart–but cannot correctly attribute the output.

What’s funny about this is: We actually really want to prefer human-authored writing! In open-label tests, where the excerpts are shown with attribution, people consistently express preference for whatever text is labeled human, even when the text is actually A.I.-generated. (So do A.I. evaluators, as I learned at the conference from Wouter Haverals, to an even greater degree.)

This is not a particularly satisfying set of findings insofar as it validates neither the A.I.-booster “it’s so over, A.I. writing is better than human writing” side nor the A.I.-skeptic “A.I. can never write like a human” side. What we can say is that people mostly can’t identify A.I.-generated text as A.I.-generated (crowd boos), but they can sometimes distinguish between it and human-authored text (crowd cheers); it’s just that they tend to think the A.I.-generated text is human (crowd boos), maybe because human-generated text is stranger, worse, or more difficult (crowd hesitantly cheers), which readers mistakenly believe is more typical of A.I.-generated text (crowd silent now) and thereby disprefer (crowd sort of murmuring confusedly), unless you tell them it’s actually human, in which case they change their minds and like it (crowd has mostly left at this point).

But all of it taken together suggests that, given our strong bias in favor of writing we believe to be human, A.I. vs. human “preference” tests (or “reads better” quizzes) are often second-order “identification” tests, in each case measuring not “preference” per se but the accuracy of the prevailing heuristics for identifying A.I. writing. Participants in these studies, it would seem, express preference for the A.I.-generated writing not because it’s “better” in some formal sense–cleaner, simpler, more beautiful, whatever–but because their “flawed heuristics” have led them to the conclusion that it’s human-authored, and ipso facto better.

[…]

As long as people want to prefer human-authored to L.L.M.-generated writing, we will place a premium on whatever style we associate with human authorship–even as that style changes. You can already see this process beginning from the other direction on social networks like Twitter, where em-dashes and not-x-but-y contrastive corrections–perfectly innocuous and useful writerly tools which not five years ago would likely have been highly correlated with “good prose”–are immediately treated with derision and suspicion. By that same token, certain kinds of “bad writing” should be seen as evidence of human authorship. How long before run-on sentences are preferred to em-dashes?

L.L.M.s, of course, can and will get better at mimicking the “strangeness,” clunkiness, and badness of human prose; I’m skeptical of claims that there is some built-in technical limitation that prevents A.I. text from ever being truly indistinguishable from human prose. What seems more likely to me is that as L.L.M.s move away from the easily identifiable generic LinkedIn style that currently dominates, our preferences will move as well, in an attempt to stay one step ahead.

Source: Read Max

Image: Randy Tarampi

Source: YouTube