Thought Shrapnel

Thought Shrapnel is in “low-power mode” over the summer, sharing 10 interesting things with minimal commentary ☀️

• Witty wotty dashes (Aeon) — “Because of its radical openness to difference, the doodle tends to function as a kind of meta-aesthetic attuned to containing a network of ambivalent affects and fleeting everyday aesthetic experiences that become increasingly common in the 20th century.”
• A moment that changed me: I resolved to reduce my screen time – and it was a big mistake (The Guardian) — “[R]educing my screen time had become its own form of phone addiction. Rather than escaping the need to seek validation from strangers online, I had happened upon a new way to earn their approval.”
• Chatbots Can Go Into a Delusional Spiral. Here’s How It Happens. (The New York Times) — “Sycophancy, in which chatbots agree with and excessively praise users, is a trait they’ve manifested partly because their training involves human beings rating their responses.”
• How to not build the Torment Nexus (Mike Monteiro’s Good News) — “As industries mature, they tend to get a little boring. And as industries age, and start seeing their own collapse over the horizon, they tend to get… defensive. Bitter. Conservative… Tech, which has always made progress in astounding leaps and bounds, is just speedrunning the cycle faster than any industry we’ve seen before.”
• System Font Stack — “Webfonts were great when most computers only had a handful of good fonts pre-installed. Thanks to font creation and buying by Apple, Microsoft, Google, and other folks, most computers have good—no, great—fonts installed, and they’re a great option if you want to not load a separate font.”
• Signal boss: ‘disturbing’ laws show the UK doesn’t understand tech (The Times) — “She says that one of the “most pernicious and alarming” problems is that if a company accepts a “technical capability notice”, it is prohibited from informing users. The upshot: “We don’t know [if any] other company has received one of those notices and responded by rolling over.” Whittaker says Signal has not received one, but that the company would sooner “leave” the UK than comply.”
• Welcome to the Cosmopolis (Contraptions) — “In brief, new technologies induce new normals through protocolization of what is initially a weird and scary sort of monstrousness irrupting across a frontier. Beyond that frontier lies a new kind of territory, a new kind of “soil” on which societies can be built.”
• Funding Open Source like public infrastructure (Dries Buytaert) — “Governments already maintain roads, bridges, and utilities, infrastructure that is essential but not always profitable or exciting for the private sector. Digital infrastructure deserves the same treatment. Public investment can keep these core systems healthy, while innovation and feature direction remain in the hands of the communities and companies that know the technology best.”
• “Privacy preserving age verification” is bullshit (Pluralistic) — “NERD HARDER! is the answer every time a politician gets a technological idée-fixe about how to solve a social problem by creating a technology that can’t exist. It’s the answer that EU politicians who backed the catastrophic proposal to require copyright filters for all user-generated content came up with, when faced with objections that these filters would block billions of legitimate acts of speech.”
• The Logic of the ‘9 to 5’ Is Creeping Into the Rest of the Day (The Atlantic) — “One way to look at 5-to-9 videos is as the product of people trying to make the most of the leisure time they have… But in attempting to take control back from their jobs, many 5-to-9 video creators end up reproducing a version of the thing they are trying to distance themselves from. If you clock out, go home, and continue checking things off a list, you haven’t really left the values of work behind.”

👋 See you next week!

– Doug