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

Auto-generated description: A scatter plot displays generative AI apps with axes showing average daily time spent per user versus average daily active users, where bubble sizes represent app revenue.
  • 4o-4 Not Found (thejaymo) — “Looking closer, 72% of Character.AI’s users are female. Which suggests the rug-pull of 4o more widely may be less a sad incel AI girlfriend story and more an AI boyfriend apocalypse.
  • Review of Anti-Aging Drugs (Aging Matters) — “My favorites from this list are Melatonin, Berberine, NAC, Rapamycin, and Selegiline. I can recommend the first three unequivocally. Rapamycin has down sides that you should consider, and Selegiline has effects on mood and energy that you may like or dislike. Personally, I take a variety of anti-inflammatory supplements, and I’m glad to have an excuse to eat dark chocolate.”
  • Digital Sovereignty Index (Nextcloud) — “Whether it’s about protecting sensitive data, avoiding vendor lock-in or ensuring democratic control over infrastructure, the debate around digital sovereignty is gaining momentum. But how sovereign is a country’s digital infrastructure in practice?”
  • Porn censorship is going to destroy the entire internet (Mashable) — “The stated reason behind these laws is to “protect children.” But as journalist Taylor Lorenz pointed out, in the UK, age verification is already preventing children from accessing vital information, such as about menstruation and sexual assault.”
  • Sunny Days Are Warm: Why LinkedIn Rewards Mediocrity (Elliot C Smith) — “The vast majority of it falls into Toxic Mediocrity. It’s soft, warm and hard to publicly call out but if you’re not deep in the bubble it reads like nonsense. Unlike it’s cousins ‘Toxic Positivity’ and ‘Toxic Masculinity’ it isn’t as immediately obvious. It’s content that spins itself as meaningful and insightful while providing very little of either. Underneath the one hundred and fifty words is, well, nothing. It’s a post that lets you know that sunny days are warm or its better not to be a total psychopath. What is anyone supposed to learn from that.”
  • The End of Handwriting (WIRED) — “But if kids always have access to devices, does it really matter whether they can write with their hands? Yes and no. If the past few years of digital nomad work and vibe coding have taught us anything it’s that, professionally, handwriting may not be all that necessary in a lot of fields. The problem is that learning handwriting might be necessary to learn everything else. “We don’t yet know what we are losing in terms of literacy acquisition by de-emphasizing handwriting fluency,” Ray says.”
  • ‘A climate of unparalleled malevolence’: are we on our way to the sixth major mass extinction? (The Guardian) — “It turns out that there are only a few known ways, demonstrated in the entire geologic history of the Earth, to liberate gigatons of carbon from the planet’s crust into the atmosphere. There are your once-every-50m-years-or-so spasms of large igneous province volcanism, on the one hand, and industrial capitalism, which, as far as we know, has only happened once, on the other.”
  • Why I’m all-in on Zen Browser (Ben Werdmuller) — “So I was pleased to rediscover Zen Browser, which has improved in leaps and bounds since I last tried it. It has a very Arc-inspired UI that gets out of your face quickly, with all the customization and keyboard shortcuts you’d expect from something built on top of Firefox. I use vertical tabs in a sidebar that auto-hides, and I can navigate just as smoothly as I ever did with Arc.”
  • Changes Coming to Higher Ed (Hybrid Horizons) — “Some may not land as written; timelines slip, context matters, contexts change, things shift and people can surprise us. Still, read this as a calm, plain-spoken brief about potential shifts coming in the sector.”
  • The circular economy could make demolition a thing of the past – here’s how (The Conversation) — “This paradigm shift – from a single-use mindset to one of “reduce, reuse, recycle” – is already common in other fields. It is now starting to take hold in construction through various global initiatives that seek to integrate these concepts into safer, more sustainable and more durable buildings. They show how this can be achieved through conscious design, based on concepts such as modularity and standardisation.”

👋 See you next week!

– Doug