Thought Shrapnel

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

Image CC BY-NC-ND su-lin

• 99 Problems: The Ice Cream Truck’s Surprising History (Longreads) — “The Glasgow Ice Cream Van Wars sound like they had all the elements of a cozy crime novel, but the reality was very different. The city’s Serious Crime Squad was dispatched to investigate and stop the fighting, but quickly became the object of derision, renamed by the locals as the Serious Chimes Squad, thanks to their inability to apprehend the perpetrators.”
• We must fight age verification with all we have (User Mag) — “Age verification, like book bans and obscenity laws, will not be narrowly used to prevent access to pornography–it will be used to “legislate morality,” control access to information and limit people’s freedom to self-manage their health and family well-being according to their own morals.”
• A new personality type - ‘Otrovert’ - is here to make life even more confusing (GQ) — “‘Otrovert’ – coined this year by New York psychiatrist Dr. Rami Kaminski – describes people who are averse to communing with groups, a bit like Groucho Marx who famously refused to join a club that would have him as a member (it seems the term “Marxist” was already taken). Other characteristics of otroverts include being an ‘original thinker’, ‘valuing deep connections’ and preferring ‘authenticity over conformity. If that sounds relatable, why not join the club? Erm. Maybe not.”
• The ROI of exercise (Herman’s blog) — “It’s well understood that a good exercise routine is a mixture of strength, mobility, and cardio; and is performed at a decent intensity for 2-4 days a week for at least 45 minutes…. This totals about 3 hours a week, or 156 hours per year. If we extrapolate that over an adult lifetime, that’s about 8,500 hours of exercise, or about a year of solid physical activity…[O]ver a lifetime, one full year of exercise leads to 10 full years of extra life. That’s a 1:10 return on investment! So even without any of the additional benefits… this is still one of the best investments you can make.”
• Are Marathon Runners More Likely to Get Cancer? (VICE) — “It all started when Dr. Timothy Cannon, an oncologist at Inova Schar Cancer Institute, noticed something off. Three of his patients, all under 40, were super-fit endurance athletes. They didn’t drink. They didn’t smoke. One was vegan. Yet all had advanced colon cancer, and none of the usual risk factors. So, he turned this mystery into a research study.”
• Writing with LLM is not a shame. An essay about transparency on AI use. (reflexions) — “I think we fell in a ethical fallacy, in a way, with the emergence of a new tech. Even if we compare LLM with other techs, we do not have the same ethics requirements against LLM. Some might say we have to because ELM can generate much more than previous techs but we are falling again in the same reasoning trap.”
• Britain leads the world in a new global business—a criminal one (The Economist) — “Britain accounts for 40% of phone thefts in Europe… British thieves’ favoured method is to approach from behind on an electric bike, grab an unlocked phone and put it in a “Faraday bag” to prevent tracking; most of the nicked phones end up in China. Meanwhile, around 130,000 cars were stolen in Britain last year, a rise of 75% in a decade. SUVs are popular targets, for export to the Gulf and Africa, where they can handle poor roads.”
• We Are Still Unable to Secure LLMs from Malicious Inputs (Schneier on Security) — “This kind of thing should make everybody stop and really think before deploying any AI agents. We simply don’t know to defend against these attacks. We have zero agentic AI systems that are secure against these attacks. Any AI that is working in an adversarial environment—and by this I mean that it may encounter untrusted training data or input—is vulnerable to prompt injection. It’s an existential problem that, near as I can tell, most people developing these technologies are just pretending isn’t there.”
• Reform and the UK press (mainly macro) — “The recent coverage of immigration and asylum in the right wing press has been almost apocalyptic. They have been hyping small demonstrations as if they were indicators of impending national unrest, and the broadcast media has largely followed their lead. The recent celebration by the Mail, Sun and Telegraph of someone who pleaded guilty to inciting racial hatred makes “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” sound rather tame. We have reached the point where a majority of the print media are in effect encouraging civil unrest and racial hatred, yet thanks to political short termism this press remains essentially unaccountable for their behaviour.”
• The great university rip-off (The New World) — “Among dozens of my friends leaving university this year, only three are heading straight into employment. The rest are either going on to further study or taking a gap year before doing so – in their own words, to avoid the inevitable hellscape of the grad job market. For those of us who have braved the post-university job application humiliation ritual, we know we should be grateful to even get a rejection letter, and to try not to have a breakdown when our parents send us 8,000 articles about graduates on universal credit or AI replacing interns.”

👋 See you next week!

– Doug