Thought Shrapnel

What I like about this website is that it’s not just “art” but art with a purpose. The subtitle of this project is Experimental Notation in Music, Art, Poetry, and Dance, 1950–1975 and covers artists I’ve heard of, such as John Cage, and many I haven’t.

What they share is an ability to rethink the way in which their art is denoted. For example:

The pointillism of Morton Feldman’s Intersection 3 is an early example of experimental musical notation. One of many pieces in the 1950s that Feldman wrote on graph paper, the work features a metronomic tempo while inviting its performer, the pianist David Tudor, to decide what pitches to play, prescribing only the number of notes and the general pitch range. The sounds that resulted evoked associations of combat and even brutality among critics, an aesthetic that Feldman himself described as “violently boiling water in some monstrous kettle.”

Ambiguity often gets a bad rap, but it’s something that fascinates me – and is, I believe, at the heart of creativity. You can see what I mean by looking at the overlapping circles diagram in this paper I wrote with my thesis supervisor 15 years ago.

TL;DR: words and symbols both denote and connote things, and it’s at the overlap of this denotation and connotation that interesting things happen.

Source: The Scores Project

Source: they can talk

Obviously staged, but I love this photo of the “artist and bon vivant” Peter Beard.

Source: Are.na

This is my favourite photo of those released by NASA from the Artemis II Lunar Flyby. There are also a lot more, including of the crew and ground control on the NASA Johnson Flickr account.

The first flyby images of the Moon captured by NASA’s Artemis II astronauts during their historic test flight reveal regions no human has ever seen before—including a rare in-space solar eclipse. Released Tuesday, April 7, 2026, the photos were taken on April 6 during the crew’s seven‑hour pass over the lunar far side, marking humanity’s return to the Moon’s vicinity.

Source: NASA | Artemis II Lunar Flyby

I’m building and experimenting with a new Thought Shrapnel-adjacent thing called Commonplace. It’s a federated collection manager for the open social web.

You can try it out and/or install your own version. I haven’t given up on the #MoodleNet idea of communities curating collections. It’s currently links-only, but once I get the right protections in place, I plan to allow resource uploads, as well as the ability to have to sign in to view collections.

Commonplace is a link collection manager for the open social web. Organise links by topic, invite collaborators, and share collections with people on Mastodon, Bluesky, and RSS — without asking them to sign up anywhere new.

Source: Commonplace

No Thought Shrapnel this week. Enjoy celebrating/not celebrating Easter however you do (or don’t do) it! 🙂

If you scratch away the surface, I’m still a History teacher underneath, so I love this idea of training an LLM on Victorian-era texts! It’s pretty slow, but fun.

Mr. Chatterbox is a language model trained entirely from scratch on a corpus of over 28,000 Victorian-era British texts published between 1837 and 1899, drawn from a dataset made available by the British Library. He is not a modern AI putting on an accent — his vocabulary, ideas, and worldview are formed exclusively from nineteenth-century literature.

He excels at discussions of Victorian life, literature, science, philosophy, manners, and the great questions of the age. Ask him about the railways, the Crystal Palace, Mr. Darwin’s theories, or the proper conduct of a gentleman. As the model is still in beta, some responses may be a little wonky. If this happens, click on an answer to regenerate it.

Source: Hugging Face

Image: Kristin Snippe

The key themes in this slide deck are interesting, especially as I like to be able to name things that I’m seeing/sensing:

• Aspirational Humanity – “As artificial intelligence hyper-flattens mass culture, anything denoting evidence of humanity becomes exceptionally desirable.”
• Sensorial Potency – “The drive to over-optimize everything has left us in a sensory void.”
• Subversive Sincerity – “The performance of ironic detachment is growing tired, and the fantasy of regressive nostalgia is no longer meeting expectations.”
• Algorithmic Evasion – “Exasperation with social media isn’t new, but chaos overload and sloppification has pushed annoyance to a threshold for action.”
• Subtle Sustainability – “Politicization has quieted brand environmental efforts over the past year, while the public succumbs to eco-fatigue upon realizing the relatively miniscule impact of individual action.”

Source: WHAT’S ANU (more here)

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