Thought Shrapnel

I’m not going to comment on the death of Charlie Kirk, but I would like to point to Garbage Day, the newsletter by Ryan Broderick which I quote regularly here on Thought Shrapnel. For me, it’s an essential aid to understand the world as it is today.

Another newsletter called Today in Tabs summarised the Garbage Day post I’m going to cite here the following way:

So in summary: it appears that this was a shooting where the victim, an influencer, was answering a question from another influencer when he was shot by a third influencer, after which a fourth influencer documented the ensuing chaos and a host of other influencers registered their takes, before the director of the FBI (an influencer) and the deputy director of the FBI (another influencer) announced the alleged shooter’s apprehension with a quote from Mad Max.

This is the way the world is today: confusing, and extremely online.

The Garbage Day post is therefore really useful and insightful. It explains terms such as “groyper” that I haven’t come across before and, as the father of an 18 year-old boy (man!), these are things it’s important to know about and discuss/share with teenagers. Well worth a read.

It’s also possible [suspect Tyler] Robinson genuinely believes in antifascist principles. But his alleged use of random internet brainrot is notable. Many extremism researchers this morning are wondering if Robinson is a self-identified “groyper,” or follower of far-right streamer Nick Fuentes. As we wrote yesterday, Fuentes has spent years attacking Kirk online. Groypers believed that Kirk was a sellout and blocking a much more extreme version of Trumpism from taking root. For years, Groypers have been carrying out what they call “Groyper Wars,” attending Kirk’s events and trying to disrupt them. For what it’s worth, 4chan users think Robinson was a Groyper.

Source: Garbage Day

Image: Steve Johnson

In general, there’s a difference between “being an informed citizen” and “being a news junkie.” Due to the fact that most people now get their ‘news’ via social media, and social networks are mostly algorithmic, there is often an emotional and/or partisan filter through which people obtain information. This is not good for our individual or collective mental health.

As a result, record numbers of people—including me— are limiting the amount of news they consume. Or at least how they consume it. I’ve even mostly stopped listening to The Rest is Politics, formerly one of my favourite podcasts. As this article points out, you have to be able to do something with the information you receive.

Globally, news avoidance is at a record high, according to an annual survey by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published in June. This year, 40% of respondents, surveyed across nearly 50 countries, said they sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29% in 2017 and the joint highest figure recorded.

The number was even higher in the US, at 42%, and in the UK, at 46%. Across markets, the top reason people gave for actively trying to avoid the news was that it negatively impacted their mood. Respondents also said they were worn out by the amount of news, that there is too much coverage of war and conflict, and that there’s nothing they can do with the information.

[…]

Studies suggest that increased exposure to news – particularly via television and social media, and especially coverage of tragic or distressing events – can take a toll on mental health.

[…]

A growing body of advice online promotes healthier ways to consume news. Much of it focuses on creating guardrails so people can be deliberate about finding information when they’re ready for it, instead of letting it reach them in a constant stream. This might include signing up for newsletters or summaries from trusted sources, turning off news alerts and limiting social media.

Source: The Guardian

Image: Buddy AN

Good stuff, as ever, from Jay Springett. He’s ostensibly talking about arguing on the internet, but this post is really about identity. Your identity might be reflected in the things you do or like, but this does not comprise the sum total of that identity.

Now, I get it, I totally do. I understand that when ones identity has been so completely ‘formatted’ by social platforms and consumer capitalism that an attack on a media property, tv show, album, podcast, game, book, football team or whatever, feels like an attack on your own identity as a person. One can’t help feel the need to go to war, to protect yourself. You aren’t the media you consume, and media properties aren’t your friends. Why argue or care about if genre fiction “is real literature” or not? I suspect its because people feel like they need validation for their choice of media diet? Validation for the amount of time and energy one has spent putting ones attention towards a certain interest. This need for validation results in people expressing their taste online, not by sharing what they love, but by fighting with someone who doesn’t.

[…]

There is a fundamental truth about the internet, and it also applies to building/having an audience: 99.9% of opinions on the internet don’t matter. You don’t know these people, and they don’t know you. Other peoples approval won’t keep you warm but the perceived lack of it will keep you awake at night. Their disapproval also shouldn’t stop you from loving the thing. You don’t need anyones approval to post on the internet, you can just do things, and like stuff.

The only people whose opinions really matter in this world are the ones expressed from across the table. From your family and friends over dinner. The people in your life who’ll ask your recommendations because they know that your taste is your own.

Source: thejaymo

Image: Kristaps Ungers

Announced Wednesday morning, the “Really Simple Licensing” (RSL) standard evolves robots.txt instructions by adding an automated licensing layer that’s designed to block bots that don’t fairly compensate creators for content.

Free for any publisher to use starting today, the RSL standard is an open, decentralized protocol that makes clear to AI crawlers and agents the terms for licensing, usage, and compensation of any content used to train AI, a press release noted.

The standard was created by the RSL Collective, which was founded by Doug Leeds, former CEO of Ask.com, and Eckart Walther, a former Yahoo vice president of products and co-creator of the RSS standard, which made it easy to syndicate content across the web.

Based on the “Really Simple Syndication” (RSS) standard, RSL terms can be applied to protect any digital content, including webpages, books, videos, and datasets. The new standard supports “a range of licensing, usage, and royalty models, including free, attribution, subscription, pay-per-crawl (publishers get compensated every time an AI application crawls their content), and pay-per-inference (publishers get compensated every time an AI application uses their content to generate a response),” the press release said.

[…]

Eckart [Walther, co-creator of RSS] had watched the RSS standard quickly become adopted by millions of sites, and he realized that RSS had actually always been a licensing standard, Leeds said. Essentially, by adopting the RSS standard, publishers agreed to let search engines license a “bit” of their content in exchange for search traffic, and Eckart realized that it could be just as straightforward to add AI licensing terms in the same way. That way, publishers could strive to recapture lost search revenue by agreeing to license all or some part of their content to train AI in return for payment each time AI outputs link to their content.

Source: Ars Technica

Image: Leo Lau & Digit

As quoted in The Marginalian, writer Annie Dillard famously stated “How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.” The longer quotation, arguing in favour of adding structure and a schedule to your day goes like this:

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.

Although he cites Tim Urban as an influence rather than Annie Dillard, this post by Nathan Brown makes a similar point. We have a finite amount of time on this earth, and finite number of hours available to us each week. A surprising number of these are discretionary—as in, whether it feels like it or not, we can choose how to use them.

I’m not a huge hustler. I’m not necessarily advocating that you spend your 52 hours/week building a startup or working an extra job. But I’m also an advocate for not being super lazy and sitting around and watching TikTok/YouTube all day.

I guess my point is to be intentional with how you spend your time, and to realize you actually have a surprising amount of it, once you account for all the essentials. What percentage of your discretionary time do you want to spend on…

• hanging out with friends
• bettering yourself
• outdoor activities
• volunteering
• creative expression (art, writing, etc.)
• entertainment

You choose—seriously. Not trying to guilt-trip you into anything. But I will be damned if I go through my life spending 10 of my discretionary hours/week watching Instagram Reels and then my gravestone says:

“Nathan was a kind, loving soul. His greatest achievement was watching 7,000,000 Instagram Reels.”

Source: Nathan Brown

Image: Resource Database

As the UK moves steadily towards a fully-renewable future, one of the issues can be stabilising the power grid when electricity suddenly drops or spikes. Wind and solar energy can, after all, be unpredictable. Traditionally, fossil fuel power stations have helped with this stabilisation, but these are being shut down to cut emissions and fight climate change.

New ‘grid-scale’ batteries are being build which act like giant backup reservoirs for electricity. They store extra power when there’s a surplus (e.g. sunny days, windy nights) and then quickly release this to the grid whenever there’s an unexpected drop. As the battery doesn’t burn fuel or make pollution, it’s great for the environment, and the new technology is fast enough to fill the power gap nearly instantly.

Zenobē’s global director of network infrastructure, Semih Oztreves, predicts that grid-forming batteries will ultimately corner the stability market thanks to their inherent multifunctionality. While synchronous condensers mostly sit idle, waiting for a rare grid fault, Zenobē’s advanced batteries earn daily revenue by doing what most other storage sites do. For example, they arbitrage energy, absorbing power when it’s cheap and selling when supplies get tight.

But the short-circuit chops of grid-forming batteries haven’t yet faced a real-life test. Until then, doubts linger about whether transmission relays will respond appropriately to the inverters’ digitally defined surge of current. In a report last year for Australian grid operator Transgrid, one expert advised against overreliance on grid-forming inverters for short-circuit current, saying that it would carry “high to very high risk.” The utility later announced 10 synchronous condensers and 5 grid-forming batteries to bolster its grid.

Source & image: IEEE Spectrum

Something I say semi-regularly to friends and family is “people can only treat you the way you let them.” Inspired by quotations from Seth Godin and James Clear, this post is the other side of the coin. It’s about the way you treat yourself.

This year, I’ve had tests for a whole range of things. One by one I’ve discovered there’s nothing wrong with the structure of my heart, with my lungs, thyroid, adrenal glands—and I’m not anaemic. As the year has gone on, I’ve gotten slightly better, and then a lot better.

I’m still not fully right, as I can’t run or do some of the more intense physical things I used to do. But I’ve got a new self-image, one that’s perhaps more appropriate to the age I am. Not that I should expect less of myself, but that I should expect different things.

Your actions follow your self-beliefs.

If you identity as a failure, incapable of achievement, unfit, unlovable, destined to play a bit-part role in your own story, then by heck no matter how much willpower you put in to push that boulder up the hill, it will return to its place.

But there’s a way through: every action you take is a vote for who you wish to become. Every day you wake up, look your old identity in the eye and say “thanks for your service, but you’re not needed around here anymore,” step forward and lean in, is a day your new identity is built.

It takes time. You have to actually want it. You have to choose to adopt a new mindset. Rome wasn’t built in a day. But it comes, a little like how Hazel Grace Lancaster describes falling in love in The Fault In Our Stars: “slowly, and then all at once.”

The path is there, should you choose.

Source: @fredrivett

Image: chloe combs

I’m not sure why I’m sharing this post other than it reaffirms my commitment to stay off social networks such as X, Instagram, and TikTok. The suggestions towards the end (use RSS! embrace federated social networks! switch to Linux/GrapheneOS/Signal!) I’ve already embraced, but the thing is that unless a significant minority of people do this, it makes very little difference on the rest of the world, which is effectively powered by algorithm.

Literary theorist Stanley Fish argued that we as individuals interpret any given text (in this case, social media content) “because each of us is part of an interpretive community that gives us a particular way of reading a text.” That interpretive community usually isn’t there when we are fed what the algorithm thinks we’ll consume. We may share something thinking that people like us will see it share their opinions. However, because of the way that algorithms work, engagement is the main driver of a post’s visibility; so here comes 10 million people who have no clue of the context on that thought you shared about your niche interest.

Suddenly your post is full of over-the-top jokes and non-content-related quips from members of a completely random mix of audiences. As the algorithm prioritizes engagement, your post’s new mixing pot of clueless audiences outnumbers the genuinely-interested audience of your own niche corner of the internet (if that even exists anymore), and they comment about everything BUT the content.

Source: tékhnē.dev

Image: Kevin Grieve

I was listening to a podcast recently about the concept of “limitarianism” entitled Imagine there’s no billionaires in which the political philosopher Ingrid Robeyns laid out the ways in which, truly, every billionaire is a policy failure. Nobody accumulates great wealth without some sort of dependency on society — whether that’s tax breaks, lack of worker regulation, or some other “pro business” (but anti-society) law.

The truth is that people don’t achieve success by themselves. Luck, nepotism, and cultural capital play a huge part in what most people would deem success. That’s not to say that it’s not possible to increase your serendipity surface, though.

What I like from this post by Josh Swords is that he centres agency in his “career advice” which is achieved by seeking feedback and getting better demonstrating humility and working in the open. Powerful stuff.

I’m pretty confident you only need two things. Feedback and humility, and they work best together. Feedback shows you what to work on, and humility lets you actually hear it.

So find your weakest discipline and work on that. The fastest way is to get feedback from someone you admire and then act on it. Don’t wait for the perfect plan, doing something is almost always better than doing nothing.

Find a mentor, be a mentor. Lead a project, propose one. Do the work, present it. Create spaces for others to do the same. Do whatever it takes to get better.

And do it in the open. A common mistake is assuming work speaks for itself. It rarely does.

But all of this requires maybe the most important thing of all: agency. It’s more powerful than smarts or credentials or luck. And the best part is you can literally just choose to be high-agency. High-agency people make things happen. Low-agency people wait. And if you want to progress, you can’t wait.

Source: people, ideas, machines

Image: CC BY-NC Focal Foto

Collected at this site are some absolutely awful uses of AI. Not only in terms of people misunderstanding what technology can and can’t do, but just really bad ideas. For example, Airbnb hosts fraudulently claiming damage via AI-doctored photos, users being able to hack McDonald’s systems by asking for the password, and Microsoft providing ‘therapy’ via LLMs for laid-off workers.

Named after Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the original Darwin Awards celebrated those who “improved the gene pool by removing themselves from it” through spectacularly stupid acts. Well, guess what? Humans have evolved! We’re now so advanced that we’ve outsourced our poor decision-making to machines.

The AI Darwin Awards proudly continue this noble tradition by honouring the visionaries who looked at artificial intelligence—a technology capable of reshaping civilisation—and thought, “You know what this needs? Less safety testing and more venture capital!” These brave pioneers remind us that natural selection isn’t just for biology anymore; it’s gone digital, and it’s coming for our entire species.

Because why stop at individual acts of spectacular stupidity when you can scale them to global proportions with machine learning?

Source: AI Darwin Awards

Image: IceMing & Digit

A few months ago, UNESCO put a call out under the title AI and the future of education: disruptions, dilemmas and directions. I asked a few talented people I know if they would be interested in working together on a response. In the end, we submitted six separate pieces and then ran an online roundtable. You can see the results here

We published our versions as, after a couple of months, we hadn’t heard anything back from UNESCO. However, last week we heard that they hadn’t included our pieces in the publication because we’d published them. Ah well, they said that they might put together a web page showcasing what we’ve done.

I’m looking forward to reading some of the contributions, which seem to come from quite diverse sources.

This anthology explores the philosophical, ethical and pedagogical dilemmas posed by disruptive influence of AI in education. Bringing together insights from global thinkers, leaders and changemakers, the collection challenges assumptions, surfaces frictions, provokes contestation, and sparks audacious new visions for equitable human-machine co-creation.

Covering themes from dismantling outdated assessment systems to cultivating an ethics of care, the 21 think pieces in this volume take a step towards building a global commons for dialogue and action, a shared space to think together, debate across differences, and reimagine inclusive education in the age of AI.

Source: UNESCO

Image: Yutong Liu & Digit

I learned the word hysteresis only recently after having a heat pump fitted Chez Belshaw. In that context, it refers to the difference in temperature at which the system turns on and off, creating a lag in response to temperature changes. That’s a good thing in this context, as it helps prevent rapid cycling of the heat pump — making the system more stable and improving overall efficiency.

Hysteresis in other contexts can be less useful, though. A lag in response to changes can be problematic when it comes to technological change affecting certain sectors, for example knowledge workers. I don’t subscribe to Venkatesh Rao’s Contraptions newsletter, but just the part publicly available is thought-provoking.

Inevitably, those who have financial and cultural capital usually catch up and re-assert their authority and dominance. I’ve seen this in practice when universities were threatened by innovations in MOOCs and Open Badges. It was the “end of universities,” apparently. But, of course, already being in a dominant position, and thanks to the catalyst of a global pandemic, we now have unis with more online than in-person students, issuing microcredentials by the million.

I’m not saying that there won’t be ‘casualties’ and that there won’t be new ways of stratifying society. I think we’re already starting to see some of that in terms of text-based communication being a lot less dominant as a means of social communication. I’m just saying that when you’ve got a lot of financial and cultural capital, you have to do a particularly bad job to squander it entirely.

The mark-maker class lives in the gap between the signs and the systems. They comprise those who produce, coordinate, teach, and manage the functioning of symbolic order on the one hand, and those who remix, stylize, dream, and craft the cultural tones in which life is rendered bearable, on the other. These are not two classes, but one diffuse stratum, braided of institutional and aesthetic lives, of spreadsheets and metaphors.

Once insulated by the seeming security of letters and credentials, the mark-makers now find themselves in hysteresis: lagging in the face of an accelerating world that no longer waits for meaning to catch up.

[…]

Bourdieu teaches us that when the field moves faster than the habitus can adapt, a lag sets in. “The hysteresis effect,” he writes, “means that practices are always liable to be objectively adjusted too late, and that habitus tends to lag behind the changes in the field.” This lag is not benign. It is lived as confusion, disorientation, ridicule, even rage. What was once a reliable feel for the game becomes a stale reflex. The mark-makers—who for decades moved with the grain of modern institutions—now find their instincts misfiring. Their ways of knowing, their modes of speaking, their cultivated manners now appear quaint, procedural, indulgent. They are mocked by populists as condescending, and by radicals as co-opted. Worse, they are made redundant by machines that now wield, with eerie fluency, the very tools they mastered.

Source: Contraptions

Image: Logan Voss

One of the things that I see on repeat in discussions around federated social networks is how decentralised Bluesky is compared with, say, Mastodon. What I like about this site is that a) it’s visual, and b) it tries to use some kind of scientific rationale to compare the two.

So yes, while you can say that Bluesky is decentralised in theory, in practice it’s very much not. Yet, anyway.

This site currently measures the concentration of user data for active users: in the Fediverse, this data is on servers (also known as instances); in the Atmosphere, it is on the PDSes that host users' data repos. All PDSes run by the company Bluesky Social PBC are aggregated in this dataset, since they are under the control of a single entity. Similarly, mastodon.social and mastodon.online are combined as they are run by the same company.

A note about the measurement:

The Shannon Index is an entropy-based measure used in ecological studies. It is computed the same as Shannon entropy using the natural log: the negative sum over all servers of the “market share” times the log of the market share. Lower values indicate lower entropy (a high concentration of one species), while higher values indicate a more even population. In this context, the maximum value is the number of servers, which would mean that all servers have equal population.

Source: Are We Decentralized Yet?

I love this idea, a list of wants which, over time, accrete into a kind of “song” rather than a bucket list. Dom Corriveau (who hosts his website on an old Google Pixel 5!) stole the idea from Keenan who, in turn, got the idea from Katherine Yang. Interesting people all.

Source: Dom Corriveau

In addition to his Just Two Things blog, futurist Andrew Curry also writes at The Next Wave on “futures, trends, emerging issues and scenarios.” In this post which cites investment writer Joachim Klement, Curry talks about sea level rise, with 1.5m being the tipping point. This"sounds fine in theory since the base case IPCC projections are for around a one metre increase by 2100," but that “doesn’t allow for subsidence (often caused by water extraction), or the possibility of cascading climate change.”

The interesting bit for me, though, was the section he entitles “moral hazards” which relate to insurance and government intervention. Basically, the stronger you make coastal defences, the more likely people are to live there.

Hsiao has also done more specific work on Jakarta, which experiences frequent flooding. There are some interesting conclusions here, broadly that a strong government commitment to sea defences (in Jakarta’s case a sea wall) creates a moral hazard, because it

attracts coastal residents, slows inland migration, and lowers the incentives for inland development. The consequence is continued spending on coastal defense and large damages should it fail.

Insurance doesn’t work because places that don’t flood don’t want to pool with places that do (“Zurich doesn’t want to pool with Jakarta”). Alternatives that might place more of the financial burden on people who choose to live in coastal areas might work, but is open to political lobbying. And once you’ve decided to go with sea defences, and people decide to live behind them, you face political pressure to keep on strengthening the sea defences.

Source: The Next Wave

While we in the UK have at least one major political party vowing to extract all of the oil and gas out of the North Sea, China has met its renewable energy goals five years early.

Again, while we have arguments about “net zero” and the aesthetics of solar farms, this summer was the hottest on record and hot homes are making children sick. Meanwhile, China is covering entire mountain ranges in solar panels.

It’s a climate emergency. We should act like it.

China broke its own renewable energy record once again in 2024, installing 80 gigawatts (GW) of wind capacity and 277 GW of solar capacity, according to the National Energy Administration, as reported by Recharge News. This marks an impressive 18% growth in wind capacity, now totalling 520 GW, and a remarkable 45% increase in solar capacity, which has reached 890 GW. Combined, these achievements fulfil the 1.2 terawatts (TW) renewable energy capacity target set by President Xi Jinping in 2020 – a goal originally intended for 2030.

[…]

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has previously pointed to China’s advancements as a key factor in keeping the global goal of tripling renewable power capacity by 2030 within reach. Despite ongoing construction of new coal-fired power plants, China’s total power generation saw a nearly 15% increase in 2024, reaching 3.35 TWh.

Source: The Renewable Energy Institute

Image: The Independent

I am in agreement with this article in The Guardian by Charlotte Blease, a researcher at Harvard Medical School and author of the forthcoming book Dr Bot: Why Doctors Can Fail Us – and How AI Could Save Lives. Her point is that while AI might not be perfect, neither are doctors, and it can definitely speed up and help with diagnoses.

Personally, I’m now 7.5 months into trying to get a diagnosis for symptoms I started experiencing on January 15th of this year. It’s the nature of medicine to do tests and rule things out, but a combination of NHS resourcing and (some) health professionals' attitudes have made the experience sub-optimal.

For example, when presenting at A&E thinking I was having a heart attack, I had an echocardiogram followed by a doctor taking me into a side room and somewhat aggressively asking me why I was there. When a GP found out that I’m vegetarian, he suggested I start eating meat — even though it had nothing to do with the issue at hand. I’ve been waiting almost six weeks for a urine test result.

So, I’ve been supplementing the information I get from health professionals and via the NHS app with asking LLMs (usually Perplexity or Lumo) about what my test results might mean, and what else might be causing the symptoms. It’s given me a list of things to ask doctors, nurses, and those performing tests, and it’s helped me know what kinds of things I should be avoiding — other medications, supplements, food, drinks, activities, etc.

Obviously, this needs to be done with huge amounts of safeguards and guardrails in place. But not to use technology which may prove useful at scale? I think that’s irresponsible.

Given that patient care is medicine’s core purpose, the question is who, or what, is best placed to deliver it? AI may still spark suspicion, but research increasingly shows how it could help fix some of the most persistent problems and overlooked failures – from misdiagnosis and error to unequal access to care.

As patients, each of us will face at least one diagnostic error in our lifetimes. In England, conservative estimates suggest that about 5% of primary care visits result in a failure to properly diagnose, putting millions of patients in danger. In the US, diagnostic errors cause death or permanent injury to almost 800,000 people annually. Misdiagnosis is a greater risk if you’re among the one in 10 people worldwide with a rare disease.

[…]

Medical knowledge also moves faster than doctors can keep up. By graduation, half of what medical students learn is already outdated. It takes an average of 17 years for research to reach clinical practice, and with a new biomedical article published every 39 seconds, even skimming the abstracts would take about 22 hours a day. There are more than 7,000 rare diseases, with 250 more identified each year.

In contrast, AI devours medical data at lightning speed, 24/7, with no sleep and no bathroom breaks. Where doctors vary in unwanted ways, AI is consistent. And while these tools make errors too, it would be churlish to deny how impressive the latest models are, with some studies showing they vastly outperform human doctors in clinical reasoning, including for complex medical conditions.

Source: The Guardian

Image: Alan Warburton, Better Images of AI

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

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

• 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

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