Thought Shrapnel

This is wild 🤯

The mechanics of the fake rescue racket are straightforward: stage a medical emergency, call in a helicopter, check a tourist into a hospital, and file an insurance claim that bears little resemblance to what actually happened. But the sophistication lies in how each link in the chain is compensated, and how difficult it is for a foreign insurer — operating from Australia and the United Kingdom— to verify events that occurred at 3,000 metres in a remote Himalayan valley.

The CIB investigation identifies two primary methods for manufacturing an “emergency.”

The first involves tourists who simply don’t want to walk back. After completing a demanding trek — an Everest Base Camp trek, for instance, can take up to two weeks on foot — guides offer an alternative: pretend to be sick, and a helicopter will come. The guide handles the rest.

The second method is more troubling. At altitudes above 3,000 metres, mild symptoms of altitude sickness are common. Blood oxygen saturation can drop, hands and feet tingle, headaches develop. In most cases, rest, hydration or a gradual descent is all that is needed. But guides and hotel staff, according to the CIB investigation, have been trained to terrify trekkers at precisely this moment. They tell them they are at risk of dying, that only immediate evacuation will save them. In some cases, investigators found that Diamox (Acetazolamide) tablets, used to prevent altitude sickness, were administered alongside excessive water intake to induce the very symptoms that would justify a rescue call.

In at least one case cited in the investigation, baking powder was mixed into food to make tourists physically unwell.

Once a “rescue” is called, the financial choreography begins. A single helicopter carries multiple passengers. But separate, full-price invoices are submitted to each passenger’s insurance company, as if each had their own dedicated flight. A $4,000 charter becomes a $12,000 claim. Fake flight manifests and load sheets are fabricated. At the hospital, medical officers prepare discharge summaries using the digital signatures of senior doctors who were never involved in the case. In some cases, these are done without those doctors’ knowledge. Fake admission records are created for tourists who were, in some documented instances, drinking beer in the hospital cafeteria at the time they were supposedly receiving treatment.

[…]

Between 2022 and 2025, investigators identified 4,782 foreign patients treated across the implicated hospitals. Of these, 171 cases were confirmed as fake rescues. Over that period, Era International Hospital received deposits of more than $15.87 million linked to these activities. Shreedhi International Hospital received over $1.22 million.

Among rescue operators, Mountain Rescue Service conducted 171 fraudulent rescues out of 1,248 total charter flights, claiming approximately $10.31 million from insurers. Nepal Charter Service carried out 75 fake rescues from 471 flights, claiming $8.2 million. Everest Experience and Assistance was linked to 71 suspicious rescues from 601 flights, with insurance claims totalling $11.04 million.

In one instance that illustrates the brazenness of the scheme, police documented a case in which four tourists were rescued on a single helicopter flight, on the same date, using the same helicopter and manifest. Insurance claims were nonetheless submitted as multiple separate rescues, with the total rescue bill reaching $31,100, plus a separate hospital bill of $11,890.

Source: The Kathmandu Post

Image: Alexander Aashiesh

The above table is included in a fantastic article by Raj Nandan Sharma entitled Good Taste the Only Real Moat Left. He offers a nuanced view of working with LLMs, arguing that, yes, of course there is the lazy, ‘slop’ version of AI that involves what he calls “passive selection”. But what’s much more interesting valuable and value is active shaping.

There is a strong version of the “taste matters” argument that quietly pushes humans into a narrow role. In that version, AI generates many outputs and the human stands at the end of the pipeline selecting the best one.

That is a useful role, but it is also too small.

Historically, important work did not emerge from detached selection alone. It emerged from co-creation under constraint. Builders argued with reality, with collaborators, with budgets, with materials, with timelines, and with the consequences of getting things wrong.

That friction matters. It is where depth comes from.

Once you see that, the risk becomes clearer: if human value is reduced to curation, the human becomes a discriminator in a mostly machine-driven loop.

The analogy to machine learning is imperfect but useful. In generative adversarial setups, the discriminator exists to help the generator improve. Once the generator is good enough, the discriminator is not the part that ships.

The warning is not that taste has no value. It does. The warning is that taste without authorship, stake, or construction can become a narrow and eventually fragile role.

Source: Raj Nandan Sharma

A couple of months ago, Matt Webb shared a tool called mist which I’d describe as Etherpad with Markdown and track changes. I don’t think I even shared it here, because, although it was cool, it wasn’t Open Source, and therefore I didn’t think it would last very long.

Happily, Matt’s not only open-sourced it, but made it really easy to deploy via Cloudflare. Happy days!

What I love about Markdown is that it’s document-first. The formatting travels with the doc. I can’t tell you how many note-taking apps I’ve jumped between with my exact same folder of Markdown notes.

The same should be true for collaboration features like suggested edits. If somebody makes an edit to your doc, you should be able to download it and upload to a wholly different app before you accept the edit; you shouldn’t be tied to a single service just because you want comments.

(And of course the doc should still be human-readable/writeable, and it’s cheating to just stuff a massive data-structure in a document header.)

So mist mixes Markdown and CriticMarkup – and I would love it if others picked up the same format. If apps are cheap and abundant in the era of vibing, then let’s focus on interop!

With mist itself:

Several people have asked for the ability to self-host it. The README says how (it’s all on Cloudflare naturally). You can add new features to your own fork, though please do share upstream if you think others could benefit.

This is the first time I’ve come across CriticMarkup which is a layer on top of Markdown for ‘track changes’. The way that it’s done in mist is explained here.

Source: interconnected

It’s one thing believing that Intellectual Property (“IP”) is absolute bollocks, and it’s another thing living your life under capitalism. It’s the reason that my doctoral thesis is CC0 licensed (i.e. “donated to the public domain”) and all of the tools I’ve been building recently are AGPL-licensed (“specifically designed to ensure cooperation with the community”).

In this essay, Jenny Odell, author of the excellent How to Do Nothing tells the story of a Japanese farmer who rediscovered the old ways, and paying more attention to the seasons. The main thrust of what she has to say, though, is about where ideas come from.

Essentially, everything is emergent, and all your brain is doing is making links between things. Which is why I don’t have any problem in using LLMs as part of my workflow.

Why is it that when we sit down and try to force an idea, nothing comes—or, if we succeed in forcing it, it feels stale and contrived? Why do the best ideas appear uninvited and at the strangest times, darting out at us like an impish squirrel from a shrub?

The key, in my opinion, has to do with what you think it is that’s doing the producing, and where. It’s easy for me to say that “I” produce ideas. But when I’ve finished something, it’s often hard for me to say how it happened—where it started, what route it took, and why it ended where it did.

[…]

Ideas are not products, as much as corporations would like them to be. Ideas are intersections between ourselves and something else, whether that’s a book, a conversation with a friend, or the subtle suggestion of a tree. Ideas can literally arise out of clouds (if we are looking at them). That is to say: ideas, like consciousness itself, are emergent properties, and thinking might be more participation than it is production. If we can accept this view of the mind with humility and awe, we might be amazed at what will grow there.

Source: The Creative Independent

Image: JACQUELINE BRANDWAYN

Related Are.na collection: How to grow an idea

I browse Hacker News most days, and earlier today came across a wonderfully addictive game called STARFLING.

When I shared it on our gaming chat, Adam Procter noticed that there’s a whole arcade that someone curates from “Show HN” threads! Delightful.

The HN Arcade is a community-driven directory of games discovered from Hacker News Show HN posts.

Source: The HN Arcade

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