Thought Shrapnel

Source: Are.na

It’s almost a decade since one of the greatest economic harms a country has ever self-inflicted. Yes, I’m talking about Brexit.

Finally, we’re getting to the stage when our current government, which is not the one that instigated the referendum, can say that “Brexit did deep damage”. Let’s hope we get back into bed with our European neighbours ASAP. The decline in Britain over the last 10 years is tangible.

“Brexit did deep damage.” With those words at her Mais lecture on Tuesday, Chancellor Rachel Reeves made it clear that there has been an important shift within the Labour Party - one that government ministers have been signalling for some time.

“Let me say this directly to our friends and allies in Europe. This government believes a deeper relationship is in the interest of the whole of Europe,” she said, while at the same time insisting that the government was not trying to “turn back the clock” on Brexit.

Speaking in such overt terms about Brexit’s perceived harms in part reflects a belief that, as the government attempts to turn around the country’s persistently sluggish economic performance, it must be more ambitious in its attempt to “reset” the UK’s post-Brexit relationship with the EU.

[…]

Speaking at a literary festival in October, Wes Streeting, the health secretary, said: “I’m glad that Brexit is a problem whose name we now dare speak,” and indicated that he believed being outside the EU was making it difficult to deliver the economic growth the government had promised.

The deputy prime minister, David Lammy, said in a podcast that it was “self-evident” that Brexit had damaged the economy and noted the economic benefit that Turkey had derived from its customs agreement with the EU.

Meanwhile, in further evidence of pressure within Labour’s ranks to rethink its policy on Brexit, on Wednesday the London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, called for the UK to rejoin the EU customs union and single market before the next election, and then campaign at that ballot on a promise to rejoin the EU.

Source: BBC News

This is definitely not for everyone, but ContraPoints (Natalie Wynn) is awesome and always makes compelling videos. This one weighs in at a little over an hour and a half, so I’m still watching it.

Ever since studying Philosophy of Art & Literature as an undergraduate, in which we looked at why people watch horror films, I’ve understood that disgust is actually a complicated emotion. As ContraPoints explains through the Saw series of films, so-called film critics have things all wrong.

I love the provocation that Home Alone is a a more ethically problematic film that Saw because we identify with the aggressor (Kevin) rather than the victims (the Wet Bandits) in the former.

The closest I get to horror these days (or any day) is watching films like Sinners which I watched with my son at the cinema recently. Once you understand that there is an art to these things, and that they have lessons for us as humans, it opens up a whole new world.

Source: YouTube

I did not enjoy studying Formal Logic as a Philosophy undergraduate. But it stood me in good stead.

I’m pretty sure there are plenty of people who wouldn’t even understand what’s wrong with the above reasoning, and in fact it explains a lot of what is wrong with the world… 🙄

Source: X via Are.na

Yes, Claude Cowork is great, but the secret sauce is actually Claude Code which you can access via the Claude app. Even better is doing so from the command line interface (CLI).

The advantage of the CLI is that you’re fully in control of your project. The difficulty, of course, is that unless you grew up having to load computer games via DOS, and unless you’ve got a mental model of how product development works, it’s going to feel very odd.

Source: How to AI

Whatever you call it, having everything in space you control has always made sense.

Why am I doing all this? Because I got inspired by the concept of POSSE: “Publish on your own, syndicate elsewhere.” For me, ROOTS is the logical first step toward that: “Return Old Online Things to your own Site” (yes, I made this up). Why? If I do decide to delete my X account or if Blogger gets quietly discontinued, then I don’t care: it’s all on my site already. I own it. It’s all Markdown files and images that I can back up anywhere I want.

You’ll see me POSSE (or PESOS – “Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site”) in the future, too: If I post a Goodreads review, it’ll also be on my Notes and Everything pages. If I post on LinkedIn, it’ll be there, too. Everything I create and find important will eventually end up on my website.

Source: Lisa Charlotte Muth

Image: GG

An insightful post from Max Read about stylistic preferences with regards to human vs AI text. Every relevant technology changes writing and, in turn, literate culture.

In many contexts most people can (more or less) correctly differentiate between A.I.-generated output and its “authentic” counterpart–but cannot correctly attribute the output.

What’s funny about this is: We actually really want to prefer human-authored writing! In open-label tests, where the excerpts are shown with attribution, people consistently express preference for whatever text is labeled human, even when the text is actually A.I.-generated. (So do A.I. evaluators, as I learned at the conference from Wouter Haverals, to an even greater degree.)

This is not a particularly satisfying set of findings insofar as it validates neither the A.I.-booster “it’s so over, A.I. writing is better than human writing” side nor the A.I.-skeptic “A.I. can never write like a human” side. What we can say is that people mostly can’t identify A.I.-generated text as A.I.-generated (crowd boos), but they can sometimes distinguish between it and human-authored text (crowd cheers); it’s just that they tend to think the A.I.-generated text is human (crowd boos), maybe because human-generated text is stranger, worse, or more difficult (crowd hesitantly cheers), which readers mistakenly believe is more typical of A.I.-generated text (crowd silent now) and thereby disprefer (crowd sort of murmuring confusedly), unless you tell them it’s actually human, in which case they change their minds and like it (crowd has mostly left at this point).

But all of it taken together suggests that, given our strong bias in favor of writing we believe to be human, A.I. vs. human “preference” tests (or “reads better” quizzes) are often second-order “identification” tests, in each case measuring not “preference” per se but the accuracy of the prevailing heuristics for identifying A.I. writing. Participants in these studies, it would seem, express preference for the A.I.-generated writing not because it’s “better” in some formal sense–cleaner, simpler, more beautiful, whatever–but because their “flawed heuristics” have led them to the conclusion that it’s human-authored, and ipso facto better.

[…]

As long as people want to prefer human-authored to L.L.M.-generated writing, we will place a premium on whatever style we associate with human authorship–even as that style changes. You can already see this process beginning from the other direction on social networks like Twitter, where em-dashes and not-x-but-y contrastive corrections–perfectly innocuous and useful writerly tools which not five years ago would likely have been highly correlated with “good prose”–are immediately treated with derision and suspicion. By that same token, certain kinds of “bad writing” should be seen as evidence of human authorship. How long before run-on sentences are preferred to em-dashes?

L.L.M.s, of course, can and will get better at mimicking the “strangeness,” clunkiness, and badness of human prose; I’m skeptical of claims that there is some built-in technical limitation that prevents A.I. text from ever being truly indistinguishable from human prose. What seems more likely to me is that as L.L.M.s move away from the easily identifiable generic LinkedIn style that currently dominates, our preferences will move as well, in an attempt to stay one step ahead.

Source: Read Max

Image: Randy Tarampi

Source: YouTube

Five years old, but still as relevant as ever.

Source: Bill Bramhall

Link to video

I ran a 90-minute workshop this morning, which started life as a 1:1 session. Around 10 people ended up coming, mainly from a couple of Slack channels - hence the “Hey Slackers…” intro.

Below is the email I sent afterwards with all of the links, etc. I’m posting it here for reference 😀

Thanks for joining this morning’s session, or for registering if you couldn’t make it. Here’s a recap of what we covered, plus the resources to help you get started.

What we did

We looked at how freelancers can use AI tools like Claude to build a business-development dashboard — a lightweight CRM and pipeline tracker that works for your specific situation, not some generic corporate workflow.

The conversation covered a lot of ground, with great contributions from everyone:

• Separating your worlds — several people mentioned mixing client work, personal projects, and other commitments (one person had a part-time Masters degree in the mix) inside a single to-do list. A dedicated dashboard draws those lines clearly.
• Tracking invoices and payments alongside pipeline activity — this came up as a popular request.
• The “second brain” approach — capturing and evaluating ideas, not just managing active leads.
• AI as a conversational partner — the key shift is thinking of it like onboarding a business development colleague who learns your context over time, rather than expecting a one-shot answer.
• Environmental and ethical considerations — there was a thoughtful discussion about AI scepticism, resource usage, and how local LLMs work well for lighter tasks (restructuring text, for example), with remote tools better suited to heavier ones (like web scraping).
• Keeping a dashboard updated — the question of maintaining a CRM built from an existing contacts export was live in the room. Cross-referencing with LinkedIn was one practical starting point.

Meta prompt The only really thing you need to remember is to give AI tools permission to ask you questions. One ‘meta’ prompt that I’ve come across which can be useful is:

Don’t answer my question yet.

First do this:

1. Tell me what assumptions I’m making that I haven’t stated out loud
2. Tell me what information would significantly change your answer if you had it
3. Tell me the most common mistake people make when asking you this type of question Then ask me the one question that would make your answer actually useful for my specific situation rather than anyone who might ask this.

Only after I answer — give me the output

My question: [paste anything here]

Tools mentioned

• Claude / Claude Cowork
• ChatGPT
• Google AI Studio
• Mistral AI Studio
• Monica HQ — open-source personal CRM
• Groundwork and TaskDial — Doug’s own projects
• Zen Browser — a Firefox-based browser worth a look

A note on AI and ethics

One participant raised points worth sitting with: hallucinations, the concentration of money and influence in big tech, resource usage, and what we lose by outsourcing too much thinking. These are fair concerns. Start small, stay critical, and use local tools where they’re up to the job.

More reason to divest yourself of US-based Big Tech platforms. (Join the first TechFreedom cohort!)

Iranian state-linked media this week published a list of offices and infrastructure run by American companies with Israeli links whose technology has been used for military applications. According to Al Jazeera, the companies include Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia and Oracle.

Many of these companies operate regional offices, cloud infrastructure or data-centre operations across the Gulf, including in the UAE. None have released public statements on this development.

The list was published by the semi-official, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-linked Tasnim News Agency alongside a warning that the scope of the conflict could expand beyond traditional military targets.

“As the scope of the regional war expands to infrastructure war, the scope of Iran’s legitimate targets expands,” Tasnim News Agency reported.

Last week, Iranian drone strikes damaged Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centres in the UAE and Bahrain, disrupting services and exposing the vulnerability of physical tech infrastructure in the region.

Source: WIRED

Image: Mockup Free

I’ve always been against unearned privilege and the idea of a ‘natural’ hierarchy. It’s antithetical to who I am and stand for, and I’ve felt that way ever since I can remember.

A good example of this in the class-stratified UK is the House of Lords. While it’s important to have a second chamber in a democracy, the idea of it being made up of heredity peers is absolutely ridiculous.

So I’m delighted that Labour are finally getting rid of the absurd idea that, just because someone is descended from an ancestor who was given land by William the Conqueror, they should have a say over our democratic processes.

Next? How about we rename the highest honours civilians can attain, removing the word ‘empire’ from OBE, CBE, etc.

Centuries of British political tradition will end within weeks after Parliament voted to remove hereditary aristocrats from the unelected House of Lords.

On Tuesday night members of the upper chamber dropped objections to legislation passed by the House of Commons ousting dozens of dukes, earls and viscounts who inherited seats in Parliament along with their aristocratic titles.

Government minister Nick Thomas-Symonds said the change put an end to “an archaic and undemocratic principle.”

“Our parliament should always be a place where talents are recognized and merit counts,” he said. “It should never be a gallery of old boys’ networks, nor a place where titles, many of which were handed out centuries ago, hold power over the will of the people.”

The House of Lords plays an important role in Britain’s parliamentary democracy, scrutinizing legislation passed by the elected House of Commons. But critics have long argued that it is unwieldy and undemocratic.

Source: Associated Press

Image: João Marcelo Martins

This made me laugh. Entitled Tree Hug by Bulgarian street artist Vanyu Krastev.

Source: Street Art Utopia

Now That’s What I Call An MVP

Source: News Canary

An inability to focus is a design problem. As I noted back in 2020 on my now-defunct literaci.es blog, perhaps we need notification literacy (archive.org link).

If the problem is screens inherently, then we need cultural revival, a return to books, perhaps even a neo-Luddite retreat from technology. But if the problem is design, then we need design activism and regulatory intervention. The same screens that fragment attention can support it. The same technologies that extract human attention can cultivate it. The question is who designs them, for what purposes, and under what constraints.

In the library, I watch people navigate information in ways that would have seemed impossible to previous generations. A research question that once required weeks of archival work now takes hours. But more than efficiency has changed. The nature of synthesis itself has transformed.

Ideas now move through multiple channels simultaneously. A documentary provides emotional resonance and visual evidence. Its transcript enables the precision needed to locate a specific argument. A newsletter unpacks the implications. A podcast allows the ideas to marinate during a commute. Each mode contributes something the others cannot. This isn’t decline. It’s expansion.

What strikes me most is the difference between people who’ve learned to construct what I call ‘containers for attention’ – bounded spaces and practices where different modes of engagement become possible – and those who haven’t. The distinction isn’t about intelligence or discipline. It’s about environmental architecture. Some people have learned to watch documentaries with a notebook, listen to podcasts during walks when their minds can wander productively, read physical books in deliberately quiet spaces with phones left behind. They’re not rejecting technology. They’re choreographing it.

Others are drowning, attempting sustained thought in environments engineered to prevent it. They sit with laptops open, seven tabs competing for attention, notifications sliding in from three different apps, phones vibrating every few minutes. They’re trying to read serious material while fighting a losing battle against behavioural psychology weaponised at scale. They believe their inability to focus is a personal failure rather than a design problem. They don’t realise they’re trying to think in a space optimised to prevent thinking.

This is where my understanding of literacy has fundamentally shifted. I used to believe, as I was taught, that literacy was primarily about decoding text. But watching how people actually learn and think has convinced me that literacy is about something deeper: the capacity to construct and navigate environments where understanding becomes possible.

Source: Aeon

Image: Mario Aziz

This week I shared my Claude-based ‘bizdev dashboard’ with a few people on some Slack channels of which I’m part. Some people have gone on created equally-useful personalised dashboards, and I’m running a session next Friday to help anyone who wants some guidance.

Meanwhile, I’ve been iterating a single-file offline, private dashboard for tracking projects and profitability for freelancers. I’ve called it ‘Groundwork’ and you simply download index.html and run it in your browser.

A dashboard for freelancers that lives entirely on your computer. Track your leads, income, time, and to-do list — without subscriptions, accounts, or sending your data anywhere.

What it does

• Pipeline — see all your work at a glance, from first conversation to getting paid. Drag jobs across columns as they progress (Lead → Proposal → Active → Invoiced → Paid).
• Income — a monthly bar chart showing what you’ve earned, your best month, and a projected year-end total based on your average.
• Time & capacity — log hours by client, see how your week is filling up, and keep an eye on your workload.
• Next actions — a simple to-do list with priority levels so you know what to tackle first.
• Ask AI — describe a change in plain English and the dashboard updates itself. “Moved the Acme project to invoiced” or “Logged 3 hours on the Barnardo’s website” — that kind of thing. Completely optional.

That last point is pretty cool. Although it can be used entirely manually, there’s also the option to connect it to an LLM via an API key from ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. You can also use a local LLM via Ollama. Oh, and it’s multi-lingual, has various colour options, and is fully accessible.

Source: GitHub

If this isn’t true (as it probably isn’t) it certainly should be.

Source: Mastodon

As a facilitator, I do love an innovative end-of-session activity. This one made me smile.

👉 Index: What do you want to point at or highlight?

🖕 Middle finger: What do you want to say f**k you to?

💍 Wedding: What do you want to marry and take with you for the rest of your life?

🤞Little / pinky: What do you want to promise yourself (pinky promise)?

👍 Thumb: What do you give a thumbs up to?

Source: LinkedIn

As one of the comments underneath this notes, “Millennials might be the last generation formed by the new and old, deep enough in intellectual tradition to have taste, early enough in the internet to lead this new era.”

Source: Substack Notes

The opening of this piece by Anu Atluru, which I’ve quoted below, is one of the clearest explanations of the shift that’s happening in so-called “white-collar” work at the moment. Their explanation of luxury workers' rights is spot-on.

AUTONOMY. CREATIVE OWNERSHIP. A SEAT AT THE TABLE. The right to say no, not like that, or not right now. Flexible schedules. Remote work. A title that keeps getting better. The expectation that your opinion shapes direction. The expectation that your resources scale with seniority.

These are among what I call luxury workers’ rights. They sit on top of human rights, civil rights, and workers’ rights. They’re the terms of a job meant to make work feel more meaningful and make you feel more valued. We typically associate them with white collar work and view them as moral principles, but they’ve always been a form of compensation for the scarcity of cognitive labor.

White collar work as we’ve known it is cognitive labor with a personhood premium—autonomy over the work itself and value attached to the person doing it. Cheap capital and high margins made it easy for companies who needed human intelligence to pay these premiums. Software’s surplus has been subsidizing our ego-scaffolding. But we’re facing the big shift now.

The early narrative was that AI would kill blue collar jobs first, but it turns out the real world is full of friction, and in the meantime, AI got a lot better at thinking. So it’s white collar work that’s exposed. AI is making intelligence abundant, and when the scarcity of anything drops, the premiums drop with it.

If you strip white collar jobs of their luxury rights, the line between blue and white collar gets a lot thinner. The professional laptop class is staring down its biggest reshaping and identity crisis since industrialization.

After suggesting that a return to the apprenticeship model might be in order for junior professionals, Atluru turns to what that means for the rest of us. How do we avoid being fired and re-hired with blue collar conditions?

MAKE YOURSELF SCARCE AGAIN. If we are indeed headed this direction, and you still want the luxury rights and compensation and glory, the answer is in the mechanism itself. The premium was always tied to scarcity. AI compressed it. So the way back is to go where you’re still scarce—or become something that can’t be compressed again.

What makes you scarce?

BRILLIANCE — You’re so good at something or so rare in your combination of skills (scientific, technical, creative, strategic) that you can’t be scoped into a trade. Your taste, voice, and judgment alone are a strong value proposition.

INFLUENCE — You have a name, an audience, a brand that engages high-value communities. Your taste is signal and cultural influence is power. People want to be associated with you, and that affiliation arbitrage is worth the overhead.

RELATIONSHIPS — You’re the person the founder trusts, the client wants to work with, that just makes the team better, and people just want to be around.

Relatedly, it might be worth exploring the Wikipedia article on elite overproduction which is identified as a cause of social instability.

Source: Working Theorys

Image: Anthropic