Thought Shrapnel

Hardly surprising, but it’s important people are still pushing on this eight years(!) after the Snowden revelations. It’s incredible to me how The Guardian and other outlets can reveal this kind of thing along with the financial corruption set out in the Panama Papers and so little changes as a result.

In Tuesday’s ruling, which confirmed elements of a lower court’s 2018 judgment, the judges said they had identified three “fundamental deficiencies” in the regime. They were that bulk interception had been authorised by the secretary of state, and not by a body independent of the executive; that categories of search terms defining the kinds of communications that would become liable for examination had not been included in the application for a warrant; and that search terms linked to an individual (that is to say specific identifiers such as an email address) had not been subject to prior internal authorisation.

An insightful post which considers the ways in which current working generations can’t “quit the rat race” in the way previous generations could (or could aspire to doing). You’re either plugged into the network, or you die.

The internet matching machine is fuelled by content. The more of it you produce, the more likely you are to reach the people who'd value what you have to offer. Writing a tweet or uploading a video costs nothing. It might be embarrassing or a waste of time, but that’s about it. In that sense, the downside of playing the game is indeed limited.

But focusing on the risks within the game obscures a much bigger problem: The game is no longer optional. Everyone must play. We have little to lose because we already lost everything: Stable jobs, affordable homes, education that lasts a lifetime, and worry-free retirement are no longer an option. Even money itself ain’t what it used to be. It loses value by simply sitting in the bank.

This is partly a result of various policy failures. But ultimately, it is due to our current stage of technological development. Information moves around and knowledge becomes obsolete faster than ever. Geographical constraints no longer protect the average from the best.

We are all in one giant global arena. We can win world-scale prizes. But we have to play. And even when we win, the rewards tend to be fleeting: they can sustain us for a while, but at any moment, the algorithms might change, or another clever fellow can whisk our followers-customers away. We are as anxious in victory as we are in defeat, and our winnings can only be used to continue to play.

Having visited Iceland in December 2019, just before the pandemic hit, I’ve seen these geothermal plants scattered around the landscape. In addition, there are places where fruit and vegetables are grown right over geothermal vents. Awesome.

The Icelandic Deep Drilling Project, IDDP, has been drilling shafts up to 5km deep in an attempt to harness the heat in the volcanic bedrock far below the surface of Iceland.But in 2009 their borehole at Krafla, northeast Iceland, reached only 2,100m deep before unexpectedly striking a pocket of magma intruding into the Earth’s upper crust from below, at searing temperatures of 900-1000°C.This borehole, IDDP-1, was the first in a series of wells drilled by the IDDP in Iceland looking for usable geothermal resources. The special report in this month’s Geothermics journal details the engineering feats and scientific results that came from the decision not to the plug the hole with concrete, as in a previous case in Hawaii in 2007, but instead attempt to harness the incredible geothermal heat.

It’s always great to hear Cory read his own work as he’s such an engaging speaker. This is a particularly interesting example, however, as it meshes so well with my experience of writing in the open for the last 15+ years.

This week on my podcast, my inaugural column for Medium, The Memex Method, a reflection on 20 years of blogging, and how it has affected my writing.

I can’t even imagine how difficult this must have been to type on!

The IBM Chinese typewriter was a formidable machine—not something just anyone could handle with the aplomb of the young typist in the film. On the keyboard affixed to the hulking, gunmetal gray chassis, 36 keys were divided into four banks: 0 through 5; 0 through 9; 0 through 9; and 0 through 9. With just these 36 keys, the machine was capable of producing up to 5,400 Chinese characters in all, wielding a language that was infinitely more difficult to mechanize than English or other Western writing systems.

To type a Chinese character, one depressed a total of 4 keys—one from each bank—more or less simultaneously, compared by one observer to playing a chord on the piano. Just as the film explained, “if you want to type word number 4862 you would press 4-8-6-2 and the machine would type the right character.⁠”

Each four-digit code corresponded with a character etched on a revolving drum inside the typewriter. Spinning continuously at a speed of 60 revolutions per minute, or once per second, the drum measured 7 inches in diameter, and 11 inches in length. Its surface was etched with 5,400 Chinese characters,⁠ letters of the English alphabet, punctuation marks, numerals, and a handful of other symbols.

The idea of subsidizing W.F.N.H. efforts is not novel. Last fall, a startup in the U.K. called Flown began developing what it describes as an Airbnb for undistracted knowledge work. The company’s home page features enviable locations, such as a room in the Cotswolds with a desk facing a floor-to-ceiling picture window overlooking a meadow, available for short-term rent. As the founder of Flown, Alicia Navarro, explained to me, when we talked on the phone, the target for these rentals is not individuals but large organizations that can buy time in bulk to support their employees.

Life should contain novelty - experiences you haven't encountered before, preferably teaching you something you didn't already know.  If there isn't a sufficient supply of novelty (relative to the speed at which you generalize), you'll get bored.  (Complex Novelty.)

I thought I'd share some things that have really opened my eyes recently.

The first is a two-part interview with Vinay Gupta from the Emerge podcast in 2019. I've followed Vinay's work ever since we tried to get Firecloud (a P2P publishing platforming using WebRTC) off the ground in 2013 when I was working at Mozilla. Ten years ahead of the curve, as always.

Working with Vinay absolutely blew my mind, and although we haven't met up in person for a few years, he's been changing the world in the meantime. He was the release manager for Ethereum, and he's currently CEO of Mattereum.

The difference with Vinay, though, is that he's enlightened. I don't mean that in a LinkedIn kind of way. I mean that in a studied-under-a-Hindu-guru kind of way. This underpins all of the humanitarian work he does, some of which you can see at myhopeforthe.world

The two episodes on the Emerge podcast are entitled Waking Up in the Monster Factory (Part 1 / Part 2). I guarantee they are worth your time.

The second thing I'd like to share is a documentary series by Adam Curtis that was released last month. Entitled Can't Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World it's available on BBC iPlayer and YouTube.

The late, great Dai Barnes implored me to watch Curtis' 2016 documentary HyperNormalisation. I'm only half way through the new documentary series, and it's having a similar effect as when I watched that. A feeling of waking up, and seeing the world as it really is. It's kind of counter-conspiracy theory.

The crucial thing for me, and my reason for sharing both of these, is a recognition that there's no-one coming to save us. But, unlike those people discussed in the 99% Invisible podcast episode The Doom Boom, it's up to us to figure out how to pull together collectively — instead of hunkering down and just making sure that our immediate family and friends are OK.

Quotation-as-title by Harold Rosenberg. Image by Antonino Visalli

The world doesn't particularly need my opinions on NFTs ('non-fungible tokens') as there's plenty of opinions to go round in other newsletters, podcasts, and blog posts.

After doing a bunch of reading, though, I think that the main use case for NFTs will be ticket sales. That is to say, when there is a limited supply of something with intrinsic value, and both the original buyer and seller want to ensure authenticity.

The rest is speculation and gambling, as far as I'm concerned, with a side serving of ecological destruction. I'm also a bit concerned about the enforcement of copyright everywhere on the web it might lead to...

Twitter's Dorsey auctions first ever tweet as digital memorabilia — "The post, sent from Dorsey’s account in March of 2006, received offers on Friday that went as high as $88,888.88 within minutes of the Twitter co-founder tweeting a link to the listing on ‘Valuables by Cent’ - a tweets marketplace."

NFTs, explained — “Non-fungible” more or less means that it’s unique and can’t be replaced with something else. For example, a bitcoin is fungible — trade one for another bitcoin, and you’ll have exactly the same thing. A one-of-a-kind trading card, however, is non-fungible. If you traded it for a different card, you’d have something completely different. You gave up a Squirtle, and got a 1909 T206 Honus Wagner, which StadiumTalk calls “the Mona Lisa of baseball cards.” (I’ll take their word for it.)"

NFTs are a dangerous trap — "The more time and passion that creators devote to chasing the NFT, the more time they’ll spend trying to create the appearance of scarcity and hustling people to believe that the tokens will go up in value. They’ll become promoters of digital tokens more than they are creators. Because that’s the only reason that someone is likely to buy one–like a stock, they hope it will go up in value. Unlike some stocks, it doesn’t pay dividends or come with any other rights. And unlike actual works of art, NFTs aren’t usually aesthetically beautiful on their own, they simply represent something that is."

Cryptodamages: Monetary value estimates of the air pollution and human health impacts of cryptocurrency mining — "Results indicate that in 2018, each $1 of Bitcoin value created was responsible for $0.49 in health and climate damages in the US and $0.37 in China. The similar value in China relative to the US occurs despite the extremely large disparity between the value of a statistical life estimate for the US relative to that of China. Further, with each cryptocurrency, the rising electricity requirements to produce a single coin can lead to an almost inevitable cliff of negative net social benefits, absent perpetual price increases."

HERE IS THE ARTICLE YOU CAN SEND TO PEOPLE WHEN THEY SAY “BUT THE ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES WITH CRYPTOART WILL BE SOLVED SOON, RIGHT?” — "Much like the world of blue chip, some NFTs may be bought and sold simply as artworks, intended for personal collections and acquired for aesthetic, conceptual, or personal reasons. However, every single one is made from the outset to be liquidated- an asset first, artwork second. They are images attached to dollar figures, not the other way around."

Quotation-as-title by Gustave Flaubert. Image of Nyan Cat, a 2011 meme, which sold as an NFT for ~$600,000 recently.

🍲 Introducing ‘Food Grammar,’ the Unspoken Rules of Every Cuisine — "Grammars can even impose what is considered a food and what isn’t: Horse and rabbit are food for the French but not for the English; insects are food in Mexico but not in Spain. Moreover, just as “Hey, man!” is a friendly greeting for a buddy but maybe not for your boss, foods may not be suitable in all grammatical contexts. “A Frenchman would think it odd to drink white coffee with dinner and an Italian probably would resent being served spaghetti for breakfast,” writes Claude Fischler in “Food, Self and Identity.” By the same token, rice is appropriate for breakfast in Korea but not in Ireland."

The essence of this article is that food is a reflection of culture, and our views of other cultures can become ossified. A good read.

🌍 Scientists begin building highly accurate digital twin of our planet — "The digital twin of the Earth is intended to be an information system that develops and tests scenarios that show more sustainable development and thus better inform policies. "If you are planning a two-​metre high dike in The Netherlands, for example, I can run through the data in my digital twin and check whether the dike will in all likelihood still protect against expected extreme events in 2050," says Peter Bauer, deputy director for Research at the European Centre for Medium-​Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and co-​initiator of Destination Earth. The digital twin will also be used for strategic planning of fresh water and food supplies or wind farms and solar plants."

This is the kind of thing that simultaneously fills me with hope and fear. On the one hand, such a great idea; on the other, if we get the model wrong, it could make things worse...

🤑 Why an Animated Flying Cat With a Pop-Tart Body Sold for Almost $600,000 — "The sale was a new high point in a fast-growing market for ownership rights to digital art, ephemera and media called NFTs, or “nonfungible tokens.” The buyers are usually not acquiring copyrights, trademarks or even the sole ownership of whatever it is they purchase. They’re buying bragging rights and the knowledge that their copy is the “authentic” one."

I've got a blog post percolating in my mind at the moment about digital reserve currencies, NFTs and deepfakes. There's something here about an emerging hyper-capitalist dystopia, for sure.

Quotation-as-title by Oscar Wilde. Image by Tu Tram Pham.

As I'm catching up with news from various sources and bookmarking articles to come back and share via Thought Shrapnel, I also come across interesting tools and resources.

Here are some of them that I thought were interesting enough to share.

ArchiveWeb.page is "the latest tool from Webrecorder to turn your browser into a full-featured interactive web archiving system!"

Bookfeed.io is "a simple tool that allows you to specify a list of authors, and generates an RSS feed with each author’s most recently released book."

Loudreader is "the world's only ebook reader that can open .azw3 [and] .mobi files in a browser!"

NES.css is "a NES style (8bit-like) CSS framework." (also see Simple.css)

novelWriter is "a markdown-like text editor designed for writing novels and larger projects of many smaller plain text documents."

Open Peeps is a hand-drawn illustration library. "You can use Open Peeps in product illustration, marketing imagery, comics, product states, user flows, personas, storyboarding, invitations for your quinceañera...or anything else not on this list."

Pattern Generator provides you with a way to "create unique, seamless, royalty-free patterns".

Same Energy is "a visual search engine. You can use it to find beautiful art, photography, decoration ideas, or anything else."

Screenstab allows you to "cut down on time and effort by auto-generating appealing graphics for marketing materials, social media posts, illustrations & presentation slides."

Quotation-as-title by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Image by Jessica Lee.

🙏 Blogging as a forgiving medium — "The ability to “move it around for a long time” is what I’m looking for in a writing medium — I want words and images to be movable, I want to switch them out, copy and cut and paste them, let them mutate. "

I love the few minutes after I press publish on a post, which feels like a race against time between me and the first readers of it. Who will spot the typos and grammatical errors first?

📝 Open working blog and weeknotes templates — "We wrote a guide on how to write weeknotes for Catalyst projects. It is based on Sam Villis’ guide and the templates here are based on Sam’s guide too."

This is useful, especially if you're not blogging yet (or haven't for a while!)

⌚ How to be more productive without forcing yourself — "Basically, if you’re addicted to any of the high-dopamine, low-effort activity, please quit it. At least temporarily so you can reestablish a healthy relationship to work. The more experienced we’re about the topic, the more obvious this is. There is no other way than to temporarily quit the addiction."

I like the practical advice in this article. Too many people do stuff that's too low-value, thus squandering their talent and ability to take on more important stuff.

🤔 Objective or Biased — "This type of analysis software is not widely used in recruiting in Germany and Europe right now. However, large companies are definitely interested in the technology, as we learn during off-the-record conversations. What seems to be attractive: A shorter application process which can save a lot of resources and money."

This is kind of laughable and serious at the same time. I've felt the pain of hiring but, as this research shows, automating the hard parts doesn't lead to awesome results.

📱 Contact-tracing apps were the biggest tech failure of the COVID-19 pandemic — "The system itself, on a technical level, is the root of the problem. In an effort to provide something that could be used universally, while also protecting users’ privacy, Google and Apple came up with a system that was doomed to be useless."

My concern here is that the fault for the failure will be placed at the door of privacy activists.

Quotation-as-title by Baltasar Gracián. Images by Vera Shimunia, Russian textile artist via #WOMENSART

👯‍♀️ Secrets of the VIP Party: Why the 1% Love ‘Ritualised Waste’ — "Post-pandemic, in a broader sense, you glimpsed an immediate reckoning and disgust with ostentatious displays of wealth in the context of COVID-19. We saw some instances where people would make statements like ‘we’re all in this together’, while broadcasting from their luxury yacht or private island, followed by a backlash. I think they’ve quickly learned not to do that since…"

This is an incredible read: an interview with a former model turned sociology professor.

💳 Germany To Let Citizens Store ID Cards On Smartphone — "The Interior Ministry said Wednesday that from this fall, citizens will be able to use the electronic ID stored in their smartphones together with a PIN number to prove they are who they claim to be when communicating with authorities or private businesses."

It's Germany, so I'm sure they'll do this sensibly, but it's incredible to think how quickly smartphones have become an essential part of our everyday life.

🏛️ 'A very dangerous epoch': historians try to make sense of Covid — "It is not just the Covid pandemic that can make these feel like unusually significant times. Populism, Trump’s rise and (perhaps) fall, Brexit, the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo protests, mass movement of refugees, the increased might of both China and India and many other issues have contributed to a sense of humanity having reached a historic moment, all while the climate crisis rages with ever more urgency."

People always think they're living through unprecedented times. But in our case, we probably are.

🚸 Why there's no such thing as lost learning — "The fact is that we – as a community of politicians, teachers and education experts – decide what any child must know, understand or be able to do at each age, not some natural law of learning. Why should a child know the structure of a cell membrane by the age of 16? I couldn’t know that information at 16 because it had not yet been fully discovered and described. But I learned it at a later stage."

This is a useful post to point people towards, as the author does a great job of pointing out the ridiculousness of putting an arbitrary body of knowledge before the well-being of young people.

👑 Should Elizabeth II be Elizabeth the Last? At least allow Britain a debate — "But none of [these revelations] reflect the real damage the monarchy inflicts on us. It’s not their money nor their abuse of power, but their very existence that ambushes and infantilises the public imagination, making us their subjects in mind and spirit."

My views on privilege hardly need rehearsing here, but suffice to say that one of the main problems with our tiny island is the delusions of grandeur we have through outdated institutions such as the monarchy.

Quotation-as-title by Anthony Hope. Image by Tyler Nix.

🕸️ A plan to redesign the internet could make apps that no one controls ⁠— "Rewinding the internet is not about nostalgia. The dominance of a few companies, and the ad-tech industry that supports them, has distorted the way we communicate—pulling public discourse into a gravity well of hate speech and misinformation—and upended basic norms of privacy. There are few places online beyond the reach of these tech giants, and few apps or services that thrive outside of their ecosystems."

It is, inevitably, focused on crypto tokens, which provide an economic incentive. If only there was a way to fix things that didn't seem to be driven by making the inventors obscenely rich?

🤯 Can’t Get You Out of My Head review – Adam Curtis's 'emotional history' is dazzling — "Whether you are convinced or not by the working hypothesis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head is a rush. It is vanishingly rare to be confronted by work so dense, so widely searching and ambitious in scope, so intelligent and respectful of the audience’s intelligence, too. It is rare, also, to watch a project over which one person has evidently been given complete creative freedom and control without any sense of self-indulgence creeping in."

Adam Curtis' documentary 'Hypernormalisation' blew my mind, and I'm already enjoying the first of these six hour-long documentaries.

💸 Why Mastercard is bringing crypto onto its network — "We are preparing right now for the future of crypto and payments, announcing that this year Mastercard will start supporting select cryptocurrencies directly on our network. This is a big change that will require a lot of work. We will be very thoughtful about which assets we support based on our principles for digital currencies, which focus on consumer protections and compliance."

Companies like Mastercard haven't got much of a choice here: they have to either get with the program or risk being replaced. Hopefully it will help simplify what is a confusing picture at the moment. I've had problems recently withdrawing money from cryptocurrency exchanges to my bank accounts.

👉 Hovering over decline and clicking accept — "There's so much written about self-care. And much of it starts from a good place but falls apart the moment things get hectic. But this idea of Past You working in service of Future You isn't a one-off. It's not a massage you sneak in one Friday morning. The secret hope that 60 minutes of hot rocks will counteract 12 hours a day hunched over a laptop."

Some good advice in here from the Nightingales, whose book is also worth a read.

👨‍💻 Praxis and the Indieweb — "If a movement has at its core a significant barrier to entry, then it is always exclusionary. While we’ve already seen that the movement has barriers at ability and personality, it is also true that, as of 2021, there is a significant barrier in terms of monetary resources."

As I said a year ago in this microcast, I have issues with the IndieWeb and why I'm more of a fan of decentralisation through federation.

Quotation-as-title by Heraclitus. Image by Saad Chaudhry.

🧐 Habits, Data, and Things That Go Bump in the Night: Microsoft for Education ⁠— "Microsoft’s ubiquity, however, is sometimes mistaken for banality. Because it is everywhere, because we have all used it forever, we assume we can trust it."

I haven't voluntarily used something made by Microsoft (as opposed to acquired by it) for... about 20 years?

⏳ You Can Set Screen-Time Rules That Don’t Ruin Your Kids’ Lives — "Bear in mind that the limits you set need not be a specific number of minutes. Try to think of other, more natural ways of breaking up their activities. Maybe your kids play one game before tackling homework. Also, consider granting them one day per weekend with fewer restrictions on screen-time socializing. Giving them more autonomy over their weekends helps approximate the fun and flexibility of their pre-COVID world, and lets them unwind and hang out more with their friends."

This has been really hard to managed as a parent, and it's easy to think that you're always doing it wrong.

💬 Why do we keep on telling others what to do? — "Usually starting a conversation out with telling people what you feel they are doing wrong is going to make it a negative conversation all in all, and I tend to believe that it's better to follow “the campfire rule”, try to make all people taking part in a conversation end up a bit better off than what they were when they started the conversation, and telling people what to do or what not to are going straight against this."

Post-therapy, I'm much better at focusing on changing myself than trying to change others. I'd recommend therapy, but that might be construed as an implicit instruction...

🙌 Twitter Considers Subscription Fee for Tweetdeck, Unique Content — "To explore potential options outside ad sales, a number of Twitter teams are researching subscription offerings, including one using the code name “Rogue One,” according to people familiar with the effort. At least one idea being considered is related to “tipping,” or the ability for users to pay the people they follow for exclusive content, said the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions are internal. Other possible ways to generate recurring revenue include charging for the use of services like Tweetdeck or advanced user features like “undo send” or profile-customization options."

This is fantastic news. It would destroy Twitter as it currently stands, but that's fine as it's much worse than it was a decade ago.

🔒 Do lockdowns work? — "It's absurd thinking, but the sceptics have finally found an argument that cannot be categorically disproved. Lockdowns have a scientific rational: you can't transmit a virus to people you don't meet. Contrary to what Toby says in his article, they also have historic precedents: during the Spanish Flu, cities such as Philadelphia closed shops, churches, schools, bars and restaurants by law (they also made face masks mandatory). And now we have numerous natural experiments from around the world showing that infection rates fall when lockdowns are introduced."

There will always be idiots who try and use their influence and eloquence to ensure they're heard. Thankfully, there are people like this who can dismantle their arguments brick-by-brick.

Quotation-as-title by Jules Renard. Image. by Elena Mozhvilo.

🏭 Ukraine plans huge cryptocurrency mining data centers next to nuclear power plants — "Ukraine's Energoatom followed up [the May 2020] deal with another partnership in October. The state enterprise announced an MoU with Dutch mining company Bitfury to operate multiple data centers near its four nuclear power plants, with a total mining consumption of 2GW."

It's already impossible to buy graphics cards, due to their GPUs being perfect for crypto mining. That fact doesn't seem like it's going to be resolved anytime soon.

😔 The unbearable banality of Jeff Bezos — "To put it in Freudian terms, we are talking about the triumph of the consumerist id over the ethical superego. Bezos is a kind of managerial Mephistopheles for our time, who will guarantee you a life of worldly customer ecstasy as long as you avert your eyes from the iniquities being carried out in your name."

I've started buying less stuff from Amazon; even just removing the app from my phone has made them treat me as just another online shop. I also switched a few years ago from a Kindle to a ePub-based e-reader.

📱 The great unbundling — "Covid brought shock and a lot of broken habits to tech, but mostly, it accelerates everything that was already changing. 20 trillion dollars of retail, brands, TV and advertising is being overturned, and software is remaking everything from cars to pharma. Meanwhile, China has more smartphone users than Europe and the USA combined, and India is close behind - technology and innovation will be much more widely spread. For that and lots of other reasons, tech is becoming a regulated industry, but if we step over the slogans, what does that actually mean? Tech is entering its second 50 years."

This is a really interesting presentation (and slide deck). It's been interesting watching Evans build this iteratively over the last few weeks, as he's been sharing his progress on Twitter.

🗯️ The Coup We Are Not Talking About — "In an information civilization, societies are defined by questions of knowledge — how it is distributed, the authority that governs its distribution and the power that protects that authority. Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides who knows? Surveillance capitalists now hold the answers to each question, though we never elected them to govern. This is the essence of the epistemic coup. They claim the authority to decide who knows by asserting ownership rights over our personal information and defend that authority with the power to control critical information systems and infrastructures."

Zuboff is an interesting character, and her book on surveillance capitalism is a classic. This might article be a little overblown, but it's still an important subject for discussion.

☀️ Who Built the Egyptian Pyramids? Not Slaves — "So why do so many people think the Egyptian pyramids were built by slaves? The Greek historian Herodotus seems to have been the first to suggest that was the case. Herodotus has sometimes been called the “father of history.” Other times he's been dubbed the “father of lies.” He claimed to have toured Egypt and wrote that the pyramids were built by slaves. But Herodotus actually lived thousands of years after the fact."

It's always good to challenge our assumptions, and, perhaps more importantly, analyse why we came to hold them in the first place.

Quotation-as-title by Blaise Pascal. Image by Victor Forgacs.

🏡 What can we learn from the great working-from-home experiment? — "A few knowledge jobs, such as IT support, are properly systematised to allow focused work without endless ad hoc emails. [Cal] Newport believes that others will follow once we all wise up. Or we may find that certain kinds of knowledge work are too unruly to systematise. Improvisation will remain the only mode of working — and, for that, face-to-face contact seems essential."

I disagree with this, having spent almost a decade doing creative, improvisational work, mostly from my home office.

✊ They left Mozilla to make the internet better. Now they’re spreading its gospel for a new generation. — "Plenty of older tech companies spawned networks of industry leaders. Mozilla has, too, only it's a different kind of group: a collection of values-driven engineers, marketers, program managers and founders. Most of them share a common story: Looking for a sense of purpose in tech, they took a financial hit for the chance to become part of the company's cult-like obsession with openness and privacy. Though the company had its flaws, they left feeling deep loyalty to the mission, and a sense of betrayal from those who went on to work for the tech giants Mozilla has been battling. "

Some companies act as a filter for a certain type of person. Mozilla is like that, and while I was there I worked with some of the most ethical and awesome people I've ever come across.

🤪 Why It’s Usually Crazier Than You Expect — "The idea that people like (or hate) what other people like (or hate) is important, because it lets small ideas grow bigger than you’d guess if you assume everything is ranked by quality alone. Social momentum is hard to model on a spreadsheet, so it’s hard to predict or think about in terms that seem rational. But it’s so powerful."

The standard economic model is that people act in their individual and group self-interest. But humans are much more complicated than that.

🎓 Academics Are Really, Really Worried About Their Freedom — "Some will process this as a kind of whining, supposing that all we should really be concerned about is whether people are outright dismissed. However, elsewhere a hostile work environment is considered a breach of civil rights, and as one correspondent wrote, “It isn’t just fear of firing that motivates professors and grad students to be quiet. It is a desire to have friends, to be part of a community. This is a fundamental part of human psychology. Indeed, experiments examining the effects of ostracism highlight what a powerful existential threat it is to be ignored, excluded, or rejected. This has been documented at the neurological level. Ostracism is a form of social death. It is a very potent threat.”

Given how conservative humanity has been for the past tens of thousands of years, and given how radical we need to be to fix the world, I don't have lots of sympathy with this view. Especially when tenured professors have the kind of job security most people can only dream of.

👩‍💻 Where we are with digital learning adoption — "We should have less big bang summative exams sat in big rooms with invigilators, there are plenty of alternatives. Online assessment systems can at least allow for typing, which is more authentic, and why not also speaking, and drawing? And in the scenarios where an unseen timed assessment is the only option and it has to be online: sometimes proctoring might be useful. It shouldn’t be the default. But it might have a place, sometimes."

I'm sharing this to +1,000,000 Amber's suggestion that, for assessment purposes, speaking and drawing should be as authentic as typing and writing.

Quotation-as-title by Marquis de la Grange. Image: Changing the Letter, 1908, by Joseph Edward Southall

🤖 Engineers Turned Living Venus Flytrap Into Cyborg Robotic Grabber — "The main purpose of this research was to find a way of creating robotic mechanisms able to pick up tiny, delicate objects without harming them. And this particular cyborg creation was able to do just that."

👀 First Look: Meet the New Linux Distro Inspired by the iPad — "This distro is designed to be a tablet first and a “laptop-lite” experience second. And I do mean “lite”; this is not trying to be a desktop Linux distro that runs tablet apps, but a tablet Linux distro that can run desktop ones – a distinction that’s worth keeping in mind."

🤯 DALL·E: Creating Images from Text — "GPT-3 showed that language can be used to instruct a large neural network to perform a variety of text generation tasks. Image GPT showed that the same type of neural network can also be used to generate images with high fidelity. We extend these findings to show that manipulating visual concepts through language is now within reach."

🔊 Surround sound from lightweight roll-to-roll printed loudspeaker paper — "The speaker track, including printed circuitry, weighs just 150 grams and consists of 90 percent conventional paper that can be printed in color on both sides."

👩‍💻 You can now run Linux on Apple M1 devices — "While Linux, and even Windows, were already usable on Apple Silicon thanks to virtualization, this is the first instance of a non-macOS operating system running natively on the hardware."

Quotation-as-title by Montesquieu. Image from top-linked post.

🏙️ How the spread of sheds threatens cities — "A white-collar worker who has tried to work from the kitchen table for the past nine months might be keen to return to the office. A worker who has an insulated garden shed with Wi-Fi will be less so. Joel Bird, who builds bespoke sheds, is certain that his clients envisage a long-term change in their working habits. “They don’t consider it to be temporary,” he says. “They’re spending too much money.”

😬 Transactional Enchantment — "The greatest endemic risk to the psyche in 2021 is not that you’ll end up on the streets next week or fail to fund your retirement in 30 years. The greatest risk is that you’ll feel so relentlessly battered by the weirdness all around that you’ll go numb and simply disengage from the world entirely today."

🕸️ The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML — "Are you developing public services? Or a system that people might access when they’re in desperate need of help? Plain HTML works. A small bit of simple CSS will make look decent. JavaScript is probably unnecessary – but can be used to progressively enhance stuff. Add alt text to images so people paying per MB can understand what the images are for (and, you know, accessibility)."

💬 Convocational Development — "The fundamental difference between the convocation and traditional open source is that energy is put into facilitating discussions between users, coders, graphic designers etc. Documentation and instructions are often the weakest part of an open source project, and that excludes people who don’t have the time or ability to assemble a mental model of the open source software and its capabilities from just the code and the meagre promotional materials. The convocation starts as a basic web forum, but evolves tools and cultures that enable greater participation in the development process itself."

📈 GameStop Is Rage Against the Financial Machine — "Instead of greed, this latest bout of speculation, and especially the extraordinary excitement at GameStop, has a different emotional driver: anger. The people investing today are driven by righteous anger, about generational injustice, about what they see as the corruption and unfairness of the way banks were bailed out in 2008 without having to pay legal penalties later, and about lacerating poverty and inequality. This makes it unlike any of the speculative rallies and crashes that have preceded it."

Quotation-as-title by R.H. Tawney. Image from top-linked post.

🧠 I Feel Better Now — "Brain chemistry and childhood trauma go a long way toward explaining a person’s particular struggles with mental health, but you could be forgiven for wondering whether there is also something larger at work here—whether the material arrangement of society itself, in other words, is contributing to a malaise that various authorities nevertheless encourage us to believe is exclusively individual."

😟 Where loneliness can lead — "Totalitarianism uses isolation to deprive people of human companionship, making action in the world impossible, while destroying the space of solitude. The iron-band of totalitarianism, as Arendt calls it, destroys man’s ability to move, to act, and to think, while turning each individual in his lonely isolation against all others, and himself. The world becomes a wilderness, where neither experience nor thinking are possible."

🙍 The problem is poverty, however we label it — "If your only choice of an evening is between skipping dinner or going to sleep in the cold before waking up in the cold, then you are not carefully selecting between food poverty and fuel poverty, like some expense-account diner havering over the French reds on a wine list. You are simply impoverished."

👩‍💻 Malware found on laptops given out by government — "According to the forum, the Windows laptops contained Gamarue.I, a worm identified by Microsoft in 2012... The malware in question installs spyware which can gather information about browsing habits, as well as harvest personal information such as banking details."

🏭 Turn off that camera during virtual meetings, environmental study says — "Just one hour of videoconferencing or streaming, for example, emits 150-1,000 grams of carbon dioxide... But leaving your camera off during a web call can reduce these footprints by 96%."

Quotation-as-title by unknown. Image via top-linked article.