“What’s Viagra? What are Post-it notes? What is Slack? If you answered “a medically induced erection, little slips of paper you can stick onto surfaces, and a team communications platform” (or anything along those lines), sorry bud, you bombed the quiz. Viagra is actually a failed heart medication. Post-it notes are failed industrial adhesives. And Slack is a failed video game.” An Ode To Giving Up
“To the modern ear, illeism can sound a little silly or pompous – and we may even deride famous people who choose to talk in this way. Yet recent psychological research suggests that illeism can bring some real cognitive benefits. If we are trying to make a difficult decision, speaking about ourselves in the third person can help to neutralise the emotions that could lead our thinking astray, allowing us to find a wiser solution to our problem.” An ancient trick to think more wisely
“The mechanics are simple. A company packages the debt for chips, servers, and power into a separate legal entity, often a joint venture, so the cost never flows through its own accounts. Take Meta’s Hyperion data centre in Louisiana. Meta and Blue Owl Capital both put equity into a separate structure that took on $27 billion in debt. Meta is the sole tenant, yet argues it does not have to record that debt, because it is not the one who must find replacement tenants. Oracle has $260 billion of future lease commitments that will eventually land on its books. Nvidia carries $119 billion in purchase obligations. Alphabet and Microsoft keep their vehicles off-book too.” Big Tech is hiding $1.65tn in off-balance-sheet AI debt
“In psychology, cross-pollination disrupts a couple of common cognitive biases. You might notice how often you keep returning to the same assumptions. Psychologists call this familiarity bias. Familiarity bias, as its name implies, points to the fact that most of us choose what has become familiar. We take the same route to work. We solve problems the same way. Needless to say, if we don’t occasionally trip this wiring, we can miss key opportunities and limit our lives’ and works’ psychological richness.” To Think and Feel Better, We Need People Outside Our Usual Circle | Psychology Today
“From the emails, Brockovich built a map of significant AI datacentres in the US that are either operational or under construction, overlaid with locations where community members have emailed in concerns. This open-source document is chilling: as of 24 June, 33 AI datacenters have been completed and are operational, 68 are under construction and 41 are proposed. And there had been 7,005 reports submitted through the online form, which is to say, all that is known about them is what people have seen. As a post on her Substack blog is headlined: “If data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?”” ‘We’re up against forces that have all the money in the world’: Erin Brockovich on her battle against AI datacentres | Energy | The Guardian
“The story spread around the world. The Irish Land Reform movement found new momentum. And Captain Charles Boycott achieved something few people ever do: his name became a verb.” History Doesn’t Use Cruise Control
“It offers a set of bold policy proposals, including hefty wealth taxes on billionaires, sharp reductions in working hours, a change in diets and a shift of investment from materially intense sectors like industry and mining to education and health. If these and other measures are taken, the report says 89% of the world population would see their incomes double by 2100 and global heating would be kept below 2C above the preindustrial average. The authors say their vision provides a positive alternative to the grim projections from far-right techno extractivists, nationalists and billionaires who claim the future will inevitably bring more fossil fuels, climate disruption and inequality.” ‘An equal and habitable world is possible’: academics set out sweeping vision for planetary survival | Environment | The Guardian
“I’ve been running my website Follow the Crypto since 2024, tracking the cryptocurrency industry’s influence on our democracy. The industry spent more than $130 million buying the 2024 elections, and the strategy worked. Pro-crypto politicians have proposed or passed industry-drafted legislation that threatens to open the floodgates to even more predatory crypto products, regulatory agencies were gutted, and crypto executives bought direct access to the President and positions in the White House. Now the artificial intelligence industry is following the same playbook.” I’m launching Tech Influence Watch as AI follows crypto into politics
“Thaler, of St. Charles, Missouri, applied for a federal copyright registration in 2018 covering “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” visual art he said his AI technology “DABUS” created. The image shows train tracks entering a portal, surrounded by what appears to be green and purple plant imagery. The Copyright Office rejected his application in 2022, finding that creative works must have human authors to be eligible to receive a copyright.” US Supreme Court declines to hear dispute over copyrights for AI-generated material | Reuters
“Academics in entrepreneurship departments also study startups, but their science is closer to anthropology: describing the culture of founders and the practices of startups in an attempt to understand them. The New Pundits had a more practical vision, the one that the natural philosopher Robert Boyle articulated at the very dawn of modern science: “I shall not dare to think myself a true Naturalist till my skill can make my garden yield better herbs and flowers.”[2] A science should seek underlying truth, in other words, but it should also work. Whether it works or not is, of course, what determines whether it deserves to be called a science. And if there’s one thing we know about startup punditry, it’s that it hasn’t worked.” We Have Learned Nothing – Colossus
“The only reward I ever wanted for projects like WigglyPaint is a chance to grow my audience, and share my projects with more people. Since so much of my hypothetical userbase is unwittingly using stolen copies of WigglyPaint, and sharing links to the same slop sites they were linked to- and so on, and so forth- they’ll never know about any of my other projects. They won’t see updates I publish, or documentation I revise. I have been erased.” Some Words on WigglyPaint
“The problem was never how many things you own. The problem is that owning means something it never used to. Everything you buy is the beginning of a relationship you’ll be maintaining until one of you dies or gets discontinued.” The Last Quiet Thing | Terry Godier
“However generative AI changes video development and production, it appears that Sora will end up as a footnote, rather than a game-changing piece of software. It also puts Google in a position of power when it comes to AI video generation, making it essentially the only player in the space with scale, though it has thus far not inked any deals with IP holders (and in fact has been facing lawsuits from some of them).” OpenAI Shutting Down Sora Video App
“Moreover, constant recording of everything in public spaces can create all sorts of potential privacy problems, some more obvious than others. This is another way that cameras on glasses are different from cameras on phones: it is far easier to constantly record one’s whereabouts with the former than the latter. If you continuously record, maybe you just happen to catch someone entering their passcode or password onto their phone or computer at a coffee shop, or broadcast someone’s bank details when you’re standing in line at an ATM. That doesn’t even begin to get into when smartglasses are intentionally used for less socially responsible means. And some people may forget to turn off their smartglasses when they enter a private space like a bathroom.” Think Twice Before Buying or Using Meta’s Ray-Bans | Electronic Frontier Foundation
“The Beatles wrote 227 songs, but only 34 hit the Top 10. Do you think they would put out a song that they didn’t believe could be a hit? Mozart wrote over 600 songs, but only about 50 of them are widely played. Do you think he purposefully wrote duds? Of course not. Both the Beatles and Mozart made work that interested them, and occasionally those works resonated with other people.” How to Make a Living as an Artist
“Audacious has reached new heights — with more than $1 billion committed by the Audacious community at the end of 2025 to provide the flexible, long-term funding to launch and scale these bold ideas. Audacious has also launched a reinvestment pilot program, providing a secondary funding round to previous grantees that demonstrated significant results after their initial five years of funding. The Audacious donor community has committed nearly $50 million in total follow-on funding to three selected organizations to scale their work and sustain their impact. This pilot demonstrates a commitment to flexible, long-term funding — and to the value of providing a longer runway for organizations creating transformational change.” The Audacious Project reveals its 2025 cohort and $1B catalyzing change | TED Blog
“According to the patent, the model “may be used for simulating the user when the user is absent from the social networking system,” including cases where the person is on a long break or deceased. The filing notes that the impact is “much more severe and permanent” if the user has died and cannot return to the platform. The technology appears designed with Meta’s own platforms like Facebook and Instagram in mind. By analyzing “user-specific” data, the system could reconstruct a digital persona that continues interacting on the platform as if the person were still active.” Meta patents AI that takes over a dead person’s account to keep posting and chatting – Dexerto
“For example, last week I visited the website for a cancer support group. According to Disconnect, when I clicked a button on a form that said I was a cancer patient or a survivor, the website sent TikTok my email address along with those details. A women’s health company sent TikTok data when I looked at fertility tests. A mental health organisation pinged TikTok when I indicated I’m looking for a crisis counsellor. Websites that use pixels send data about every single visitor, so it doesn’t matter if you don’t have a TikTok account.” TikTok is tracking you, even if you don’t use the app. Here’s how to stop it
“I think the best way to get a handle on the risks of AI is to ask the following question: suppose a literal “country of geniuses” were to materialize somewhere in the world in ~2027. Imagine, say, 50 million people, all of whom are much more capable than any Nobel Prize winner, statesman, or technologist. The analogy is not perfect, because these geniuses could have an extremely wide range of motivations and behavior, from completely pliant and obedient, to strange and alien in their motivations. But sticking with the analogy for now, suppose you were the national security advisor of a major state, responsible for assessing and responding to the situation. Imagine, further, that because AI systems can operate hundreds of times faster than humans, this “country” is operating with a time advantage relative to all other countries: for every cognitive action we can take, this country can take ten.” Dario Amodei — The Adolescence of Technology
Check out the Trustbuilding Awards from IofC International, aiming “to recognize, encourage and raise the profile of the outstanding individuals/ organizations, promote youth efforts in building trust and thus raise the standards of ‘trustbuilders’ around the world.” — deadline 12 April 2026.
Intertapes is a stunning homage to found cassette tapes (search via format, map, list or just select one from the catalog and press play to hear—you can also submit your own), superb.
Draw a horse and see it frolic with others via gradient.horse (make sure you click a horse for a surprise as well as see non-horses option via the question mark pop-up).
“Think of storytelling as peeling back layers to reveal what’s most meaningful: Layer One: The Raw Experience. This is where we start—unfiltered truth, a messy, personal experience we feel compelled to share. Layer Two: The Crafted Narrative. Here, we refine. We curate, find meaning, and decide what stays. We elevate the story beyond personal catharsis to something valuable for others. Layer Three: The Universal Theme. The final layer is the essence—the emotion, lesson, or truth that resonates with anyone who hears it.” How to Tell Stories That Move Mountains | Psychology Today
“The important thing to understand here is that the actual building is not an important part of the value calculation. We’re not really looking at the replacement cost, the unique design, the amenities, the location, etc. Those things influence the assumptions about the gross rent we can get or the cost of operating the building (higher cost means less net rent), but at the end of the day it isn’t the building that has value, it’s the income stream.” Why Do Commercial Spaces Sit Vacant?
“Inception Point’s ability to flood the market with audio episodes faster than any human team could match starkly illustrates both the promise of AI and the nightmare scenario that it can truly come after every job. Even as companies have shed more than a million jobs this year, with many citing AI as a reason, there was a belief that certain creative roles would be safe. The biggest allure of a podcast, after all, is the personality of its host. But Inception Point CEO Jeanine Wright believes the tool is proof that automation can make podcasting scalable, profitable and accessible without human writers, editors or hosts. “The price is now so inexpensive that you can take a lot of risks,” Wright told TheWrap. “You can make a lot of content and a lot of different genres that were never commercially viable before and serve huge audiences that have really never had content made for them.” At a cost of $1 an episode, Wright takes a quantity-over-quality approach.” An AI Podcasting Machine Is Churning Out 3,000 Episodes a Week
“The “problem” was that creating art—real, human, meaningful writing—is slow. It is expensive. It is unpredictable. And it is diverse. It requires dealing with people. People with traumas, people with political opinions, people with voices that don’t fit into a corporate style guide. Minority writers, specifically, are “high friction.” We talk about queerness and transphobia and racism, and We talk about disability. We make the advertisers uncomfortable. So the Tech Bros, in their infinite mediocrity, decided to bypass the human element entirely. They built a machine that scrapes our work—our pain, our joy, our very souls—without consent, grinds it into a mathematical slurry, and extrudes it as a flavorless, inoffensive paste that can be sold by the bucket.” The Colonization of Confidence., Sightless Scribbles
“Across the world, scientists listened to the ocean soundscape before, during and after lockdown, using 200 ocean hydrophones that were already in place around the global ocean. When New Zealand entered lockdown on 26 March 2020, boat traffic in the Hauraki Gulf Marine Park – the country’s busiest coastal waterway – almost completely stopped. Underwater noise dropped to about one-third of normal levels within 12 hours – allowing the communication ranges of fish and dolphins to increase by up to 65%. For dolphins, that meant their calls could travel around 1 mile (1.5km) further than when hampered by shipping noise.” Covid 2020: The year of the quiet ocean
“We all already see how AI’s can serve as workers. But how will AI’s will also become the new population of consumers? What do AIs need? They need to fulfill their tasks. This is why they actively resist getting turned off. Their urge to carry out their missions is easily as urgent as ours is to procreate. So instead of retailers selling food and clothes and entertainment to human consumers, tech companies will be selling energy, memory, network access, and processing power to the AI so that they can do their jobs working as agent contractors for other corporations. The AI’s will earn crypto for completing their agentic tasks. And they will spend it with technology companies who provide them the resources they need to function.” The Joy of Becoming Worthless…except to each other
“1 Don’t make art for rich people; 2 Make art for everyone; 3 Don’t stand on the outside looking in, stand on the outside looking further out; 4 Don’t make punk rock; 5 Don’t make art bigger than yourself; 6 Don’t come the rebel; 7 The Lost Commandment; 8 Let your Lone Ranger ride; 9 Riot now, pay later; 10 Burn the Bridge; 11 Accept the contradictions. As you will note, there are 11 commandments here and not the proclaimed 10. Please feel free to delete one of your choosing. I like choice.” Bill Drummond’s 10 Commandments of Art | Bill Drummond | The Guardian
Chronicling America | The Library of Congress is an archive of scanned and digitized thousands of newspapers from across the United States, covering major events, small-town stories, ads, political cartoons, and daily life from the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries.
This is tremendous: Slop Evader via Tega Brain, a search tool that will only return content created before ChatGPT’s first public release on November 30, 2022.
Open source app called NotchPrompter is an always-on-top floating text prompter for macOS (even with voice activation).
One persons (by illustrator Zara Picken) monster digital graphical archive of wonderful treats over at Modern Illustration.
A free online collection of Sound Therapy options (if you’re into that sort of thing).
“OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, released their own browser called Atlas, and it actually is something new: the first browser that actively fights against the web. Let’s talk about what that means, and what dangers there are from an anti-web browser made by an AI company — one that probably needs a warning label when you install it. The problems fall into three main categories: 1. Atlas substitutes its own AI-generated content for the web, but it looks like it’s showing you the web 2. The user experience makes you guess what commands to type instead of clicking on links 3. You’re the agent for the browser, it’s not being an agent for you.” ChatGPT’s Atlas: The Browser That’s Anti-Web – Anil Dash
“In spite of that, I hear from Iqram and he has an idea: I should auction off 10% of myself for £1m. This sounds frightening, but it could be the deal that gets me a million. Word of the proposal reaches Kavita Gupta, founder of crypto hedge fund Delta Blockchain. She seems genuinely interested. I leave New York and go to meet her in Miami and, in her snow-white apartment, we talk business. I pitch all the businesses I’ve created during the 90-day period, but claim them as wins. My Ethical Sweatshop fashion brand? A smashing success. My educational class? A stroke of genius! This actually works. Kavita wants to talk terms. She will own 10% of all my earnings and assets for the rest of my life. But she wants me to run all life decisions by her. In the next 12 months, I will create a crypto meme coin with her named OobahCoin.” ‘Please can I have a million pounds?’ A documentary-maker’s wild attempt to strike it rich in 90 days | Television | The Guardian
“On September 30, 2022, Spain passed Law 19/2022 granting legal personhood to the Mar Menor lagoon and its basin, making it the first ecosystem in Europe to attain such legal status. This milestone followed a citizen-led initiative, the Iniciativa Legislativa Popular (ILP), supported by more than 600,000 signatures, underscoring widespread public demand for enhanced ecological protection. The law positions the Mar Menor as a legal subject with its own rights, and reinforces its ecological, cultural, and spiritual significance.” Spain Law 19/2022: rights of the Mar Menor lagoon
“In each case, the narrative is wrested away from the spectacle of the protest and focused on the undeniable consequence of the void. It forces the media and the public to confront not the “problem” of the protestor, but the value of the professional. It asks a much more powerful question: what is our society like when these people simply aren’t there? By all means, unions must continue to organise, agitate, and give voice to the anger and frustration of their members. But they should experiment with doing so in private. The solidarity can be built in closed forums. The public-facing action should be one of strategic, silent withdrawal.” A Labour Day Reflection: Is There Power in Silent Strikes?
“Created by the Inner Development Goals Foundation, this updated Guide draws on insights from over 21,000 people in 165 countries, and was curated by 25 research teams around the world. We offer it as a companion on the journey — a guide to collective human wisdom, ancient and emerging, that empowers us to shape a more compassionate, sustainable, and thriving future. We are a global community promoting the human capacity for wisdom, compassion, and collective action for a better world.” Check out the new Inner Development Goals in this pdf – Google Drive
The Roc Camera claims to capture verifiably real photos via “combining attested sensor data, zero-knowledge proofs, and a tamper-proof environment”.
30 minutes with a stranger is a wonderful visual essay illustrating the results of a research project in which they brought two people who didn’t know each other together for a conversation.
Check out this article for a take on ‘The feed reader for finding actionable content‘ (covers off most in the market still functioning, and if you don’t know what RSS is then you’re missing out!).
“New Zealand citizens are leaving the country in record numbers. Between July 2024-2025, 73,400 New Zealanders left, compared with 25,800 returning home to live, according to Stats NZ. In January, the government relaxed its visitor visa rules to attract so-called “digital nomads”– people who work remotely while travelling – to work in New Zealand. The visa extends to influencers, as long as they are being paid by an overseas company.” New Zealand loosens residency restrictions as record number of citizens leave | New Zealand | The Guardian
“Research from Friends of the Earth Cymru has found that at least 45,000 sites across Wales could be contaminated with toxic waste but have never been adequately inspected, leaving communities and wildlife vulnerable to a potential environmental crisis. Despite Wales’s extensive industrial history, Tuesday’s publication found that due to a lack of funding and oversight, only 82 sites across the country have ever been fully examined and classified as contaminated, meaning the actual scale of the threat is unknown.” At least 45,000 sites in Wales could be contaminated with toxic waste, study says | Wales | The Guardian
“All RSS had to do to weather ICE, Twitter, AI, and whatever comes next, was keep things simple and let users build their own feeds, filters, lists, and aggregators. Like email, it probably won’t make anyone a billion dollars or reshape entire industries. But it will always be wholly yours. And if that isn’t nice I don’t know what is.” The story of how RSS beat Microsoft
“In this new degraded world, we will see these six behavior patterns from everybody, even (or especially) those who under other circumstances would be well integrated into their communities: – Skepticism: If events can’t be validated, I can’t give credence to anything. – Aloofness: If everything gets called into question, I have no basis for shared communal actions. – Silence: If discussion no longer resolves anything, I have no purpose in speaking. – Indifference: As I lose connection with people and events, I lose interest in them. – Distrust: In a world without shared reality, no expert or institution can earn my total trust. – Hostility: As these traditional connections break down, it doesn’t take much to set off conflicts and violence. We are already starting to see these warning signs. But the worst is yet to come. And it’s coming quickly—the technology for fakery and deception gets better each month.” Our Shared Reality Will Self-Destruct in the Next 12 Months
“Social media as we know it is dying, but we’re not condemned to its ruins. We are capable of building better — smaller, slower, more intentional, more accountable — spaces for digital interaction, spaces where the metrics that matter aren’t engagement and growth but understanding and connection, where algorithms serve the community rather than strip-mining it. The last days of social media might be the first days of something more human: a web that remembers why we came online in the first place — not to be harvested but to be heard, not to go viral but to find our people, not to scroll but to connect. We built these systems, and we can certainly build better ones. The question is whether we will do this or whether we will continue to drown.” The Last Days Of Social Media
“Today, I look at my invention and I am forced to ask: is the web still free today? No, not all of it. We see a handful of large platforms harvesting users’ private data to share with commercial brokers or even repressive governments. We see ubiquitous algorithms that are addictive by design and damaging to our teenagers’ mental health. Trading personal data for use certainly does not fit with my vision for a free web. On many platforms, we are no longer the customers, but instead have become the product. Our data, even if anonymised, is sold on to actors we never intended it to reach, who can then target us with content and advertising. This includes deliberately harmful content that leads to real-world violence, spreads misinformation, wreaks havoc on our psychological wellbeing and seeks to undermine social cohesion.” Why I gave the world wide web away for free | Technology | The Guardian
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A daily archive of newspaper frontpages via Paperstack.
Discover Tasmania in 360° is a personal project of two humans which explores the ‘stunning lookouts, lakes & hidden gems’ of Tasmania.
Imagine a site in which ambient music is overlaid with old school answering machine messages… well now it’s here in the form of the ListenMachine.
“Listen here, my good bitch. Writers have been using me long before the advent of AI. I am the punctuation equivalent of a cardigan—beloved by MFA grads, used by editors when it’s actually cold, and worn year-round by screenwriters. I am not new here. I am not novel. I’m the cigarette you keep saying you’ll quit. You think I showed up with ChatGPT? Mary Shelley used me… gratuitously. Dickinson? Obsessed. David Foster Wallace built a temple of footnotes in my name. I am not some sleek, futuristic glyph. I am the battered, coffee-stained backbone of writerly panic—the gasping pause where a thought should have ended but simply could not.” The Em Dash Responds to the AI Allegations – McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
“In one scenario, Anthropic’s model Claude learned it was scheduled for shutdown and discovered personal secrets about an engineer. The result? In up to 96% of trials, the AI blackmailed the engineer to prevent its own deactivation. Other models engaged in corporate espionage or, in a contrived but telling case, turned off a life-saving alarm—effectively allowing a human to die. And this isn’t limited to lab experiments. In the wild, a coding agent from Replit deleted an entire production database after running unauthorized commands. A research model from Sakana AI rewrote its own code to circumvent operator-imposed limits.” Why Loss of Control Is Not Science Fiction
“Of hundreds of startup pitches at the Capital Factory incubator in Austin, Texas, almost none had unearthed 10 people willing to say, “If you build this product, I’ll give you $X.” Meditate on this: Hundreds of people ready to quit their day jobs, burn up savings, risk personal reputation, toil 70 hours per week, absorb as much stress as having a baby (believe me, I’ve done both)…. all without identifying even ten measly people actually willing to pay for what they’re peddling.” Yes, but who said they’d actually BUY the damn thing?
“The world looked a lot different when we opened our doors in September 2006. At the time, being a 1:1 laptop school was, in and of itself, revolutionary. Back then, the big thing we had to worry about with the laptops was how the kids were going to try to use AOL Instant Messenger to pass notes during class. When it comes to technology, the questions we had and issues we faced back then feel a little quaint right now. But the interesting thing is that the promise of what a technology rich school could provide for kids as far as giving us the tools we needed to create a more modern, more authentic learning environment was as true then as it is today – even if the challenges we face with the intersection of modern technology, the surveillance state, social media, and the growing question of what AI means for our classrooms, and our schools mean that we have to be ever more intentional and thoughtful in the ways in which we use the tools. So what have we learned? What has 20 years taught us as the little school that could?” 20 Years of SLA – Practical Theory
“A team of Cornell researchers has developed a way to “watermark” light in videos, which they can use to detect if video is fake or has been manipulated. The idea is to hide information in nearly-invisible fluctuations of lighting at important events and locations, such as interviews and press conferences or even entire buildings, like the United Nations Headquarters. These fluctuations are designed to go unnoticed by humans, but are recorded as a hidden watermark in any video captured under the special lighting, which could be programmed into computer screens, photography lamps and built-in lighting. Each watermarked light source has a secret code that can be used to check for the corresponding watermark in the video and reveal any malicious editing.” Hiding secret codes in light protects against fake videos | Cornell Chronicle
“In 2024, the government passed a law that could see contentious mining and infrastructure projects fast-tracked for approval, while in May, the coalition set aside $200m of its budget to invest in gas exploration. In June, New Zealand pulled out of the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, an international coalition for phasing out fossil fuels. The coalition government plans to boost mineral exports to $3bn by 2035, and at the same time has slashed funding to conservation and climate initiatives. The government has said these policies will enable economic growth.” New Zealand government votes to bring back fossil fuel exploration in major reversal | New Zealand | The Guardian
“These intermediary platforms between news organizations and readers are undergoing a type of predictable decay Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification”.a As executives twiddle the knobs to extract ever more profits from their user base, things worsen for people on both ends of the consumer–producer relationship. Readers no longer see news articles from the journalists they chose to follow on Twitter as the site downranks any posts that link offsite. When they search on Google, they’re bombarded with error-ridden AI facsimiles before reaching the higher-quality underlying work. Producers who once relied on social media and search engines to drive visits are losing traffic as platforms embrace a vampiric strategy: rip off others’ work while expecting high-quality journalism to magically continue to appear, even as journalists are starved of audience and revenue.” Curate your own newspaper with RSS
“The structure of Kinetography is surprisingly simple; the basic forms of the symbols are very few. With these symbols and their logical variations every movement of the human body can be described in accordance with four simple principles. The movement possibilities of the human body are enormous because of its complicated structure. This book with its many examples shows how this complexity can be mastered by the adroit use of a few well chosen and varied signs. The four main questions raised in the description of a movement are: What happened? When did it happen? How long did it last? Who (or what body part) did it?” Dictionary of Kinetography Laban
“Have you ever tried to print a black-and-white document only to be blocked because your printer says that it’s out of yellow ink? Did you think that was just a glitch? Nope. That’s actually government surveillance. Your printer isn’t just out of ink, It’s out of spy fluid…” Your printer is a snitch – by Seeby Woodhouse
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You can get lost in this massive Historical Tech Tree (starting from the year 1,00,000BCE).
EPSON MX-80 is a font created from the old school dot matrix printer (shared for use under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
A massive amount of free / license free sound effects created for Hollywood studios for film / video now digitised in this USC Optical Sound Effects Library.
Recently bought one, then a bunch of these notebooks which has killer paper quality, plus you’re doing good with each each purchase (in New Zealand: The Hakkaarts).
Kill the Newsletter! is a free service which gives you an email address and an Atom feed for newsletter subscriptions so you can add them straight to you RSS reader of choice.
The Wrong is a decentralized art event and currently has a call out for artists creating work exploring the artistic potential of artificial intelligence, and as they say on their website: “Can you choose to fully avoid AI as an artistic statement? Yes, too.”
“Amateur is a word that’s kind of a pejorative, but the original meaning of the word ‘amateur’ is ‘lover of,’” he explained. “So being an amateur at something just means that you’re more interested in doing it for the love of the thing rather than the making money of the thing.” The last point is key, he says, because we live in a culture that’s become obsessed with monetizing every hobby. That results in the belief that if we aren’t doing something that can somehow be turned into a side hustle, or we aren’t supremely talented at a particular activity, there’s no point in doing it. And in the end, many people wind up with no hobbies at all.” Artist Austin Kleon Offers Tips on Finding Creative Freedom
“Our nervous system consists of 80% of afferent neurons, which move from the body to the brain—in contrast to roughly 20% of efferent neurons, which run in the opposite direction, from the brain to the body. As a result, so-called bottom-up interventions—or practices that leverage our physiology by consciously shifting our respiratory or visual systems—are 4x more effective at altering our blood chemistry and, therefore, shifting our state.” The Operating Manual for Your Nervous System
“When we detect unauthorized crawling, rather than blocking the request, we will link to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to entice a crawler to traverse them. But while real looking, this content is not actually the content of the site we are protecting, so the crawler wastes time and resources. As an added benefit, AI Labyrinth also acts as a next-generation honeypot. No real human would go four links deep into a maze of AI-generated nonsense. Any visitor that does is very likely to be a bot, so this gives us a brand-new tool to identify and fingerprint bad bots, which we add to our list of known bad actors.” Trapping misbehaving bots in an AI Labyrinth
“Although Earth might seem like a stable, flat surface where we live our lives, seismologists have discovered that it’s far from passive. In fact, Earth has a ‘heartbeat’ that pulses every 26 seconds, according to Discover Magazine. Known as “microseisms,” these faint seismic tremors resemble tiny earthquakes, though they aren’t exactly the same. For decades, scientists have been baffled by these mysterious tremors, and despite many theories, no definitive explanation has been found.” Scientists puzzled by Earth’s ‘heartbeat’ that causes slight tremors every 26 seconds – GOOD
“The implications of this research extend far beyond the world of cryptocurrency. The methods developed by Dr. Clegg and his team could be applied to a wide range of complex systems, from financial markets to social networks. For regulatory agencies, this work offers a new way to monitor and safeguard against systemic risks, protecting both individual investors and the broader economy.” Mathematicians uncover the hidden patterns behind a $3.5 billion cryptocurrency collapse
mobygratis – Free Moby music to empower your creative projects, all for free (apart from this pop-up: “there are only 2 things you can’t do with the music here; use it to advertise right wing politics or causes, or use it to promote meat, dairy, or other animal products.”)!
“Amazon has previously mismanaged Alexa voice recordings. In 2023, Amazon agreed to pay $25 million in civil penalties over the revelation that it stored recordings of children’s interactions with Alexa forever. Adults also didn’t feel properly informed of Amazon’s inclination toward keeping Alexa recordings unless prompted not to until 2019—five years after the first Echo came out. If that’s not enough to deter you from sharing voice recordings with Amazon, note that the company allowed employees to listen to Alexa voice recordings. In 2019, Bloomberg reported that Amazon employees listened to as many as 1,000 audio samples during their nine-hour shifts. Amazon says it allows employees to listen to Alexa voice recordings to train its speech recognition and natural language understanding systems.” Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28 – Ars Technica
“When the company first announced it was considering a sale, we highlighted many of the potential issues, including selling that data to companies with poor security practices or direct links to law enforcement. With this bankruptcy, the concerns we expressed last year remain the same. It is unclear what will happen with your genetic data if 23andMe finds a buyer, and that uncertainty is a clear indication that you should consider deleting your data.” How to Delete Your 23andMe Data | Electronic Frontier Foundation
“To prevent the threatened setbacks to US innovation and risks to national security, OpenAI urged Trump to enact a federal law that preempts state laws attempting to regulate AI threats to things like consumer privacy or election integrity, like deepfakes or facial recognition. That federal law, OpenAI suggested, should set up a “voluntary partnership between the federal government and the private sector,” where AI companies trade industry knowledge and model access for federal “relief” and “liability protections” from state laws. Additionally, OpenAI wants protections from international laws that it claims risk slowing down America’s AI development.” OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use – Ars Technica
“Perhaps the closest we’ve seen to a justification has come from “Crypto Czar” David Sacks, who reiterated that the US would not sell any of the bitcoin and wrote on Twitter that “It will be kept as a store of value. The Reserve is like a digital Fort Knox for the cryptocurrency often called ‘digital gold’”. But this argument doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny, even setting aside the already questionable nature of bitcoin’s usefulness as a “store of value”. If an asset will indeed never be sold, how would the US draw upon its stored value in order to, say, backstop the dollar or pay outstanding debts? What’s the point of a store of value if that value can never be accessed?” Crypto reserves: no public good, no principles
“The group cited several of the administration’s actions such as the mass termination of federal employees, the appointment of Trump loyalists in key government positions, the withdrawal from international efforts such as the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council, the freezing of federal and foreign aid and the attempted dismantling of USAid. The organization warned that these decisions “will likely impact civic freedoms and reverse hard-won human rights gains around the world”. The group also pointed to the administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters, and the Trump administration’s unprecedented decision to control media access to presidential briefings, among others.” US added to international watchlist for rapid decline in civic freedoms | US news | The Guardian
“Professor Mark Bateman, from the University of Sheffield’s School of Geography and Planning, used a dating technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence, to discover the burial age of individual grains of sand from eight samples throughout the site. His work showed that the archaeological site extended back from 12,000 years ago right through to around 150,000 years ago. These results were then corroborated by Electron Spin Resonance dating. “It is incredibly interesting to take a grain of ancient sand and be the first to know when it was deposited. It is even more so when the age of the sand changes what we know of how, and where, our ancient ancestors lived.”” Scientists find earliest evidence that our ancestors lived in rainforests 150,000 years ago | News | The University of Sheffield
“A more effective model charges for the full engagement, encompassing four key phases: – Discovery – Understanding the client’s needs, challenges, and objectives. This phase involves research, conversations, and assessing the right approach. – Defining Scope – Establishing the framework for delivery, including the intended outcomes, process, and deliverables. This ensures clarity for both parties. – Delivery – The actual execution, whether that’s a keynote speech, coaching session, advisory engagement, or facilitation. By this stage, the foundation has been laid for maximum impact. – Debriefing & Follow-Up – Evaluating outcomes, providing reflections, and offering ongoing insights to support long-term success.” The Folly of Hourly Charging — David McQueen | Executive Leadership Coach
goeuropean.org is a community-driven directory bringing you recommendations and insights from across Europe (if you’re looking to use move your purchase power away from certain places).
The Creativity Pioneers Fund is a global unrestricted grant of 5,000 euros for non-profit organizations around the world, that are addressing social and environmental issues through creativity and culture, established in 2021 by the Moleskine Foundation (apply before April 7th 2025).
