“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
“This year my family moved. The kind of move that doesn’t feel dramatic until you notice how often your body reaches for things that aren’t there anymore. Different grocery stores. Different roads. The quiet disorientation of standing in a room that hasn’t learned your style yet. Moves do that, I guess. They show you how much of your life is habit pretending to be home.” bye bye 2025 – by John Roedel – Around the Campfire
“In the decades to come, creativity will be key to doing most jobs well. In this article the authors offer a new typology that breaks creative thinking into four types: – integration, or showing that two things that appear different are the same; – splitting, or seeing how things that look the same are more usefully divided into parts; – figure-ground reversal, or realizing that what is crucial is not in the foreground but in the background; and – distal thinking, which involves imagining things that are very different from the here and now. Most of us tend to think in just one of those four ways. But we can hone our ability to be creative in other dimensions. Managers need to understand both their own strengths and how to balance the types of thinking across their teams to successfully execute creative projects. And organizations can use this typology to optimize innovation across the workforce.” Cultivating the Four Kinds of Creativity
“Men are not so much confused as they are conflicted. They know what is required of them, but are held back by unexamined beliefs—about responsibility, misplaced loyalties, masculinity, failure, and the cost of choosing themselves. Anger often masks sadness. Guilt disguises fear. Shame convinces them that movement itself is dangerous. And anything that even hints at shame is usually on their do-not-examine list. So they distract, minimize, work harder, drink more, stay busy, mislead themselves, or just go silent. What appears as endurance is often just disconnection over time.” Why Men Know What to Do but Still Don’t Do It | Psychology Today
“He likens Solid “pods” to backpacks of data that are securely held by each individual, allowing them to choose what to share with certain people, businesses and organisations. Department of Education data could be shared with an AI tutor; medical data with a cousin, doctor and nutritionist. The Flanders government in Belgium treats data as a national utility and is already using Solid pods for its citizens. The Facebooks and Xs of the world need not join in – the new systems will be so empowering, collaborative and compassionate, he believes, that parts of today’s web will become obsolescent.” ‘It’s not too late to fix it’: internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee says he is in a ‘battle for the soul of the web’ | Internet | The Guardian
“The same Google search can now yield a neatly packaged “AI Overview,” a synthesized recipe stripped of voice, memory and community, delivered without a single user visit to the creator’s website. Behind the scenes, their years of work, including their page’s text, photos and storytelling, may have already been used to help train or refine the AI model. You get your lasagna, Google gets monetizable web traffic and for the most part, the person who created the recipe gets nothing. The living web shrinks further into an interface of disembodied answers, convenient but ultimately sterile.” The AI-Powered Web Is Eating Itself – NOEMA
“Relabeling the digital economy as the “metaverse” was a simple, elegant move—as well as a deeply cynical effort to rebrand already existing digital markets as the next internet—that allowed forecasts to assume an air of inevitability. Until it wasn’t. Perhaps more urgently now, the metaverse should also be understood as a dress rehearsal for today’s AI boom: The former was to succeed the mobile internet, while the latter now promises to be “more profound” than electricity or fire. Perpetually inflating definitions. A single-minded focus on profit that identifies but fails to address egregious harms. Manufactured narratives about inevitability and technological progress. Burning eyewatering sums on infrastructure for a product nobody wants. Any of this sound familiar?” The rise and fall of the metaverse: What went wrong?
“I remember the night shoot when Hagrid’s hut was set on fire. It was about 4am and freezing cold. We stood together on a grassy bank, Helena Bonham Carter and Robbie Coltrane battling behind us. Alan didn’t utter a word. I finally mustered the courage to ask him: “You all right, Alan? How you feeling?” About 10 seconds after I’d spoken he turned his head to me and replied slowly: “I’ve peaked.” He then turned his head back with the tiniest hint of a smile and a twinkle in his eye.” ‘I fell in love with him on the spot’: Alan Rickman remembered, 10 years after his death | Film | The Guardian
“Fortunately, there is plenty of scientific research that offers different ways to help you improve your mood. From making use of your anger to putting your phone to work for you, here are nine tips that we have discovered during our reporting: 1. Stop striving for perfection 2. Forge better friendships 3. Take up some social hobbies 4. Put your anger to good use 5. Count your blessings 6. Make your phone work for you 7. Embrace the dark days of winter 8. Sing to feel better 9. Find time for a nap.” Nine science-backed ways to help you feel better in 2026
“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.
“That’s why I keep documenting corruption and abuse, the erosion of norms, and each step away from democracy. Not because I expect immediate consequences, but because documenting the truth will matter later even if it doesn’t seem to matter now. Because caring isn’t naive. Because documentation isn’t pointless. Because hope isn’t for fools.” It matters. I care.
“She’s fighting back tears again. Her tone is so sad. Why does she think it’s still so hard? “People only see the decisions you made, not the choices you had. The first part of Covid, people saw all the choices and decisions. And the second half, it just got hard. It got hard. Vaccines bring an extra layer that’s really difficult.” I apologise for taking her back to a dark time. “One of the things that still stands out in my mind – I can’t remember if it was a meme or a genuine cartoon – but it was an image of Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin,” she says. “It was at the tail end of Covid, and Christopher says, ‘How will we know if we succeeded?’ And Winnie says, ‘Because they’ll say we did too much.’ And it captured this idea that there probably isn’t a sweet spot. Maybe there were only two options in the end. Maybe it was: you’ll be attacked for doing too little or you’ll be attacked for doing too much. And I know what I would choose.”” ‘Empathy is a kind of strength’: Jacinda Ardern on kind leadership, public rage and life in Trump’s America | Jacinda Ardern | The Guardian
“The Future Generations Report is designed to support politicians and public body leaders in making life better for people and planet now and in the future. This report is based on extensive evidence, research and analysis and engagement with hundreds of representatives from organisations and communities across Wales. It includes findings and statutory advice to Public Bodies. The Future Generations Commissioner will work with Public Bodies to ensure that the recommendations in the report are implemented.” Future Generations Report 2025 – Future Generations Wales
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Get your retro on and chill out to some tunes / visuals from Poolsuite ☼.
The Star Wars Galaxy detailing all the worlds plus those important trade routes mapped.
Spend some time clicking / tapping / hovering on these forms to make them fidget: Form + Fidget | Noodle.
Little Webby Press is an online tool to convert your (Markdown) manuscript into both an eBook and a Website.
If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel, a side-scrolling accurate map of our solar system (click the icon in the bottom right hand corner also).
“We believe that electing the Ocean to be a Trustee of SAMS is one of the most important decisions in our history. It challenges outdated models of governance and champions a future where the ocean’s voice is central to decision-making. That the Ocean should be represented in our governance might seem, at first blush, to be a gimmick, even whimsical. We are conscious that the move could be seen as trivial or ‘greenwashing’. After all, as a non-profit marine research organisation, surely SAMS always has the best interests of the Ocean in mind? But after several months of careful discussion and debate, the Trustees are convinced that even with a strong empathy for ocean conservation and a well-informed understanding of marine environmental matters, our decision-making is essentially anthropocentric; human interests are given precedence, and concern is limited to the impact on the Ocean rather than the interests of the Ocean.” News – The Ocean enters the boardroom — The Scottish Association for Marine Science
“…the British government’s undisclosed order was issued last month, and requires the capability to view all encrypted material in iCloud. The core target is Apple’s Advanced Data Protection, which is an optional feature that turns on end-to-end encryption for backups and other data stored in iCloud, making it so that even Apple cannot access that information. For a long time, iCloud backups were a loophole for law enforcement to gain access to data otherwise not available to them on iPhones with device encryption enabled. That loophole still exists for anyone who doesn’t opt in to using Advanced Data Protection. If Apple does comply, users should consider disabling iCloud backups entirely. Perhaps most concerning, the U.K. is apparently seeking a backdoor into users’ data regardless of where they are or what citizenship they have.” The UK’s Demands for Apple to Break Encryption Is an Emergency for Us All | Electronic Frontier Foundation
“Last month, Meta admitted to torrenting a controversial large dataset known as LibGen, which includes tens of millions of pirated books. But details around the torrenting were murky until yesterday, when Meta’s unredacted emails were made public for the first time. The new evidence showed that Meta torrented “at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries through the site Anna’s Archive, including at least 35.7 terabytes of data from Z-Library and LibGen,” the authors’ court filing said. And “Meta also previously torrented 80.6 terabytes of data from LibGen.” ”Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right”: Meta emails unsealed – Ars Technica
“For the new study, Lupyan and Nedergaard recruited 47 participants who scored the highest for having an inner voice and 46 who registered low scores—roughly in the top and bottom fifths of scores. They then gave these participants four language-related tasks they thought might be influenced by the use of inner speech. In the first, participants were briefly shown five words and asked to repeat them back. The second involved participants saying whether the names of objects in two pictures rhymed. In both experiments the group with less inner speech was less accurate in their responses. For the rhyme judgements, people with more inner speech were also faster. “This wide-ranging study really tests what inner speech gives us in terms of cognitive benefits,” Fernyhough says.” Not Everyone Has an Inner Voice Streaming through Their Head | Scientific American
“Here are just some of the factors in the Startup Drake Equation, the failure of any one of which is terminal: – Product that people want to pay for (really) – Able to grab those people’s attention amidst the noisy Internet – Pricing that those people will accept (and that is greater than your costs) – Competitive and distinctive enough to be chosen – Able to build the product as promised by the home page – Sustained value-delivery months and years later, so customers stay and keep paying – Able to fund the venture, either through early profits or fundraising – Able to work well with co-founders (or able do it all alone) – Develop a repeatable and profitable customer acquisition process – Able to attract and retain talent – Able to psychologically handle many years of deep effort, stress, and pain – Get lucky on occasion” The Startup Drake Equation
““A factor of 10 is an enormous difference, and this is what happens when you look at a reproduction compared to a real work,” said Martine Gosselink, director of the Mauritshuis, on Wednesday. “You become [mentally] richer when you see things, whether you are conscious of it or not, because you make connections in your brain.” Gosselink said she had been convinced of the power of the real before the study but had wanted her hunch to be formally investigated. “We all feel the difference – but is it measurable, is it real?” she said she had asked her colleagues a year ago. “Now, today we can really say that it is true.”” Real art in museums stimulates brain much more than reprints, study finds | Neuroscience | The Guardian
“Let’s be clear: the UK’s mooted copyright scheme would effectively enable companies to nick our data – every post we make, every book we write, every song we create – with impunity. It would require us to sign up to every individual service and tell them that no, we don’t want them to chew up our data and spit out a poor composite image of us. Potentially hundreds of them, from big tech companies to small research labs. Lest we forget, OpenAI – a company now valued at more than $150bn – is planning to forswear its founding non-profit principles to become a for-profit company. It has more than enough money in its coffers to pay for training data, rather than rely on the beneficence of the general public. Companies like that can certainly afford to put their hands in their own pockets, rather than ours. So hands off.” Here’s the deal: AI giants get to grab all your data unless you say they can’t. Fancy that? No, neither do I | Chris Stokel-Walker | The Guardian
““The existing structure of OpenAI is quite convoluted,” said Brian Quinn, a professor at Boston College law school. “If they simplify their structure in some way and have a public benefit corporation as the parent company, they can make as much money as they want.” The ChatGPT developer is reportedly heading for a valuation of $150bn under the new fundraising, making it worth nearly as much as Uber. Apple and the chipmaker Nvidia are among the companies cited in reports as potential investors in the funding round.” OpenAI planning to become for-profit company, say reports | OpenAI | The Guardian
“The TikTok owner launched its own web scraper, Bytespider, in April, and it’s now scraping data multiple times faster than bots from other companies, Fortune reported, citing research from Kasada, a bot management company, and Dark Visitors, a monitor of scraper bots. Companies developing AI models, such as Google and Meta, use scraper bots to gather data to train and improve the large language models (LLMs) and multimodal models that power the companies’ AI services.” TikTok owner ByteDance scrapes the web faster than OpenAI
“Kline sat at his keyboard between the lime-green walls of UCLA’s Boelter Hall Room 3420, prepared to connect with Duvall, who was working a computer halfway across the state of California. But Kline didn’t even make it all the way through the word “L-O-G-I-N” before Duvall told him over the phone that his system crashed. Thanks to that error, the first “message” that Kline sent Duvall on that autumn day in 1969 was simply the letters “L-O”.” ‘We were just trying to get it to work’: The failure that started the internet
“This week, Balaji posted an essay on his personal website, in which he argued that OpenAI was breaking copyright law. In the essay, he attempted to show “how much copyrighted information” from an AI system’s training dataset ultimately “makes its way to the outputs of a model.“ Balaji’s conclusion from his analysis was that ChatGPT’s output does not meet the standard for “fair use,” the legal standard that allows the limited use of copyrighted material without the copyright holder’s permission.” Former OpenAI Staffer Says the Company Is Breaking Copyright Law and Destroying the Internet
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The Mudita Kompakt is live on Kickstarter and fun attempt at cutting out the digital distractions of a phone (apart from the e-ink this can be achieved with any phone though but good for kids as a dumb phone).
The WikiProject AI Cleanup aims combat the increasing problem of unsourced, poorly written AI-generated content on Wikipedia.
Linkwarden is a self-hosted, open-source collaborative bookmark manager to collect, organize and archive webpages.
“Google, especially, has relied on the open web RSS protocol to gain so much market share and influence, but continues to engage in behavior that exploits the open web at the expense of its users. As a result, Google has single-handedly contributed to the reason many users who once relied on RSS feeds have stopped using them.”
“When writing by hand, brain connectivity patterns were far more elaborate than when typewriting on a keyboard, as shown by widespread theta/alpha connectivity coherence patterns between network hubs and nodes in parietal and central brain regions. Existing literature indicates that connectivity patterns in these brain areas and at such frequencies are crucial for memory formation and for encoding new information and, therefore, are beneficial for learning.”
“Put simply, the numbers don’t add up. Data from Patreon and Substack suggests the average conversion rate from follower to paying fan is about 5%. This means a creator would need a total fanbase of 20,000 followers to yield 1,000 paying supporters. And building a core fanbase of 20,000 engaged followers is extremely difficult in today’s crowded creative landscape.”
“A Vicar asks his congregation in the valleys the question “What would you do if Jesus returned tomorrow?”. A voice in the flock pipes up; “Move Barry John to inside-centre”!”
“Much furor has been raised in recent months over the unauthorized scraping of the web to train AI models; OpenAI even thanked the faceless “millions of people” who created the data to train GPT-3 in its paper describing the model. But when it comes to data willingly shared with Facebook and Meta, that Faustian bargain was struck long ago.”
Scientists believe we have great thoughts in bed because our brain is in a state conducive to neuroplasticity. Occupying ourselves with smartphones has replaced staring off into the distance and daydreaming. People equate boredom with low productivity, but making time for boredom may help you be more creative.
…if an AI company was aware that its training data included unlicensed works, or that its algorithms generated unauthorised derivative works not covered by “fair use”, then it could be liable for damages of up to $150,000 for each instance of knowing use. And in case anyone thinks that infringement suits by angry artists are like midge bites to corporations, it’s worth noting that Getty, a very large picture library, is suing Stability AI for alleged unlicensed copying of millions of its photos and using them to train its AI, Stable Diffusion, to generate more accurate depictions based on user prompts. The inescapable implication is that there may be serious liabilities for generative AIs coming down the line.
“Despite the increasing adoption of the technology, campaigners point out there is no legal basis for police to use it, with a courtroom challenge finding that South Wales police’s use of biometric surveillance was unlawful and breached privacy rights and equality laws.“
“I’ve been using the voice function since yesterday and noticed that it makes breathing sounds when it speaks,” said one Reddit user. “It takes a deep breath before starting a sentence. And today, actually a minute ago, it coughed between words while answering my questions.”
“Company documents cited in the complaint described several Meta officials acknowledging the company designed its products to exploit shortcomings in youthful psychology, including a May 2020 internal presentation called “teen fundamentals” which highlighted certain vulnerabilities of the young brain that could be exploited by product development. The presentation discussed teen brains’ relative immaturity, and teenagers’ tendency to be driven by “emotion, the intrigue of novelty and reward” and asked how these asked how these characteristics could “manifest . . . in product usage”.”
“Now Earth’s oceans are no longer unique. They’re just strange. They exist on our planet’s sunlit surface, while the seas of the outer solar system are tucked beneath ice and bathed in darkness. And these subterranean liquid oceans seem to be the rule for our solar system, not the exception. In addition to Europa and Enceladus, other moons with ice-covered oceans almost certainly exist as well. A fleet of spacecraft will explore them in detail over the next decade.”
It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply… There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.
Sheety, which turns Google spreadsheets into powerful APIs to rapidly develop prototypes, websites, apps & more.
This open-source software license that developers can use to prohibit the use of their code by applications or companies that threaten to accelerate climate change through fossil fuel extraction.
Why am I doing this? Well I tweet some good stuff I find during my RSS adventures and online digital breadcrumb following, thought it be a good exercise to curate them.
