Scattered thoughts from Brussels, Belgium.
“What people are not getting is that we can’t turn this back – the CO2 to a large part remains in the air for thousands of years,” said Rahmstorf. “Some people think we can wait and, when it gets too bad, then we reduce emissions and things will get better again. People don’t realise that we can’t make it get better again. We can only prevent it from getting much worse.” We're not even trying to…
It's always cars. We really messed up on that one. Initially just another mode of transport, but now also a status symbol, the core of everything we build, and a source of dementia.
Spotted in Leuven yesterday…
You've probably heard of enshittification, a term coined by Cory Doctorow and also a book (which I recommend). Here's a video from the Norwegian Consumer Council that demonstrates it with humour incredibly well.
A fascinating look inside a hidden greenhouse in Los Angeles filled with rare plants. Carlos, their passionate caretaker, gives the tour.
The average IQ was increasing year over year until about 2010, when it started declining. One popular hypothesis is the simultaneous decline of print and the increase in short-form and video content that decreases deep thinking. A really significant feature of books is that if you make a case in print, you have to make it logically add up. You can’t just assert things in the way you can on TikTok…
There's a persistent belief in the tech world, particularly in AI, that the human brain is basically a computer and that once we figure out how it stores and processes information, we'll be able to upload our consciousness to the cloud. This has always seemed quite reductive to me. As Douglas Rushkoff would say, "What about the squishy bits?" Anyway, this fascinating article by a senior research…
Are you old enough to remember these? You couldn't visit a web page back in the day without seeing at least one.
Antoinism is a religion that was created in 1910 by a metal worker called Louis-Joseph Antoine from the Liège region of Belgium. Membership is declining sharply, and only 10 temples are left. Most of their temples have been converted to housing. I've walked past one of them a few times and always wondered what the inside was like. This article follows one of their "healers" and gives a fascinating…
In this age of ragebait and kinetic videos, I find watching each episode of Ed Pratt's journey from source to sea down the river Thames to be online comfort food. You can find the other episodes on his YouTube channel .
I've been fixing bugs that affected, among other things, the RSS feed. Sorry if some of you are seeing duplicate content. It should be fine from now on.
I didn't know the U.S. Capitol had its own mini underground rail network to shuttle people between buildings. I'm always fascinated by these independent networks.
An interesting deep dive into how your geolocation data gets exfiltrated by advertising networks via apps on your phone and sold to, not only the highest bidder, but basically any data broker, government agency, or other organisation that can afford it. All of this, of course, despite you setting your phone to not allow these apps to track you. By the way, the list of apps that do this (Google…
I just switched this blog from using a dynamic Django -based solution to running as a static site using Eleventy . I mainly did this in anticipation of some further changes to come. But, basically, I needed something simpler that would encourage me to post more often. Considering the state of social media and the internet in general, I want to move to publishing on a platform I own, not one I rent…
This piece, from Ed Zitron, is one of the best things I've read in a while. It puts into words what I've been feeling about tech recently better than I ever could. He's angry, but rightly so. The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into…
A former Boston Globe reporter on his now homeless life. A tense and depressing read.