I'm making an effort to post something every day. I've been fostering a daily writing habit outside of this platform, and when I miss a day I start to feel a creeping withdrawal. I need to write something. Anything. Even if it's a list of links to what I read that day.
I'm also prospecting a quieter internet: building a life free from algorithmic control. The articles I'm posting here are surfacing from my old-school RSS feeder I've built and continually retool using Bazqux. BQ charge a nominal yearly fee and even offer lifetime subscriptions.
Here's what I sunk my teeth into yesterday:
- Anthropic CEO Says Company No Longer Sure Whether Claude Is Conscious (Frank Landymore, Futurism)
- Microsoft Added AI to Notepad and It Created a Security Failure Because the AI Was Stupidly Easy for Hackers to Trick (Victor Tangermann, Futurism)
- Undoing as Remaking: How Abraham Lincoln Drew Poetry and Power from His Suicidal Depression (Maria Popova, The Marginalian)
- Honor Thy Error (Elliot Williams, Hackaday)
- Israeli soldiers accused of using Polymarket to bet on strikes (Dov Lieber & Alexander Osipovich, The Wall Street Journal)
It's not all doom and gloom. The Marginalisn piece--a review of a Lincoln's Melancholy, which I've been sitting on for years--is inspirational and links off to other reviews addressing the artistic navigation of a horrendous affliction. The Hackaday newsletter piece highlights how accidents and mistakes foster creativity. It also reminded me that Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies exists. The AI stuff highlights the absurd lengths CEOs will take to promote their products. NYT podcasts, predictably, lick that swill up.
The polymarket piece is, though, is true doom and gloom. Everyone should get their eyes on it, though. Unregulated internet gambling is cancerous, and we're asleep at the wheel. Why wouldn't we be? We let kids legally gamble all the time via lootboxes and microtransactions. It's normalized. It doesn't make it less morally dubious, and the outcome might just be gambling on insider knowledge of state secrets.
Oh, and one more cautionary tale. Do not ignore this one. You do so at your own peril as we careen toward a future requiring the complete surrender of your privacy to log-on to the internet:
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