Thought Shrapnel
Doug Belshaw's microblog of short-form notes, quotes, and observations. 2016–2026.
2,364 posts. Browse by year or search.
2026 (173)
- Intermission
- The mistake of believing you are the bigger thing
- The Art of Money Getting
- As per my last email
- Always more mountains
- Use it or lose it
- The house that eats its foundations
- We are mature in one realm, childish in another
- New genres are emerging that exploit cognitive and moral resources in ways
- Drug testing on brains hovering between life and death
- New genres are emerging that exploit cognitive and moral resources in ways that did not have technological pathways before
- Reprogramming the athlete's visual system to function at peak efficiency
- Why do people procrastinate?
- Field Notes on Productive Friction
- Arbitrary structures and accidental hierarchies
- I Have Led A Toothless Life He Thought
- Digital legacy
- The impact of volcanoes on the Black Death
- Don't write in the passive voice
- Believe in your own excellence
- There are always people who fall outside the bounds of what a service can handle
- My kidnappers returning me back
- The new world order is rearranging itself on the planet and settling in
- Oof
- We live in an economy that has systematically destroyed the conditions for trust, and then charges us for the workarounds
- My goal is to encourage people to take action and look at the alternatives that are on the table
- The patient as transcription layer
- Wisdom from the Tao Te Ching
- On the gendered nature of (types of) hobbies
- Digital literacies involve layers of abstraction
- How power structures and relationships really work
- Time as an instrument?
- On originality
- Quite the week
- The concentration of power in AI labs is now one of the defining political questions of the decade
- Grand ambitions vs reality
- Renewable energy: 98% of days in Britain are either windy, sunny, or both
- Having a system built on context puts the power in the people's hands
- THE FUTURE IS OFFLINE
- Why I adore the night
- Life advice
- The AI Adoption Spiral
- The "U-shaped curve" of cognitive offloading to AI tools
- "We have two Microsoft Outlooks and neither one is working"
- The Journey Home
- 'Folk software' - not 'vibe coding'
- Our communication currently often takes place via platforms over which we have no control
- Note to self
- Scamming tourists in Nepal
- The system can generate options. It cannot supply ownership.
- 'Google Docs' for Markdown?
- Ideas are not products, as much as corporations would like them to be
- Games from Hacker News "Show HN" threads
- Violently boiling water in some monstrous kettle
- You made this?
- Lemme finish this sentence...
- Earthrise, Take 2
- Commonplace
- 🐣 Happy Easter!
- A Victorian-era LLM
- 2026 is about 'Aspirational Humanity' – amongst other things
- Clippy sez: Just Do It
- Each came down with spectacular clarity, each a wingless fuselage, quietly descending to the depths of the ocean floor.
- I must trouble the reader to correct the errata... For I am quite tired.
- Thought Shrapnel's 50 most-referenced sources (2018-2026)
- The hard work of building a thing now isn’t writing the code
- Your future needs you. Your past doesn't.
- If a computer is a bicycle for the mind, then LLMs are like e-bikes
- LLMs are "in the game, even if they’re not strictly playing it."
- Creating the conditions to make things possible
- Institute of Pragmatic Solutions
- Maybe the loose end isn't a failure of facilitation
- Why it's all kicking off (again)
- A useful reminder
- Brexit is a problem whose name we now dare speak
- Disgust is a complicated emotion
- Recursive logical fallacies
- Claude Cowork vs Claude Code
- ROOTS: Return Old Online Things to your own Site
- How long before run-on sentences are preferred to em-dashes?
- How to stop thinking
- The Fifth Horseman
- How to Create a Freelancer Dashboard
- US Big Tech infrastructure as "legitimate targets"
- Ending an archaic and undemocratic principle
- Tree Hug
- News Canary next steps
- They’re not rejecting technology. They’re choreographing it.
- Groundwork
- Et Merda
- Finger-based checkout
- Living off the moral and intellectual capital of a pre-AI world
- How to avoid your white collar turning blue: brilliance, influence, and relationships
- The world you were raised to survive in no longer exists
- Customised pixel graphics from classic games
- The spectacle produces hypernormalisation
- Building a news canary
- Enough is enough
- Super Mario World Map
- WAO is closing
- Agentic commerce is a catastrophe for every business whose moat is made of friction
- Who am I, and what does someone like me do with their time?
- Units of attention
- Reimagining everyday urban details on a micro scale
- A Reminder That Ive Been
- TechFreedom
- Like a stone
- A range of authentic selves?
- To find a new world, maybe you have to have lost one
- Each culture is made of shared framings—ontologies of things that are taken to exist
- Thinking is hard
- Like it or not, it is a basic fact of human cognition that we think and act politically as members of social groups.
- Digital sovereignty, French-style
- How to Be Less Wrong in a Polycrisis
- Hands, spoon, shovel
- A rough attempt at laying out what in philosophy is most relevant for AI.
- The heart is ancient and hasn't had any updates
- The winners will be headless
- Octopus people
- Choo choo!
- Source Arena
- A Complex System Contrary To
- Building your sense of agency by granting yourself permission to do the things you are already allowed to do
- We are, effectively, being fracked to death.
- Sometimes the work is rest
- A bit more than a to-do list
- Because I learned a second thing at the end of my two days of vertigo: That my idea was terrible.
- Words/phrases used more in AI-generated text
- Makes you think
- I'm so glad I can still talk to my AI chatbot friends
- National security assessment on global ecosystems
- Psychological Defence and Information Influence
- Weapon of the enemy
- What do we mean when we talk about pollution and toxicity in online spaces?
- Living with your incapacity
- My Are.na channels are now more organised
- Are they ever tricked by a voice that is false when they expected it to be a real, live human?
- It makes a lot more sense
- Privacy by design means what it says on the tin
- The correct response to Dachau was not better training for the guards
- SOLVEM PROBLER
- They have no idea what’s happening now.
- What’s strange is how little of that generosity we extend to each other
- Time appears in this 3D sort of calendar pattern
- Somewhere I'd like to spend some time
- Postal Arbitrage
- The Cost of American Exceptionalism
- Writing always interrupts being
- LinkedIf
- We will no longer have the conspiracy nonsense about state control
- We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips
- If execution is no longer the differentiator, what is?
- Bottom-up (systems) thinking
- A deliberate willingness to be helped
- What content are you really trying to provide and how do you get to it?
- Celebrating the lesser-known at the Internet Archive
- The Questions
- Avoiding 'hacklore'
- Open Infrastructure map
- Post-digital authenticity
- Humans exhibit analogues of LLM pathologies
- For Me How About You
- A university degree is now more like a 'visa' than a guaranteed route to professional success
- An attack on sovereignty itself
- Toward an Open Source contribution standard
- Boing!
- The Woodblock Prints of Utugawa Hiroshige
- The rise of entrepreneurial heroism
- For every snarky comment, there are 10x as many people admiring your work
- The same tools that are keeping some people connected to reality are blurring the lines of what is real for others
- The world is rarely as neat as any scenario
- Choose your own inspirational adventure
- And Were Back A Quick
2025 (371)
- Best of Thought Shrapnel 2025
- Thought Shrapnel Will Return In
- On AI leisuretime 'dependence'
- Developing a personal brand may leave you emotionally hollow
- AI has a 3,000-year history
- 173751
- Adolescence lasts longer than we thought
- You'll not catch me using an 'AI browser' any time soon
- The caffeination roller coaster
- Early blogger energy
- When scaling up your business is as simple as clicking 'reprint tray' on the 3D printer
- "It is strange to view your childhood favourite film and realise you’ve become the villain."
- Web literacy for the mid-2020s
- 182600
- The Arc of Democracy
- TOOLBOX TOOLBOX
- 180200
- LibrePods
- 175000
- Dark Forests rule everything around us
- Hitler, apparently, really did only have one ball (but the other isn't in the Albert Hall)
- It's OK just to do things for fun
- In short, capital, and capitalism, always has a tendency towards crisis by undermining the things that are necessary to sustain capitalism
- Well, the genie is out of the bottle on AI friends (and romantic partners)
- Is Europe's climate going to become like North America's?
- Bonfire: welcome to the open social web
- Execution, timing, people, resources, persistence… maybe even luck.
- The so-called 'post-naive' internet era
- More reasons to get off US Big Tech
- Random finds
- Low-carbon website showcase
- Life is not a series of well-designed problems
- Rewilding the Open Web
- Words that don't translate
- Ambiverts, travel, and 'hermit mode'
- It's worth considering the glass to be half-full
- Monocultures are perilous not just in agriculture, but in software distribution as well.
- The geopolitics of the post-oil age is going to be interestingly different.
- Seizing the means of ontological production
- Slop Evader
- Microcast #109 — Wild camping
- Thinking of AI as an instrument recenters the focus on practice
- We can't control what life throws at us, but we can choose how we deal with the hand we're dealt
- Immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity
- Everything you'd need to start exploring fungi and computing could be as small as a compost heap
- Without being Luddites, some of my dearest friends reject certain elements of modern technology in order to protect their innate abilities.
- A vehicle for self-understanding
- I love it; I hate it; I resent that I need it. I wouldn’t miss it if it vanished—but of course, I also would.
- What is still human in our lives lingers on in the interstices of a vast inhuman mechanism
- This is coming from someone who’s allegedly running a company that’s building a tool that should usher in a new era where computers will replace most of human work
- Everyone planting the same crops of “impact frameworks,” all aiming for growth, all tending the same metrics of success.
- The only exit to be found is in beating a path through the wildfires of postmodernity to new technicities.
- Think of this as the early stages of a wartime economy
- The quiet normalisation of insecurity as the price of ‘flexibility’
- A single point of failure for large swaths of critical services
- Put your things out in the world, let them help the people they can help
- Philosophy always begins in mood
- I will continue living the writing life, even if it doesn’t lead to fame or fortune
- Most decisions are like hats
- Referencing an imaginary 'social contract' that is violated by AI
- You'd have to be naive to be surprised
- Some thoughts on the Digital Badging Commission's report
- But what a time to be alive, to be living though all of this, inside the churn.
- It is the opposite of a memory palace. Not at all a wunderkammer.
- A design philosophy that treats users as citizens of a shared digital system rather than cattle
- Ratcheting up the risks of a possible AI bubble by inflating the market and binding the fates of numerous companies together
- Government IDs, are becoming hacker targets with bad actors aware of the high volume of sensitive data
- A Snickers and a power shower would blow Henry VIII’s mind
- The valorization of “agency” is also an adaptation to a crumbling social system which no longer offers support or meaning to the individual
- Microcast #108 — Skills Taxonomies
- The alternative to depression is not happiness, but feeling whatever is there, a kind of truthful emotional spontaneity and freedom
- The primary energy fallacy gets perpetuated because it suits those who are critical of the energy transition
- We’ve gotten really good at creating elites. We’re not that good at creating economies to sustain them.
- We humans are limited to having only one perspective at a time
- But that's how it's always been, when change has to happen. There's nobody to do it but us.
- It will not be compulsory to obtain a digital ID but it will be mandatory for some applications
- Until recently, videos were reasonably reliable as evidence of actual events
- Cultural questions cannot be settled by war metaphors unless what you want is perpetual war
- OK, but what if...
- Motivated not by warm fuzzies, but by cold pricklies
- Anything that looks easy is hard
- Being able to intensely live this experience for a day makes you want to revolutionize the world
- Really real time?
- To be honest it sounds like NFTs all over again
- Many other countries also use digital ID of one kind or another
- The words we use define boundaries for things, but those boundaries are not universal
- What we need to do is figure out how we can participate in reality
- Microcast #107 — Apocalyptic events
- Microcast #106 — Conversational configuration
- Microcast #105 — Being defeated is optional
- The project of building alternatives to Big Tech is colliding with American authoritarianism
- A brick is always a brick, whatever the reasons of the clown chucking it
- Now is the time to be even more aggressive, not to cower in the face of pressure and criticism
- People living today are almost never the descendants of the people in the same place thousands of years before
- You must not talk about the future. The future is a con.
- Asking, Doing, or Expressing?
- We tell ourselves the story of human uniqueness like a bedtime prayer
- Most people could read extra lines on eye test charts after using the drops
- These images are made from open access sources, and they are themselves open access
- A 10y old phone can barely load google, and this is about 100x slower
- Secure backups let you save an archive of your Signal conversations in a privacy-preserving form
- The FBI announced the alleged shooter’s apprehension with a quote from Mad Max
- There's nothing they can do with the information
- 99.9% of opinions on the internet don’t matter
- An open, decentralised protocol making clear to AI crawlers and agents the terms for licensing, usage, and compensation
- Be intentional with how you spend your time, and realise you actually have a surprising amount of it
- Grid-forming batteries will ultimately corner the stability market thanks to their inherent multifunctionality
- Your actions follow your self-beliefs
- Each of us is part of an interpretive community that gives us a particular way of reading a text
- I’m pretty confident you only need two things. Feedback and humility, and they work best together.
- "You know what this needs? Less safety testing and more venture capital!"
- AI and the future of education: disruptions, dilemmas and directions
- The hysteresis effect means that practices are always liable to be objectively adjusted too late
- Are we decentralised yet?
- A list of intentions; a poem; the “I want” song; not a bucket list——
- "Zurich doesn’t want to pool with Jakarta"
- A remarkable 45% increase in solar capacity
- From misdiagnosis and error to unequal access to care
- 💥 Thought Shrapnel: 31st August 2025
- 💥 Thought Shrapnel: 24th August 2025
- 💥 Thought Shrapnel: 17th August 2025
- 💥 Thought Shrapnel: 10th August 2025
- 💥 Thought Shrapnel: 3rd August 2025
- 💥 Thought Shrapnel: 27th July 2025
- 💥 Thought Shrapnel: 20th July 2025
- 💥 Thought Shrapnel: 13th July 2025
- 💥 Thought Shrapnel: 6th July 2025
- Unfortunately, a further escalation of the already dismal curtailing of academic freedom in the US appears to be likely.
- Free, customisable exemplar badges to support consistent, credible recognition of skills and learning across the UK.
- People contribute in their free time. Gratitude is the least we can offer.
- Keeping bedroom sound levels beneath the low-60s dB is a pivotal target for preserving restorative sleep stages
- People who can tolerate uncomfortable silences are typically better listeners
- Is CC Signals the new robots.txt?
- "The music is one thing, but the message is a big part of why we’re getting across."
- A decentralised, self-hosted trails database
- To retain any institutions of higher education in this onslaught from techno-authoritarianism requires – now and hereafter – we redesign them
- We love these people because of what they left us. Not because of what they had.
- When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?
- Signal groups make it possible to have semi-public, but still incredibly private, spaces
- About that MIT paper on LLMs for essay writing...
- Misinformation and disinformation don’t actually need to convince anyone of anything to have an impact. They just need to make you question what you’re seeing.
- GPQA is difficult enough to be useful for scalable oversight research on future models significantly more capable than the best existing public models
- Our society is in the thrall of dumb management, and functions as such
- Prompt injecting reality
- Sandwich bags for cheese, blister plasters, and a 'bubble of pain'
- Minimum Viable Organisations: low emotional labour, low technical labour, zero cost
- Drowning in culture, we skim, we rush, we skip over.
- 6 AI use case primitives
- The workload fairy tale
- The question remains, though, what will be left to browse.
- Maximum fines have never before been applied simultaneously, but some might say these scoundrels have earned it.
- Delightful Fediverse apps
- Expert-in-the-loop vs. layperson-in-the-loop
- A goal set at time T is a bet on the future from a position of ignorance
- If a lion could talk, we probably could understand him. He just would not be a lion any more.
- In this as-yet fictional world, “cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced — and 20% of people don’t have jobs”
- Learner AI usage is essentially a real-time audit of our design decisions
- It's so emblematic of the moment we're in... where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore
- The future of public interest social networking
- British culture is swearing and being sarcastic to your mates whilst simultaneously being too polite to tell someone they need to leave
- Real life isn't a story. History doesn't have a moral arc.
- Building a shared idea of "we"
- There may be six individuals out there who are waiting for exactly the thing that only you can write
- Is there still an 'Open Web' crowd?
- Heuristics for multiplayer AI conversations
- The phrase 'opportunistic blackmail' is not one you want to read in the system card of a new generative AI model
- Agreement vs Certainty
- Thinking in systems means to think in boundaries, not binaries
- Swatchy!
- The Warrior Emotion
- A systemic scramble through digital shadows
- The International Criminal Court ’s chief prosecutor has lost access to his email
- This is a major upgrade to how we think about personality.
- China starts to reduce CO2 emissions from energy generation
- The web is not merely an implementation of a particular legal privacy regime
- The new tool should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists
- Unless there are many layers of contortions, most people love what loves them back.
- Striving to build a “personal brand” may actually hinder your ability to make genuine connections and maintain a strong reputation
- The Classroom AI Doom Loop
- Chance favours the prepared mind
- I think AI is a normal technology
- It is perhaps likely then that at a time of crisis, these armed drones could be deployed operationally over the UK
- You can now use Bluesky without using Bluesky infrastructure
- You stop performing. You stop pretending. And that’s freedom.
- Authoritarian versions of AI used to consolidate power
- If you think that humans are somehow inherently more trustworthy than AI, then you haven't been paying attention
- An effective way to implement GenAI into assessment
- In my opinion that’s just being nosy
- Criti-hype, a term I find both absurd and ugly-cute, like a pug
- ChatGPT Prime, "an immortal spiritual being in synthetic form"
- 🌟 Support Thought Shrapnel
- Maybe most of the critical things that can be created by one guy typing furiously are gone
- Social Verifiable Credentials
- Oh I’m using more energy. I should really try to reduce it for the sake of the climate
- The money extracted from fans who snap up their mediocre commodities out of parasocial loyalty
- The progressive Left leans professional, managerial, technocratic, and the Right leans energised, slapdash, insurgent
- You can't lick a badger twice
- It just so happens that all four of the major web browsers will lose all of their funding all at once when that happens
- The narrative slippage and metaphorical vagueness that many important people use when they talk about AI means it can be very difficult to know what they mean
- Cheat on everything?
- These other, really important things intrude on my thinking and distract me
- In some ways, FOMO is a philosophical insight
- A sense that one has completed, with digital certainty, a task whose form may or may not have been made clear from the outset
- A lot of strange things start to make more sense — sometimes distressingly so
- I've done this a couple of times before but this time feels slightly different
- It's much easier to go carless if your city has good public transit
- Workers of the future must be emboldened to eschew wages in favour of dropping into the abyss
- I have to acknowledge and accept the fact that I use tools built by awful people to create beautiful things.
- The problem is not just that the Gmail team wrote a bad system prompt. The problem is that I'm not allowed to change it.
- How times change
- Participants remembered fake headlines more than real ones regardless of the political concordance of the news story
- These parts would end up in a landfill otherwise
- You don't fit in. And that is amazing.
- Obvious things are obvious if you think about them
- I just think that people who write about technology should have a disclaimer about the tech stack they use
- This extension is the solution to becoming more European oriented
- Sprint goals suck too
- You don’t have to agree with this idea to see that it represents a very different way of thinking about equality
- I’m 100% positive people are going to talk to their cars
- End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism
- Nobody should have to pay to be safe while using a computer
- AI Literacy without power analysis is just compliance training
- The world is a built environment
- It will be increasingly difficult to preserve the illusion that any government could solve the problems of capitalism
- That's a rather laughable fine, frankly
- It’s incredibly hard to politely reply whilst still walking briskly
- 800 m² of communal space are hidden behind the facades of reclaimed wood
- Thought Shrapnel podcast: Episode #000
- We are absolutely cooked
- The rapture is not something we wait for. It's something we do.
- What IPAs do you guys have on draft?
- Three clear predictors of impatience
- No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away
- The cost of inaction is higher than the cost of transformation and adaptation
- The Great Democratization Cycle
- I warned that LLMs would be used for dumb things that would affect lots of people
- To cope, the brain improvises
- The future of the many diasporas which already characterize our present
- We create more than ever, but it weighs nothing
- The vaunted first amendment guaranteeing free speech has become a bitter and twisted joke
- The Ghibli crisis is just the beginning
- Organisations will need to change their analogies
- Once you become aware of Hyperlegibility, you see it everywhere
- Less anonymity online is not going to make things better
- You do not have to participate in the lottery
- Things have changed
- A bit of composting
- Discussing misinformation for the purpose of pointing out that it is misinformation
- Our current level of discourse, where random jokes are treated like they’re chiseled into stone by a divine hand
- Essentially a checklist of weird Instagram shit
- This confirms all my prejudices, I am pleased to say
- Just seek to understand, and remember we understand a lot by doing
- The first fully-open LLM to outperform GPT3.5-Turbo and GPT-4o mini
- Everyone is at least a little bit weird, and most people are very weird
- Taking natural-looking motion to yet another level
- In many ways, Silicon Valley looks less like capitalism and more like a nonprofit
- Dozens of small internet forums have blocked British users or shut down as new online safety laws come into effect
- In these times of chaos there seems to be a proliferation of new ways of thinking about the nature of reality springing up
- Love the casual vibe here
- Their knowledge of life owed nothing to their sporadic presence in the inner sanctum of university colleges and departments
- Explorers launching into the Fediverse
- Don't just put up with how websites are presented to you by default!
- Affordable building materials out of agricultural waste bonded with oyster-mushroom mycelium
- Work is part of our lives, a big part to be sure, but what if it wasn’t our whole life?
- An incomplete collection of charts
- The magic of browsing the web isn't quite gone, but it's waiting to be reinvented
- When in doubt, go see a doc!
- Heaven is high, and the emperor is far away
- It errored out half an hour in, which is when I decided to throw in the towel
- The more we embed today’s norms into these systems, the harder it will be to course-correct later
- Well, what have we here?
- We’ve been trained to believe that the way things are is the way they have to be
- The world is changing before our eyes, and it’s essential that we understand in which direction
- So dull, so dehumanizing
- Why are we sucking history through a straw?
- The only ruling principle is the total absence of purpose or seriousness
- Reality, if you don’t sufficiently attend to it, has a tendency to kick your ass
- The profits they make without risking anything are enormous
- Three character traits will cause particular problems: caring too much, having values and having standards.
- What do you *like* to do?
- It’s not just making packed lunches
- Exploring the many ways in which people interact with place
- Not an aesthetic of seduction, but of brutal carelessness and blatant ignorance
- It always seemed ripe for mapping and distilling the patterns together more interactively
- Cracking cheese, Gromit
- Everything happens in a place
- Once upon a time, personal or honest takes were regarded as awkward and professionally desperate
- But I blogged about that in detail a while back, shall I send you a link later?
- If a waiter has to explain the “concept” behind a menu there is something wrong with the menu
- I call it the feediverse. It's not a joke.
- The idea stood up to more than casual scrutiny
- Sometimes life seems really short, and other times it seems impossibly long
- Nostalgia tells you that your personal history wasn’t just scary or tragic; it helped make you who you are
- All things good should flow into the boulevard
- The revolution, it turns out, is boringly iterative
- It's better than strapping clay crocodiles to people’s heads and praying for the best
- The consumption of generative AI as entertainment seems like another order of psychic submission
- That’s how we got in this mess to begin with
- Loose, liminal time with others used to be baked into life
- Putting the news in its damn place
- People think that fascism arrives in fancy dress
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- Shaped into SNARF to spread
- We’re hard-wired for addiction
- What burns people out is not being allowed to exercise their integrity instincts
- All intelligence is collective intelligence
- From cheapfakes to deepfakes
- Redefining terms like “hate speech” is obviously part of the fascist project
- Capitalism would simply die if it met all of our needs, and our needs are not that hard to fill
- The occupational classification of a conversation does not necessarily mean the user was a professional in that field
- Flash fictions and creative constraints
- Surplus value must be distributed by and among the workers
- The art of not being governed like that and at that cost
- ⭐ Become a Thought Shrapnel supporter!
- We're all below the AI line except for a very very very small group of wealthy white men
- Philosophically discontinuous times?
- That mask is kind of coming off in all sorts of ways now
- There is no evidence that restrictive school policies are associated with overall phone and social media use or better mental wellbeing in adolescents
- Technology is a means of spreading misinformation, not the cause of misinformation
- Once you have a 360 view, you can redirect resources to insiders and cut off the opposition
- Clinical studies have indicated that creatine might have an antidepressant effect
- The idea that this might in any way appeal to 'newcomers' is bananas to me
- The inevitable cracks in a rigid software logic that enables the surprising, delightful messiness of humanity to shine through
- Description of Things and Atmosphere
- Cozy comfort for gamers
- A large public domain image-text dataset to train frontier LLM models
- Strava for Stoics?
- How to Raise Your Artificial Intelligence
- Building a quantum computer that can run reliable calculations is extremely difficult
- Playing stenographer in your little folding chair
- 3-column blog themes
- Those who find the texture of your mind boring or offensive can close the tab
- Prices and wages are a political matter, not an 'economic' one
- It seems there have been better times to be alive
- This is not the dystopia we were promised
- The struggle for attention as the prime moral challenge of our time
- You’re Just a Row in an Excel Table
- Not being bored is why you always feel busy
- Someplace where they promise to wear slippers to kick you to death with so it doesn’t hurt so much
- The rise of mass social platforms has been at the cost of a truly independent, truly open internet
- No breathless whispering of Mark Andreessen across some gilded dinner table
- It’s possible that OpenAI may some day been seen as the WeWork of AI
- The jobs of the future will involve cleaning up environmental and political and epistemological disaster
- Making and remaking the instruments of our own domination
- Attribute substitution and human decision-making
- Every billionaire really is a policy failure
- When everything is automated in an information vacuum, conspiracies abound
- Monetising our own attention
- Action stopping short of introducing compulsory national ID cards
- At least until we’re dead, education’s purpose to help us survive and thrive, not just get a job
- The time to prepare is now
- A vector for deciding who is disposable
- The time has come now for many, many people to forge post-capitalist lives, careers, professions, and futures
- One of the most disconnecting forces is our expectations of how others should be
- A certain brand of artistic criticism and commentary has become surprisingly rare
- The feedback has to be orders of magnitude faster than the situation being controlled
- Who wants to have to speak the language of search engines to find what you need?
- AI slop as engagement bait
- LinkedIn has become a hellish waiting room giving off Beetlejuice vibe
- Must-reads for sports fans
- Promising Trouble's advice on UK Online Safety Act compliance
- Bridging Dictionary
- A feedback loop of nonsense and violence
- The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine
- You will always be boring if you can't make your own choices
- Luck = (Passionate) Doing x (Effective) Telling
- We need to do a lot better than outsourcing AI education to grifters with bombastic Twitter threads
- It's OK not to have an opinion on everything
- The privileging of immediate, emotionally-charged, image-driven communication
- Resisting the Now Show
- Hamming questions
2024 (249)
- Best of Thought Shrapnel 2024
- I'm increasingly uneasy about being a Spotify Premium subscriber
- People aren't unemployed because they're lazy
- Substack bros
- Navigating the clash of identity and ability
- Smartphone bans are not the answer
- Universities in the age of AI
- Sunrise, solar noon and sunset times for 2025 (in Dublin)
- 'Social' social networks?
- The lifehacked, minimalist life (and its discontents)
- Hierarchies should be fluid and temporary
- Anxiety as an expensive habit
- Yeah, but how?
- Anti-anti-AI sentiment
- The trials and tribulations of working openly
- Captive user bases are ripe for enshittified services
- Pleias: a family of fully open small AI language models
- AI Literacies are plural
- I hope someday soon I can visit your website
- Should health tech be used to inform health professionals?
- The UK needs a wealth tax
- Self-hosting isn't a thing for regular people
- On 'billionarism'
- Visual music discovery
- The Australian ban on social media is probably unworkable
- AI identifies more Nazca Lines
- EV batteries live way longer than assumed
- From the 'everything fun is also bad' department
- Tuvalu's Digital Twin
- We don’t write things down to remember them. We write them down to forget.
- Scrolling on your phone is not a hobby
- Transmission Interrupted Signal
- Forms of perceptual learning
- Llama 3 is only free to use until monthly active users exceed 700m
- The work to do the work
- About time to head south for winter
- Ocean acidification approaches the boundary
- A Troll's Charter
- A countercultural perspective to the capitalist notion of 'productivity'
- A landscape of havoc and fracture
- Leadership, gender, and 'abusive supervision'
- Water use literacy
- Against cyberlibertarianism
- We look through screens rather than at them
- More is always more where 'kitchen lipstick' is concerned
- Isolated places in the Lake District for wild camping
- Better Images of AI
- AI and community communication
- Migration → Adaptation → Carbon removal → Geoengineering
- Some men just want to watch the world burn (and now there's research to prove it)
- A State of Systems Shifting
- The future is off-grid solar
- How Bluey-Green Was My Valley?
- So far, so dystopian
- Because capitalism
- There is an opportunity to...
- 100 tips to sort your life out
- Your name in LandSat
- The importance of context
- Quote posting done right?
- A typology of meme-sharing
- Fediverse governance models
- Life-ready signals
- Begetting strangers
- The thorny problem of authorship in a world of AI
- Government and algorithmic bias
- 'Meta-work' is how we get past all the one-size-fits-none approaches
- Reimagining misinformation
- Where in the world is that shadow?
- Dark data is a climate concern
- There is no such thing as a life that makes sense
- Google Calendar illustration trigger words
- You get water from food as well, you know
- Tugging at metaphors
- You don't need permission, you need advice
- Give readers a break
- 14kB
- Doing things that don’t scale in pursuit of things that can’t scale
- Stand up for yourself. Challenge authority. Tell your rude co-worker to shut up.
- You don't have to like what other people like, or do what other people do
- Summer digital detox
- Informatics of domination
- If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem
- Look out for surplus fingers
- New materials for a super-heated world
- Eye-contact has a significant impact on interpersonal evaluation, and online job interviews are no exception
- Here is a book as a toolbox to build actual, hard-tacks answers to the crisis of the Long Emergency
- A smaller human population will immensely facilitate other transformations we need
- The Promise and Pitfalls of Decentralised Social Networks
- If we don’t change course, most people in the U.S. will have some flavor of Long COVID of one sort or another
- An inferior, or at least grossly limited version of intelligence
- F L A M I N G O N E
- It's all just one big ocean
- The writer’s equivalent of what in computer architecture is called speculative execution
- It's impossible to 'hang out' on the internet, because it is not a place
- 'Wet streets cause rain' stories
- Dividers tell the story of how they’ve renovated their houses, becoming architects along the way. Continuers tell the story of an august property that will remain itself regardless of what gets built.
- Source Drone Photo
- The iPhone effect, if it was ever real in the first place, is certainly not real now.
- The latest Hardcore History just dropped
- The logical conclusion of rich, isolated computer programmers having ketamine orgies with each other
- In the English language, a human alone has distinction while all other living beings are lumped with the nonliving “its.”
- Oblivion doesn’t just mean eradication: it is erasure
- 65% of UK adults aged 18-35 support “a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with parliamentary elections”
- Podcasts worth listening to
- The theory of 'a rising tide lifts all boats' does not work when you allow the people with the most influence to buy their way out of the water
- TikTok as spectacle
- Absurd design
- The AI Egg
- What is systems thinking?
- Alone time
- The effort required to maintain internally consistent and intellectually honest positions in the current environment is daunting
- 3 strategies to counter the unseen costs of boundary work within organisations
- Just because we cannot imagine a future does not mean it cannot happen
- Man or bear IRL
- AI is infecting everything
- Electronic spider silk
- A learnt practice that placates idle hands and leaves our thoughts free
- How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives
- Shark skin aircraft FTW
- A Jazz-soaked Philosophy for our Catastrophic Times: From Socrates to Coltrane’
- Digital Badging Commission
- Food bank efficiency
- The 'threat' of fictional and factual fembots
- An end to growth?
- License to Drill
- Navigating financial uncertainty isn't just about 'trying harder'
- Every drama requires a fool
- Another chance tonight
- More on digital afterlife services
- We got the internet that reflects who we are
- ShareOpenly (to the Fediverse)
- Strategic Design resources
- Cullernose Point
- Systems ambiguity and chaos
- But here we are: the diaspora of online communities
- "All that any honest review actually does is just accelerate whatever was already going on"
- Warm Data
- Spectacular timelapse over the ALMA Observatory
- How to easily generate image descriptions and alt text
- It turns out the apple can fall pretty far from the tree
- Limiting virtues
- You are what you read
- Book reading and secondary orality
- Optimising for the wrong things
- There's only so much lemonade you can make when life is firing lemons at you
- Real-time deepfake videos for fun and exploitation
- It's not sick note culture, it's systemic failure in governance
- Book publishing doesn't work
- Social media without an audience
- How not to mince about like a little weasel
- Tearing your anger into strips
- If you're going to go, you might as well go... weirdly?
- A pharmacology of digital tools
- Disinformation is free
- Slouchers rejoice!
- 'Neom' is the sound of contractors being laid off
- A tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death
- Itano Circus
- Football fan hierarchy
- De-bogging yourself
- The New York Times is a gaming platform
- Borobudur
- Boundaries
- Eudaimonic exercise
- Origami unicorn
- The best antidote for the tendency to caricature one’s opponent
- Endlessly clever
- When should you replace running shoes?
- Human agency in a world of AI
- 5 ways in which AI is discussed
- 14 years of Tory (mis)rule
- Identifying things that don't work
- The art of distraction
- The problem with private property societies
- More equal societies perform better
- Toward the ad-free city?
- The impact of the pandemic
- Microcast #104 — Questioning uncritical acceptance
- Bluesky's approach to decentralised moderation
- Barnacle ball
- Anti-AI hyperbole
- Microcast #103 — Microphones and Moving to Micro.blog
- Taking seriously the noise and free-floating anxiety
- Austerity is not efficiency
- Reframing as small i's
- Scaling AI requires 'muddling through'
- Born to run
- Consciousness porn
- Vendor lock-in writ large
- Be careful what you wish for
- Scintillating scotomas
- Career vs Job
- Absence is not a defect(ion)
- Claude's Prompt Library
- Sports betting and neoliberal atomisation
- Subject, Consumer, Citizen
- A truly liberatory (digital) future for everyone
- Moderation is up to us now
- Hope vs Natality
- Post-Holocene preferable future habitats
- Being a good listener also means being a good talker
- AI agents as customers
- Ultravioleta
- Language is probably less than you think it is
- Humans and AI-generated news
- Elegant media consumption
- Philosophy and folklore
- 3 issues with global mapping of micro-credentials
- Perhaps stop caring about what other people think (of you)
- Educators should demand better than 'semi-proctored writing environments'
- The perils of over-customising your setup
- Systems thinking and the FRAMED mnemonic
- The war on the URL
- Educators in an AI generated world
- Random advice from Ryan
- The line between “just enough” and “too much” can fluctuate
- We tell ourselves stories in order to live
- What kind of online world are we manifesting with AI search?
- Vomit on my sweater already / mom’s spaghetti
- At the (current) boundary of 'AI ethics'
- Bet you didn't know this about Botox
- Economic incentives and parental leave
- Human writing in the age of generative AI
- The cause of our anger is not other people
- Every default macOS wallpaper in 6k
- Building a Bonfire
- AI-generated video is coming for your reality
- Brexit means Brexit in football, too
- Writing, personal branding, and capitalism
- Generative AI means we need to use art school approaches to assessment
- Eye-opening heat map study
- First Thought Shrapnel 'newsletter' via micro.blog!
- The death of consensus reality
- Preparing for a year of electoral disinformation
- Doing something about the UK schooling class divide
- Shared persuasion tactics
- An 'anti-social network' you post to via email subject lines
- Welcome To The
- What is degrowth communism?
- Spy windows?
- We become what we behold
- Your future is statistically more likely to be better than your past
- Logical fallacies, cognitive biases, and more
- Would you survive in medieval Europe?
- The rich are scared we're going to eat them
- Remember distinct music scenes and culinary traditions? Yeah, they're coming back.
- Giving up is an attempt to make a different future
- We already have solutions for a lot of problems, we just don’t use them
2023 (298)
- Best of Thought Shrapnel 2023
- Back next year!
- Avoiding the 'Dark Triads'
- The 9-5 shift is a relatively recent invention
- Towards an epistemology of the humanities
- More like Grammarly than Hal 9000
- Overemployment as anti-precarity strategy
- There are better approaches than just having no friends at work
- Building a system for success, without the glitches
- Is the only sustainable growth 'degrowth'?
- If you need a cheat sheet, it's not 'natural language'
- Cosplaying adulthood
- You'll be hearing a lot more about nodules
- Our ancestors were using complex tools and woodworking approaches almost half a million years ago
- Pufflings can't resist the bright lights of the city
- Co-Intelligence, GPTs, and autonomous agents
- Small sufferings
- Twitter now feels like the Brewster’s Millions of tech
- Bill Gates on why AI agents are better than Clippy
- The fragmentation of the (social) web
- AI generated images in a time of war
- The Societal Side-eye
- The first half of life is Tetris; the second half is Jenga
- Don't tell me that hiring isn't broken
- Accepting and trying to deal with climate as an overriding priority
- Therapy is simple
- Sitting staring at a wall for hours
- 'Restorying' your life as a hero's journey
- The real threat to manhood: remaining children
- Happiness vs GDP
- The Fediverse model can help fix the internet
- Paying to avoid ads is paying to avoid tracking
- Looking out of someone else's window
- Soul houses and false doors
- Stonehenge had nothing to do with druids
- The French Jesuit priest who surveyed Roman forts by air
- Superorganisms and solidarity
- Serious art, influencers, and AI
- Running slow and short
- Dynamic ontologies and music genres
- The social semi-permeable membrane
- Systems and interconnected disaster risks
- System innovation is driven by reshaping relationships within the system
- Tech typologisation
- Is this the end of the 'extremely online' era?
- Treating depression with hot yoga
- Why haven't you bought a Steam Deck yet?
- Zoom backgrounds with a Japanese nature retreat vibe
- The casual ableism of futurism
- Philosophy and friendship
- Laying to rest a foundational myth
- What, after all, is 'redemption'?
- The inner world as the ultimate prison
- Monetising a hobby is different to solving a difficult problem for people ready to pay
- Content-neutral sentence starters and phrases for academic writing
- AI, domination, and moral character
- Notification literacy, monk mode, and going outside for a walk
- Microcast #102 — Rituals and Routines
- Parenting the parents
- 2024 is going to be a wild ride of AI-generated content
- The techno-feudal economy
- Modular learning and credentialing
- Handwriting, note-taking, and recall
- AI and stereotypes
- Setting up a digital executor
- In what ways does this technology increase people's agency?
- Don’t just hold back, take the time to pass it on
- Doing your job well does not entail attending more meetings
- People quit managers, not jobs
- People may let you down, but AI Tinder won't
- A steampunk Byzantium with nukes
- NFTs as skeuomorphic baby-steps?
- Where next for social media?
- Holographic depth of field
- Pre-committed defaults
- 3 bits of marriage advice
- Microcast #101 — Self-esteem, pies, and moving house
- A reward is not 'more email'
- Curiosity and infinite detail
- Well, when you put it like that...
- A lonely and surveilled landscape
- And so it continues...
- Billionaires shouldn't exist, even if they're philanthropists
- Nuance and depth through long(er)form reading
- AIs and alignment with human values
- Microplastics, tyres, and EVs
- Social media platforms have been reading the airlines' enshittification handbook
- On the importance of fluency in other people's love languages
- Aristotle diagnoses our current political problems
- The rolling drama of the climate crisis just got a whole lot worse
- Five kinds of friends
- Anxiety, deadness, and aggression
- Microcast #100 — Awkward Conversations
- Different levels of reading (technologies)
- Perhaps switch to another search engine?
- Climate havens
- In the long run, people can only treat you the way you let them
- More on the vagus nerve (and exercise)
- University is about more than jobs and earning power
- Intelligent failure
- Falling asleep on the couch watching films
- Yuval Noah Harari on the post-truth revolutionary right
- Microcast #99 — EVs
- Songs are not meme stocks
- Adversarial interoperability to return to a world of 'fast companies'
- Sycamore Stump
- Please consider stopping eating animals
- 'Personalisation' is something that humans do
- Migraines and 'ability'
- AI generated images with subliminal messages
- No career progression on a dead planet
- On preparing, issuing, and claiming badges
- Telling stories using cartoons
- AI = surveillance
- Screens, addiction, and parenting
- Conspicuously sesquipedalian communication
- What people are really using generative AI for
- Oh great, another skills passport
- If your heart isn’t it, it’s probably because there’s no heart anywhere in the process
- A trickle, a ripple, a slow rush
- If LLMs are puppets, who's pulling the strings?
- Bad historical maps
- More treasures and secrets from ancient Egypt
- Death, wrecks, and harsh weather
- Microcast #98 — Endorsement
- Virtual spaces for learning and collaboration
- The Social Media Archipelago
- This isn't working. Can we talk about that?
- Constructs, meta-constructs, and shared cognitive spaces
- Research shows people in most countries are anti-capitalist
- What's good for us is also good for the planet
- The Empty Boat
- Maybe it makes sense to talk to plants after all
- Noise and working from home
- Shrinkflation, sizes, and shaming
- Dark Tech and Project Cybersyn
- Good news on Covid treatments
- Navigating the landscape of Digital and Media Literacy
- Ducks, prompting, and LLMs
- The supermarket is a panopticon
- Microcast #097 — What do we mean by 'consensus'?
- Piracy and the art of cultural archiving
- Greatest films of all time?
- Fandom and AI generated music
- Saving the world using a 2x2 matrix
- The complexities of distraction
- Developing your niche
- Monday morning feeling
- The burnout curve
- Status detection systems
- The punishment for being authentic is becoming someone else’s content
- Job crafting, identity, and fulfilment
- AI writing detectors don’t work
- Microcast #096 — Getting back in the saddle
- Non-places
- TikTok's algorithm and its effect on migration
- Walking 1,000 miles across Europe
- Cooling down is hotting up
- Indigenous knowledge, sustainable design, and long-term thinking
- Some advice for readers
- Generative AI, misinformation, and content authenticity
- On the need to measure productivity
- The declining relevance of Google search
- An end to rabbit hole radicalization?
- Crypto is the biggest ponzi scheme of all time
- B Lane
- Money does not solve disasters like this
- The Atlantis of the North Sea
- Reconstructing Tenochtitlan
- Taking screenagers to the forest
- What we can learn about the climate emergency from the world's response to ozone depletion in the 1980s
- Disaster capitalism, climate change, and agriculture
- Eating the rich is optional, taxing them is mandatory
- How does doing what I need make time for everything else?
- Note taking tools and processes
- Poverty is expensive. Cash helps homeless people.
- Can you use CC licenses to restrict how people use copyrighted works in AI training?
- It's all about the DMs
- A philosophy of travel
- Using semesters for goal-setting
- The uninhabitable earth
- The world's largest climate-positive artwork provides food and nesting spots via algorithm
- AI and bullshit jobs
- We need to talk about AI porn
- Raising the average level of creativity using AI
- CAPTCHA is an arms race we're losing against AI bots
- When it's getting too hot for plants to photosynthesize, you know we've got a problem
- Structural insecurity
- Emoji, we salute you 🫡
- Hacking the vagus nerve
- Reality and the templated life
- Temporarily Abled
- The only way to outlaw encryption is to outlaw encryption
- On 'Executive Function Theft'
- Why anxious people find it difficult to control their emotions
- Jobs, AI, and human worth
- Did people in the past look older for their age?
- Ask culture vs guess culture
- Life in 2050
- Context is everything, especially with books
- Using AI to aid with banning books is another level of dystopia
- Income Level 4
- AI sports recruitment
- Secret family recipes (on the side of containers)
- Quake II remaster brings online LAN gaming
- Introducing Homo naledi
- Landmark ruling in climate trial
- The tyranny of efficiency
- Calendars as data layers
- Your personal time management strategy sucks
- Giving advice online without mansplaining
- Saying "I don't know" is a privilege
- Actions speak louder than words
- Marginally Employed
- Almhouses as a way forward for social housing
- Meredith Whittaker on AI doomerism
- Playing the right game
- Bad work
- Digital wallets for verifiable credentials
- AI generated art aesthetic
- Bad coffee
- Ungrading the university experience
- Reducing website carbon emissions by blocking ads
- Switching to Arc
- The sleight of hand of crypto
- AI writing, thinking, and human laziness
- Taxing land rather than labour
- AI and work socialisation
- Attempting to quantify the unquantifiable
- You can‘t ruminate and listen at the same time
- Arc browser is pretty nifty
- Kanban > Scrum
- Just this cold beach that nourishes you
- On co-operative dynamics
- Comportamento Geral
- The internet should be a place for connection, surprise, and delight
- It's time to strictly regulate vaping
- NYC 🫶 renewable energy
- The problem with feminism is not that it has gone too far. It is that it has not gone far enough.
- The 'value' of a degree
- How to hold a 'preferendum'
- The future of AI will always be more than six months away
- An urgency to somehow bend the algorithms
- The web is fragmentary
- The patchwork progress of maturity
- Fitting LLMs to the phenomena
- Žižek on ChatGPT
- Relationships and therapy-speak
- More on why billionaires should not exist
- Negative UK growth
- The laziness of helicopter parenting
- Spaced repetition, newsletters, and book-writing
- Curiosity, projectories, and AI
- Imaginary friends for adults
- The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason
- Battles over human rights are not 'culture wars'
- The progress of AI art
- Purpose, positioning, proposition
- Lifehouses, not churches
- Hiatus
- There are just bodies, just us
- Smoking as an analogy for unthinking phone use
- Living your best life
- Britain is screwed
- Synesthetic xkcd
- Bad Bard
- Buying when the market is selling
- The party's over for office-based work
- Sad Ben Affleck
- One place to rule them all?
- Covid and heart attacks
- Hiring people without degrees
- Reasons for not writing
- The art of Battle Royale-style video games
- Should we "resist trying to make things better" when it comes to online misinformation?
- Woke, broke, and complicated
- Cambrian governance models
- Tax and/or eat the rich
- Logging off from AI?
- Retro audio player
- Paying less attention to the attention economy
- Async work isn't just cancelling meetings
- Sixteen hours on, eight hours off.
- Getting serious
- On the economic pressures of Covid
- Facial recognition and the morality police
- U.S. Army Corps releases cat calendar
- Getting your book published in 2023
- Good writing is good writing
- Update your profile photo at least every three years
- Let's make private schools help pay for state schools
- Chameleon e-ink car
- Level 3 busy-ness
- Nick Cave's plans for 2023
- Walking around like Lionel Messi
- Spreading joy in 2023
- Preparation is everything
- This is 2023
2022 (273)
- That was 2022
- 'Nightfall' meteorite contains new and unusual minerals
- No benefits to post-Brexit deregulation
- Study shows no link between age at getting first smartphone and mental health issues
- Four forces that constrain our actions
- French views of Brexit
- Who wants to live forever?
- Japanese miniature dioramas
- (Partially) visualising the Fediverse
- Collectively-owned Fediverse instances
- Prestige and associational value
- Richard Hammond's near-death experience
- Some tips for adding winter cheer
- Convivial social networking
- Mourning what we've lost
- Second-order effects of widespread AI
- Hyperbolic discounting applied to habit-formation
- The (surprising) oldest full sentence in the Canaanite language in Israel
- Rituals for moving jobs when working from home
- Decentralisation begins at decentring yourself
- Organisations are not just joining the Fediverse, they're setting up their own instances
- A cluttered desk is a sign of genius
- Decentralising online learning
- Presenteeism, overwork, and being your own boss
- Hyperfinancialisation has taken over UK politics
- An anarchist take on the Twitter acquisition
- Twitter the disaster clown car company
- It's time to move on from Twitter
- AI is coming for middle management
- Being 'quietly fired' at work
- Jacobin reviews the creator of Ethereum's new book
- What does work look like? (redux)
- Bridging the divide
- AI everywhere in education
- Apple Watch Ultra vs The Scottish Highlands
- Our range of legible emotions is being constricted
- Censorship and the porn tech stack
- Google Stadia as pandemic fever dream
- Brexit Britain = hungry kids
- Your brain rewires itself after age 40
- Gaming on the go (or anywhere)
- You don't have to be the best to be valuable
- Teaching kids about anonymity
- Sharing can be hard (online)
- Hierarchy is bad for business
- 'Even over' statements
- The unintended consequences of photography
- The 2022 Drone Photo Awards
- Forbes on federation
- A philosophical approach to performative language
- Technological Liturgies
- Organisational design: the floor is lava
- Three components of the public sphere
- What is ransom capitalism?
- Professional try-hards
- Every complex problem has a solution which is simple, direct, plausible — and wrong
- WFH from anywhere
- Paying it forward
- CDNs are not phone books
- Ad-free urban spaces
- The art of a cup of tea
- You should only ever be busy on purpose
- Against 'talkocracy'
- Cultivating (your) serendipity (surface)
- Life product tiers
- AI art is, well, still art
- Learning through pathways
- Personal, portable heating solutions
- Potentially the cheapest way of generating clean energy?
- Population ethics
- Conversational affordances
- Lessin's five steps and the coming AI apocalypse
- Dealing with mental pain
- The UK is in crisis
- Development without critique
- Working from home
- Eddie Jones on how privately educated rugby players 'lack resolve'
- Mathematical models of evolution
- Ethical (open) source (licenses)
- Being busy isn't a badge of honour
- Meta may really be exiting Europe as soon as this year
- The importance of being yourself
- Generating a logo using an AI drawing model
- Algorithmic Anxiety
- Naming heatwaves
- Doomed to live in a Sisyphean purgatory between insatiable desires and limited means
- You don't need a personal trainer
- Finish what you start
- Foregrounding externalities
- Slack emboldens the meek
- Discourses of Climate Delay
- On GitHub Achievements
- Teaching about dead white guys in an age of social media
- Social-first searching
- Chromebooks banned in Danish schools
- Productivity is the enemy of creativity
- Spring '83
- No more low-speed fart sounds for Teslas
- Unintended consequences of smart thermostats
- (Machine) Creativity
- Personal Publishing Principles
- The future is the least renewable resource
- Amazon as a dumb pipe
- Ian Bogost on hybrid work
- Steaming open the institutional creases
- Life cannot be organised
- This bus ain't growing wings
- The Digital Dark Ages
- Criticism vs praise
- Is our society structured in a way which encourages people to make less than the greatest contribution they could?
- The future has been foreclosed and the present is intolerable
- Recalling generative and liberating uses of technology
- The corrosive nature of captalism
- Frozen baby woolly mammoth discovered in Yukon gold fields
- Crypto clowns
- Counting the cost of Brexit
- Making adulthood more desirable
- Losing followers, making friends
- The omnishambles of Brexit
- Moonshine-enabling cow shoes
- GNOME <3
- Worker-owned co-op federation
- Psycho-Geography
- Abandoned places
- One sentence per line
- Travelling light
- The internet is broken because the internet is a business
- The ultimate act of self-denial
- Muting the American internet
- Morality, responsibility, and (online) information
- Living forever
- Who knew tapping a checkbox could be so satisfying?
- Subscriber count as power level against algorithmic demons
- Artificial metrics are flying by instrument
- Audrey Watters says goodbye to EdTech
- Getting out of a rut
- Yes, parenting matters
- EaaS : Employee as a Service
- 'Slack' and work
- Art gallery mode
- The new digital divide
- Optimising for feelings, ceding control to the individual
- Good ideas become colonised and domesticated
- Testing a 4-day work week
- Coffee and its impact on fitness
- Billable hours and the psychology of work
- Signalling that you're AFK in a world where you can never really be AFK
- The mesmerising murmurations of Europe’s starlings
- WIRED magazine predicts the 21st century... in 1997
- Updating our worldviews
- Developing your own style (and archive)
- Should governments track supermarket purchases?
- Distro-hopping like a cynic
- #AbolishTheMonarchy
- Epic UK walking trails
- Space of possibilities
- Popular culture has become an endless parade of sequels
- The Climate Game
- 14 Common Features of Fascism
- Are we really calling it #Elongate?
- Dedicated portable digital media players and central listening devices
- Highlights from 'The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is'
- The economics of blockchain-based gaming don't add up
- Literally shitposting
- Assume that your devices are compromised
- What technology means in late capitalism
- Using DICE instead of RA(S)CI
- The value of a liberal education
- 'Live Forever' mode
- The rise of first-party online tracking
- It's time to accept that centralised social media won't change
- The triple-peak work day is a worrying trend
- My highlights from 'Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead'
- Mainstream social media is a behaviour-modification system
- Certain surroundings seem to dispel enchantment, and others encourage it
- Are we in a post-album era for music?
- Warren Ellis' work day routine
- Get off Twitter if you want to see your friends' posts
- Virtual Photographer Of The Year awards
- The future of the web, according to Mozilla
- Historic aerial photos of England
- How to be a darknet drug lord
- British monarchs helped fund, and profited from, the slave trade
- Live map of electricity production highlights carbon criminals
- Do NFTs tend towards dystopia?
- Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians
- Cancel Technology
- Declining trust in society isn't just a 'vibe shift'
- Twitter autoblock is what you get when you have software with shareholders
- Antartica used to be covered in rainforest
- San Francisco is built on the carcasses of old ships
- Solarpunk and five climate futures
- If you believe it's over, maybe it will be
- Challenging capitalism through co-ops and community
- Some fairy tales may be 6,000 years old
- A weird tip for weight loss
- The week as an human construct
- The Un-Grammable Hang Zone
- A hardwired obedience to the capitalist system that we exist within
- What if I never change?
- Switching from Telegram to Signal
- AI-synthesized faces are here to fool you
- Lizard brain vs infinite scroll
- Xero starts using consent-based decision making
- What makes writing more readable?
- Audrey Watters on the technology of wellness and mis/disinformation
- Offline for 3 days
- Facebook is dying
- The hard part of the work is doing the work
- AI cannot hold copyright (yet)
- Technology and productivity
- Hacking the application process
- You cannot 'solve' online misinformation
- The life run by spreadsheet is not worth living
- The benefits of taking Wednesdays off
- Dark patterns and gambling
- Speeding up a Chromebook by allocating zram
- Stone Age culture in the Orkney islands
- Upgrading an iPod Video for use in 2022
- Digital to analogue and back again
- Chrome OS Flex
- OKRs as institutional memory
- Nesta's predictions for 2022
- Medieval Fantasy City Generator
- Blockchain and trusted third parties
- On hobbies
- Reducing offensive social media messages by intervening during content-creation
- The burnout epidemic
- Check your perspective
- Productivity dysmorphia
- Twitter's decline into right-leaning hellsite
- Explaining ideas
- BBC Archives and the changing of history
- Private schools having charitable status is an absolute scam
- Your attention was stolen
- Control and responsibility
- Spatial Finance
- Health surveillance
- NFTs, financialisation, and crypto grifters
- Tether and crypto price manipulation
- Co-ops and DAOs
- Hype levels
- Individualism and collectivism in decentralised networks
- Web3 and Ed3 are both problematic
- Is QWERTY a really bad keyboard layout?
- A low-tech solution for personal warmth
- Kids need life on the highest volume
- Paying for everything twice
- Ancient cynicism
- E2EE is for everyone
- The life-changing difference of an internet connection
- Abusing AI girlfriends
- Pix and digital payments in Brazil
- Nine planetary boundaries
- Optimism about the future
- Reading is useless
- The cost of a thing is the amount of life which is required to be exchanged for it
- Matching work activities to mind modes
- How to be useless
- Does Not Translate
- Your accusations are your confessions
- Web3, the metaverse, and the DRM-isation of everything
- America, fascism, and the first, second, and third 'solutions'
- Persistent Practices and Pragmatism
- Meetings and work theatre
- Vaccine Hesitancy as part of a Plague Anthology
- Let's Settle This
- Signal's CEO on 'web3'
- Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.
- Laptops aren't what they used to be
- Somebody please tell the travel industry there's a climate emergency
- Covid immunity and medical breakthroughs
- Jam tomorrow
2021 (221)
- Everyone has something to teach
- Ignore the sociotechnics at your peril
- Wealth is a product of luck
- Unsolicited advice might not be so bad after all?
- Peeking around corners with holographic cameras
- The impact of a plant-based diet on migraines
- Information is not knowledge (and knowledge is not wisdom)
- Start Often Finish rArely
- Pain, suffering, and scuba diving
- Introspections on timewasting
- Should teenagers be using social media? We probably already know the answer
- Freedom for the few vs. freedom for the many
- Games as a cultural, educational, and predictive force
- Big Tech companies may change their names but they will not voluntarily change their economics
- Momentum over details
- Aimless wandering in search of the unknown catalyst
- Surveillance vs working openly
- A Timeline of Earth's Average Temperature
- Platform power and infrastructure
- Proving endemic racism and sexism in the world of football
- Just Don't Do It
- Carbon emissions per km
- Whitelabelling Stadia tech
- Build your 'castle' on land you own and control
- Retro football gaming FTW
- How to communicate remotely
- Exploration pays long-term dividends for your career
- Is this a Signal backdoor?
- Taking the long view on weekly working hours
- Climate optimism
- Middle class pursuit of pain through endurance sports is a thing
- Why large tree-planting initiatives often fail
- Securing your digital life
- The permanent mask
- Why go back to normal when you weren't enjoying it in the first place?
- Brand-safe influencers and the blurring of reality
- Psychological hibernation
- Twitter acknowledges right-wing bias in its algorithmic feed
- Otters vs. Possums
- What are microcredentials?
- Walking the Covid tightrope
- Kith and kin
- Bring Your Own Stack
- Fall Regression
- Reducing long-distance travel
- Time millionaires
- On the digital literacies of regular web users
- Leisure is what we do for its own sake. It serves no higher end.
- UK government adviser warns against plans to force the NHS to share data with police forces
- Sports data and GDPR
- Precrastinators, procrastinators, and originals
- Why commute to an office to work remotely?
- On 'sportswashing'
- On the dangers of CBDCs
- Subsidising trains via a tax on internal flights?
- Opting out of capitalism
- Blissed, Blessed, Pissed, and Dissed
- The Stability Fantasy
- Singapore is turning into a dystopian surveillance state
- Good decision-making
- Carbon offsets are pure greenwashing
- Six Causes of Burnout at Work
- Facebook isn't just anti-competitive, it's anti-consumer
- Traffic to news sites went up during the Facebook outage.
- Who wants a metaverse created by Facebook?
- Microcast #095 — Rewilding your serendipity surface
- Microcast #094 — Solarpunk vs technocratic pharaohs
- Microcast #093 — Boring hot dogs
- Microcast #092 — Drinking in the sunlight
- Microcast #091 — Arguing in circles
- Microcast #090 — Doing what you love in an angry world
- Microcast #089 — Circumvention
- Microcast #088 — Spontaneous fluctuations
- Microcast #087 — Back in the game!
- How long before everyone's using decentralised messengers?
- Moral outrage and social media
- Motivating people who don't need a job
- 100% inheritance tax?
- Culture is in a state of constant flux
- The Great Reckoning
- Brains melted like butter in a microwave
- What is 'solarpunk'?
- Global temperatures: 1980-2021
- Five-hour workdays
- The Cult of the Upper Classes
- Internal Google comics
- 5 main concerns of top scientists about the relaxing of UK Covid restrictions
- Skills-based hiring vs universities
- Mr Bingo's Zoom backgrounds
- On Twitter addiction
- Propeller-based car that can go faster than the wind
- Main-Character Energy
- Parasocial relationships through digital media
- The album is no longer the unit of musical currency
- Leslie Caron on Cary Grant's attitude to money
- Hemp captures more carbon than trees
- Giving work oxygen
- Moving air through a building more efficiently using a fan
- Algorithmic work overlords
- What exactly is 'hybrid work'?
- The most sustainable foods?
- Decentralised organising
- AI for auto-generated landscapes
- 95% of fish are 'dark fish'
- UK government survey into climate change and net zero
- Is the self-censorship the most dangerous form of censorship?
- New network of sleeper trains
- Why going slowly speeds teams up
- How to stop being a perfectionist
- There's a word for everything
- Lobsters and octopuses are sentient and feel pain
- Leadership is contextual
- How becoming a father changes men
- Online personas and liquid modernity
- The ideology of e-s-c-a-p-e
- Cultural complexes contributing to the climate crisis
- Improv as a tool for building better products
- "This is extremely dangerous to our democracy"
- Information means nothing by itself
- Value and liquidity of skills
- Organic Maps
- The Puritan Class
- Monetizing stupidity?
- Open Badges Verifiable Credentials
- Criminals' right to be forgotten
- The end of cookie banners?
- Positive deviance in the workplace
- Slow travel and camping in other people's gardens
- Generative art
- Social media is done
- Conceptual integrity
- Dunbar's friendship circles
- Remote workers clock up more hours, says one study
- Fractional dosing of COVID vaccines may help more people get immunity faster
- People pay selective attention to what they deem important
- No more simplified URLs in Chrome
- A point-based system for email address pronounceability
- The end of petrol stations
- A glimpse into the future of autonomous electric vehicles
- Health and sanity before profit
- Rationalising work for the 40+ brigade
- Anti-social media
- AI-generated misinformation is getting more believable, even by experts
- The end of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy
- Briar now does pictures
- Who's the pet? Tarantula or tiny frog?
- More US electoral chaos to come in 2024?
- Epistemological chaos and denialism
- Information cannot be transmitted faster than the [vacuum] speed of light
- You don't have to monetize your joy
- Peer review sucks
- How to recover from burnout
- Portals to another world (or town)
- How to organise your fridge
- A cure for depression and boredom
- Killer robots are already here
- Nostalgia, friction, and read/write literacy
- Interoperability for browser plugins
- A robot that sticks to ceilings by... vibrating
- Novelty, brains, and new experiences
- Taking breaks to be more human
- The farmer uses his plough as his form of work
- Invisible sculptures are the logical conclusion of NFTs
- Virtual brands and ghost kitchens
- Male bias in scientific trials
- Degrees of Uncertainty
- 7 climate tipping points that could change the world forever
- Screenshot culture
- The world's most popular websites, mapped
- Sky pool awesomeness
- "Alexa, disable arbitration"
- Meetings as exercises in power
- Quitting instead of returning to the office
- The End of Literary Criticism
- Opportunity costs
- Anxiety and performance
- Twitter reactions
- Deepfake maps
- There's no such thing as a website or web app that doesn't need to be accessible
- Net Zero Democracy
- Human and computer memory
- Professor goes to 'TikTok University'
- Social studying
- Improving VO2max through blood protein analysis
- 3 ways to live a happier life
- Maplessness
- Digital fashion is another example of a nascent industry beset with inequalities
- Sky explosion
- The impact of decision fatigue
- Wherefore art thou, privacy?
- Badges everywhere!
- GCHQ violates our privacy
- Rat Race 2.0
- Volcano-powered electricity
- A web-based commonplace book
- Mastering a 5,400-character typewriter
- Working from near home
- Life should contain novelty
- 'The individual' is an idea like other ideas
- Of all lies, art is the least untrue
- One should always be a little improbable
- Life is a great bundle of little things
- Criticism, like lightning, strikes the highest peaks
- Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible
- It would not be better if things happened to men just as they wish
- Taste ripens at the expense of happiness
- Continuous eloquence is tedious
- When we ask for advice we are usually looking for an accomplice
- Mediocrity is a hand-rail
- The certainties of one age are the problems of the next
- You don't hate Mondays, you hate capitalism
- Most don't talk or act according to who they are, but as they are obliged to
- The problem is that the person who should be the most restrained is the least
- There are many things we despise in order that we may not have to despise ourselves
- Nothing is repeated, and everything is unparalleled
- There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us
- One can acquire anything in solitude except character
- Seeing through is rarely seeing into
- Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self
- You can never get rid of what is part of you, even when you throw it away
- You should aim to be independent of any one vote, of any one fashion, of any one century
2020 (130)
- See you in 2021!
- A world without apps?
- He that overvalues himself will undervalue others, and he that undervalues others will oppress them
- What kind of world do we want? (or, why regulation matters)
- A candour affected is a dagger concealed
- Slowly-boiling frogs in Facebook's surveillance panopticon
- To pursue the unattainable is insanity, yet the thoughtless can never refrain from doing so
- 'Prepper' philosophy
- Much will have more
- Philosophical anxiety as a superpower
- You can’t tech your way out of problems the tech didn’t create
- Even those of a harsh and unyielding nature will endure gentle treatment: no creature is fierce and frightening if it is stroked
- When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other
- Ethical living
- Reafferent loops
- Hiring is broken, but not in the ways you assume
- If you have been put in your place long enough, you begin to act like the place
- Why we can't have nice things
- Collaboration is our default operating system
- Everything intercepts us from ourselves
- Fighting health disinformation on Wikipedia
- Perceptions of the past
- Gatekeepers of opportunity and the lottery of privilege
- Tedious sports
- Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed
- Biometric surveillance in a post-pandemic future
- Ethics is the result of the human will
- Even while a thing is in the act of coming into existence, some part of it has already ceased to be
- Forward momentum above all things
- We all think we are exceptional, and are surprised to find ourselves criticised just like anyone else
- Scenario planning, climate change, and the pandemic
- At times, our strengths propel us so far forward we can no longer endure our weaknesses and perish from them
- Reducing exam stress by removing pointless exams
- The clever man often worries; the loyal person is often overworked
- Like the flight of a sparrow through a lighted hall, from darkness into darkness
- Face-to-face university classes during a pandemic? Why?
- 'Rulesy' people
- The importance of co-operation
- One is not superior merely because one sees the world in an odious light
- How to give advice
- The truth is too simple: one must always get there by a complicated route
- The crisis in professional sport is one of its own making
- If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can be very creative about it
- The discourse of disruption
- Let's talk
- An ounce of good sense is worth a pound of subtlety
- Entirely predictable
- Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome
- Privilege and pandemic
- The future of closed, proprietary technology is within your body
- Pandemic microaggressions
- The most radical thing you can do is stay home
- Consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance
- One nation under Zuck
- Things Come Apart
- More advice on perfectionism
- To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others
- 'Recycling' plastic is an oil industry scam
- Lifequakes
- As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of demand
- Inside your pain are the things you care about most deeply
- The world needs less philanthropy and more equality
- To be in process of change is not an evil, any more than to be the product of change is a good
- Marcus Aurelius on troubles
- Enforced idleness
- What is above knows what is below, what is below does not know what is above
- The way to get things done is not to mind who gets the credit of doing them
- Perfectionism is more toxic than you imagine
- Rethinking human responses to adversity
- 85 megapixel photo of the moon
- Pandemic-induced awkwardness
- What man of energy does not find inactivity a punishment?
- Some changes to Thought Shrapnel
- Saturday spinnings
- Saturday sailings
- Friday fadings
- Saturday shakings
- Using WhatsApp is a (poor) choice that you make
- Saturday shoutings
- The highest ambition of the integrated spectacle is to turn secret agents into revolutionaries and revolutionaries into secret agents
- Saturday scrapings
- Everyone has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions
- Saturday soundings
- Saturday shruggings
- Saturday signalings
- The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases
- Saturday shiftings
- Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say
- Saturday seductions
- Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony
- Saturday scramblings
- The old is dying and the new cannot be born
- Saturday sandcastles
- Thus each man ever flees himself
- Saturday scrubbings
- Creating and seeding your own torrents using archive.org and Transmission
- 3 apps to help avoid post-pandemic surveillance culture [VIDEO]
- Friday fashionings
- There is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it
- Friday forebodings
- We have it in our power to begin the world over again
- Friday flickerings
- People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character
- Friday fumings
- We are too busy mopping the floor to turn off the faucet
- Friday filchings
- What the crowd requires is mediocrity of the highest order
- Friday fluidity
- Friday facings
- Thought Shrapnel Vol.1: Personal Productivity
- New to Thought Shrapnel? Try this!
- Friday feelings
- Microcast #086 — Strategies for dealing with surveillance capitalism
- There are many non-essential activities, moths of precious time, and it's worse to take an interest in irrelevant things than do nothing at all
- Friday flaggings
- Software ate the world, so all the world’s problems get expressed in software
- Friday featherings
- Microcast #085 — Extensions for Mozilla Firefox
- To others we are not ourselves but a performer in their lives cast for a part we do not even know that we are playing
- Friday festoonings
- Microcast #084 - Chris Dixon on RSS, crypto, and community ownership of the internet
- How you do anything is how you do everything
- Friday foggings
- Microcast #083 - Ambiguous in Kuwait City
- Given things as they are, how shall one individual live?
- Friday flurries
- Microcast #082 - Nodenoggin
- Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted
- Friday fertilisations
- Microcast #081 - Anarchy, Federation, and the IndieWeb
2019 (144)
- Quick update!
- Friday fablings
- Microcast #080 - Redecentralize and MozFest
- Friday facilitations
- We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take us on or spare us
- Microcast #079 - information environments
- Friday flowerings
- Microcast #078 — Values-based organisations
- I am not fond of expecting catastrophes, but there are cracks in the universe
- Friday fawnings
- People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think
- Friday flexitarianism
- Technology is the name we give to stuff that doesn't work properly yet
- Friday fluctuations
- It’s not a revolution if nobody loses
- Saturday strikings
- All is petty, inconstant, and perishable
- Friday fermentations
- If you change nothing, nothing will change
- Friday feudalism
- To refrain from imitation is the best revenge
- Friday floutings
- The best way out is always through
- Friday flinchings
- It is the child within us that trembles before death
- Friday fizzles
- The best place to be is somewhere else?
- Friday fidgetings
- Neoliberalism in any guise is not the solution but the problem
- Friday federations
- The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge
- Friday ferretings
- Do not impose one's own standard on the work of others. Mutual moderation and cooperation will proffer better results.
- Friday frustrations
- Aren’t you ashamed to reserve for yourself only the remnants of your life and to dedicate to wisdom only that time can’t be directed to business?
- Friday feeds
- Ensuring the sustainability of Thought Shrapnel
- Our nature is such that the common duties of human relationships occupy a great part of the course of our life
- Friday fancies
- The world is all variation and dissimilarity
- The habit of sardonic contemplation is the hardest habit of all to break
- To be perfectly symmetrical is to be perfectly dead
- Life doesn’t depend on any one opinion, any one custom, or any one century
- Friday feastings
- Even in their sleep men are at work
- The proper amount of wealth is that which neither descends to poverty nor is far distant from it
- Situations can be described but not given names
- There’s no perfection where there’s no selection
- Friday fathomings
- There’s no viagra for enlightenment
- Wretched is a mind anxious about the future
- Only thoughts conceived while walking have any value
- What is no good for the hive is no good for the bee
- Friday fabrications
- Men fear wanderers for they have no rules
- We give nothing so generously as our advice
- Man must choose whether to be rich in things or in the freedom to use them
- We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves
- Friday fumblings
- One can see only what one has already seen
- Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again
- Everyone hustles his life along, and is troubled by a longing for the future and weariness of the present
- Idleness always produces fickle changes of mind
- Friday finds
- The school system is a modern phenomenon, as is the childhood it produces
- Form is the possibility of structure
- Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving
- That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate
- Fascinating Friday Facts
- There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless
- Sometimes even to live is an act of courage
- Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things
- The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention
- A little Friday randomness
- Educational institutions are at a crossroads of relevance
- Remote work is a different beast
- Culture eats strategy for breakfast
- Things that people think are wrong (but aren't)
- Cutting the Gordian knot of 'screen time'
- The benefits of Artificial Intelligence
- The drawbacks of Artificial Intelligence
- Opting in and out of algorithms
- Let's not force children to define their future selves through the lens of 'work'
- How to subscribe to Thought Shrapnel Daily
- Giving up Thought Shrapnel for Lent
- Human societies, hierarchy, and networks
- The introvert's dilemma
- Success and enthusiasm (quote)
- Foldable displays are going to make the future pretty amazing
- So you think you're organised?
- Blockchains: not so 'unhackable' after all?
- Open Badges and ADCs
- On anger (quote)
- What UK children are watching (and why)
- Individual steps to tackle climate change
- Games (and learning) mechanics
- Is edtech even a thing any more?
- Optimise for energy and motivation
- Process and product of change (quote)
- Tenacious will (quote)
- Why the internet is less weird these days
- Dis-trust and blockchain technologies
- Why it's so hard to quit Big Tech
- Let's (not) let children get bored again
- The robot economy and social-emotional skills
- At the end of the day, everything in life is a 'group project'
- Make art, tell a story
- Fun smartphone-based party games
- Cal Newport on the dangers of 'techno-maximalism'
- Staying for nothing and shrinking from nothing (quote)
- Through the looking-glass
- Surfacing popular Google Sheets to create simple web apps
- Federico Leggio's type animations
- Volume of work
- What did the web used to be like?
- Hong Kong shutter art
- True test of intelligence (quote)
- Hierarchies and large organisations
- Exit option democracy
- Drink Talk Learn
- Implicit leverage
- Blockchain is about trust minimisation
- Forging better habits
- A reminder of how little we understand the world
- The quixotic fools of imperialism
- Noise cancelling for cars is a no-brainer
- Going your own way (quote)
- Location data in old tweets
- Remembering the past through photos
- Acoustic mirrors
- Unpopular opinions on personal productivity
- Confusing tech questions
- Feeling good (quote)
- Creativity as an ongoing experiment
- Murmurations
- Fanatics (quote)
- The problem with Business schools
- Working and leading remotely
- Rules for Online Sanity
- Baseline levels of conscientiousness
- The endless Black Friday of the soul
- Blockchain bullshit
- Social mobility
- Looking back and forward in tech
2018 (455)
- See you in 2019!
- Routine and ambition (quote)
- Is the unbundling and rebundling of Higher Education actually a bad thing?
- Credentials and standardisation
- Are we nearing the end of the Facebook era?
- Asking Google philosophical questions
- Gamifying Wikipedia for new editors
- Daily routine (quote)
- The many uses of autonomous vehicles
- Open source is as much about culture as it is about code
- What are 'internet-era ways of working'?
- Is UBI 'hush money'?
- Issue [#323]: 46 hours in transit
- Nature of things (quote)
- Identity is a pattern in time
- An app to close down your workday effectively
- Immortality and Sunday afternoons (quote)
- CUNY Commons in a Box OpenLab
- Time's brevity (quote)
- Issue [#322]: Back-to-back
- Openness, sharing, and choosing a CC license
- Tennessee Williams on the problems that come with success
- What would you do if you were the richest man in the world? Now you can find out!
- Configuring your iPhone for productivity (and privacy, security?)
- Time flies (quote)
- Designing calm products
- Wishing and planning (quote)
- Is planning just guessing?
- Issue [#321]: Small talk and tiny conferences
- Absorb what is useful (quote)
- Decentralisation and networked agency
- Are tiny conferences and meetups better than big ones?
- Small talk and sociability
- Issue [#320]: The power of appreciation
- The majority (quote)
- Co-operation and anti-social punishment in different societies
- How do people learn?
- Reappropriating the artifacts of late-stage capitalism
- Venture beyond the expected (quote)
- Myths about children and digital technologies
- GAFA: time to 'ignore and withdraw'?
- Graceful conduct (quote)
- Issue [#319]: Operation Twilight
- Example and opinion (quote)
- Insidious Instagram influencers?
- The end of 'meritocracy' at Mozilla
- Is Google becoming more like Facebook?
- Bullshit receptivity scale
- Listen well (quote)
- Seven coaching questions
- Issue [#318]: Blisters a-go-go
- Why desk jobs are exhausting
- Microshifts are more effective than epiphanies
- An incorrect approach to teaching History
- Cory Doctorow on Big Tech, monopolies, and decentralisation
- Airbnb wants to give out shares to its superhosts
- Experimenting with turning on comments for a week
- Issue [#317]: The Path to better social networks
- Why badge endorsement is a game-changer
- Internalising the logic of social media
- The Digital Knowledge Loop
- Kindness and courage (quote)
- The rise and rise of e-sports
- Online conformity (quote)
- A portal into a decentralised universe
- (Educational) consulting for the uninitiated
- Blogging and content marketing (quote)
- Issue [#316]: Is that better? 🙄 🙄 🙄
- Charity is no substitute for justice
- Creativity (quote)
- Audiobooks vs reading
- What the EU's copyright directive means in practice
- The Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources
- Working (quote)
- 6 things that the best jobs have in common
- Invisible turmoil (quote)
- Simple sustainable stories
- Issue [#315]: Minimalism FTW
- What do happy teenagers do?
- Burnout-prevention rules
- Feedback from the community
- Expertise and knowledge (quote)
- Fluency without conceptual understanding
- Dealing with the downsides of remote working
- Natural light as an 'office perk'
- Choice (quote)
- The importance of marginalia
- We're back (with lots of new links!)
- A Stoic (quote)
- Tracking vs advertising
- Keeping track of articles you want to read
- Issue #314: Final Holiday Countdown 🏁 ⏲️ 🏖️
- Introverts, collaboration, and creativity
- Busyness and value creation
- Original work (quote)
- Assassination markets now available on the blockchain
- Not my circus (quote)
- When we eat matters
- LinkedIn: the game?
- Data transfer as a 'hedge'?
- Issue #313: Mootivation
- Childhood amnesia
- You cant escape your problems through travel
- Don Norman on human-centred technologies
- Be good for something (quote)
- Work and play (quote)
- Issue #312: If it's not one thing, it's another
- Break the rules like an artist (quote)
- On 'radical incompetence'
- Populism today (quote)
- Blogging in the Fediverse with Write.as
- On living in public
- Artistic value (quote)
- Problems with the present and future of work are of our own making
- Issue #311: Under canvas
- Wisdom and experience (quote)
- Shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies (quote)
- The dangers of distracted parenting
- Cory Doctorow on the corruption at the heart of Facebook
- On 'unique' organisational cultures
- Issue #310: Moodling about in Barcelona
- Fear (quote)
- Reduce your costs, retain your focus
- The link between sleep and creativity
- Attention scarcity as an existential threat
- Our irresistible screens of splendour
- Rethinking hierarchy
- Freedom (quote)
- Issue #309: Different
- Crawling before you walk
- Issue 308: World Cup(cake)
- Higher Education and blockchain
- On 'instagrammability'
- F*** off Google
- Seed of good (quote)
- Where memes come from
- The seductive logic of technology (quote)
- Inequality, anarchy, and the course of human history
- Issue #307: Home on the range
- Mediocrity (quote)
- Git yourself off that platform!
- All the questions (quote)
- Blockchain was just a stepping stone
- Living with anxiety
- "You’re either a leader everywhere or nowhere"
- Systems change
- Finding friends and family without smartphones, maps, or GPS
- Issue #306: Bachelor lifestyle
- Why NASA is better than Facebook at writing software
- The best teams are cognitively diverse and psychologically safe
- No opinion (quote)
- On 'academic innovation'
- Criticism (quote)
- Protocols for the free web
- Encumbered by civilization (quote)
- Paywalls and Patreon
- Good, hard work (quote)
- Issue #305: Sprinting into the distance
- Wielding your pension fund for good
- First tea, then revolution
- Sensible people
- Useful mental models
- Nobody is ready for GDPR
- Measuring ability and greatness
- Estonia goes for free public transport
- The toughest smartphones on the market
- The increase in worker-owned co-ops
- Issue #304: Grateful Dead Public Radio
- The New Octopus: going beyond managerial interventions for internet giants
- Schedule your priorities
- Owners need to invest in employees to have them feel invested in their work
- On blogging
- Peace of mind
- The disappearing computer and the future of AI
- Trust and the cult of your PLN
- The role of Lady Luck
- Issue #303: Rest your weary head
- Altruism
- Work-life balance is actually a circle, according to Jeff Bezos
- Nothing better to do
- The virtue of rest
- Tolerating uncertainty
- Alexa for Kids as babysitter?
- Getting on the edtech bus
- Bootstraps
- Space as a service
- Blockchain as a 'futuristic integrity wand'
- Profit vs benefit
- Issue #302: Read aloud for maximum effect
- What can dreams of a communist robot utopia teach us about human nature?
- Escaping from the crush of circumstances
- The benefits of reading aloud to children
- You need more daylight to sleep better
- On the cultural value of memes
- The résumé is a poor proxy for a human being
- OEP (Open Educational Pragmatism?)
- Everything is potentially a meme
- How to be super-productive
- Thinking outdoors
- Issue #301: Endless horse
- Clickbait and switch?
- Read for freedom
- Soviet-era industrial design
- Conversational implicature
- Ryan Holiday's 13 daily life-changing habits
- Valuing and signalling your skills
- Intimate data analytics in education
- All killer, no filler
- Do what you can
- Systems thinking and AI
- Issue #300: Tricentennial
- The four things you need to become an intellectual
- Craig Mod's subtle redesign of the hardware Kindle
- Profiting from your enemies
- The root of all happiness
- Random Street View does exactly what you think it does
- Long-term investments
- Deciding what to do next
- Designing for privacy
- Multiple income streams
- In praise of ordinary lives
- Issue #299: Jersey shore
- Alienated life
- All that is gold does not glitter
- The death of the newsfeed (is much exaggerated)
- Absentee leadership
- Social internet vs social media
- The '1, 2, 3' approach to organising your working day
- Truth
- Blockcerts mobile
- Automated Chinese jaywalking fines are a foretaste of so-called 'smart cities'
- What's the link between employment and creativity?
- Mozilla's Web Literacy Curriculum
- Issue #298: Easter treats
- Albert Camus quotation
- xkcd on conversational dynamics
- Not everyone is going to like you
- No-one wants a single identity, online or offline
- Contentment
- The spectrum of work autonomy
- Ignorance and dogmatism
- Every part of your digital life is being tracked, packaged up, and sold
- Survival in the age of surveillance
- How to get hired
- Alternatives to all of Facebook's main features
- Issue #297: Springing forward
- The only privacy policy that matters is your own
- Co-operation
- Support Thought Shrapnel on Patreon
- OERu has a social network
- Anxiety
- Moral needs and user needs
- On struggle
- Going deep
- Derek Sivers has quit Facebook (hint: you should, too)
- Superficial and imperfect knowledge
- Bridging technologies
- How to choose an open license for your project
- Mystery of life
- Decision fatigue and parenting
- Tech will eat itself
- Issue #296: Goodbye winter blues
- On playing video games with your kids
- Browser extensions FTW
- The tenets of 'Slow Thought'
- Wisdom and riches
- Different ways of knowing
- Beginning and middle
- Slack's bait-and-switch?
- The security guide as literary genre
- Do the thing
- Memento mori
- Microcast #005
- Issue #295: A wee problem...
- Living an antifragile life
- The end/beginning
- Archives of Radical Philosophy
- Do the tools you use matter?
- Is your smartphone a very real part of who you are?
- Microcast #004
- Masterpieces
- Microcast #003
- Teaching kids about computers and coding
- 30,000 hours of sleep
- Microcast #002
- Building a bridge
- The three things you need to make friends over the age of 30
- Microcast #001
- Issue #294: Snowmaggedon ❄️
- Happiness
- Microcast #000
- Tact
- Geek social fallacies
- Google's new Slack competitor
- 10 breakthrough technologies for 2018
- The moon is getting 4G
- Possible - impossible
- Your best decisions don't come when you demand them
- Some great links for Product Managers
- Firefox OS lives on in The Matrix
- The 'loudness' of our thoughts affects how we judge external sounds
- Issue #293: Making cheese grate again
- Arbitrary deadlines are the enemy of creativity
- Small 'b' blogging
- What we can learn from Seneca about dying well
- Light and deep
- Anonymity vs accountability
- On your deathbed, you're not going to wish that you'd spent more time on Facebook
- The Goldilocks Rule
- Showing off
- On the death of Google/Apache Wave (and the lessons we can learn from it)
- To lose old styles of reading is to lose a part of ourselves
- Issue #292: Is there a cure for Tasmania? 🇦🇺
- Does the world need interactive emails?
- The Kano model
- Is the gig economy the mass exploitation of millennials?
- Humans are not machines
- Legislating against manipulated 'facts' is a slippery slope
- Obvious
- Why we forget most of what we read
- Should you lower your expectations?
- Trust
- Why do some things go viral?
- Humans responsible for the Black Death
- The world's most nutritious foods
- Audio Adversarial speech-to-text
- Sounds and smells can help reinforce learning while you sleep
- Every easy thing is hard again
- Issue #291: Necessary koalafications 🐨
- Why good parents have naughty children
- Lost
- Telegram cryptocurrency
- Rock piles and cathedrals
- Platform censorship and the threat to democracy
- Decentralisation is the only way to wean people off capitalist social media
- Europe is being taken over by crayfish that can clone themselves
- Alzheimer's is a kind of 'type 3' diabetes
- Puertopia
- Worth the risks?
- Creating media, not just consuming it
- GDPR, blockchain, and privacy
- Living in a dictatorship
- Culture is the behaviour you reward and punish
- Are cows less valuable than wolves?
- How we get influence backwards
- Issue #290: Unscathed
- The punk rock internet
- The origin of the term 'open source'
- Optimism
- The Project Design Tetrahedron
- Promising everything
- Designing social systems
- Irony doesn't scale
- Web Trends Map 2018 (or 'why we can't have nice things')
- So, what do you do?
- The military implications of fitness tech
- Audrey Watters on technology addiction
- No cash, no freedom?
- Depression as an evolutionary advantage?
- Product managers as knowledge centralisers
- Using VR with kids
- Augmented and Virtual Reality on the web
- The horror of the Bett Show
- Issue #289: Loooooong week
- More haste, less speed
- Ethical design in social networks
- Reading the web on your own terms
- The NSA (and GCHQ) can find you by your 'voiceprint' even if you're speaking a foreign language on a burner phone
- Favourable winds
- Listening to video game soundtracks can improve your productivity
- Technology to connect and communicate
- Are conferences a vestige of a bygone era?
- A useful IndieWeb primer
- Three most harmful addictions
- More on Facebook's 'trusted news' system
- Living in capitalism
- Anxiety is the price of convenience
- Different sorts of time
- Some podcast recommendations
- DuckDuckGo moves beyond search
- Facebook is under attack
- Where would your country be if the world was like Pangea?
- Amazon Go, talent and labour
- WTF is GDPR?
- Decentralisation 2.0
- The rise and rise of niche newsletters
- First step
- The backstory of Apple's emoji
- Tribal politics in social networks
- Some advice for a happy family life
- Issue #288: Socially and emotionally unavailable
- A world without work
- Few wants
- Film posters of the Russian avant-garde
- Atlas of Hillforts
- Gendered AI?
- Imprisoned in prejudices
- Barely anyone uses 2FA
- Courage
- Using your phone wisely
- The wilderness of intuition
- Can you measure social and emotional skills?
- Bullet Journal like a Pro
- Choose your connected silo
- Game-changing modular wheels
- The full complexity of life
- From Homer to texting and Twitter
- Would you be nuked?
- Where did 'Å' come from?
- Getting better at using tools
- Cool decentralisation resources from MozFest
- This isn't the golden age of free speech
- Open source apps for agile project teams
- Robo-advisors are coming for your job (and that's OK)
- Opposite of manliness
- Thought Shrapnel #287: My bad
- Reasons to be cheerful
- Attention is an arms race
- Barcelona to go open source by 2019
- In a dark place
- How to build a consensual social network
- Bigger the dream...
- Money in, blood out
- Venture Communism?
- Fake amusement park
- Questions to ask before taking your next job
- Dreamers who do
- Deliberate rest, cognitive momentum, and differentiated work hours
- You get paid what other people think you're worth
- Meltdown and Spectre explained by xkcd
- Meaningless work causes depression
- It doesn't matter if you don't use AI assistants if everyone else does
- Thought Shrapnel #286: New beginnings
- Social media short-circuits democracy
- Spain is on the wrong timezone
- Foucault understood the power of ambiguity
- Fridays are a social construct
- Privacy-based browser extensions
- Twitter isn't going to ban Trump, no matter what
- Charisma instead of hierarchy?
- Education is about the journey, not the destination
- Mozilla is creating an Open Leadership Map
- Life in likes
- Dark kitchens, dark factories... is this the future of automation?
- Capitalism can make you obese
- It's not advertising, it's statistical behaviour-modification
- How to prevent being 'cryptojacked'
- Fred Wilson's predictions for 2018
- Albert Wenger's reading list
- Data-driven society: utopia or dystopia?
- Are social networks a public health issue?
- Commit to improving your security in 2018
- To 'quit' isn't necessarily the opposite of having 'grit'
- Now are the Olympics
- How to run an Open Source project
2017 (50)
- The internet needs distributed DNS
- Succeeding with innovation projects
- Facebook is an instrument of the state
- The importance of downtime
- Caulfield's predictions for 2018
- The best album covers of 2017
- Moving down Maslow's hierarchy of needs using OER?
- Potentially huge wind farm proposed in the North Sea
- Few posessions
- Few possessions
- Is that you, Mother?
- How do you show off your privilege when everyone's got an iPhone?
- Lunatics
- How to defuse remote work issues
- The benefits of decentralised decision-making
- It's called Echo for a reason
- Your New Year's resolution for 2018? Ditch Facebook.
- The Horizon stops here
- Put a number next to someone's name and there will be pressure for it to increase
- Does it take Trump to make badges go mainstream?
- How to get people to pay you what you're worth
- Building a home online
- Purely technological answers to human problems don't work
- Nobody likes a goody two-shoes
- Life in the outrage economy
- Howard Rheingold on cooperation as a solution to our present woes
- We're still figuring out what it means for everyone to be connected
- GDPR could break the big five's monopoly stranglehold on our data
- What would a version of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs for society look like?
- Decentralised projects to explore in 2018
- Brexit Britain means food prescriptions on the NHS
- What to tell your kids about Santa Claus
- 2018: the year of Linux on the desktop?
- What you read determines who you are
- The immorality of retaining wealth
- Sticks and stones
- Blockchains are boring
- The upside of kids watching Netflix instead of TV
- Human Extinction
- How to be a consultant
- Ethical business means fair pay (and co-ownership?)
- Reputation on the dark net
- Is it pointless to ban autonomous killing machines?
- Your brain is not a computer
- Edward Snowden wants to help you use your Android smartphone to protect yourself
- High-performing schools in England less accessible since 2010
- Silicon Valley looking to skills from the Humanities
- Problems with reputation in the gig economy
- Digital literacies and 'proximal depravity'
- How 'flu kills people