Recently Read

Over the past week or so I’ve read a few articles, some of them have been interesting, some of them fascinating, and I’ve listed my favourites here:

• Sophie Woods completes Via Alpina endurance challenge in record 29 days – BBC Sport — Another gruelling world record smashed by a woman. More proof they are NOT the weaker sex.
• From the front of the choir: What else can your singers do without you? — I like posts like this which feature life lessons from a specific practice, that we can all benefit from.
• Two Minutes and 42 Seconds in Heaven — “I listened to it and said, in my rich and sonorous timbre, in my typically concise and absolutely-nailing-it fashion: ‘Here is a song that has everything I need and nothing I don’t.’”
• All design proposals — Potential designs for new EU. banknotes, the final 10 shortlist. I love this kind of thing.
• More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’ | WIRED — “In one of the starkest outlines of this anti-AI counterstyle so far, Clickhole writer Jessye McGarry authored an article titled “5 Reasons to Love Summer (NO AI)”, which was filled with typos and incessant pleas that it was written by a human. ‘When summer’s here, you can finally shake off the winter blues and get out in the beaitiful sunshine!’”
• ‘Have I been influenced, or is this actually me?’ How personal taste fell out of fashion | Social media | The Guardian — “Algorithms encouraged humans to produce generic content, while AI just generates the generic content right away. Now we call that kind of generic content ‘slop’. So the patterns are still there, and we often are consuming AI content through the same algorithmic feeds. It remains a vicious cycle.”
• BBC Radio on your HomePod — Ohh yes to this. Why I didn’t think of this is a little beyond me but I am very much borrowing this shortcut, thanks Barry!!
• Your Freedom of Speech Is My Freedom of Distribution – Blaupause — “The right to say something does not oblige anyone else to print it, broadcast it, recommend it, or turn it into money.” I’ve recently softened my view on SubstackZ maybe I shouldn’t have.
• The Future Of Knowledge Workers In An AI-Driven World — “Knowledge work has always been inherently abstract. Plenty of these jobs, particularly at larger organizations, are structured like Russian nesting dolls: roles designed to support other roles, which support still other roles, layer after layer, until it’s no longer clear where there’s a solid center to be found. It’s easy to see how, to a plumber, a carpenter or a line cook, work of this nature can appear like exactly what David Graeber called it: bullshit. “
• -0024- Let’s Make Interrobang Great Again‽ – SUBPROJECT86.NET — Yes!! For a while I used an interrobang in the name of this blog. Can’t remember why I dropped it.
• meditation: what’s the point – ReedyBear’s Blog — There is a reason that meditation is seen as a practice. Exploring how you use it and how it affects you remains a fascination to me. Note to self, meditate more often!
• Bring Back the Paragraph — Yes. But no. A paragraph has no given length. Sometimes it is just a sentence. I fear we are letting AI drive us to write oddly, in fear of our words being called “AI”. Fuck that. Write however you want.