in the bleak midwinter

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Capitalism is what happens when you believe glorified fishmongers should chart the course for humanity.” —@aral

“11 yrs ago I found this funny: ‘How many Microsoft designers does it take to change a light bulb? None. They just define darkness as ‘industry standard’. But now I can’t unsee this: ‘How many huge companies does it take to fix the climate? None. They just define global warming as ‘industry standard’.” —@HelenCzerski

“it’s easy to propose a solution if you only understand 10% of the problem” —@tef

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learn to rest

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“I am well in body although considerably rumpled up in spirit” — Anne Shirley, Anne of Green Gables, via @FelicityShoulders

“Maybe one of the Hall of Fame-level cons of all time was economists dressing up their discipline as an exact science, fake Nobel and all.”—@brunoc

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unintended but not unknown

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From The Guardian — Not quite religion, not quite self-help: welcome to the Jordan Peterson age of nonsense.

But living on social media, seeing the world through its lens, is like returning to a pre-information age. First, because everything is current. Records of previous discussions fade quickly – miss a day and it is almost impossible to catch up. Instead, as with cycles of oral history, memories of the past are collective and mutable.

As history fades, so does truth itself. If information is about extracting signal from noise, social media is about turning up the noise. Among the flow of dubious facts, it can be hard to determine which to cling to. Meanwhile, mob mentality ramps up the risk of speaking up against the beliefs of a large group.

It is in such environments that meaning becomes tribal. Your beliefs are not really about the external facts, but about which group you identify with. People rely less on their own capacity for reason and more on each other. This is the petri dish from which systems of faith have always tended to arise. —Martha Gill, 2024-11-24

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decentralized social media

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‘Decentralised social media is more than just a technical shift; it’s a step toward restoring autonomy and trust in our digital lives, empowering individuals and communities to connect without compromising their values or privacy.’ —Zhilin Zhang, University of Oxford, 2024

In November 2022 — from platforms to covenants — I wrote that I firmly believe open protocols connecting small pieces loosely joined is a better framework than any privately owned social media platform. Twitter was just too darned easy for many years. I am connecting more on Mastodon though I have not mastered all of its functions. Mastodon is an open protocol and anyone can put up a server and connect to what is called the ‘fediverse’, a federated network of hosts using the protocol.

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two decades of blogging

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Bryan Cantrill discusses what he has learned after 20 years of blogging through the decades. I too, crossed the two decade mark this past February. Bryan was asked four questions on the occasion by Cynthia Dunlop.

  1. What blog entry was I most proud of?
  2. Which one was most difficult to write?
  3. What impact of blogging have I found surprising?
  4. What advice would I have for those getting started with blogging?

So I thought it might be a good idea for me to do the same.

1. I am proud of a post that received the most negative feedback ever. I was even asked to change the title of the post. Our future is networked and feminine looked at how there were many ancient tribal societies led by women but both the advent of institutions, like kingdoms and religions ‘of the book’, and later capitalist markets were clearly male-dominated. Today, in a network society, we are seeing more avenues for feminine influence, as evidenced by movements like ‘me too’, and of course there is a resulting push-back from patriarchal institutions and markets. The shift is not complete but if we don’t blow ourselves up, I think it will happen.

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farewell little bird

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I started using Twitter in late 2007, at the urging of several friends, who felt that as a blogger it would be a good way to extend my reach. And it did. From 2012 to 2021 Twitter (Tweetbot) was one of my top three tools for learning. It dropped to fourth place after Musk bought the company and then it dropped completely off my list.

Over the years I have noted that the micro-blogging platform let me stay in loose touch with many people. I wrote that next to my blog, Twitter was my best learning tool and allowed me to stay connected to a diverse network [SEEK & SHARE]. For several years Twitter was the largest source of visitors to this blog. It even eclipsed Google search.

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grand theft autocomplete

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Grand Theft Autocomplete is my new favourite term for LLMs.” —@ben

Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the field of AI, was quoted in Life magazine — in 1970, “In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.” —AIWS.net

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defeated by the pandemic

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Following up from yesterday’s post — fix the networks — this presentation at XOXO Festival 2024, by Ed Yong tells the story about how the pandemic defeated him. Yong wrote many articles focused on making sense of the pandemic for The Atlantic from 2020. In 2021 Yong won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. His first premise is that succeeding or failing to deal with a pandemic is a choice.

For me, just the fact that Yong wears a N95 respirator mask while presenting, makes this worth watching. It’s real leadership by example. With no previous journalistic experience, Yong set some rules for himself, especially after winning the Pulitzer. These are good rules for any writer.

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fix the networks

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Erin Kissane, in a presentation at XOXO Festival 2024, discusses how Twitter was instrumental in crowd-sourcing a wide variety of experts to understand what was happening early in the Covid pandemic. Twitter enabled many ‘rando’, or loose social connections which resulted in the Covid Tracking Project that was ahead of the CDC and other official sources of public health information. But as Kissane states, “It’s a mark of institutional failure to leave your public health crisis data in the hands of amateurs and volunteers.” That has been the ongoing state of affairs in most Western countries, Canada included.

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sowing good seeds

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Why should we help those we compete with? Because we want to live in a resilient society and have a thriving economy.

“There was a farmer who grew excellent quality corn. Every year he won the award for the best grown corn. One year a newspaper reporter interviewed him and learned something interesting about now he grew it. The reporter discovered that the farmer shared his seed corn with his neighbours. “How can you afford to share your best seed corn with your neighbours when they are entering corn in competition with yours each year?” the reporter asked.

“Why sir” said the farmer, “Didn’t you know? The wind picks up pollen from the ripening corn and swirls it from field to field. If my neighbors grow inferior corn, cross-pollination will steadily degrade the quality of my corn. If I am to grow good corn, I must help my neighbours grow good corn.” —Author unknown — see below*

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