Recent links 2024-02-01

Not quite weeklinks, more a 6-month backlog of links. Think I’m going to post these here for a while – at least until I get round to setting up a different personal blog.

Organised by theme, subjective.

Inconvenience

• We should stop worshipping at the altar of convenience (FT)

• Old Computer Challenge from July 2023

• Is the ‘low-maintenance’ garden a myth?

Art and Form

• Anton Repponen’s amazing, scrollable Museum of Online Artifacts

• Oulipo – "the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy"

• Haunted by design: how buildings can make us see ghosts

• Willingham Sends Fables Into the Public Domain

• Sanpo Game Devlog (006) – Moving on from "Shuffled World"

• Take in a sunset, a snowstorm or a baby’s cry, and see why AI is no threat to art | Ai Weiwei

Disruption

• Fake plans for three cesspits across city circulate on social media

• Most of the world’s workers are ‘quiet quitters’

• On the future of work, learning, time, and space

• Quit Your Job – "You need far less than you think to live in monk mode and pursue this kind of exploration."

• A “Do More of the Things you Love” tool — Caroline Beavon

• Paul Watson on Being a Serious Artist – relevant to anyone that wants to do anything for reasons other than money, I think

Illusions

• Chief executive of collapsed crypto fund HyperVerse does not appear to exist

• San Serriffe – an April Fools invented island from the Guardian in 1977. I’ll visit one day.

Mindsets

• Engineering Habits of Mind – what are they and how can we cultivate them?

• From Individual Self to Universal Self – It’s not about You

• Out of the Wild – "By pretending to be above nature, we are the only unnatural creature."

• other networks – "… a cluster of projects that document and experiment with networks outside of what’s now called “the internet.”"

• How are you doing? – a visual exploration of self-care.

Infrastructures gone wrong, going wrong

• UK has made dumb mess of £13.5bn smart meter scheme

• Voter ID in England led to racial and disability discrimination, report finds

• AI is making us less environmentally friendly, Google admits

• OpenAI’s GPT-4 safety systems broken by Scots Gaelic

• Each Facebook User is Monitored by Thousands of Companies – The Markup

Long-term Tech

• For ‘Oppenheimer’ 70mm Print, Imax Needed to Write Software to Emulate a 2002 PalmPilot Device to Control Massive Film Platters

• Wii U Splatoon and Mario Kart 8 – Notice regarding the ending of the current maintenance

• Recycling power: man uses 80 discarded vape batteries 'marketed as disposable' to power e-scooter

• New EU Rules: Smartphones and Tablets will follow new ecodesign requirements by June 2025! – Right to Repair Europe

• “The Fairphone experiment is changing the tech industry.”

• The Performance Inequality Gap, 2024 – Website sizes, load times, and device performance