#777: Happily surrendering our leisure to lines

#764: It's been a year

Plus: phone poems, low-friction friends and the decline of online travel recs

#760: Gambling the future into existence

Plus: Cosmo for conservatives, AI;DR and being "agentic"

#773: Regressing to the mean

Plus: slop wildlife, the post-American internet and AI for emotional labor

#769: Nothing you see online is true

Clipping as emergent online literacy, the women self-injecting bootleg Botox and the woes of Facebook nanny groups

#766: An AI company you can wear without socks

Plus: Wedding Brain, news hustlers, the importance of talking to strangers and the best restaurant bread in America

Everything is miscellaneous : the power of the new digital disorder

Includes bibliographical references (p. [235]-257) and index; Prologue : information in space -- The new order of order -- Alphabetization and its discontents -- The geography of knowledge -- Lumps and splits -- The laws of the jungle -- Smart leaves -- Social knowing -- What nothing says -- Messiness as a virtue -- The work of knowledge -- Coda : misc; Philosopher Weinberger shows how the digital revolution is radically changing the way we make sense of our lives. Human beings constantly collect, label, and organize data--but today, the shift from the physical to the digital is mixing, burning, and ripping our lives apart. In the past, everything had its one place--the physical world demanded it--but now everything has its places: multiple categories, multiple shelves. Everything is suddenly miscellaneous. Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture. He examines how Rand McNally decides what information not to include in a physical map (and why Google Earth is winning that battle), how Staples stores emulate online shopping to increase sales, why your children's teachers will stop having them memorize facts, and how the shift to digital music stands as the model for the future.--From publisher description; From A to Z, Everything Is Miscellaneous will completely reshape the way you think - and what you know - about the world. Includes information on alphabetical order, Amaxon.com, animals, Aristotle, authority, Bettmann Archive, blogs (weblogs), books, broadcasting, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), business, card catalog, categories and categorization, clusters, companies, Colon Classification, conversation, Melvil Dewey, Dewey Decimal Classification system, Encyclopaedia Britannica, encyclopedia, essentialism, experts, faceted classification system, first order of order, Flickr.com, Google, Great Books of the Western World, ancient Greeks, health and medical information, identifiers, index, inventory tracking, knowledge, labels, leaf and leaves, libraries, Library of Congress, links, Carolus Linnaeus, lumping and splitting, maps and mapping, marketing, meaning, metadata, multiple listing services (MLS), names of people, neutrality or neutral point of view, New York Public Library, Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), order and organization, people, physical space, everything having place, Plato, race, S.R. Ranganathan, Eleanor Rosch, Joshua Schacter, science, second order of order, simplicity, social constructivism, social knowledge, social networks, sorting, species, standardization, tags, taxonomies, third order of roder, topical categorization, tree, Uniform Product Code (UPC), users, Jimmy Wales, web, Wikipedia, etc

The hidden ‘rules of the game’ that dictate how we navigate the world | Psyche Videos

How free are we really, if human behaviour embodies the complex, intertwined webs of society and history?

#782: I saw this and I thought of you

Plus: Group chats, unsent love letters and optimization

Emergence: the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software

In the tradition of Being Digital and The Tipping Point…

Palantir’s manifesto: Technofascism in plain sight

Because I get asked a lot.

Living in Data: A Citizen's Guide to a Better Information Future (Paperback)

Jer Thorp’s analysis of the word “data” in 10,325 New York Times stories written between 1984 and 2018 shows a distinct trend: among the words most closely associated with “data,” we find not only its classic companions “information” and “digital,” but also a variety of new neighbors—from “scandal” and “misinformation” to “ethics,” “friends,” and “play.”To live in data in the twenty-first century

233. "The Illusion of Thinking" — Thoughts on This Important Paper

This is a fantastic paper. I just love it. tl;dr AI is not human. Anthropomorphization has been bad for AI, LLMs, and Chat. Clippy walked so today's AI could run.

My Trip to FOSDEM 2025

Exploring Brussels and FOSDEM 2025: A visual journey through history, open-source AI, and Belgian charm.