'A prayer wheel for capitalism', and other links
A prayer wheel for capitalism #
Over on the newsletter I wrote about writing and text.
One aspect of writing that tends to get lost in all the discourse is that writing is thinking. The process of putting your thoughts into words is a form of reasoning that clarifies and condenses those thoughts. Writing is how I discover what matters to me. Writing is where I find out what I think.
Read the rest over on the newsletter site.
National Day and Women’s Rights Day #
Today is “Kvenréttindadagurinn” here in Iceland. On this day in 1915, Icelandic women over the age of 40 gained the right to vote. This had been delayed from 1911 because the Danish crown didn’t approve. was The age limit wasn’t removed until 1918 when the Danish crown finally gave Icelandic and Danish citizens equal rights.
Saturday was National day, celebrating the fact that on 17th of June 1944, Iceland declared independence from Denmark. This process was made easier by the fact that Denmark was then occupied by the Nazis, so the Danish weren’t able to use their usual underhanded methods to delay full independence.
My granddad, who was born under Danish rule, always referred to the Danish as “helvítisdanir”, or “fuckingdanes” all one word. Their policies kept Iceland in starvation and poverty. Our economic growth skyrocketed, and child mortality plummeted after independence.
There’s a reason why the only public statue of a Danish king in Iceland is of Christian IX. We got our first steps to self-rule while he was king, so even though he personally had little to do with it, he gets the honour of being the token “except maybe that one” of the pre-independence Danish kings.
As in, “may they all burn in hell. Except maybe that one.”
So, even though I’m a couple of days late, happy birthday to the Republic of Iceland!
“Því lýðveldið Ísland á afmæli í dag!”
AI links #
- "🤦🏽♂️ No, GPT4 can’t ace MIT". Most “AI” research is bad science whose only “value” comes from inflating the AI bubble.
- "The Elements of AI Ethics"
- "AI Hype-Driven Development - Parallels in History. Recurring Patterns from Simulmatics to the Large Language Models Hype". “Now with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, we can see several systematic violations for scientific methodologies.”
- "I Am a Careless Person and AI Is Smarter. A Self Fulfilling Prophecy" “I was struck by the strong conviction about AI superiority.”
- "Probable events poison reality - by Rob Horning"
- "The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget"
Tech and dev links #
- "If You Have an Enemy, Then Buy Them a Car: Gig Workers vs. Multinational Corporations in India"
- "My thoughts on Apple Vision Pro". “Thus, I would implore developers to charge separately for their visionOS apps, and charge a higher, sustainable price.”
- "Positioning anchored popovers | hidde.blog"
- "Adactio: Journal—Days of style and standards"
- "Minute Rice, Minute Text, Minute Websites - Jim Nielsen’s Blog"
- "Good work is not enough — aows". “We do not become what we are today overnight; it’s only after weeks, months, years, decades, of hard work (or the lack of) that we achieve results (or not).”