Classy dissection.

Very thought provoking and quite apart from reading and thinking about it, I'm feeling the need actually to do something about it.

it's a truism that anyone who wants you to stop thinking isn't your friend but it's equally true that anyone who insists that you think in exactly the way they've deemed proper is also not your friend. 

This is why I contribute my bit to the Internet Archive, when I can.

Very grateful to John Naughton for pointing to this article, which explains the problems and some of the solutions and which seems like an obvious dose of sanity.

 Ultimately, like many discussions around solutions to climate changes, this is a “yes, and” rather than an “or” choice. We can, and should, build more transmission capacity and storage, whilst reforming the market such that the UK’s phenomenal success in deploying wind power can be finessed to more precisely match our energy needs.

I'm sure I don't understand all the details, but I feel as if I understand more than I ever did before.

I'm persuaded; but then, I was already persuaded.

Maggie Appleton has a very persuasive article on the boredom that faces us from generative AI and some ideas to deal with it.

I particularly liked:

Easier said than done, but one of the best ways to prove you're not a predictive language model is to demonstrate critical and sophisticated thinking.

Which ought to go without saying, but of course doesn't. And which ought also to include some sort of distinctive authorial voice.

And:

we can prove we're real humans by showing up IRL with our real human bodies

Bring it on.

Fascinating deep read, prompting deep memories of my father's abiding interest in cryptic crossword puzzles and prodding me to maybe take up my pen (or more likely pencil) again..Maybe in the New Year.

I feel so seen, and this by Someone Who Knows.

Oh my god web results for popular programming questions are terrible. The top hits for every search phrase with python in it lead to pages that technically contain the information I seek, but which clog up the browser window with animated ads, subscription pop-ups, and sliding survey pitches. 

Still not feeling a whole lot of urgency about any alternatives to That Silo. Maybe that just reflects my lousy performance as a self-promoter.

I really, really like this series, and am thankful it comes around each year. (Even though Medium's markup sucks.)

TIL about TATT and MUS.

[C]ould it be possible that health care in a small farm future wouldn’t necessarily be inferior, because we have the wrong image of what health care involves?

More fascinating ideas from Chris Smaje:

Why focus so much on the undeserving poor, rather than on the undeserving rich? Accounts of the undeserving rich do exist in our politics, but they’re not nearly so prominent as their counterpart. The numerous ways that the fortunes of the world’s rich people and rich countries are extracted from the poor ones go too little remarked. Out of wealth comes the power to keep writing the rules in favour of wealth, and thence the need to keep dusting its crumbs from the table in the form of stigmatizing welfare policies.