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May 5, 2025

Craft & Practice #2

Hello you lovely lot,

Friday, I made the two-hour trip down to my parents to celebrate Santa’s twin brother’s birthday.

A photograph of my mom and dad, dressed in their Santa and Mrs. Claus outfits, smiling and dancing. They're surrounded by the built photography set; standing in front of two large doors, the entrance to Santa's workshop. Scattered around their feet are toys, presents, and nutcrackers standing guard of the doors.
A photograph of my mom and dad, dressed in their Santa and Mrs. Claus outfits, smiling and dancing.

One of my favorite facts to share when meeting people: my dad’s Santa.

From the garden

I found a company called Scribe. They've built a “smarter documentation” product. It prompted some reflection about the business my partner & I founded in 2022: Poet & Scribe. The reflective note on building our first business.

One of my active community efforts is co-hosting a fortnightly Job Seekers Support Group in Active Voice’s Slack community. This week we gathered and discussed productivity around job seeking: planning, task management, goals, to-do’s. I wrote a list in the chat, as we discussed. With intent to nurture, I planted my insights in the garden.

From the soil

  • Buttondown’s Stack was a very cool discovery, and is a fantastic example of the Open Business movement.

  • The Kerning on the Pope’s Tomb is a Travesty. Rare when typography news makes international headlines—living in interesting times, indeed.

  • Researchers from the University of Zurich deployed AI-generated comments on r/changemyview to study how LLM's could be used to change views of people:

    • without disclosing they were doing it;

    • without getting permission to use the bots;

    • without contacting any moderators; and

    • the whole super shitty aspect of what they were doing.

    The response from the moderators and Chief Legal Officer are well worth a read.

  • Found a brilliantly detailed write-up of the ongoing Assault on Oversight in the Executive Branch. If—like me—you can’t keep track of everything, that’s happening all at once—only 100-ish days in this fascist coup—, it’s a great resource to come back to for perspecting-time.

That’s it for last week. Plenty more read and linked on my site, but those are some of the (I guess you can call them) highlights.

Be safe; take care—and, thank you for reading,

Jonathan

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