NESTED! Negative checking, Lesbian feta, orca hats, Havegoodday
Merry Christmas, hunties! Here are some links for you to read during your holidays:
Wikipedia is the best website
Model collapse is one of the big threats to generative AI. Large language models improve by ingesting more and more data; but companies that train them seem to slowly run out of new data to ingest (without further drowning into copyright infringement lawsuits). As the internet is already increasingly polluted by AI-generated slop, the quality of models trained on new data may decrease as they only learn from their own output (I’ve seen it called “Habsburg AI”, because it becomes inbred).
See this article if you want to learn more!
The theft of fire, symbolising the passing of knowledge and technology from the gods to humanity, is a motif recurring in many mythologies across the world. In the Western world, we mostly know it as Prometheus.
Fukuppy was the (short-lived) English name of a mascot for Fukushima Industries, an attempted portmanteau of “Fukushima” and “Happy”. It’s an example of an unfortunate wasei-eigo, a Japanese pseudo-anglicism.
In 1993, several hundreds of forged documents about John F. Kennedy were sold to collectors for $7M. They reportedly include evidence that JFK had an affair with Marilyn Monroe, had committed tax evasion, accepted bribes and colluded with organised crime. The forgery was discovered five years later during a fact-checking exercise during the production of a documentary, while noticing anachronisms like choice of typewriters, or the presence of a ZIP code prior to their introduction in 1963.
The fictitious persons disclaimer in almost every piece of media appears because of a defamation lawsuit related to… Rasputin, in 1932. It still shows as a preventative measure even on films that are clearly parodies of real people or events (because no production lawyer wants to be the one to test if it’s still needed.)
See also: negative checking, when producers ensure that fictional names cannot be confused with names from real-life cases.
(I have previously found an English play — written before I was born — and a French novel with characters all called Victor Loux!)
Me every morning rn
Mildly interesting
In the 1970s, some people had a plutonium-powered pacemaker implanted, a choice option for a long-lasting power source that can outlast its owner. They eventually got phased out, as lithium batteries and other… safety and disposal concerns made them obsolete, but up to a hundred people in the US still wore one as of the early 2000s.
Killer whales are wearing salmon on their head for… fashion purposes? It seemed to be a trend in the 1980s but apparently vintage is back in style.
Great piece on the American obsession with expanding highways — it’s obviously not an American-only obsession, but the article makes a super interesting detour about the history of dam-building in the country, and how activists have successfully managed to stop it.
Relatedly: good observations on the difference between consequences and punishment for bad driving, and how this can impact road design. (Consequences are immediate and tangible and based on physics: not slowing down for a speed bump or a bollard means you ruin your car and so people naturally react, whereas the threat of fines has not been particularly effective at slowing drivers down on wide roads, because it’s barely enforceable even when there is an accident).
A new camera the size of a grain of salt is being developed. This can have many great medical applications (and I can’t wait to see the dystopian surveillance applications!).
Instead of being cynical, try becoming skeptical. 🧘
Everything is depressing
Loved this essay by Erin Kissane, against the dark forest theory of the internet that I see repeated more and more (which posits that the future of the Internet has to be in “gated communities” like Discords or newsletters where we all know each other, rather than an open Twitter-like space that lets multiple bubbles cross over each other).
I’m certainly one who’s favoured smaller spaces online since leaving most social media almost 6 years ago (when I started this newsletter!), but I love the optimism coming out of the vision that social media doesn’t have to be trash if we only let ourselves imagine the possibilities.
A refreshing take on the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO.
This month in AI:
We’re continuing to see consequences of people using generative AI as a search engine and propagating made-up hallucinations as facts in several news outlets.
This is, obviously, a huge problem because of Brandolini's law — the effort it takes to fact-check and refute bullshit is orders of magnitude higher than the effort to produce it; and the effort to produce it is now significantly lower than just half-arsing research, or even lying deliberately. And the fact-checking can’t be automated by the same AIs that produce incorrect information and present it with a high degree of confidence.Studies show that people prefer AI-generated art because most people prefer bad/kitsch art.
Continuing to build LLMs is probably not going to be a brilliant business: LLMs as they are today have already become a cheap commodity to run, but the return on investment is still not showing up when trying to train the next generation.
If you are going to use generative AI (please not as a search engine), some great tips for good prompting, which really help with understanding the space of possibilities while avoiding hitting all the failure modes of LLMs.
You Exist In The Long Context: some very interesting thoughts on the “second brain” potential of long-context AI models, kicking off with the example of an interactive text adventure generated from a historical book.
Good to look at
There is such a thing as Lesbian feta (there’s nothing to it beyond the fact it’s produced on the island of Lesbos, but still… obsessed)
Psychology might be a big stinkin’ load of hogwash and that’s just fine!
I really like the “rhythmical lines” work of Wacław Szpakowski, a Polish artist who died in 1973.
Also love Papa's Maze, a strikingly busy and detailed maze drawn over 7 years by a Japanese school janitor. (The link is to a print version of it - that’s my entire last minute gift guide for the puzzle people in your life)
Anatomy of an internet argument, and what it means to engage with and “win” one.
I’m famously not a dog person but I am OBSESSED with this list of dog names from the Middle Ages. You’re telling me this pooch is called Beste-of-all? This hunting hound is called Takehym? This fighty boy’s name is Quarell? You can name a dog Havegoodday?
Chronophoto is a fun game where you simply need to try and guess the year a picture was taken.
I’ve been reading bits of The Homosexual Society, a book commissioned by the UK Home Office Research Unit in 1962, now available for free on the Internet Archive. While it has an extremely… of-the-time opinion about male homosexuality prior to decriminalisation, the author actually went to great lengths to interview gay men and reproduced quotes verbatim, and it’s a fascinating glimpse of gay sexuality at the time. I was surprised by the candour of some interviewees — and to see that some things haven’t changed in 60 years.
Loved the glossary at the end.
Enter the Supersensorium is an engrossing essay about entertainment, art, how we dream, and fiction.
A handy guide to pronounce Chinese names a little better.
Work! Design! Tech!
The State of UX in 2025: gloomy but so real!
Plus this essay from Ed Zitron about the what/how/why of the Great Enshittification of the Internet
Egoless Engineering is a fantastic talk looking at how many eng teams are run and what makes them inefficient (the title is a clue), and how to improve that.
I like this framing: many companies are run as networks of competence rather than hierarchies of authority.
A programmer’s guide on how to think about time.
How to give feedback to a senior leader (without getting fired).
Talking of fired, love Anil Dash’s metaphors of things learned while burning stuff.
Thinking of you for my hit of dopamine,
Victor