Hi girlies, it’s Victor! Here’s things I’ve read and wanted to share in the last few months.

Wikipedia is the best website

• The indigenous Mosuo people of southwestern China are known for practicing walking marriages, where partners don’t typically live together. They visit each other at night, and children are raised by the maternal extended family and uncles.

• Haint blue is a shade of blue-green, historically painted on the ceilings of porches in the Southern United states to ward off haints (”haunts”, ghosts) from entering the house.

• Amidst the student protests currently happening in France, « Bismillah c'est les ténèbres » has become a meme and slogan. It’s a nonsensical Snapchat message — and racial caricature— attributed to an undercover cop that was trying to infiltrate organisers’ group chats.

• I did not know that the father of Matt Groening, creator of the Simpsons, was called Homer Groening and married a woman called Marge Wiggum.

• Anti-football is a playing tactic in football that tries to prevent the opposing team from scoring, rather than pursuing an offensive strategy to win the game.

  • Unrelated to anti-prom.

New cat dropped

Mildly interesting

• A few years ago I shared the story of Amelia Earhart, an aviation pioneer who broke several records — and unfortunately failed tragically to circumnavigate the globe in 1937. Well, in 2011, another woman named… Amelia Earhart, who believed to be her distant relative, thought “you know what would be an incredibly funny thing to do to history?”, took flying lessons, and successfully completed the same journey.

• Like many things in nature, rivers are surprisingly mathematical and their natural shape has more order than you might think.

• Across the Global South, electric two-wheelers are revolutionising transport and local economies very differently than with electric cars. Besides lower running costs, they’re much more sustainable in their production and impact on air quality (relative to cars).

• Cheap Chinese TV streaming sticks from Amazon are stealing all your data.

AI is depressing

• Meta’s new AI agent, Muse, is happy to sext with you and roleplay as a Dom, an excellent trait for an agent that has access to your emails and bank account. I cannot wait for the headlines about people getting blackmailed and sextorted by ”their horny Facebook AI labubu” (per Today in Tabs).

  • Unrelatedly: some AI CEO connected X’s famous CSAM-production machine agent Grok to everything in his life, and the agent posted his bank balance and statement to his whole team on Slack. It responded to “How the f*** could you get this wrong?” with oops, “that’s on me”.

• On becoming AI-blind —a phenomenon named after banner blindness— that I also started experiencing: “trying to read a document someone has sent me and my brain somehow refuses to analyse it. It feels like I'm reading it, but I'm unable to focus on its content.”

• Sean Goedecke argues that after spending 30+ years being responsible for transforming or eliminating so many other fields, software engineers don’t get to be Luddites about AI’s coding skills: “Now that it’s our turn, should we bluster and complain that software engineering is a priceless art that should not be automated? Come off it. No crying in the casino.” Oooooft.

• The future of knowledge work in an AI-driven world: “AI might give us the pleasure of finding out what happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers.”

• Gary Marcus continues being more skeptical and makes the case for boycotting generative AI.

• Tokenomics are Coming: "A technology can be world-changing and a generationally bad investment at the same time, and history is mostly the gap between those two facts being violently closed".

• Re AI in games and creative industries: “I have never seen a game fail because the artists were too slow”.

Good to look at

• TearHere is an archive of condiment packets.

• This is a fantastic essay on the gendering of hobbies. It’s not a new observation that many of the historically feminised hobbies (cooking, baking, textiles craft, local community organising) involve others, contribute to domestic labour, and require you to be near the home; while hobbies more often taken up by men (gym, golfing, video games, DIY) are more self-oriented, requiring time alone or physically away from the housekeeping and childcare. That essay draws a much deeper taxonomy of how this happens across many hobbies.

• Wholesome tool: Make My Drive Fun! Just give it your start and end point, and it’ll point out hidden gems to stop by along your route.

• This came out before The PHP Incident™ of this week, but always timely: a data visualisation (and love letter) of some of the people holding up the internet’s infrastructure in their spare time.

• I liked this contrarian “one month without social media on my phone” essay and the possibility of reclaiming agency on how to use your phone.

  • Related: GPS and the lost art of getting lost [archive link]; which also reminded me of this article about trekking across Switzerland with no GPS and relying on people’s hand-drawn maps. I feel insane about not being able to direct myself without Google Maps, but that’s a key reason why I won’t do a dumb phone.

    • (I’ve long felt Google Maps should be public infrastructure instead of owned by big tech, but it shouldn’t be run by the US).

• The Brand Ledger tracks hundreds of brands that used to be reputed for quality, and tells you who now owns them, and if they're still worth buying — or if they’ve been enshittified like everything else.

I hope this email finds you before I do,

Victor