Welcome to 5 Quick Things that I saw since last month that I thought were interesting enough to share with you. None of them are particularly timely so feel free to just enjoy 🙂

>Number One<

Annoyance Tolerance

We live in a messy world full of imperfect people. I think about this all the time I watch some terrible people doing horrible things that harm all of us get less flack and hate and pile ons than people are who, let’s just say, a bit annoying. This article gets at a part of that. I worry that in trying to design a world that is siloed and as friction less as possible, we are accidentally tuning out real people whose only problem is that they don’t fit a perfect box.

>Number Two<

The Move to 2.0

I try not to lament the past and become mired in the nostalgia hole but the thing I actually liked about “the old internet” was that you had to intentionally take time to update. As this article says:

Here’s the crux of the problem: When something is easy, people will do more of it.

And do more of it they did to the point that there is no such thing as a truly customized social media profile and you can post on it as much as you want with basically no friction at all (I guess that’s the theme for this month). Anyway, just some food for thought because you used to have to intentionally want to post your thoughts on the internet and now it feels like that might be one of the very last things people are asked to do. But hurry! Do it as quickly as possible!

>Number Three<

Beautiful Morning

I don’t remember what I actually looking for when I found Ibn Gehad‘s Youtube page but I actually really love this video. I don’t have any relatives left and I’m not from a culture that has a habit of posting good morning messages but I imagine the generational divide between them is pretty stark and it’s amazing to see Ibn engage with not only the concept and beauty of these messages but get feedback from his loving grandmothers about them. I don’t know, I just found this really heart warming. (It is also interesting to me, as always, that he is an artist in a family of artists).

>Number Four<

LOST is a Conspiracy Theory Machine

Look, neither me nor the author of this article are saying that because JJ Abrams made a mystery box show that devolved into nonsense because there were no answers to find, but I don’t think it helped things. And I do think that even if there isn’t a line between to things, they at least have the same mechanism at their beating heart:

[W]e are now being governed by people who want to dig rabbit holes that lead nowhere. They see endless conspiracies which will never be explained, only mystified further and further. There’s not that much difference between endlessly wondering about the Dharma Initiative, and raising endless bad-faith questions about vaccines, climate change, and trans people. In both cases, the questions never stop and answers never arrive — because answers would spoil all the fun.

>Number Five<

LLMs are not Search Engines, I’m Not Arguing with You, I’m Right.

Here’s a short explainer of why you should stop using chatbots for search purposes and I’m not arguing with people any more about it. I think people are doing a mental disservice to themselves on top of the ecological harm and the fact that these programs are not giving the right answer anyway. Lose, lose, lose.

That’s all for this month and hopefully I’ll see you back again next month with some more exciting and cool things!