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A montage of screenshots of the eight webpages discussed.

A varied collection of links some of which have been sitting in my notes for a while.

Frank Cottrell-Boyce: ‘We’ve treated a generation of chil…

They miss school? “School is where our kids feel secure. It’s where they’re fed. It’s their happy place. They don’t like the summer.”

Many times in different schools I’ve head about children that are troubled by the approach of summer. This is a great article. I’ve been disappointed by the Observer since it changed hands but this was well worth a read. A podcast episode SNC Extra: Frank Cottrell Boyce on modern childhood – The Slow Newscast was great too. That link is to Castro, I could not find a url for the source episode, even in the acast rss feed!

Philip K. Dick’s Most Disturbing Writing Isn’t His Novels

He came to believe that an unchanging reality–the Ancient Roman time of 50 A.D.–existed permanently underneath our perceived reality that occasionally bleeds through into ours. And people could only notice it if they were sensitive (or perhaps unstable) enough.
LLMs aren’t the traditional Terminator androids that science fiction warned us about. The problem with these glorified chatbots is more subtle, and one Dick actually identified: they are extraordinarily sophisticated generators of pseudo-reality. Fluent, confident, plausible text (plus images and video) delivered directly into the heads of millions of people who have increasingly limited tools for distinguishing it from reality. Deep fakes. AI psychosis. Misinformation. These are the pseudo-realities Dick was worried about when they were created by institutions.

I’ve not read any PKD for quite a few years, might be time to revisit or read some different ones?

Back to books – Sweden’s schools cutting back on digital learning

Sweden’s government is championing a renewed focus on physical books, paper and pens in classrooms, designed to reverse falling literacy levels.

But doubling down on analogue tools has drawn criticism from tech companies, educators and computer scientists, who argue it could impact pupils’ employment prospects, and even damage the Nordic nation’s economy.

The pendulum swings…

One Art | The Poetry Foundation

I Accidentally Built a Completely New Type of Website | Pootlepress

https://scrappy.world/ is a wee bit like the mac freeform app. Another interesting “store in browser” app.


Print your own images using turmeric and sunlight | Popular Science

Sometime I wish I was back in school.

Breaking the Spell of Vibe Coding – fast.ai

Similarly, AI can produce grammatically correct, plausible sounding text. However, it does not directly sharpen your ideas. It does not generate the most precise formulations or identify the heart of the matter.

Bubbles I’ve actually been getting some traffic from this site! Feed of posts from independent sites, as they happen or in a voted list. I’ve not tried the my feeds which let you create your own list. Sign in via mastodon.

Cursor Camp noted this a while back. Some fun.

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Read: Solace House by Will Maclean ★★★★ 📚

After sudden scalding exposure to the late twentieth century, and the garish monomania of the supermarket, it was joyous to return to the hospital, to the house. I found that I wanted to immerse myself in Solace House and its environs, gather it around me, cloak myself in it. I didn’t doubt, in that moment, that this was what Flayne had felt, sequestered here in his self-imposed exile.

Fun Gothic horror with magic mushrooms. A narrator who becomes more & more unreliable as the book gets weirder. I am not sure I really know what went on. Plenty of nineties details.

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Likes We Ran a Huge Social Experiment on a Whole Generation. It Turned Out to Be Terrible | Pootlepress by Jamie Marsland.

Like:

“Wait. You knew it was damaging mental health, sleep, attention and social development, and your response was… to give younger children even more access?”

And we will say:

“Well, yes. But everyone else was doing it.”

A clear succinct run over social media & the young. Personally I think there might be something in making the vendors made efforts to fix social media but at least there seems to be some movement.

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Read Belonging By Amanda Thomson

ONE AUGUST, WALKING HIGH ON the Cairngorm Plateau, small groups of swifts came and went up and over us, slicing and screeching the air, moving north to south, arching, spiralling up and over, on their way again.

It is estimated that there might be as many as 90,000 seabirds on Mingulay during the summer, and on the day I was there, there were perhaps thirty people on the whole island – our presence so fleeting. It was clear that everything would go on, whether or not we were there, indeed despite us being there, and as a gust whipped up to unsteady us and we found ourselves suddenly too close to the edge, or on a bank down to another cliff edge that was slippier or steeper than we’d imagined, we knew how vulnerable, how remote, how isolated we were.

A wonderful book. Touches on so many things, some I know a bit about, trout flies, others new to me, the process of etching. Travels, walks, bird ringing & ecological surveys mix with family history. Lists of old Scot’s words for weather, gpx tracks turned into art. Capercaillies, hares and moths.

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Read: The Savage Landscape by Cal Fly ★★★★ 📚

Travelogue & wide ranging exploration of the idea of wilderness. Indigenous people, conservation, history, fiction & religion. The author digs through idea & puts herself in the picture, questioning her own ideas & coming up against lots of contradictions. Lots to think about. Curious & surprising details.

Travelogue & wide ranging exploration of the idea of wilderness. Indigenous people, conservation, history, fiction & religion. The author digs through idea & puts herself in the picture, questioning her own ideas & coming up against lots of contradictions. Lots to think about. Curious & surprising details.

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Read: The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich ★★★★ 📚

IN SOME PLACES, lambsquarters is considered the Prince of Greens, one of the most nutritious greens ever analyzed; it was one of the earliest agricultural crops of the Americas. It also resembles amaranth, but the brothers rarely spoke of that. The rough-cut men were preparing to eradicate one of the most nutritious plants on earth in favor of growing he sugar beet, perhaps the least nutritious plant on earth. Evolution thought this was hilarious.

A very mixed up novel, romance, farming, ecology, a series of bank robberies, local gossip & lots more. Often hilarious, enjoyable & thought provoking.