Life in Links 67

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.