Links on Dani Arribas-Bel

🔗 THE PEOPLE DO NOT YEARN FOR AUTOMATION

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 22:14:54 +0100

Amen.

Metadata

Author: The Verge
Category: podcast
URL: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcas…

Highlights

[21:51] I’m just saying these things aren’t everything, that not everything about our lives can be measured and automated and optimized. It shouldn’t be. And so the tech industry is rushing forward to put AI everywhere at enormous cost: energy, emissions, manufacturing capacity, the ability to buy RAM, locked into the narrow framework of software brain without realizing they are also asking people to be fundamentally less human. And then they’re sitting around wondering why everyone hates them. I don’t think a couple of haircuts are going to fix it.

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 23:32:18 +0100

This was a lot more fascinating than I thought it would. Come for the craze around OpenClaw, stay for the background story of the mind behind it.

Metadata

Author: The Pragmatic Engineer
Category: video
URL: www.youtube.com/watch

Highlights

Then it will send you a message on WhatsApp, and suddenly you talk on WhatsApp, making this flow easy. That was hard. Yeah, even coming up with the idea that you’re not editing the configuration, because the agent can edit its own configuration. You don’t have to update anything because the agent can update itself. You can literally ask your bot to update itself, and it will fetch itself and update itself, coming back with new features. Planning the technical giveaway, so far that’s the magic.

“I would recommend them to be infinitely curious. Yes, it’s going to be harder to enter this market. It’s absolutely going to be harder, and you need to build things to gain experience. I don’t think you need to write a lot of code, but you need to explore. There’s a lot of open source that is complex, that you can check out and learn from.

I added a bootstrap file to explain the model that is now being born to create an identity and a soul where the values of the user are, and the model will be like, “Hello! Who are you?” “Who am I? What’s my name?” You know, and I’ve watched people do it, and that’s where the magic starts.

You don’t have to update anything because the agent can update itself. You can literally ask your bot to update itself, and it will fetch itself and update itself, coming back with new features. Planning the technical giveaway, so far that’s the magic. That’s

You don’t have to update anything because the agent can update itself. You can literally ask your bot to update itself, and it will fetch itself and update itself, coming back with new features. Planning the technical giveaway, so far that’s the magic.

But this new world needs people that can bridge both areas.

Even, you know, even when I get a pull request, I’m actually more interested in the prompts than in the code. I ask people to please add the prompts, and some do, and I read the Prompts more than I read the code, because to me this is a way higher signal of like how did you get to the solution? What did you actually ask?

🔗 How Markdown took over the world

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 23:42:56 +0100

Sobre very good Internet History lesson, full of delicious details that corroborate the idea the web is built more on the nice part of human beings than the not so nice.

Metadata

Author: Anil Dash
Category: rss
URL: anildash.com/2026/01/0…

Highlights

But it’s important for everyone to know that the Internet, and the tech industry, don’t run without the generosity and genius of regular people. It is not just billion-dollar checks and Silicon Valley boardrooms that enable creativity over years, decades, or generations — it’s often a guy with a day job who just gives a damn about doing something right, sweating the details and assuming that if he cares enough about what he makes then others will too.

🔗 Earth Embeddings: Towards AI-centric Representations of our Planet

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 22:35:26 +0100

Very very timely paper that captures the current zeitgeist in EO and AI. If nothing else, it serves as a fantastic introduction to one of the technologies that I think(/hope) will help the most bring imagery to the masses in the coming years.

Metadata

Author: eartharxiv.org
Category: article
Document Tags: paper
URL: eartharxiv.org/repositor…

Highlights

Earth embedding vectors emb are produced by a family of embedding functions E that map continuous location inputs (i.e., longitude, latitude with optionally elevation, and time) into a d-dimensional vector space:

Figure 2: Earth embeddings provide different functions: (1) They compress high-dimensional data into a lower-dimensional vector format. (2) They fuse together different geospatial data modalities, from different types of images to text and tabular data. (3) They can interpolate to unseen spatiotemporal locations, where raw data is missing. (4) They are interoperable with other AI foundation models, such as LLMs, through aligned embedding spaces.

as explicit models, extracting embeddings from raw data (e.g. satellite imagery) associated with a location (emb ∼ Eexplicit(datalocation))

implicit models, returning embeddings from only location inputs (emb ∼ Eimplicit(location)).

Earth embeddings map places and times that share similar properties closer together in embedding space.

GeoFMs are large-scale modeling and learning frameworks, whereas Earth embeddings constitute the interoperable, location-indexed data outputs that can be stored, shared, or queried independently of the model that created them.

We posit that Earth embeddings will emerge as the dominant format of geospatial data in the AI age

ways in which users can employ Earth embeddings for prediction, conditioning, simulation, and search

Call to action: Advancing analyses and applications with Earth embeddings.

• Evaluating and benchmarking Earth embeddings

• Explainable and interpretable Earth embeddings

• Learning planetary processes with Earth embeddings

Earth Embedding Models: Explicit Feature Extraction versus Implicit Neural Representation

Challenges and opportunities for improving Earth embeddings.

• Model capacity

• Spatio-temporal heterogeneity

• Data curation and scaling

• Learning objective

The research agenda we outline is fundamentally interdisciplinary: Earth embeddings will rely on feedback from domain scientists, e.g. in ecological, geological, oceanographic, and atmospheric sciences, that incorporate Earth embeddings into their analyses and from data practitioners apply- ing Earth embeddings in their workflows and products.

🎧 From Data Dump to Data Product

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:07:31 +0100

So many common points and arguments that really resonate here and make me more hopeful for Imago. The discussion of data as infrastructure, invisibility as success, and thinking really hard about how to make sure “it”’s not only here now, but tomorrow and the day after are points that’ll stay with me. And it’s also great to find more people who’re thinking creatively (not only from the tech side of things) to ensure the world has more collective-ness around data. Most recommended listen.

Metadata

Author: MapScaping
Category: podcast
Document Tags: audio
URL: podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcas…

Highlights

The way I frame it is like, the game is figuring out how to lower the cost of asking questions.

🔗 21 Lessons from 14 Years at Google

Sat, 17 Jan 2026 13:57:13 +0100

There’s probably a limit to how many “lessons” blog posts one should read but, every once in a while, they’re helpful. Many of these resonate with me after a similar amount of time in research and academia.

Metadata

Author: Addy Osmani
Category: rss
URL: www.oreilly.com/radar/21-…

Highlights

The “best tool for the job” is often the “least-worst tool across many jobs”—because operating a zoo becomes the real tax.

Abstractions don’t remove complexity. They move it to the day you’re on call. Note: “Every augmentation is an amputation” Senior engineers keep learning “lower level” things even as stacks get higher. Not out of nostalgia but out of respect for the moment when the abstraction fails and you’re alone with the system at 3am. Use your stack.

Teaching is debugging your own mental models.

If you win every debate, you’re probably accumulating silent resistance.

Model curiosity, and you get a team that actually learns.

Your job isn’t forever, but your network is. Approach it with curiosity and generosity, not transactional hustle.

Deleting unnecessary work is almost always more impactful than doing necessary work faster. The fastest code is code that never runs.

The engineer who treats their career as compound interest, not lottery tickets, tends to end up much further ahead.

The engineer who truly understands the problem often finds that the elegant solution is simpler than anyone expected.

First do it, then do it right, then do it better.

🔗 The year of technoligarchy

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 11:05:43 +0100

Molly White is on fire for this new year’s first dispatch…

Metadata

Author: Molly White
URL: www.citationneeded.news/the-year-…

Highlights

They know it. The technoligarchs aren’t confident their hold will last. That’s why they’re dismantling oversight, rushing through favorable legislation, securing pardons, amassing wealth — grabbing everything they can reach right now.

An economy built on stripmining its populace cannot be sustained.

The industry that promised it would free us from captured institutions has captured them itself.

When the economy they’ve hollowed out seizes up, when the markets they’ve destabilized implode, when the legitimacy of the institutions they’ve captured evaporates, and when everyday people suffer, their names are on all of it.

📺 deftones: private music & more with zane lowe [apple music]

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 21:31:42 +0100

With their new album, I’ve been listening to some interviews. This one is particularly nice (at over 1h, probably only for hardcore fans). Besides making me feel a bit younger again, there’s something nice in seeing a bunch of friends who’ve gone through all the ups and downs of the rockstar life still sticking together to do what they like.

🎧 The Vergecast on RAM

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 23:23:58 +0100

Good overview of the forces behind the spike in the price of RAM, and some musings on what’s ahead (spoiler: it’s not great).

The Vergecast RAM Holiday Spec-Tacular

🔗 Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (05 Dec 2025)

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 21:45:22 +0100

Metadata

Author: Cory Doctorow
Category: rss
URL: pluralistic.net/2025/12/0…

Highlights

Start with what a reverse centaur is. In automation theory, a “centaur” is a person who is assisted by a machine. You’re a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete. […] And obviously, a reverse centaur is machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.

Obviously, it’s nice to be a centaur, and it’s horrible to be a reverse centaur. There are lots of AI tools that are potentially very centaur-like, but my thesis is that these tools are created and funded for the express purpose of creating reverse-centaurs, which is something none of us want to be.

🔗 Why "Science-as-a-Service" Doesn't Work for Earth Science

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 16:54:05 +0100

Very important, if sobering, piece on the TerraWatchSpace newsletter on why “handing off to industry” is not a great idea for Earth Observation (EO) for basic science. In some ways, I see parallels with the discussion in the social sciences around how traditional sources (think decadal censuses, but also large surveys, etc.) could potentially be replaced by new sources such as mobility from phones or, for that matter, modern uses of Earth Observation. Don’t get me wrong, I am more excited than most about the potential of new data in the social sciences (imagery in particular!). We do need more data than a drop every ten years to not fly blind through everything that happens between release points (which is a lot). The bit that makes me very uneasy here is the replace, rather than complement. Without the census, satellites and phones are fairly close to useless for social scientists, and the reasons are very similar to why commercial EO needs large, public, and free programmes like Sentinel and Landsat.

Metadata

Author: Aravind
Category: rss
URL: newsletter.terrawatchspace.com/why-scien…

Highlights

Jared Isaacman, President Trump’s nominee for NASA Administrator has articulated a compelling vision: “NASA needs to constantly be recalibrating to do the near impossible, what no one else is doing - and the things they figured out, they hand off to industry.”

Earth Science Data Is Infrastructure, Not a Service

Infrastructure requires institutional commitment that transcends market cycles and political administrations. It requires transparency, neutrality, and guaranteed long-term access. It requires optimization for societal benefit rather than profit margins.

🎧 The Verge wrap up and forward

Tue, 16 Dec 2025 10:38:52 +0100

Two end-of-year linked episodes of the Vergecast are good fun:

Both are Joanna Stern from the Wall Street Journal, and The Verge’s very own Nilay Patel and David Pierce. This is end-of-year podcasting at its best. It got me thinking what’d be my boring, mild, and spicy predictions for 2026, though not sure I have much to add. Perhaps for another one in GLaD…

🔗 World Urbanization Prospects 2025

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 12:46:50 +0100

Cities are (still) a pretty cool thing…

Metadata

Author: Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA)
Category: pdf
URL: population.un.org/wup/asset…

Highlights

The world has become increasingly urban; more people live in cities today than in towns or rural areas.
The number of “megacities” (10 million inhabitants or more) continues to grow; over half are in Asia.
More people live in small and medium-sized cities than in megacities; many of these smaller settlements are among the fastest growing, especially in Africa and Asia.
Growth of the world’s city population between now and 2050 will be concentrated in seven countries.
City population growth is uneven; most cities are growing, but thousands have shrinking populations.
Towns are home to more than a third of humanity and are critical for sustainable development.
As the world’s rural population approaches its peak size, it faces unprecedented challenges.
The expansion of built-up areas is outpacing population growth worldwide.
The Degree of Urbanization methodology reveals the world is more urbanized than national statistics suggest.
Sustainable development requires integrated planning that treats cities, towns and rural areas as interconnected and interdependent.

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 23:00:51 +0100

Metadata

Author: Pete Warden
Category: rss
URL: petewarden.com/2025/11/2…

Highlights

If I’m right, this spending is unsustainable. I was in the tech industry during the dot com boom, and I saw a similar dynamic with Sun workstations. For a couple of years every startup needed to raise millions of dollars just to launch a website, because the only real option was buying expensive Sun servers and closed software. Then Google came along, and proved that using a lot of cheap PCs running open-source software was cheaper and much more scalable. Nvidia these days feels like Sun did then, and so I bet over the next few years there will be a lot of chatbot startups based on cheap PCs with open source models running on CPUs. Of course I made a similar prediction in 2023, and Nvidia’s valuation has quadrupled since then, so don’t look to me for stock tips!

Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, and nobody’s going to get fired for investing in OpenAI.

🔗 The climate action that matters is in the global south, argues an architect of the Paris agreement

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:16:44 +0100

Metadata

Author: The Economist
Category: article
URL: www.economist.com/by-invita…

Highlights

The era when American politics could make or break global climate co-operation is over. The world is no longer waiting for Washington. This time the global south is leading the way.

🎧 The company at the heart of the AI bubble

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 14:47:16 +0100

This is a very interesting look into the more physical aspect of AI (data centers) but also to the even more ethereal one (finance) behind the recent spectacular growth, and whether it is a good (economic) idea.

podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcas…

🔗 The City As Text

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 23:06:35 +0100

Neat paper by a great gang.

Metadata

Author: Jonathan Reades, Yingjie Hu, Emmanouil Tranos, Elizabeth Delmelle
Category: pdf
Document Tags: paper
URL: www.nature.com/articles/…

Highlights

This Review seeks to ground this opportunity in an introduction to the kinds of text and tools available to researchers, providing examples of the state of the art in urban research while contextualizing these applications in the broader framework within which this interest in textual data evolved.

🔗 AI as Normal Technology

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 22:34:38 +0100

Finally made it to read (listen) to this one, after seeing it referred to by seemingly everyone whose views on AI I respect. Well worth the time. Particularly the first part (regulatory and risks leave me a bit colder), it provides such a useful framing to about AI as a rather than the technology.

Metadata

Author: Arvind Narayanan, Sayash Kapoor
Category: article
URL: www.normaltech.ai/p/ai-as-n…

Highlights

AI as normal technology is a worldview that stands in contrast to the worldview of AI as impending superintelligence.

[…] we assume that, despite the obvious differences between AI and past technologies, they are sufficiently similar that we should expect well-established patterns, such as diffusion theory to apply to AI, in the absence of specific evidence to the contrary.

🔗 Beyond the Machine

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 21:38:41 +0100

Metadata

Author: Frank Chimero
Category: article
URL: frankchimero.com/blog/2025…

Highlights

Thinking of AI as an instrument recenters the focus on practice.

In other words, instruments can surprise you with what they offer, but they are not automatic. In the end, they require a touch. You use a tool, but you play an instrument.

We may not be in AI winter, but I am hoping for an AI autumn. Autumn is amazing; the air cools, the mania of summer dissipates, things slow down.

Here’s Eno again from earlier this year: “I can see from the little acquaintance that I have with using AI programs to make music, that what you spend nearly all your time doing is trying to stop the system becoming mind numbingly mediocre. You really feel the pull of the averaging effect of AI, given that what you are receiving is a kind of averaged out distillation of stuff from a lot of different sources.” An average email or line of code is fine. Average art isn’t.

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 10:24:43 +0100

scikit-learn has always been an example in many ways of how to do many things well (apis, open source, community). One more reason to the list.

Metadata

Author: Gaël Varoquaux
Category: article
URL: https://gael-varoquaux.info/personnal/a-national-recognition-but-science-and-open-source-are-bitter-victories.html

Highlights

And two decades later, we have won. Open source is everywhere. Statistical algorithms raise billions of dollars. But what good will this free software, these algorithms, have been if an Elon Musk can buy their vector of action and transform it into a fascist machine. This victory is bitter.

And it is these battles that today’s medal rewards. I have always been wary of individual distinctions. Success is rarely the work of a single person. We need more collective effort and fewer heroes, less ego.

🎧 How Silicon Valley enshittified the internet

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 22:12:21 +0100

Man, Cory Doctorow is on fire on this one.

—-

Decoder: How Silicon Valley enshittified the internet, Oct 30, 2025

podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcas…

… “And so, you know, one day Mark Zuckerberg arises from his sarcophagus and says, harken to me, brothers and sisters, I know I told you that the future was arguing with your most racist uncle using this text interface, but actually, I’m going to transform you and everyone you love into a legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon character so I can imprison you in a virtual world I stole from a 25-year-old cyberpunk novel. I call it the metaverse, right? And that’s end stage enshittifcation, the giant pile of shit.”

🔗 Why You Should Write Every Day (Even if You’re Not a Writer)

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 10:46:23 +0100

Metadata

Author: JA Westenberg
Category: rss
URL: www.joanwestenberg.com/p/why-you…

Highlights

When you write, you can’t handwave. You can’t bluster and obfuscate your own ideas into oblivion. When you’re alone with a blank page, there’s nobody to rescue you with a charitable interpretation.

🔗 Should We Let Public Transit Die?

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 23:06:19 +0100

No.

Metadata

Author: Jarrett Walker
Category: article
URL: www.bloomberg.com/news/arti…

Highlights

What does it take to replace transit? You have to match the fare, capacity and travel time of the services being provided now. Most alternatives are offering only one or two of these.

two big types of benefit that justify their subsidies.

First, dense cities do not have room for everyone to drive alone in a car, so their functionality depends on large numbers of people traveling in ways that use space efficiently.

Second, all communities have people who cannot, don’t want to, or shouldn’t be driving.

Most of these inventions seem to have a common theme: They will protect us from the unwanted company of strangers.

The biggest danger is that we will let transit die long before any technology could be ready to replace it.

in the US we have constructed our transportation funding streams to make transit’s costs visible, while the costs of car dependence are mostly concealed.

the future lies in making these decisions as locally as possible.

🔗 GeoFM: how will geo-foundation models reshape spatial data science and GeoAI?

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 09:13:29 +0100

This was a much more insightful read than I anticipated. The first part is a fantastic introduction to the idea of state of the art foundation models today, in particular in the Geo space. The second is more prospective, and thus a little more speculative. Either way, very good food for thought.

Metadata

Author: Krzysztof Janowicz, Gengchen Mai, Weiming Huang, Rui Zhu, Ni Lao & Ling Cai
Category: article
Document Tags: paper
URL: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/…

Highlights

Given these three motivating factors, GeoFM can be defined as follows: Geo-foundational models are foundation models specifically trained on heterogeneous spatiotemporal data, capable of reliably performing advanced spatiotemporal reasoning, and designed to incorporate spatial, temporal, and other contextual factors into their output to support a wide range of (geo)spatial downstream tasks in geography and neighboring disciplines that benefit from a spatial or geographic perspective.

Just as LLMs encode the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of human language, GeoFM could encode the language of space, i.e., the place-agnostic properties that define geography – spatial dependence and heterogeneity (Anselin,Citation1988) and its related concepts such as scale, adjacency, spatial and temporal scopes, and so on.

why do we need geo-foundation models (GeoFM) at all, and what exactly are they or will they be? First, foundation models can only generalize within the scope of their training data.

Second, many geospatial tasks are highly specific

Third, geography is inherently local/regional or contextual.

GeoAI advances along two major dimensions: (1) it applies novel methods and technologies from the broader AI and machine learning community to geographic and geospatial research questions and (2) it feeds its own, novel theoretical and methodological contributions back to the broader AI community

location embeddings can be trained separately and concatenated with the embeddings representing learned building footprints, land classes, and so on (Mac Aodha et al. Citation2019; Yan et al. Citation2019; Mai et al. Citation2020). Note: This is an idea I’ve had for a while and would be good to check some of these references to see how they approach it. Although modern foundation models were not yet on the horizon in the early 2010s, it was already clear that the era of custom, single-purpose models was slowly giving way to workflows developed around reuse and transferability. This shift raises a key question for GeoAI research: how can we distinguish progress driven by GeoAI-specific innovation from improvements mostly gained through the application of transfer learning (and related methods) from general-purpose models?

The successful combination of few-shot, prompt engineering, and transfer-learning methods on top of powerful general-purpose models raises the old question again: is spatial really special?

we can roughly classify the existing GeoFM-related research into the following categories: 1) adapting existing FMs on geospatial tasks via prompt engineering and task-specific fine-tuning; 2) developing advanced LLM agent frameworks for geospatial tasks; and 3) developing novel geo-foundation models via geo-aware model training and fine-tuning.

we further classify the current GeoFMs in four categories based on the data modalities they support and their application scenarios: geospatial language foundation models, geospatial vision foundation models, geospatial graph foundation models, and geospatial multimodal foundation models.

three major ways of realizing GeoFM or using generalist FM

For now, it is unclear whether one of the paths is preferred to approach the vision of generally capable GeoFM so that the research community could consolidate our efforts, or if this is task-dependent, and, hence, varying paths should be taken for different types of tasks.

Designing architectures that can jointly process such heterogeneous data, scale to large datasets, and accomplish effective cross-modality alignment remains a major open challenge.

A fundamental question is whether those subjective and complex human experiences should become part of GeoFM.

this raises concerns about GeoFM misrepresenting geography, be it by introducing bias or by learning representations that do not align with those of groups or societies.

spatial priors should ideally be incorporated into the pre-training of GeoFM […] those priors change across scale, resolution, modality, and so forth, and it is presently not clear how to best handle those. For instance, should they be explicitly engineered or implicitly learned?

Without co-evolving our data and benchmarks, the true potential of GeoFMs will remain constrained.

most present work on AI alignment does not account for regional, e.g., cultural, differences. However, as geographers, we know that the aforementioned societal goals, values, and norms vary greatly across geographic space and time – without any being inherently superior to others.

skills that help us better interact with such agents, critically think about their outputs, align AI with societal goals, and so on, will increase in importance.

🔗 Mission Critical -- Satellite Data is a Distinct Modality in Machine Learning

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 20:50:15 +0100

Some of the arguments made here would ring obvious to traditional spatial analysts, others to traditional remote sensers and, I suppose, many might seem “bread and butter” for the ML crowd. But it is not each individual argument that is the point here; it is putting them together, now, and in a contemporary and fresh framework that makes this paper worth a read. Well worth it indeed.

Metadata

Authors: Esther Rolf, Konstantin Klemmer, Caleb Robinson, Hannah Kerner Category: article URL: arxiv.org/abs/2402….

🔗 Why We’re Talking About a Centralized Vector Embeddings Catalog Now

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 15:59:32 +0100

The white paper mentioned below is well worth a read. It puts in much more eloquent words many of the reasons why I’m very excited about the new generation of satellite foundation models and the potential embeddings have to make satellite data more useful, useable, and used! A lot of food for thought and great argumentation for why we need to think about satellite images more and more like abstract tables than like images of pixels.

Metadata

Author: Nathan Zimmerman
Category: article
URL: element84.com/machine-l…

Highlights

our team published a detailed white paper in which we make the case for how Earth Observation (EO) data providers such as NASA can dramatically improve access to their data by creating a centralized vector embeddings catalog

🔗 The rise of end times fascism

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 13:27:11 +0100

Metadata

Author: Naomi Klein
Category: article
URL: www.theguardian.com/us-news/n…

Highlights

The governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.

Three recent material developments have accelerated end times fascism’s apocalyptic appeal. The first is the climate crisis. While some high-profile figures might still publicly deny or minimize the threat, global elites, whose ocean-front properties and datacenters are intensely vulnerable to rising temperatures and sea levels, are well-versed in the ramifying perils of an ever-heating world. The second is Covid-19: epidemiological models had long predicted the possibility of a pandemic devastating our globally networked world; the actual arrival of one was taken by many powerful people as a sign that we have officially arrived at what US military analysts forecasted as “the Age of Consequences”. No more predictions, it’s going down. The third factor is the rapid advancement and adoption of AI, a set of technologies that have long been associated with sci-fi terrors about machines turning on their makers with ruthless efficiency – fears expressed most forcefully by the same people who are developing these technologies. All of these existential crises are layered on top of escalating tensions between nuclear-armed powers.

The startup country contingent is clearly foreseeing a future marked by shocks, scarcity and collapse.

the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.

contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.

But it also opens up powerful possibilities for resistance. To bet against the future on this scale – to bank on your bunker – is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home.

bunkered nation lies at the heart of the Maga agenda, and of end times fascism.

We should think of this less as old-school imperialism than super-sized prepping, at the level of the national state.

End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy.

🔗 Why we still need small language models - even in the age of frontier AI

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 17:47:33 +0100

This is a cool example of how less can be more. The article is also surprisingly informative for a post of these characteristics.

Metadata

Author: turing.ac.uk
Category: article
URL: www.turing.ac.uk/blog/why-…

Highlights

In a six week sprint, we set out to see how far a small, open-weight language model could be pushed using lightweight tools and without massive infrastructure. By combining retrieval-augmented generation, reasoning trace fine-tuning, and budget forcing at inference time, our 3B model achieved near-frontier reasoning performance on real-world health queries – and is small enough to run locally on a laptop. We’re open-sourcing everything, and we believe this approach has enormous potential for public sector and compute-constrained environments.

🔗 Trump, national-capitalism at bay

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 10:00:32 +0100

Metadata

Author: par piketty
Category: article
URL: www.lemonde.fr/blog/pike…

Highlights

Let’s be clear: Trump’s national capitalism likes to flaunt its strength, but it is actually fragile and at bay. Europe has the means to confront it, provided it regains confidence in itself, forges new alliances and calmly analyzes the strengths and limitations of this ideological framework.

This is the first weakness of national capitalism: when powers reach a boiling point, they end up devouring each other. The second is that the dream of prosperity promised by national capitalism always ends up disappointing public expectations because it is, in reality, built on exacerbated social hierarchies and an ever-growing concentration of wealth.

When measured in terms of purchasing power parity, the reality is very different: the productivity gap with Europe disappears entirely.

The reality is that the US is on the verge of losing control of the world, and Trump’s rhetoric won’t change that.

In the face of Trumpism, Europe must, first and foremost, remain true to itself.

Europe must heed the calls from the Global South for economic, fiscal and climate justice.

🔗 Against "Brain Damage”

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 10:31:47 +0100

The final quote of “[o]ur fear of AI “damaging our brains” is actually a fear of our own laziness” has a lot of power, although it also oversees the mirrors of “nudges” that technology creates to act lazily.

Metadata

Author: Ethan Mollick
Category: rss
URL: www.oneusefulthing.org/p/against…

Highlights

ways of using AI to help, rather than hurt, your mind.

If you outsource your thinking to the AI instead of doing the work yourself, then you will miss the opportunity to learn.

the harm happens even when students have good intentions.

we have increasing evidence that, when used with teacher guidance and good prompting based on sound pedagogical principles, AI can greatly improve learning outcomes.

Moving away from asking the AI to help you with homework to helping you learn as a tutor is a useful step.

find more in the Wharton Generative AI Lab prompt library.

while AI is more creative than most individuals, it lacks the diversity that comes from multiple perspectives.

The deeper risk is that AI can actually hurt your ability to think creatively by anchoring you to its suggestions. This happens in two ways.

the anchoring effect. Once you see AI’s ideas, it becomes much harder to think outside those boundaries.

Second, as the MIT study showed, people don’t feel as much ownership in AI generated ideas, meaning that you will disengage

how do you get AI’s benefits without the brain drain? The key is sequencing. Always generate your own ideas before turning to AI.

Every post I write, like this one, I do a full draft entirely without any AI

Only when it is done do I turn to a number of AI models and give it the completed post and ask it to act as a reader: Was this unclear at any point, and how, specifically could I clarify the text for a non-technical reader? And sometime like an editor: I don’t like how this section ends, can you give me 20 versions of endings that might fit better.

there is the option to have it help make us better. One interesting example is using AI as a facilitator.

If you want to keep the human part of your work: think first, write first, meet first.

Our fear of AI “damaging our brains” is actually a fear of our own laziness.

🔗 Last Week in Earth Observation: May 26, 2025

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 15:26:32 +0100

Aravind has a really interesting take on why the hyperscalers are moving into the weather model space.

Metadata

Author: Aravind
Category: rss
URL: newsletter.terrawatchspace.com/last-week…

Highlights

I think the real story here is not about weather accuracy, and it is definitely not about replacing ECMWF or NOAA in the future.

This is really about weather becoming part of the cloud infrastructure, about turning forecasting into a cloud-native service that’s deeply embedded within their compute ecosystems.

For sectors such as energy, insurance, agriculture, logistics and finance, weather is not just data, it is a key decision driver. If you can offer native, on-demand, customisable forecasts, users will start building their products and workflows around you: models, simulations, dashboards, alerts and triggers, aka a sticky service layer.

TL;DR: I think Google and Microsoft are trying to make weather foundational by turning it into a programmable infrastructure layer, that powers the horizontal layer of weather intelligence and climate services.

🔗 The Copilot Delusion

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 13:15:13 +0100

Metadata

Author: Jj, May 22
Category: article
URL: deplet.ing/the-copil…

Highlights

It doesn’t point you to the holy scrolls where veterans debate exception guarantees like theologians dissecting scripture. But if you already know what you want and just need the incantation, it’s a better, quicker scribe than most human interns

“But I just use AI for boilerplate!” you whimper, clutching your Co-Pilot subscription. Listen to yourself. If you’re writing the same boilerplate every day like some industrial-age cog monkey, automate it yourself. Write a library. Invent a macro. Reclaim some dignity. If AI’s doing your “boring parts”, what exactly is left for you to do? Fidget with sliders? Paint by numbers while the inference works it’s magic?

When you outsource the thinking, you outsource the learning.

The problem isn’t just laziness. It’s degradation.

🔗 How to Do Ambitious Research in the Modern Era

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 22:04:58 +0100

The director of Ink & Switch on the research process. This is one of those rare videos that the internet is still able to produce with really big ideas and the feet on the ground, both boldly and firmly.

Metadata

Author: Nemertes
Category: video
URL: www.youtube.com/watch

Highlights

[Our research process] has three steps. Pre-infusion, execution, and then writing and reflection. […] pre-infusion is before you pull an espresso shot, which is intense pressure uh and like a short time, first you want to pre-oak the the coffee, pre-oak the puck for a few seconds. And that opens up the coffee so that everything else goes better. […] once we have clarity about what we’re doing, we go into execution mode. […] being in the tunnel.[…] And then finally there’s writing and reflection.

🔗 Remarks on AI from NZ

Mon, 19 May 2025 02:06:09 +0100

via.

Metadata

Author: Neal Stephenson
URL: nealstephenson.substack.com/p/remarks…

Highlights

Marshall McLuhan wrote that every augmentation is also an amputation.

🔗 ChatGPT decreases idea diversity in brainstorming

Sun, 18 May 2025 01:51:14 +0100

Metadata

Author: Lennart Meincke, Gideon Nave, Christian Terwiesch
Document Tags: paper
URL: www.nature.com/articles/…

Highlights

Across tasks, instructing participants to use ChatGPT enhanced the average creativity of ideas, outperforming web searches and unaided human intuition, with creativity measured as the average of aggregated scores of originality (original, innovative, creative) and appropriateness (practical, effective, useful).

However, as we demonstrate analytically, reliance on ChatGPT for idea generation comes with a trade-off: while enhancing individual ideas’ creativity, it reduces the diversity of ideas in a pool of ideas—a critical element for effective brainstorming.

🔗 OSMlanduse a dataset of European Union land use at 10 m resolution derived from OpenStreetMap and Sentinel-2

Thu, 08 May 2025 23:54:34 +0100

Metadata

Author: Michael Schultz, Hao Li, Zhaoyan Wu, Daniel Wiell, Michael Auer, Zipf Alexander
Document Tags: paper
URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-025-04703-8

This is a very interesting one, where a standard (CORINE) classification is mimicked with OSM where enough good data is available, and then sparser areas are filled in with satellite data and standard ResNet’s. A useful pattern that’d be interesting to see if it works in less standard setups as well.

Highlights

large-area fusion of OpenStreetMap and Copernicus data at a spatial resolution of 10 m or finer and can be applied globally.

land use labels from OpenStreetMap and remote sensing data to create a contiguous land use map of the European Union as of March 2020.

Country-specific deep learning convolutional neural networks and Sentinel-2 feature space composites of 2020 at 10 m resolution were employed. The overall map accuracy is 89%, with class-specific accuracies ranging from 77% to 99%. The data set is available for download from https://doi.org/10.11588/data/IUTCDN and visualization at https://osmlanduse.org.

LULC products benefitted most notably by the use of remote sensing, its proliferation through open data policies4 and artificial intelligence5. Currently the further accelerated use of such technology is primarily limited by the availability of sufficient thematically labelled data

Given the fragmented availability of OSM data and opportunistic availability of thematic content and depth, resulting LULC products are consequently incomplete in terms of spatial coverage. Such gaps in unlabelled LULC data can be addressed by performing basic classification of remote sensing data, using known areas as training data

Copernicus Sentinel 2 (S2) 10 m multi spectral feature space processed through Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) sepal.io system. Note: This is an interesting project, note to explore further. Feature space was a best pixels medoid composite of Sentinel 2 bands red, green, blue (RGB) and near infrared (NIR) at 10 m of the past three years as of April 2020.

Our decision to train separate classification models per country stems from the varying completeness and likely slightly different tagging cultures of OpenStreetMap data across Europe, may differ at national borders.

🔗 Learning to speak with honesty—and without AI

Thu, 08 May 2025 08:47:57 +0100

Metadata

Author: Ethan Zuckerman
URL: www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/tec…

Highlights

For at least some audiences, this ability to see someone perform authenticity is satisfying in a way that carefully scripted, packaged entertainment is not.

On some online platforms, it is common for content creators—figures such as Andrew Tate—to express voluntarily misogynist and hateful views. This may be part of the performance of authenticity.

But given that many users are turning to AI as counsellors and companions, maybe what I’m experiencing is my own middle-aged culture shock: I have trouble seeing this AI-generated text as anything but insincere by definition.

People may be excited to use AI to write computer code more quickly. But I hope it remains a faux pas to have AI tell your friend you’re sorry about their mother’s death.

If performances of authenticity are a shortcut to success and power, we need a way to understand what we should truly view as authentic.

🔗 OSMnx Reference Paper Published

Tue, 06 May 2025 18:34:32 +0100

Metadata

Author: gboeing
URL: geoffboeing.com/2025/05/o…

Highlights

Keep on keeping on… congrats Geoff!

This year will mark the 10th anniversary of my work on the OSMnx project. It recently reached version 2.0 with a slew of new features and enhancements. If you haven’t used it before, OSMnx is a Python package to easily download, model, analyze, and visualize street networks and any other geospatial features from OpenStreetMap.

🎧 Justin Vernon talks to Christa Tippett

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 21:46:47 +0100

onbeing.org/programs/…

This is a heart warming conversation. I’ve now listened to a couple recent interviews and they have a similar spin, but this one sits a little more right with me.

🔗 High-spatiotemporal-resolution mapping of global urban change from 1985 to 2015

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 09:23:40 +0100

Metadata

Author: Xiaoping Liu, Yinghuai Huang, Xiaocong Xu, Xuecao Li, Xia Li, Philippe Ciais, Peirong Lin, Kai Gong, Alan D. Ziegler, Anping Chen, Peng Gong, Jun Chen, Guohua Hu, Yimin Chen, Shaojian Wang, Qiusheng Wu, Kangning Huang, Lyndon Estes, Zhenzhong Zeng
Document Tags: data paper cities
URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-0521-x

There’s plenty of good stuff here. The thing that stuck with me was:

global urban extent has expanded by 9,687 km2 per year. This rate is four times greater than previous reputable estimates from worldwide individual cities, suggesting an unprecedented rate of global urbanization. The rate of urban expansion is notably faster than that of population growth

This one also struck a cord:

the global urban extent increased from 362,747 km2 to 653,354 km2 from 1985 to 2015, representing a net expansion of 80% […] During the same period (1985–2015), data from the United Nations show that urban population, an essential driver of urban area expansion, increased by 52% […] Thus, much of the newly developed urban lands were not used for housing but for other purposes (for example, commercial and industrial districts).

I’m not sure the last sentence follows from the previous ones. The economist in me probably thinks people consume more land per head (i.e., bigger houses, bigger plots, bigger cars that require bigger lanes). But, as they say, this is an empirical question…

Highlights

we map global annual urban dynamics from 1985 to 2015 at a 30 m resolution using numerous surface reflectance data from Landsat

global urban extent has expanded by 9,687 km2 per year. This rate is four times greater than previous reputable estimates from worldwide individual cities, suggesting an unprecedented rate of global urbanization. The rate of urban expansion is notably faster than that of population growth

our understanding of how cities change in space and over time is limited by the lack of spatially and temporally comprehensive urban land cover data at a high resolution6,7. Development of this information lags behind that of state-of-the-art non-urban landcover change data

The current understanding of urban growth is largely based on demographic (population) data rather than information describing the spatial and temporal patterns of urban land-cover change.

we defined the extent of urbanized land between 1985 and 2015 by fusing four available global urban-extent maps with similar spatial resolutions for 1985 and 2015 (that is, the Global Human Settlement Layer6,19, the Global Urban Footprint20, the Global Urban Land 7 and the Global Artificial Impervious Area16; Supplementary Table 1). We extracted cells from the two fusion maps that changed from non-urban in 1985 to urban in 2015. We then used an annual time series (1985–2015) of the normalized urban areas composite index (NUACI) to detect the year of urbanization and green recovery (vegetative regrowth or new plantings in built environments) for each pixel within this urbanized extent. Finally, we assessed the accuracy of all derived products over the past three decades Note: Approach the fused GAUD global urban extent maps are robust across different urban ecoregions and have relatively high mean accuracy.

Better accuracy is mainly attributed to (1) our GAUD data having urban regions that are consistent in different urban products and (2) inconsistent regions being reclassified using a locally adaptive random forest classifier.

the global urban extent increased from 362,747 km2 to 653,354 km2 from 1985 to 2015, representing a net expansion of 80%

During the same period (1985–2015), data from the United Nations show that urban population, an essential driver of urban area expansion, increased by 52%

the rates of urbanization in Asia, Africa and South America accelerated during the 30 yr period but began to slow in North America, Europe and Australia

the bulk (~70%) of urban growth since 1992 occurred at the expense of agricultural land, followed by grasslands (~12%) and forests (~9%)

the dataset can be used to improve our understanding of how urban areas affect carbon cycles, a negative anthropogenic impact that has not been studied thoroughly30,31 because of the lack of accurate and continuous global urban extent maps. The GAUD data can also be used to study how urban expansion drives global changes in energy and water use and in turn triggers changes in water and energy fluxes between the land and atmosphere25,32. GAUD may also aid research into the impacts of rapid urban expansion on habitat and biodiversity loss or the extent that health risks arise from urban heat island effects.

🔗 An LLM Codegen Hero's Journey

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 22:40:34 +0100

Metadata

Author: Harper Reed’s Blog
URL: harper.blog/2025/04/1…

Highlights

There’s so much interesting stuff on this piece, it puts a lot of “tangible” into this new way of software engineering. Interestingly, I don’t know how much this workflow translates into data science, where one often needs to get deep into coding to be able to fully define it (aka write a good prompt). But, paraphrasing this piece, maybe this is me being a bit of a “boomer data scientist”…

Our brains are often ruined by the rules of the past.

You will start coding defensively:

• really hardcore test coverage

• thinking about formal verification

• using memory safe languages

• choosing languages based on compiler verbosity to help pack the context window

🔗 The End of Programming as We Know It

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 00:14:23 +0100

Metadata

Author: Tim O’Reilly
URL: www.oreilly.com/radar/the…

Highlights

In each of these waves, old skills became obsolescent—still useful but no longer essential—and new ones became the key to success.

When there’s a breakthrough that puts advanced computing power into the hands of a far larger group of people, yes, ordinary people can do things that were once the domain of highly trained specialists. But that same breakthrough also enables new kinds of services and demand for those services. It creates new sources of deep magic that only a few understand.

In short, there is a whole world of new software to be invented, and it won’t be invented by AI alone but by human programmers using AI as a superpower.

🔗 Generative AI

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 23:19:51 +0100

Metadata

Author: Michael Batty
URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23998083251332093?mi=ehikzz

Highlights

new technologies are now invented so quickly that it is no longer useful to separate them out from one another. They crowd into each other, disrupting what already exists, only for many of them to come back to regenerate and rekindle what has already been invented.

These systems are moving science from being theory-led to data-led, from deduction to induction, although this does not mean that theory is being dispensed with, only that new ideas can emerge and converge from any or both of these directions.

generative AI is uniquely suited to designing solutions which improve the human condition, in our own case the quality of life, the sustainability and the prosperity associated with cities. In a previous editorial (Batty, 2024b), I sketched out how generative AI was an early theme in the development of configurational statistics, shape grammars, design methods, pattern languages, and related optimisation models which we published in this journal. In fact, this is likely to herald a revival in ideas about design coming from this area in the next decade.

🔗 “Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 05:23:15 +0100

Metadata

Author: Molly White
URL: www.citationneeded.news/free-and-…

Highlights

But the trouble with trying to continually narrow the definitions of “free” is that it is impossible to write a license that will perfectly prohibit each possibility that makes a person go “wait, no, not like that” while retaining the benefits of free and open access.

Often by trying to wall off those considered to be bad actors, people wall off the very people they intended to give access to.

The true threat from AI models training on open access material is not that more people may access knowledge thanks to new modalities. It’s that those models may stifle Wikipedia and other free knowledge repositories, benefiting from the labor, money, and care that goes into supporting them while also bleeding them dry. It’s that trillion dollar companies become the sole arbiters of access to knowledge after subsuming the painstaking work of those who made knowledge free to all, killing those projects in the process.

This isn’t just about strain on one individual project, it’s about the systematic dismantling of the infrastructure that makes open knowledge possible.

Instead, we must ensure that mechanisms are in place to force AI companies to engage with these repositories on their creators' terms.

🔗 The rise of ‘Frankenstein’ laptops in New Delhi’s repair markets | The Verge

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 02:04:20 +0100

Metadata

Author: Hanan Zaffar
URL: www.theverge.com/tech/6391…

Highlights

India’s largest e-waste hub — becoming a critical way to source spare parts. Seelampur processes approximately 30,000 tonnes (33,069 tons) of e-waste daily, providing employment to nearly 50,000 informal workers who extract valuable materials from it. The market is a chaotic maze of discarded electronics, where workers sift through mountains of broken circuit boards, tangled wires, and cracked screens, searching for usable parts.

🔗 Angelina Jolie Was Right About Computers

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 19:40:36 +0100

Metadata

Author: By Jason Kehe
URL: www.wired.com/story/ang…

Highlights

Without closed source, proprietary Big Tech, there’s no open source, free-for-all Little Tech. Don’t listen to the techno-hippies who claim otherwise; that’s always been the case.

RISC-V has already done what many thought impossible and made a sizable dent in Arm’s and Intel’s architectural dominance. Everyone from Meta and Google and Nvidia to NASA has begun to integrate it into their machinery.

🔗 Satellites are getting too good for forest carbon?

Sun, 06 Apr 2025 14:22:34 +0100

Metadata

Author: Anil Madhavapeddy (anil@recoil.org)
URL: anil.recoil.org/notes/for…

Highlights

There’s a letter in Science today from a bunch of well known remote sensing researchers that make the unusual point that modern satellite resolution is getting too good to be accurate for forest carbon estimation.

but this resolution (0.3-5m) is too high for mapping forest carbon. Forest carbon has a natural resolution constraint: the size of an individual tree.

This is a great reminder that, sometimes, good spatial thinking trumps “better” technology. The insight applies much more widely than forest carbon estimation.

🔗 Formalising the urban pattern language: A morphological paradigm towards understanding the multi-scalar spatial structure of cities

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 23:30:18 +0100

Metadata

Author: sciencedirect.com
Category: article
Document Tags: paper
URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264275125001544?via%3Dihub

Highlights

urban patterns, the recurring configurations or arrangements of urban elements (Marshall, 2004), to reduce complexity and summarise the characters of the urban form.

pattern language represents a set of guidelines or solutions for reoccurring design problems derived from historic and contemporary urban environments.

urban landscape as a series of patterns of different urban elements at varying scales

The urban pattern language conceptual framework is built upon two fundamental hypotheses

firstly, that distinct patterns of different urban elements exist at various scales are not arbitrary but follow specific rules,

and secondly, the rule or relationship between the diverse patterns is unique with potential as a reflection to the cities' particular background and needs.

it is important to identify the scales of these patterns, whether the focus is on an overarching city blueprint or the intricate design of a specific neighbourhood

The language could be interpreted as the rule or the relationship between the patterns coming together to form the solution.

Note: This is an interesting way of summarizing the information on metrics across scales and the two cities.

The quest to correlate urban form with emergent dynamic data has taken centre stage over the past decade.

[Note: Good set of references of papers linking urban form with other phenomena to follow.]

🔗 Turning Numbers into News: the Economist’s Sondre Solstad on Data Journalism and Mapping the Ukraine War

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 18:03:17 +0100

Metadata

Author: Elena Sofia Massacesi
URL: oxfordpoliticalreview.com/2025/02/2…

Highlights

Dr Solstad described how sometimes he starts from the question, asking himself what information is missing, why it is missing, and what he can do to get it

he considers it his job to deliver information that is both useful to the reader and told in an engaging way which respects readers’ time and attention.

🔗 AI’s Future: Not Always Bigger

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 03:08:28 +0100

Metadata

Author: Mike Loukides
URL: www.oreilly.com/radar/ais…

Highlights

Are they supporting a small number of wealthy companies in Silicon Valley? Or are they open to a new army of software developers and software users? Are they a billionaire’s toy for achieving science fiction’s goal of human-level intelligence? Or are they designed to enable practical work that’s highly distributed, both geographically and technologically? The data centers you build so that a small number of companies can allocate millions of A100 GPUs are going to be different from the data centers you build to facilitate thousands of companies serving AI applications to millions of individual users.

The big question, then, is how these models will be used. What happens when AI diffuses through society? Will we finally get “relentlessly human” applications that enrich our lives, that enable us to be more creative? Or will we become further enmeshed in a war for our attention (and productivity) that quashes creativity by offering endless shortcuts?

🔗 The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem

Sat, 22 Mar 2025 22:27:54 +0100

Metadata

Author: Alex Reisner
Category: article
URL: www.theatlantic.com/technolog…

Highlights

generative-AI chatbots are presented as oracles that have “learned” from their training data and often don’t cite sources (or cite imaginary sources). This decontextualizes knowledge, prevents humans from collaborating, and makes it harder for writers and researchers to build a reputation and engage in healthy intellectual debate.

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 22:06:05 +0100

🔗 Stitch by stitch, Rose Girone kept her family going

Metadata

Author: The Economist (paywalled)
Category: article
URL: https://www.economist.com/obituary/2025/03/06/stitch-by-stitch-rose-girone-kept-her-family-going

Highlights

Her instructions for life remained the same. Anything you could fix with money was not a problem. Nothing was so very bad that something good couldn’t come of it. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Her recipe for longevity was good children (you had to be lucky with that. She had the best child in the world), and lots of dark chocolate. Most important, though, was always to have a plan.

🔗 Malka Older on narrative disorders in the not so distant figure.

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 17:38:54 +0100

Late to the party, but this piece is so insightful, such an elegant way to bring a bunch of trends and seemingly disparate phenomena under the arc of narrative.

firesidefiction.com/the-narra…

🔗 Cellophane Oasis

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 23:27:40 +0100

Metadata

Author: Paul Salopek
Category: rss
URL: outofedenwalk.nationalgeographic.org/articles/…

Highlights

[…] the “convenience stores” of those olden says, were far more romantic steppe oases, colorful caravanserais where sunburned merchants could swap stories and trade goods, as well as buy their camel fodder and egg salad sandwiches?

Yet aren’t modern convenience stores much the same?

🔗 The Guardian reviews Nord

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 19:43:59 +0100

www.theguardian.com/food/2025…

It’s part Austin Powers shag palace, part Mos Eisley Cantina from Star Wars. It really is groovy, baby.

🔗 JupyterGIS

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 11:42:17 +0100

blog.jupyter.org/real-time…

Baking a bit of geo right on top of Jupyter “ is a great idea for both the Jupyter and geo worlds. Plenty of room to leverage the geo data science py-stack!

🎧 Interview with Steven Markley

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 22:16:07 +0100

🎧 Writing a novel about, really about, climate change

Interview with Steven Markley, author of my very most favorite book of last year. Pretty wonky and and insightful conversation on the next couple of decades for climate, politics, and society.

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 22:11:51 +0100

🗞️ Making Satellite Data Mainstream: Gaps, challenges, and opportunities for remote sensing experts [Industry Profiles and Activities] URL

By Aravind Ravichandran on IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine (11 December 2024).

Plenty of interesting points here. My favorite one is the focus on the boring but necessary aspects required to push adoption beyond the “usual suspects”. Very much an Imago theme.

🔗 Pluralistic: Apple's encryption capitulation (25 Feb 2025)

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 16:10:14 +0100

Metadata

Author: Cory Doctorow
Category: rss
URL: pluralistic.net/2025/02/2…

Highlights

Apple announced it will disable a vital security feature for every UK user. This is a terrible outcome, but it just might be the best one, given the circumstances

In 2016, Theresa May’s Conservative government passed a law called the “Investigative Powers Act,” better known as the “Snooper’s Charter”

If we’re going to fault Theresa May’s Conservatives for refusing to heed the warnings of the risks introduced by the Snooper’s Charter, we should be every bit as critical of Apple for chasing profits at the expense of billions of its customers in the face of warnings that its “curated computing” model would inevitably give rise to the Snooper’s Charter and laws like it.