No image posts today, but it’s a blockbuster edition of the link roundup this week! I hope you find something interesting in here…

1 → LinkedIn power users are turning to ghostwriters (Vox)

LinkedIn remains a complete mystery to me.

“It’s cliché, but it’s true that people want to work with people, people buy from people, people want to see the human side of who you are before they decide to work with you,” says Tara Horstmeyer, an Atlanta-based ghostwriter who offers packages for 12 LinkedIn posts for anywhere between $2,000 and $3,000.

2 → How the Great Recession paved the way for the influencer industry (Vox)

It’s worth reading this fascinating interview with a curious mind. Especially if you, like me, are “of a certain age” and feel like you just don’t get it…

Influencers are neither ‘a flash in the pan’ nor ‘a bubble about to burst,’ but indicators of a paradigm shift in the way we think about each other and ourselves.

3 → On Place (Alica Kennedy)

This is a lovely, rich essay on the difference between “destination” and “place” when we travel, how digital nomadism displaces locals, the pursuit of a “decent meal” abroad, and more.

Continued economic dependence upon tourism leads inevitably to brain drain, when a labor force no longer wishes to work only service jobs. What does ‘local’ as an experience mean when it’s not in service to those who are literally local?

4 → The Life I Refused to Surrender (The Free Press)

This short essay from Amanda Knox packs a huge punch and really got to me. All we have is now…

No matter how small, cruel, sad, and unfair this life was, it was my life. Mine to make meaning out of, mine to live to the best of my ability. There was no more waiting. There was only now.

5 → The Streaming Market Is Fundamentally Broken. It’s Time To Fix It. (Public Knowledge)

There is just so much wrong with the music streaming industry.

Artists aren’t allowed to see the deals that set their streaming payment rates; indie labels aren’t allowed to see the deals distributors cut with labels on their behalf . And in many cases, artists aren’t even allowed to compare notes and talk about their own contracts.

6 → People Started Buying Crocs During the Pandemic. They Can’t Stop. (NYT Gift Article)

I have no pithy comment for this one.

“I roll into the gym with my Crocs on and everything, and people ask, ‘Aren’t you going to change shoes?’” Mr. Ndugga said. “No, this is how I’m going to live life for now.”

7 → Free Bird (Substack)

A top-to-bottom excellent post about Twitter from Ed Zitron. Read the whole thing!

Twitter can create an incredible sense of both intellectual invincibility and vulnerability that can drive someone quite mad.

8 → The Counterintuitive Thing About Trust That Explains Why So Many Teams Have Issues With It (LinkedIn)

This is an insightful post on the leader qualities that really build trust. In short, it’s about showing that you really, truly care.

Studies indicate that conveying benevolence is much more likely to earn you trust than conveying how competent you are. […] That’s why all things being equal, a person who is charismatic and kind will gain more trust than a person who is seen has having good ability.

9 → The Dangers Of Highly Centralized AI (Medium)

I agree with this take from Clive. It’s like we’ve learned nothing from social media.

The field of large language models is becoming dangerously centralized. A huge amount of power resides in the hands of a tiny number of firms.

10 → The Stories That Bind Us (NYT Gift Link)

This is a wonderful essay about the things that ensure happy and enduring families.

The bottom line: if you want a happier family, create, refine and retell the story of your family’s positive moments and your ability to bounce back from the difficult ones. That act alone may increase the odds that your family will thrive for many generations to come.

The World Nature Photography Awards 2022 winners have been announced.

What Does Workplace TikTok Look Like During Layoffs? It Gets Weird. Always Be Contenting, I guess. “It’s uncanny to watch clips of boisterous lunch buffets next to teary videos about being exiled from them—sometimes from the very same creators just months apart. You come to see how workday and layoff TikToks are mutually intelligible, odd sides of the same coin. No matter what happens, they say, workers will post through it. Work will be forged into content, no matter what.” (NYT gift link)

How to Take Back Control of What You Read on the Internet. Even The Atlantic is getting in on the RSS love! Could 2023 really, actually be the year? “But despite the syndication format’s cult following, most internet users have never heard of it. That’s unfortunate, because RSS provides everyday internet users with an easy way to organize all of their online-content consumption in one place, curated by the user, not an algorithm.”

I doubled-down on RSS. More RSS content! Here are a lot of words about the good and the bad of it. And some interesting observations too… “If you judge someone solely from the content they blog about, most folk will seem stodgy and humorless. I’m painfully aware that I’m no exception. The problem is that if you position yourself as irreverent, you’re likely to be dismissed.”

How The Last of Us re-created a 2003 arcade with the help of true enthusiasts. This article is so great. “We’re stupidly proud of this. All of it. We knew that anything less wouldn’t cut it and we’re nothing shy of grateful that HBO and the rest of the production encouraged us to go to these lengths.”

How the ring got good. A wonderful reflection on how Tolkien stumbled his way to what became Lord of the Rings. There’s some strong words of encouragement for all of us: “If Tolkien can find his way to the One Ring in the middle of the fifth draft, so can I, and so can you.”

De La Soul Is Streaming. A very important public service announcement on where you should start listening.

The African Bricks 3. Mosaic artworks inspired by the culture and beauty of Africa, by Charis Tsevis.

The Cello in Soho Square. I like this description by Michael Lopp of the difference between “dabblers” and “S-tier” people (who are the absolute best at something): “There is an infinite list of exciting things to learn, but the Dabbler knows they have finite time, so they dabble. They get 80% of the juice, and they move on. Respect. S-Tier knows the last 10% of the challenge is the hardest, but it also teaches you the most.”

Physicists Say Aliens May Be Using Black Holes as Quantum Computers. This is fine. “In a recent study, a German-Georgian team of researchers proposed that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations (ETCs) could use black holes as quantum computers. This makes sense from a computing standpoint and offers an explanation for the apparent lack of activity we see when we look at the cosmos.”

Honestly, it’s probably the phones. Don’t dismiss this argument just from the headline, like I almost did. There’s some solid evidence presented here. “If we’re looking for one big ‘silver bullet’ or ‘grand unified theory’ of modern teenage unhappiness, phones are probably the place to start looking.”

Papercraft Models by Rocky Bergen. “Construct the computer from your childhood or build an entire computer museum at home with these paper models, free to download and share. Print, Cut, Score, Fold and Glue.”

In an Uncertain Job Market, How Can Companies Retain Workers? The conventional wisdom that people tend to hunker down when there are layoffs around them might not be accurate: “Layoffs ‘create an environment where people worry it might happen to them next,’ said Laszlo Bock, who was Google’s SVP for people operations. Poorly handled reductions may ‘degrade trust in management as people start hearing rumors of further cuts, and that in turn raises anxiety, which causes more people to quit.’” (NYT gift article)

How the Phonograph Created the 3-Minute Pop Song. I can’t resist a good “technologies people thought would ruin everything” article, and this is another fascinating one: “Plenty of folks worried that records would destroy musical culture. John Philip figured it would demotivate anyone from learning to play an instrument themselves. Why bother, when you could just put on music by a true virtuoso? ‘When music can be heard in the homes without the labor of study,’ he fretted in a 1906 article, ‘it will be simply a question of time when the amateur disappears entirely.’”

The Case for Hanging Out. I love this essay. “Pushed further into isolation by the pandemic, we’re all losing the ability to engage in what I view as the pinnacle of human interaction: sitting around with friends and talking shit.”

Explore. I think it’s probably too late for a viable LinkedIn alternative, but this site would be a great contendor.

Underwater Photographer of the Year—2023 Winners. These are so great.

Impostered. Great post from Mandy Brown about the need to reframe how we think about imposter syndrome. “I’ve started to think less about imposter syndrome (a description of a person’s experience with it) and more about being impostered (a framing that draws attention to the systems and structures that lead people to believe they are imposters). While the former framing remains useful in many contexts, the latter creates space to consider not only the symptoms but the root cause of the phenomena.” [everythingchanges.us]

What’s So Funny? Very good essay about the current state of stand-up comedy, and what makes something funny. “The audience whooping and applauding Roseanne’s ‘anti-woke’ comedy is not reacting with laughter at a previously un-acknowledged truth, but instead expressing approval for the point of view that they already knew they agreed with. This is not the same thing as laughter in response to a joke.” [biblioracle.substack.com]

Why Are You Seeing So Many Bad Digital Ads Now? “Social media advertising, once a niche art practiced by specialist agencies, is now easily available to anyone. Many of them are eschewing targeted ads — placements intended to reach specific audiences, usually at a higher cost — in favor of a cheaper spray-and-pray approach online, hoping to catch the attention of gullible or bored shoppers.” [NYT gift link]

Traffic Lights Need a Fourth Color, Study Says: Here’s Why. Yeah what could possibly go wrong. “For the dawning age of the self-driving car, transportation engineers from North Carolina State University are proposing the addition of a fourth ‘white light’ whose function would be to alert humans to simply ‘follow the car in front of them.’” [popularmechanics.com]

The people who live inside airplanes. Ok I kind of like this idea. “By the end, she had a fully functional home, with over 1,500 square feet of living space, three bedrooms, two bathrooms and even a hot tub — where the cockpit used to be. All for less than $30,000, or about $60,000 in today’s money.” [cnn.com]

Mehul Kar says he’s not super excited about the “fediverse” in the context of social media. However, he sees a huge need for The Fediverse At Work. The issue? The lack of integration across all the tools we use at work has become incredibly tedious and hard to keep track of:

Sometimes there are Figma design specs, with their own set of comments. And Loom walkthroughs, also with comments and likes. And any number of other things over time. The combinatorial complexity of these tools across these platforms (not to mention emails) can be quite messy to track. It’s really hard to remember where a conversation took place. Coworkers often repeat the same text in multiple places, prefixing with phrases like “Shared this in Notion comment also, but…” or “Just left a review, but high level: …”.

He believes that a decentralized platform for all these tools to effectively talk to each other would be hugely beneficial:

Maybe the protocols that make up the Fediverse can help. What if, instead of sharing a Github Pull Request URL in Slack, your Slack team channel could instead be subscribed to the Github repository. Maybe new Pull Requests are broadcasted to followers, and replies from Slack users to those posts are sent as comments to the Pull Request in addition to being threaded in Slack. Maybe the Notion document is treated the same way. Maybe the Loom walk through is a reply to a Slack thread, and comments on the video appear in Slack. Maybe the Slack thread is a series of comments displayed on a Figma design.

There are more examples in his post. I really hope we can get to this type of philosophy for our work tools. It does sound a little bit like the problem that Luro is trying to solve.

AMEN by Jessica Hilltout. “The aim of AMEN was to shine the light on all those in the shadow of the World Cup, far from the big stadiums and the corporate carnival-nature of the event. To embrace Africa and everything that makes it unique. To speak of the authenticity and sheer ingenuousness of a continent that manages to do so much with so little. To capture people with simple needs and huge hearts. To express football in its purest form.” [jessicahilltout.com]

God Did the World a Favor by Destroying Twitter. I love Paul Ford. “Our smarter, richer betters often preach the idea of a town square, a marketplace of ideas, a centralized hub of discourse and entertainment—and we listen. But when I go back and read Genesis, I hear God saying: ‘My children, I designed your brains to scale to 150 stable relationships. Anything beyond that is overclocking. You should all try Mastodon.’” [wired.com]

SolidGoldMagikarp (plus, prompt generation). This is all super weird and shows that we really have no idea what’s going on with these LLMs. Are we really ready for this stuff to become the backbone of internet search? “We’ll demonstrate a previously undocumented failure mode for GPT-2 and GPT-3 language models, which results in bizarre completions (in some cases explicitly contrary to the purpose of the model), and present the results of our investigation into this phenomenon.” [lesswrong.com]

Hey, Ease Up; A Load-Bearing If-Statement. What happens if, for health reasons, you need to use a fitness tracker to move less? “But if you’re trying to conserve energy, you don’t want to reach that goal. You want to stay under it. Sure, you want to maybe get up and about, I guess? Take a very slow short walk outside? But you are supposed to be resting.” [newsletter.danhon.com]

Scientists Develop Compound That Kills So Efficiently They Named It After Keanu Reeves. “The molecules ‘kill so efficiently that we named them after Keanu Reeves,’ German researcher Sebastian Götze said in a press release, ‘because he, too, is extremely deadly in his roles.’” [futurism.com]

Buy Nothing groups and the culture of free stuff. This deep-dive into the things people post in Buy Nothinggroups (and that actually get picked up!) is quite something. “There is something about free stuff that makes us abandon all rational thought.” [washingtonpost.com, soft paywall]

The mystery of the disappearing vacation day. Why have we stopped taking regular vacations? “Many were on a paid-time-off (PTO) plan that lumps sick days, personal days and vacation days in a single bucket. While workers often appreciate the flexibility of PTO and employers find it easier to administer, such plans can deter taking long vacations by making us feel as if we’re cutting into the PTO we might need in case of sudden illness or tragedy.” [washingtonpost.com, gift article link]

Nope, coffee won’t give you extra energy. It’ll just borrow a bit that you’ll pay for later. Ok listen, don’t come at me with your “facts”, please. “While it feels energizing, this little caffeine intervention is more a loan of the awake feeling, rather than a creation of any new energy.” [theconversation.com]

Lego reveals massively detailed Lord of the Rings Rivendell set. Take my money! [polygon.com]

The Window Trick of Las Vegas Hotels. “In order to make the buildings look smaller, less intimidating and messy, architects have come up with a ‘four or six windows in one’ solution. This means they grouped several windows (usually four or six) together and made them look like one window. This creates the visual effect of ‘shrinking’ the building, of making it more orderly and symmetrical.” [schedium.net]

You have to read this whole article for the full context, but this classification of the different ways we can choose to act online really got me thinking: “I see roughly three typical public stances: boring, lively, or outraged. Either you act boring, so the bandits will ignore you, you act lively, and invite bandit attacks, or you act outraged, and play a bandit yourself. Most big orgs and experts choose boring, and most everyone else who doesn’t pick boring picks bandit, especially on social media. It takes unusual art, allies, and energy, in a word “eliteness”, to survive while choosing lively. And that, my children, is why the world looks so boring.” [overcomingbias.com]

The Junkification of Amazon. Why Does It Feel Like Amazon Is Making Itself Worse? “If you understand Amazon as an aspiring megascale infrastructure company — a provider of systems, services, capacity, and labor — its junkification makes sense. Amazon hasn’t been acting like a store for a while. In its ideal future, selling things to people is everyone else’s problem.” [nymag.com]

People Can’t Stop ‘Spotify Snooping’ on Friends, Exes and Crushes (WSJ paywall, Archive.is link here). “When Ms. Ticoalu looked up what her ex-boyfriend was listening to in November, she saw ‘Glimpse of Us’ by Joji, a song about starting to date again after a relationship ended. Because he played the song so soon after their breakup, it led her to believe the two events were related. ‘It does lead me to overthink a lot,’ Ms. Ticoalu says.” [wsj.com]

New Form of Ice Discovered. “The newly discovered ice is amorphous — that is, its molecules are in a disorganized form, not neatly ordered as they are in ordinary, crystalline ice. Amorphous ice, although rare on Earth, is the main type of ice found in space. That is because, in the colder environment of space, ice does not have enough thermal energy to form crystals.” [scitechdaily.com]

This is such a fun and interesting story by Louie Mantia about his time working as an icon/UI designer at Apple in the early 2010s. [lmnt.me]

• Surreal Animal Mashups by Ingo Lindmeier. This one lives up to the title.
• Interesting research on Time Savings When Working from Home and what we’re spending that extra time on. It’s mostly for more work! “The average daily time savings when working from home is 72 minutes in our sample. […] Workers allocate 40 percent of their time savings to their jobs and about 11 percent to caregiving activities.”
• See also: Why 2023 Could Finally Be the Year of the 4-Day Workweek. “Among the reporting countries in the 4 Day Week study, revenues rose an average of 8.14% and increased a whopping 37.55% in comparison with the same period the previous year.”
• But then also see: Job searching and interviewing is a nightmare — and only getting worse. “It’s important to remember that if a company’s hiring process feels off, working there might feel off, too.”
• I’m never relinquishing my closet of DVDs. I can definitely relate—it’s why I still buy vinyl and CDs. “Unless you have a physical disc in hand, you really don’t have control over what happens to it.”
• Wonders of Street View. Weird things picked up by Google Street View. Easy to get way too lost in these.
• I’ve been spending more time on Mastodon now that Ivory is available for iOS. It’s a wonderful app and it’s really fun over there. Come join us!

This is an interesting interview with Richard Culatta, author of Digital for Good: Raising Kids to Thrive in an Online World. They discuss how to help kids bridge the gap between physical and digital spaces, how to model good technology behavior, and more. This is such a good point:

By focusing on screen time we miss the far more important concept that we should be teaching our kids; screen value. Some digital activities are just not a good use of a kid’s time (eg. playing a repetitive, luck-based game) while others provide much greater value (eg. editing a movie, creative writing, FaceTiming with a grandparent, etc.) And context is important to consider too. Digital activities that are appropriate on a long car-ride will likely be different than those on a beautiful spring day when friends are around, or the day before a large school project is due.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that is something that not only kids need to learn. We can all benefit from this lesson:

The most important lesson we can teach young kids is to recognize that some digital activities provide more value at some times than others. This means evaluating each digital activity on its own merit based on the circumstances.

We should probably also remember that controlling children’s behavior with screen time leads to more screen time:

Researchers investigated the impact of parenting practices on the amount of time young children spend in front of screens. They found a majority of parents use screen time to control behavior, especially on weekends. This results in children spending an average of 20 minutes more a day on weekends in front of a screen. Researchers say this is likely because using it as a reward or punishment heightens a child’s attraction to the activity.