Alternate world where the Web3 thing starts now and is focused on keeping out Gen AI and bots, instead of supporting all kinds of speculation and hustles.
🤖 While antagonistic and agonistic both stem from the Greek root agon (meaning contest or struggle), they describe fundamentally different kinds of conflict:
- Antagonistic implies a destructive, hostile opposition—an adversarial relationship where the goal is to defeat, neutralize, or overcome an enemy.
- Agonistic refers to a productive, generative struggle or contest. In an agonistic relationship (like a intellectual sparring partner or a challenging text), the struggle is mutual, respectful, and engaged in for growth, testing, or creative friction, rather than out of malice or a desire to destroy.
As Derek Thompson notes in his discussion of media theory, AI communications are often criticized precisely because they lack an agonistic tone; instead of offering constructive friction or a robust counter-argument, they tend to be overly agreeable and sycophantic. Similarly, William Davies contrasts the smooth, frictionless processing of “learnification” with an agonistic ideal of literacy, where the difficulty, inefficiency, and struggle of engaging with a text are precisely what give it worth The Right Words in the Right Order.
After the #thats_a_shame collection, I’m starting another one I’ve been meaning to have. Places that look like they’re a sure shot at being used as a movie setting.
Brick bathhouse by Kengo Kuma nears completion in Copenhagen
Pyramidal towers frame pools at the Kai Water Culture House by Kengo Kuma & Associates, which is nearing completion in Copenhagen.
www.dezeen.com
This type of hack is multiplying. We don’t know specifically what they use, but considering LLM’s “talent” for hacking, it’s a good bet that they are being used for things like this.
Hackers Break Into Blood Plasma Cold Storage Units, Cranking Up Temperatures in Attempt to Destroy Lifesaving Medical Resources
Hackers broke into the refrigeration systems at French blood banks and cranked temperatures up to excessive levels.
futurism.com
Poor, poor Elon.
“That’s a shame.”
I’ve been meaning to have a series like this for the longest time, now that things like this, coding-wise, are so simple, here we go.
Tesla to end Cybertruck production as sales stall at ~10% of plan
Tesla will wind down Cybertruck production in mid-2027. Musk blames Cybercab, but the truck sells at about a tenth of its planned 250,000 units a year.
electrek.co
Meta warns that election backlash against data centers could make AI expansion harder | TechCrunch
Meta warns that growing political opposition to data centers could threaten future AI investments, as communities push back against massive infrastructure projects.
techcrunch.com
It’s actually quicker now to make changes to my weblog’s functionality using Claude Code than finding, installing, and understanding WordPress plugins. No security issues either, it’s all flat files on the server. 🦾 🥳
They literally don’t build them like they used to.
The future used to be faster: celebrate the art and style of Concorde
‘Supersonic – 50 Years of Concorde’ is a one-off exhibition that puts the dramatic airliner back in the spotlight
www.wallpaper.com
New version of this blog, heavily influenced design-wise by the venerable and inestimable sippey.com. The website is built with Eleventy and just creates a bunch of files on the server, while posts are files mirrored in my main Obsidian vault. Now I’m also trying out something very old school, or at least very “log” in “weblog.” I have one weblog.md file with short microblogging (tweets basically) entries one after the other, just split by a *** (<hr />). The vibe coded app splits them into files when I deploy the website. The aim, of course, is to make posting as frictionless as possible. I never rekindled my interest in microblogging post Twitter exodus, and since Bluesky and Mastodon have virtually zero interactions for me, and I’m not interested in putting the effort, I might just throw things on my own domain. Perhaps a future upgrade will syndicate them to one service or another? Perhaps not.
Sometimes slop is better?
There’s a lot of talk about AI slop, ugly and/or unecessary things created too easily with various LLM tools. But there’s a also a certain style of web and email design that’s recognisably Claudeish (created by Anthropic’s Claude applications). And, well, that’s much better than a lot of the ugly, near illegible stuff we were getting before so that’s … good? At the same time, it’s so common that I’m also getting tired of it. So more polish but all the same polish, is it really better than before?