We don’t notice technologies that quietly solve the problem they were intended to solve. I’ve never seen a rage post about light switches. Or wrenches. Or locks. Or pencils.

AI, and a lot of the technologies we complain about, are business models that prioritize value to the producer over value to the buyer or user. They aren’t technology per se, so much as a shoddy product wrapped in unrealistic promises.

gotta be triangles

a little too close to reality, tbh

In a recent series of experiments, we paid people a few dollars to unfollow the most divisive political accounts on X. After a month, they reported feeling 23% less animosity towards other political groups. In fact, their experience was so positive that nearly half the people declined to refollow those hostile accounts after the study was over. And those who maintain their healthier newsfeed reported less animosity a full 11 months after the study.

Twitter got a lot better when I unfollowed the peeps whose tweets I hated. But it also got boring, so I stopped using it (this was loooong before Trump, Elon, etc).

There’s probably a lesson there.

Pretty sure she’s proposing to the pizza. After mating with it, she will consume it, like some sort of spider (or other creature where the female eats her mate).

Unless we plan to go back to bartering, basic financial literacy is important. It doesn’t make you an evil exploiter to understand that we use money

Pretty much this. If people have a better understanding of how our system is supposed to work, they’ll get angry when the rich bad people take advantage of it.

The questions weren’t about esoteric financial instruments that allow the rich to get away with murder, they were home ec style questions:

Stuff like

• Imagine that someone puts €100 into a savings account with a guaranteed interest rate of 2% per year. They don’t make any further payments into this account and they don’t withdraw any money. How much would be in the account at the end of five years, once the interest payment is made?

• Now imagine the following situation. You are going to be given a gift of [€1,000] in one year and, over that year, inflation stays at 2%. In one year’s time, with the [€1,000], will you be able to buy: [more, less, or the same]

• Which of the following is true? An investment with a higher return is likely to be: [more risky, less risky]

Maybe part of the reason governments keep bailing out bad financial moves by private companies is because the electorate has decided investing is black magic and ignores it.