Links, December 26th, 2025

§Landslide; a ghost story

Erin Kissane is back with a wonderful (if long) piece about how we know things, and how the popularization of social media was an inflection point for decades of changes in how information is disseminated:

Millions of people came to a new and more accurate understanding of the prevalence of state violence against Black Americans; millions simultaneously came to a new and deranged understanding of vaccines, public health, and even germ theory.

This is what I think is happening: The knowledge substrate of our society has become increasingly loose and disorganized. It’s now composed of an extraordinary variety of highly disparate things that claim to be news, from vivid and skillful investigative reporting to openly partisan propaganda through the distributed op-ed cultures of podcasters, Substackers, and streamers.

And perhaps more frightfully, how it’s about to get a lot worse.

§The Kids Are Not Okay (With Tech)

A professor does a retrospective on banning device use in their courses, and provides some observations about their students’ relationship with what they perceive as technology, how they haven’t yet learned to channel their anger at feeling shamed by becoming addicted to products designed to be addicted at big systems, and what they perceive as the great literacy crisis – how first-year students often don’t have the grammatical ability to compose coherent sentences.

As the parent of a grade-school kid, I keep an eye on this stuff closely; sooner or later we’re going to have to introduce our kid to the internet, and I am not prepared for that. Apparently today’s college students are too:

Probably the most moving sentiment I heard from them and read in their work was an acute concern for those generations even younger than themselves, Gen Alpha and so on. Zoomers see themselves as having gotten some unmediated childhood play, with core memories of just going outside and running around, climbing trees, etc. But they don’t see their younger siblings getting that same experience. They’re very concerned about iPad babies.

§How We Lost Communication to Entertainment

The Fediverse is an interesting experiment in what social media might look like if it were run by anarchists and co-operatives, and in my time there I’ve witnessed plenty of conflicts about all sorts of things which this piece sums up nicely as

such irreconcilable opinions do not arise only from ignorance or oversight. It usually means that both parties have vastly different assumptions about the world.

This is a highly one-sided post about how Pixelfed – an attempt at creating an Instagram-like experience on top of ActivityPub (the plumbing of the Fediverse) – does not display posts which do not contain images. I disagree with many of the points the author of this post makes, but I think the piece is worth reading, regardless, because it strikes at the heart of what makes anarchistic software efforts difficult: people bring different assumptions about what the goal of the thing being built is supposed to be, and as is the nature of assumptions, the differences in these goals often don’t come out until they present as active conflicts.

§The Resonant Computing Manifesto: same AI slop, same AI guys

If you haven’t heard of “the Resonant Computing Manifesto”, consider yourself lucky – it’s such tripe, I’m not going to link to it. This piece places it in the storied history of Silicon Valley manifestos and what they mean by “freedom”, and just as how, when I’m on the fence about a local election I look at who’s endorsing it or who’s opposing it, when you look at who’s behind this, the motives couldn’t be more clear.

The Manifesto promises to fix everything that’s wrong on the internet right now. But you look at the authors and the signers, you’ll see the same guys who caused the present problems. These guys made it rich on the Torment Nexus and they’re now claiming they can fix it.

§Generative AI hype distracts us from AI’s more important breakthroughs

There is someone in my familial circles who has gotten very into diffusion-based generative artwork, and though they speak about the topic religiously, they try to fend off any criticisms of LLMs or Diffusers with “well AI could also solve cancer!”

The idea of Artificial Intelligence is and has always been a marketing term. In my own discussions on the matter I am making a concerted effort to avoid it (much as I try to avoid the exonerative tense and to especially describe traffic accidents as collisions) in favor of describing particular technologies by name.

This piece in the MIT Technology Review does not go that far, but it does hammer on this idea that what it calls “predictive AI” is fundamentally different both in purpose and results, and if you are similarly trying to discuss this sort of thing with people who aren’t as well-versed on the topic, a good thing to send them.

Alternatively, you could take the predictive approach: Simply locate and point to an existing picture of a cat. That method is much less glamorous but more energy-efficient and more likely to be accurate, and it properly acknowledges the original source. Generative AI is designed to create things that look real; predictive AI identifies what is real. A misunderstanding that generative systems are retrieving things when they are actually creating them has led to grave consequences when text is involved, requiring the withdrawal of legal rulings and the retraction of scientific articles.

§Waterway Map

An illustration of the world’s rivers, with width indicating the volume of water upstream of the point on the line. Finer details appear as you zoom in, it has all of the creeks near my house. Color coding is apparently by watershed. I was moderately surprised to learn that the Puget Sound apparently has less water volume than the Columbia River.

§in which our protagonist dreams of laurels

A meditation on the nature of free and open-source software, from the creator of Guile:

What I would like to say is that free software is a strategy. As a community of people that share some kind of liberatory principles of which free software has been a part, let use free software as best we can, among many other strategies.

§Public Domain Day 2026 is Coming: Here’s What to Know

Regular observers of copyright law’s favorite holiday know the drill: on January 1, 2026, a new crop of creative works from 1930 (along with sound recordings from 1925) will enter the public domain in the United States—ready to be remixed, recycled, or repurposed into B-grade horror films and ill-advised erotica.

It’s great to see things being put back into the commons.