Hybrid #8

So many endeavors – we saw examples from writing, math, creative cooking, and design – start with messy, rough, experimental thought and then focus down, usually going through cycles of revision and iteration.

Most of the time we hide that mess. Others only see the final show. They don’t see the countless hours of failed experiments and rehearsal.

What might we build to support the messier stages of thought for students? Knowing that it’s absolutely normal to start messy is certainly a great lesson. It’s also great to understand how to systematically get to creative clarity by alternating generative and editorial mindsets.

⤷ Messy thought, neat thought, May-Li Khoe

To love walking is to love the body, and this has been a barrier for me. Walking requires us to be a physical presence moving in a physical space. Your body is on display, with all its jostling parts and creaky joints. I know it’s vanity—this self-consciousness, this awareness of other people’s eyes—but it was something I shouldered when I walked, something that made me seek the comfort of a climate-controlled car.

[…]

I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to look up at it. Such an odd sensation to straighten and tilt my head back. It was a rare sunny day in Exeter. I shielded my eyes with my hand and felt like a flower willing itself through the ground. Then I waved at the gargoyle. I don’t know why. Cars whizzed by. People walked on both sides of the street—parents like me, getting their kids from school. The steeple of St. Leonard’s Church was in the distance, a beautiful marker of how far it was to Bodhi’s school. I headed toward it, my head high, learning a new way of being.

⤷ On Walking, Ira Sukrungruang

digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence

⤷ Merriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of the Year: Slop

We are waiting because a defining feature of generative AI, according to its true believers, is that it is never in its final form. Like ChatGPT before its release, every model in some way is also a “low-key research preview”—a proof of concept for what’s really possible. You think the models are good now? Ha! Just wait. Depending on your views, this is trademark showmanship, a truism of innovation, a hostage situation, or a long con. Where you fall on this rapture-to-bullshit continuum likely tracks with how optimistic you are for the future. But you are waiting nonetheless—for a bubble to burst, for a genie to arrive with a plan to print money, for a bailout, for Judgment Day. In that way, generative AI is a faith-based technology.

⤷ The World Still Hasn’t Made Sense of ChatGPT, Charlie Warzel

And what’s worse is that other industries are getting increasingly comfortable with that monetise & weaponise strategy I was mentioning above. The mainstream gaming industry, which has weaponised fun and entertainment and monetised the hell out of it with online services, microtransactions, and gambling-like tactics that have turned players into ludopaths. The car industry, which has transformed cars into smartphones or tablets on wheels, and showered them with tech gadgets while almost forgetting basic stuff like offering vehicles that are pleasant to drive simply for the sake of driving and that can help people disconnect from a daily routine already drowning in tech and bad habits. Or basic stuff like providing a driving experience that is more focused on security than infotainment systems that distract drivers and passengers, and ‘smart solutions’ that dangerously lull drivers into a false sense of security (hi, Tesla!)

⤷ This time it’s not fatigue, but disconnection, Riccardo Mori

The new Amazon Alexa with AI has the same basic problem of all AI bots, it acts as if it’s human, with a level of intimacy that you really don’t want to think about, because Alexa is in your house, with you, listening, all the time. Calling attention to an idea that there’s a psuedo-human spying on you is bad. Alexa depends on the opposite impression, that it’s just a computer. I think AI’s should give up the pretense that they’re human, and this one should be first.

⤷ Dave Winer

…For example, in the same entry in which Queen Victoria proclaimed her love of industry and loathing of idleness, she gave a precise schedule of her day:

I awoke at ½ past 7 and got up at a ¼ past 8. At ½ past 9 we breakfasted. At 1 we lunched … At ½ past 1 came Baroness Howe and Sir Wathen Waller. At a ¼ past 2 we went out walking … till a ¼ to 3. At a ¼ to 6 I played with Mamma till a ¼ past 6 … At 7 we dined. I stayed up till a ¼ to 9.

⤷ Victorian diary-writers kicked off our age of self-optimisation, Elena Mary

If people feel a little like audience members observing their friends’ lives when looking at social media, that’s probably in part because people think of their friends as audiences when posting. Certain scholars describe social-media posts as falling somewhere in between interpersonal and mass communication. (They call it “masspersonal.”) Research has also shown that when posting, people tend to have an “imagined audience” in mind—which may not always line up with who really sees their posts. Contributing to the blending of the social with the parasocial, many regular people post to their small followings in the style of influencers: They speak directly to the camera (“Hey, guys”), or curate their photo dumps to display just the right blend of playful, cool effortlessness.

[…]

This, in turn, affects how people consume posts. As the ratio shifts toward content that isn’t truly social—and as social media is experienced more as entertainment than as a place for connection—perhaps, people will be more likely to just tune in and zone out rather than bothering to interact with the friends they do still see there. “My gut tells me that that expectation that the audience responds has plummeted,” Jeffrey A. Hall, a communications professor at the University of Kansas, told me. So it would make sense that “any gains we used to get from that amount of small interaction in the social-media stream also go away.” Although researchers aren’t yet sure exactly what this phenomenon means for relationships, Hall said that he considers it “part of the long sunset of the public social network as being the place where we see sociality.”

⤷ The Great Friendship Flattening, Julie Beck