Substrate

Due to the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 and Online Safety Act 2023, the UK has become a hostile online environment for activists, leading the We Are Open Co-op to host Amnesty International UK’s community platform outside the country. Internet lawyer Neil Brown shares these concerns and is considering routing some of his traffic through servers outside the UK to preserve access and privacy.

The note describes Dirty Little Zine, a free browser-based tool for creating printable 8-page folded zines from a single sheet of paper. The author is working on a 40-page zine about Productive Friction and considers using this tool to produce a smaller companion "zinette." The idea evokes the whimsical extra "little tissue" given by a Big Issue seller.

Laurens Hof analyzes how the UK government selectively enforces its monopoly on legitimizing violence—cracking down on Palestine Action supporters while ignoring Elon Musk’s amplification of far-right riots. He argues that the "amplification layer" of social media creates a structure of permission that favors established power, and that decentralized networks could make this dynamic even harder to challenge.

A French TV forecast from 2014 depicting extreme heat in 2050 turned out to be accurate for 2026, illustrating how climate change replaces cooler weather patterns with hotter ones faster than expected. The note suggests that continued climate skepticism is now untenable.

The author reflects on the phrase "Thought for 2,682,000,000s" and notes it would make a fitting epitaph on their tombstone. They used AI imagery for this note, which they rarely do, because the opportunity was too good to pass up.

The note argues that the term "AI slop" is imprecise and unproductive, as it conflates distinct phenomena and shifts blame onto technology rather than the societal structures that enable low-quality content. It agrees with Manoel Horta Ribeiro that critiques should be more specific, noting that many pre-AI content forms already exhibited similar traits like superficial competence and mass producibility.

co/core is a cooperative where people share their own compute power to run AI for each other, instead of renting from large providers. The key innovation is an open standard for making inference requests and recording job results, allowing anyone to build their own exchange on top of it. This idea mirrors an earlier attempt to create a shared resource platform through WebRTC.

The note highlights Ryan Mather's advice on identifying and living by personal values, starting with understanding them as core principles even when unseen. It emphasizes setting small monthly goals aligned with those values and measuring daily progress, noting that values are what ultimately matter given life's inevitable end.

Bo Burnham discusses how corporations colonize our minds by capitalizing on every free second through social media and technology. The note reflects on the intense and insightful nature of his commentary on self-esteem and the effects of phones on kids and society.