Friday’s Finds

On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds

Shared by my Daughter” “I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are”. In response to “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear”. via @itisboller

The Odyssey may likely be the first example of misogyny in a written work. —Retrieving Gender Balance

“One day, Penelope comes downstairs and she hears a bard singing very sad songs about how difficult it is for people like Odysseus, her husband, to get home. And she says to the bard, quite understandably, ‘Oh bard, play something a bit more cheerful.’ And this young, wet-behind-the-ears teenager Telemachus comes over to her and says, ‘Oh mother, shut up. Speech is man’s business.’” —Mary Beard

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“I reject the idea that we have to be slaves to surveillance capitalism in order to participate in the modern economy.” —Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew, after rejecting a 350-acre data centre outside of Winnipeg, via @Dulce Maria

“When I first encountered a word processor, decades ago now, it was as if my writing and my mind were suddenly liberated from the text-to-paper prison of yesteryear. Free to add, subtract, shift, experiment, hone, refine, or chuck and restart, I found that the entire writing process became an exciting adventure. I have no interest in offloading that excitement, that adventure, to AI.” —@jd

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

Anytime anyone says: “thoughts and prayers” — my response is going to be: “pitchforks and torches” —@Julie Webgirl

Could this be because they can recognize it as mansplaining as a service? — @Diogenes Pontifx
“… women were consistently more skeptical than men that AI benefits would outweigh its risks, and were less convinced that their professional lives would gain because of the technology.” —Fortune

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

The Four Classes of Military Officers (Or Office Workers): Clever, Diligent, Stupid and Lazy

Clever and Lazy: While most senior leaders will deny this classification, it applies well, and not just for the reasons cited by Hammerstein-Equord. These are the leaders who have the breadth of experience and depth of wisdom to ask the right questions, see the future for what it is, and make the right decisions under the greatest duress. They’re also renowned for finding the simplest solutions to the most difficult problems, and that drives a lot of people crazy.

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Grab your pens and shovels, rabble rouser rebels. Take to the streets. Dig in for the long haul! Globally, communities of creative resistance are saying no to bullies. Artists and scientists, homemakers and caretakers, workers and kindreds in kindness and LOVE. — Unite. CREATE! Imagine. Fear not!” —Sheree Fitch

A new world is being born’: author Rebecca Solnit on the ‘slow revolution’ the far right cannot tolerate

A government can take away your rights, but no one can take away your belief in those rights. The first points of challenge to fascism are memory and history.” … “I often quote my friend Bill McKibben [the environmentalist]. We were sitting on a concrete floor at an activist space during the Paris climate treaty process [the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015]. Somebody walked up and asked him a question he gets asked all the time. ‘What’s the best thing I can do as an individual?’ He said, ‘Stop being an individual.’ You may have your own quirky playlist and eye-makeup techniques, but you also have this solidarity. When you act, you act with others.”

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Those who love how machines ‘think’ tend to think like machines themselves.” —Fiona Tribe

Software engineering in 2026 be like “we need you to be physically present in the office so we can replace you with AI” —Tilton Raccoon

“No, I don’t want an AI assisted experience. I want clean air, forests, and a future for the next generation.” —Greenpeace

Oh, sure—when *the company* automates my job and keeps collecting the profits, that’s “innovation,” but when *I* automate my job and keep collecting a paycheck, that’s “time clock fraud.” —Max Leibman

Gall’s Law: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.” —Antoine Buteau

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Rights aren’t rights if they can be taken away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country: A bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news, even badly, you know that the list gets shorter and shorter” —George Carlin

“GenAI sits at the intersection of fascism, capitalism, labor, climate change, and environmental degradation. It is the quintessential technology of our time, the epitome of our current struggles. Defeating it is the key to defeating capital.” —Ben Lockwood

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

RETRACTED: Safety Evaluation and Risk Assessment of the Herbicide Roundup and Its Active Ingredient, Glyphosate, for Humans

via @Jan Wildeboer

The article’s conclusions regarding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate are solely based on unpublished studies from Monsanto, which have failed to demonstrate tumorigenic potential. The handling (co) Editor-in-Chief also became aware that by the time of writing of this article in the journal, the authors did not include multiple other long-term chronic toxicity and carcinogenicity studies, that were already done at the time of writing their review in 1999. —Science Direct [undated retraction but assumed to be recent, after 25 years since original publication]

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” —Viktor Frankl

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“The real power of PKM shows up not at the end, but in the consistent rhythm of seeking, sensing, and sharing.” —Bonni Stachowiak

“America putting most of its eggs in the generative AI basket, China going hard into green tech. When history looks back on this period, someone is going to look awfully stupid.” —Nicholas Grossman

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“Little men in lofty places throw long shadows, because our sun is setting.” —Walter Savage Landor

“AI isn’t just like an intern, but like a *dishonest* intern. With careful supervision it can be productive enough to be useful. But you have to know what it’s doing better than it does, and watch it like a hawk And unless there’s something specific it offers that saves you time or gives you access to information you wouldn’t have otherwise, it probably isn’t worth that effort. I’m starting to wonder if the necessary skill for the AI age is going to be knowing where those lines should be drawn.” —tokyo_0

“It helps to understand that LLMs are basically machine learning programs for finding statistical relationships in language use. It’s an advanced form of the sort of ML that digital humanities researchers have used to, say, chart the incidence of sexist language in English literature over time. So there are logical uses for LLMs, but a) they’re mostly limited to the study of language, and b) they don’t necessarily justify the costs piling up around commercial startups like OpenAI and Anthropic.” —@lrhodes

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