How it goes these days

The cats seem to be fighting over time with me this morning—I’m sitting in the den with Pema, and Arthur’s standing at the door, begging to get in. This has become our routine, as we try to give them each time and attention while keeping them mostly separate (since Pema is wont to wreck Arthur, and he’ll let her, if given the chance). Slowly, in measured doses, we’re helping them get used to each other, but it’s a long (and still uncertain) road.

This week, highlights have included seeing T get excited about our upcoming vegetable gardening plans, enjoying the brightening, lengthening days, and sharing treats with friends.

• I hadn’t first read Gioia’s “dopamine culture” piece, but his own follow-up to it was enlightening on its own, on ritual as a counter to seeking dopamine.
• Mita Williams linked to Gioia’s piece and commentary on it, but also shared a host of thoughts and fragments on memory and learning, celebrating the “joy in the remembering you can do on your very own, without notebooks or machine learning”.
• Speaking of machine learning and so on, Ben Werdmuller floated a mechanism to pay royalties for the use of people’s work to train generative AI models. What I particularly like about this is how he pays attention to the different economic incentives of various actors in the space, pushing ultimately for individuals to get their due.
• Sarah Jeong, writing about the use of anti-hacking laws to prosecute journalists, offers a beautiful definition of journalism today: “journalism in the modern day is the act of using your computer in a way someone somewhere would really rather you did not”. (Thinking also about the murkiness around similar laws in Canada.)
• Paul wrote up his reflections on the Auditor General’s ArriveCan report, pointing to just some of those broader systemic issues that I’d hoped folks would discuss more. It’s characteristically excellent.
• Neat to see a former minister’s social media records going to Library And Archives Canada, even if the prompting circumstances are… unusual. As ever, left wondering about the format LAC will take these in, its capacity to serve born-digital records, and how long it’ll actually be until they’re somewhat accessible to the public!
• Many of you shared this with me, which I appreciate you for: the process of updating the crown imagery for GOV.UK.

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas