A curated collection of quotes from the brightest minds on the internet.
A more social IndieWeb | Dominik Hofer
My entry for the IndieWeb Carnival of December 2025 about the IndieWeb in 2030.
The IndieWeb Movement: Owning Your Data and Being the Change You Want to See in the Web · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer
A look at what the IndieWeb is, why you should care, and how to get started with it.
"I just find AI to be creatively soulless": Casey Hudson on the controversial tech and Star Wars: Fate Of The Old Republic
"I’m just really unimpressed with it."
The IndieWeb Is Punk Manifesto
Three chords and a domain name. A manifesto for the DIY web.
Reclaiming my digital identity — Open Indie
This post is the preamble of a 5-part series called The Great Untangling. The following four posts have already been published and are li...
Unreasonable Effectiveness
Seriously: Machines Do Not Need to Think to Be Thought About 💡As I am immersed in PhD research I am at risk of becoming increasingly dense and nerdy. So I am adding a "nerd rating" to posts from now on, evaluating my estimation of how niche a post probably is.
a guide to remembering yourself
Gradients of intimacy and creating shelter: An interview with Erin Kissane
How might we use nature as an inspiration for creating online communities?
Hardcover
We're a social network for book lovers to find life changing books, track what you read & want to read, and connect with passionate readers.
Many Minds: Seven metaphors for AI
If you wanted a petri dish for understanding metaphors—how they emerge and evolve and jostle with each other—it would be hard to do better than the world of AI. We talk about AI systems variously as coaches or co-pilots, little genies or alien intelligences. Some researchers claim that AIs "grow," that they're entering their phase of "adolescence." Critics deride AI products as slop and dismiss LLMs as a kind of autocomplete on steroids. What's behind these different characterizations? Which ones are accurate and which are unfair? And are our metaphors mostly colorful rhetoric or do they matter? Are they shaping how we understand, adopt, and ultimately regulate these new technologies? My guest today is . Melanie is a computer scientist and Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the author of the book, and she writes a by the same name. This episode is a bit of companion to with Steve Flusberg. In that episode, Steve and I attempted a kind of crash course on metaphor and the human mind. Here, Melanie and I sit down for more of an extended case study: how metaphors are guiding, galvanizing, and maybe deceiving us in the contested realm of AI discourse. We unpack seven of the most widely used metaphors in this space. We consider how these metaphors are shaping not only our everyday understandings of AI, but also law and policy. We also talk about the metaphor and analogy capabilities of AI itself. Can these system reason abstractly in the way that humans can? Along the way, Melanie and I touch on: AI-generated poetry, anthropomorphism, the original sin of AI research, the myth of Narcissus, psychometric testing and its pitfalls, metaphors for AI that are a bit hard to spot, and the question of whether an AI has ever come up with a decent analogy for itself. Longtime fans of the show will know that we've had Melanie on the show . We invited her back, not only because she's thought about metaphor and analogy in AI discourse for decades, but because she's a voice of calm insight in an area that’s increasingly awash in hype and polemic. Longtime fans of the show may also note that we are now celebrating our 6th birthday at Many Minds. That's right, the show launched in February 2020. If you'd like to support us as we recognize this milestone, you can leave us a rating or a review, recommend us to a friend, or give us a shout out on social media. Your support is always appreciated. Without further ado, on to my conversation with Dr. Melanie Mitchell. Enjoy! Notes 3:30 – For an overview of Douglas Hofstadter’s work on analogy, see . 8:00 – Much of our discussion in this interview draws on Dr. Mitchell’s piece on the in Science magazine. 13:30 – For earlier discussions of anthropomorphism on the show, see our earlier episodes and . 16:00 – See for the original discussion of LLMs as “stochastic parrots.” 17:00 – See for the original discussion of ChatGPT as a “blurry jpeg.” 18:30 – See for the original discussion of LLMs as role players. 22:00 – See for one use of the “LLMs as crowds” metaphor. See also a discussion of this metaphor (and other metaphors for AI) . 25:00 – For one discussion of AI as a “cultural technology” by Alison Gopnik and colleagues, see . For a more recent discussion of the same metaphor by Henry Farrell, Alison Gopnik and others, see . 27:00 – For the podcast series on intelligence that Dr. Mitchell co-hosted for the Santa Fe Institute, see . 28:00 – See for an influential formulations of the idea that AI is an “alien intelligence.” 29:00 – For philosopher Shannon Vallor’s book about AI as “mirror,” see . 31:00 – For the recent study on users’ metaphors for AI systems, see . 33:00 – For more on the rise of social AI, see our earlier episode . 38:00 – For more on what AI researchers might learn from developmental and comparative psychologists, see Dr. Mitchell’s (summarizing here keynote at NeurIPs). 42:00 – For more on the ARC (Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus) and the research that Dr. Mitchell and colleagues have been doing with it, see and . 48:30 – For the study on humans' preference for AI-generated poetry, see . 50:30 – For Brigitte Nerlich’s documentation and discussion of various metaphors for AI (including AI’s metaphors for itself), see . Recommendations , by Shannon Vallor ‘,’ by Murray Shanahan (!) et al. ‘,’ by Henry Farrell et al. Many Minds is a project of the , which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by , with help from Assistant Producer and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by . Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter ! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. For updates about the show, visit or follow us on Bluesky ().
Can AT Protocol Fix Monolithic Platforms?
your long-form atmosphere · pub search
what you publish, who reads it, your semantic neighborhoods, and what you recommend
Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong | Defector
For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, archive perusers, and history buffs who grew to love their areas of study because of the specific objects that constitute the field: the…
Build the web you want to see
My website, James’ Coffee Blog, is now over five years old. I seldom thought about how old my website was until recently, when I looked and realised that years had passed since the single black-and-white HTML page that comprised my site. “Hyperlinks are my friend,” I said, in a playful tone whose message foreshadowed my deepening appreciation for the web and what the web could be. Five years on, I find myself as invigorated about the web as I was at the beginning. I started what would become James’ Coffee Blog interested in blogging, seeing a personal website as a way to share words on the web. Those words would help me nurture my passion for writing. My website could, I learned, be a place for me to grow and experiment as a writer. Having a website encouraged me to ask the question what could I write today? Whether or not I published what I wrote, I was writing. I was making something. I was proud. My passion for the web is fuelled not only by my own experiences writing, but by seeing what others make. Seeing others’ websites, I have asked myself questions like How did they make that?, spurring my interest in web design. Web design is a topic I would later find the motivation to study in greater depth. I have been delighted by stories that people have shared, eliciting reactions in me from I see myself in this to That was fascinating! Blog posts on personal websites have made me curious, they have made me feel seen, they have satisfied my interest in learning – they have opened up new worlds, from the technical to the poetic, from the introspective to the collaborative. When I was thinking what would be a good fit for The Good Internet Magazine – a publication whose very existence makes me excited about the future of the web – a question came to mind: “what have I learned over the years that a new web weaver would find interesting?” Here is my answer to that question.
Weird Studies
Professor Phil Ford and writer J. F. Martel host a series of conversations on art and philosophy, dwelling on ideas that are hard to think and art that opens up rifts in what we are pleased to call "reality."
