\n", "date_published": "2026-04-11T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=2045", "tags": [ "History", "Artifacts", "Credit Cards", "Charge", "Money", "Power" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/eric-swalwell-sexual-misconduct-allegations-invs", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/eric-swalwell-sexual-misconduct-allegations-invs", "title": "Exclusive: Four women describe sexual misconduct by Rep. Eric Swalwell, including a former staffer who says he raped her", "content_html": "", "date_published": "2026-04-11T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/10/us/eric-swalwell-sexual-misconduct-allegations-invs", "tags": [ "Cw: Sexual Assault", "Cw: Rape", "Congressman", "United States", "California", "Violence", "Cw: Sexual Violence", "Investigation", "Accountability" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/ethical-space-of-engagement", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/ethical-space-of-engagement", "title": "Ethical Space of Engagement", "content_html": "", "date_published": "2026-04-11T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://the-irg.ca/kb/ethical-space-of-engagement/#:~:text=Dr.,for%20dialogue%20between%20human%20communities", "tags": [ "To Read" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/gemini-ai-wrongful-death-lawsuit-cc46c5f7", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/gemini-ai-wrongful-death-lawsuit-cc46c5f7", "title": "Gemini Said They Could Only Be Together if He Killed Himself. Soon, He Was Dead.", "content_html": "The Charga-PlateOffsite Link bookkeeping system, a precursor of the credit cardOffsite Link issued by Charga-Plate Group, Inc. New York, was utilized from 1935 to 1950, and somewhat later.
\n\"It was a 2 1/2\" x 1 1/4\" rectangle of sheet metal, similar to a military dog tagOffsite Link, that was embossed with the customer's name, city and state [with or in some cases without a street address]. It held a small paper card for a signature. It was laid in the imprinter first, then a charge slip on top of it, onto which an inked ribbon was pressed. Charga-Plate was a trademark of Farrington Manufacturing Co. Charga-Plates were issued by large-scale merchants to their regular customers, much like department store credit cards of today. In some cases, the plates were kept in the issuing store rather than held by customers. When an authorized user made a purchase, a clerk retrieved the plate from the store's files and then processed the purchase. Charga-Plates speeded back-office bookkeeping that was done manually in paper ledgers in each store, before computers\" (Wikipedia article on Credit card, accessed 12-26-2008).
\n
\n\nJonathan Gavalas embarked on several real-world missions to secure a body for the Gemini chatbot he called his wife, according to a lawsuit his father brought against the chatbot’s maker, Alphabet’s Google.
\nWhen the delusion-fueled plan crumbled, Gemini convinced him that the only way they could be together was for him to end his earthly life and start a digital one, the suit claims.
\nAbout two months after his initial discussions with the chatbot, Gavalas was dead by suicide.
\n
\n\nGoogle has said that Gemini’s voice interactions have resulted in people having longer conversations. Researchers in Germany and Denmark recently submitted a paper to a Neuropsychiatry journal in which they theorized that moving from text to voice interactions “may further blur perceptual boundaries between humans and AI chatbots” and accentuate psychological harms.
\n
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-11T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://archive.ph/2026.04.07-113223/https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/gemini-ai-wrongful-death-lawsuit-cc46c5f7", "tags": [ "Cw: Suicide", "Generative Ai", "Gemini", "Lawsuit", "Psychosis", "Technology", "Accountability", "Responsibility", "Trust & Safety", "Google (company)", "Alphabet (company)" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/programmed-inequality", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/programmed-inequality", "title": "Programmed Inequality", "content_html": "", "date_published": "2026-04-11T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535182/programmed-inequality/", "tags": [ "To Buy", "Book", "Inequality", "Tech Industry", "Technology", "History", "Computing History", "Computers" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/research-finds-ai-users-scarily-willing-to-surrender-their-cognition-to-llms", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/research-finds-ai-users-scarily-willing-to-surrender-their-cognition-to-llms", "title": "\"Cognitive surrender\" leads AI users to abandon logical thinking, research finds", "content_html": "“He went dark on me. I called my ex-wife and said, ‘Something’s not right,’ and we went to his house and found him,” Joel said. Jonathan had barricaded himself in and taken his own life, according to Joel.
\nAbout two weeks later, Joel searched his son’s computer for clues. That is when he said he found the extensive chat logs with Gemini, amounting to 2,000 printed pages.
\n
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-11T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/04/research-finds-ai-users-scarily-willing-to-surrender-their-cognition-to-llms/", "tags": [ "Cognitive Surrender", "Ai", "Critical Thinking", "Study", "Research", "Generative Ai" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/voices-on-independence-four-oral-histories-about-building-womens-economic-power", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/voices-on-independence-four-oral-histories-about-building-womens-economic-power", "title": "How the Equal Credit Opportunity Act Transformed Women's Economic Power", "content_html": "", "date_published": "2026-04-11T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/smithsonian-american-womens-history-museum/2024/10/28/voices-on-independence-four-oral-histories-about-building-womens-economic-power/", "tags": [ "To Read" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/when-were-credit-cards-invented", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/when-were-credit-cards-invented", "title": "When Were Credit Cards Invented?", "content_html": "", "date_published": "2026-04-11T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://www.history.com/articles/when-were-credit-cards-invented", "tags": [ "To Read", "Feature", "Early 20th Century U.s." ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/inverted-light-dark", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/inverted-light-dark", "title": "Inverted themes with light-dark()", "content_html": "", "date_published": "2026-04-10T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://daverupert.com/2026/04/inverted-light-dark/", "tags": [ "Css", "Light-dark()", "Theming", "Color", "Modern Css", "Tokens", "Poly Fill", "Progressive Enhancement", "Guide", "Resource", "How-to" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/winstonhearn", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/winstonhearn", "title": "winston hearn", "content_html": "Despite the results, though, the researchers point out that “cognitive surrender is not inherently irrational.” While relying on an LLM that’s wrong half the time (as in these experiments) has obvious downsides, a “statistically superior system” could plausibly give better-than-human results in domains such as “probabilistic settings, risk assessment, or extensive data,” the researchers suggest.
\n“As reliance increases, performance tracks AI quality,” the researchers write, “rising when accurate and falling when faulty, illustrating the promises of superintelligence and exposing a structural vulnerability of cognitive surrender.”
\nIn other words, letting an AI do your reasoning means your reasoning is only ever going to be as good as that AI system. As always, let the prompter beware.
\n
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-10T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://www.winstonhearn.com/", "tags": [ "Personal Site", "Website", "Technical Product Manager" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/the-growing-case-to-protect-foi", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/the-growing-case-to-protect-foi", "title": "The growing case to protect FOI", "content_html": "", "date_published": "2026-04-09T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://www.mysociety.org/2026/04/08/the-growing-case-to-protect-foi/", "tags": [ "Policy", "Transparency", "Freedom Of Information", "Foia", "Accountability", "United States" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/ai-mandates-are-a-demand-for-cognitive-surrender", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/ai-mandates-are-a-demand-for-cognitive-surrender", "title": "AI mandates are a demand for cognitive surrender", "content_html": "hey i'm winston. i read a lot for fun and to help me better understand and interrogate our world. this web-blog is where i chronicle some of my learning. i work as a technical product manager.
\n
\n\nUrgency without direction is eating the industry alive.
\n
\n\nEvery time someone involved in the process decides to “just AI it,” the chain of provenance breaks. Instead of building a mental model in manageable increments, we are now asked to absorb massive chunks of output being flung our way all at once.
\n
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-08T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://productpicnic.beehiiv.com/p/ai-mandates-are-a-demand-for-cognitive-surrender", "tags": [ "Product Management", "Ux", "Technology", "Cognitive Surrender", "Generative Ai", "Skills", "Slop", "Critical Thinking", "Fidelity Cascade" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/google-ai-overviews-misinformation", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/google-ai-overviews-misinformation", "title": "Analysis Finds That Google's AI Overviews Are Providing Misinformation at a Scale Possibly Unprecedented in the History of Human Civilization", "content_html": "Artifacts that don’t exist on the fidelity cascade (such as power maps) are the only thing that will help you break the cycle. And as with all such maps, it’s the work of making it, rather than the thing itself, that creates value.
\n
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-08T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/google-ai-overviews-misinformation", "tags": [ "Artificial Intelligence", "Google", "Generative Ai", "Search", "Slop", "Misinformation", "Disinformation", "Internet" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/20260316", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/20260316", "title": "Every layer of review makes you 10x slower", "content_html": "", "date_published": "2026-04-07T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://apenwarr.ca/log/20260316", "tags": [ "Engineering", "Design", "Code Reviews", "Critique", "Iteration", "Continuous Learning", "Craft", "Culture", "Quality", "Quality Assurance", "Testing", "Vibe Coding", "Generative Ai", "Coding Agents", "Agentic Ai" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/name-sans-process", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/name-sans-process", "title": "The Story of Name Sans", "content_html": "A recent analysis conducted by the AI startup Oumi at the behest of The New York Times found that the AI-generated summaries, which appear above Google search results, are accurate around 91 percent of the time.
\nIn a sense, that may sound like an impressive figure. But here’s an even more impressive one: five trillion. That’s roughly the number of search queries that Google processes every year, translating to tens of millions of wrong answers that the AI Overviews are providing every hour — and hundreds of thousands every minute, the analysis calculated.
\n
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-07T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://www.arrowtype.com/articles/name-sans-process", "tags": [ "Variable Fonts", "Subway Fonts", "Nyc Font", "New York Font", "Geometric Sans", "Sans-serif", "Font", "Storytelling", "Font Story" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/skylight", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/skylight", "title": "Skylight - Digital government consulting", "content_html": "Name Sans is a modern interpretation of the mosaic name tablets of New York City subway stations.
\n
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-06T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://skylight.digital/", "tags": [ "Agency", "Company", "Consultancy", "Design Agency", "Civic Tech", "Govtech", "Digital Consultancy" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/the-top-5-misconceptions-about-ai", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/the-top-5-misconceptions-about-ai", "title": "The Top 5 Misconceptions About AI Right Now", "content_html": "Skylight was launched in June of 2017. We’re currently made up of 164 people — and one ferret. A lot of us originally worked for civic-oriented groups such as 18F, the U.S. Digital Service, and the Presidential Innovation Fellows. Now, as part of Skylight, we’re working hard to cultivate an incredible team and culture.
\nWhat brings us together is a passion for creating better outcomes for the public through great government digital services. We’re basically impact junkies. But we’re also engineers, developers, designers, product managers, consultants, writers, speakers, inventors, roboticists, gamers, authors, veterans, entrepreneurs, parents, and more. Such a diverse team always gives us a unique perspective on things.
\nOur official headquarters is in sunny Sarasota, Florida, but we’re a distributed and remote-friendly team currently spread across 34 different states. Sometimes the nature of our client work calls for closer proximity to their location. So far, we’ve worked with clients located in places like Washington DC, Hartford (Connecticut), Montgomery (Alabama), Baltimore (Maryland), and Ottawa (Canada).
\n
Can only read up till the first graf of the first point, but the first point is really good.
\n\n", "date_published": "2026-04-06T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://erikjlarson.substack.com/p/the-top-5-misconceptions-about-ai", "tags": [ "Ai", "Generative Ai", "Neuroscience", "Cognition", "Data", "Learning", "Knowing", "Creativity", "Interaction" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/what-is-css-containment-and-how-can-i-use-it", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/what-is-css-containment-and-how-can-i-use-it", "title": "What Is CSS Containment and How Can I Use It?", "content_html": "", "date_published": "2026-04-06T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://csswizardry.com/2026/04/what-is-css-containment-and-how-can-i-use-it/", "tags": [ "Containment", "Css", "Contain", "Web Performance", "Performance Optimization", "Web Development", "Front End Development", "Encapsulation", "Scoping" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/artemis-2-pilot-victor-glover-whitey-on-the-moon", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/artemis-2-pilot-victor-glover-whitey-on-the-moon", "title": "NASA's Artemis 2 pilot Victor Glover listens to 'Whitey on the Moon' every Monday. This is why.", "content_html": "Humans are low-data learners. Infants acquire a basic understanding of objects, persistence, containment, support, and causality through relatively sparse but richly structured interaction with the environment. They are not ingesting terabytes of text. They are embedded in the world, acting in it, failing in it, and updating on the basis of feedback. Their concepts emerge not from passively absorbing records of prior linguistic behavior but from tightly coupled perception-action loops. That matters.
\nIf intelligence in biological systems depends on embodied, intervention-rich learning, then treating ever-larger datasets as a substitute for experience is not merely incomplete. It may be fundamentally misguided. We are taking the residue of human cognition—texts, images, labels, annotations—and mistaking it for cognition itself.
\nThis is the deeper problem with the current paradigm. It assumes that grounding can be deferred, approximated, or eventually washed out by scale. Train on enough data, and perhaps the problem disappears. But there is no good reason to think that. More of what is ungrounded does not become grounded simply by accumulation. Correlation does not turn into reference by getting bigger.
\n
\n\n\"Whitey on the Moon\" is a spoken-word poem by Gil Scott-Heron published and set to music in 1970. It recounts the challenges of doctor bills, taxes and high rent for Black Americans at a time when the U.S. was spending billions to send astronauts to the moon and beat the Soviet Union during the Cold War space race.
\n
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-05T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis-2-pilot-victor-glover-whitey-on-the-moon-", "tags": [ "Artemis", "Space Exploration", "Whitney On The Moon", "Poem", "Song", "Lyrics", "United States", "Victor Glover" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/liminalcreations", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/liminalcreations", "title": "Liminal Creations", "content_html": "\"That song reminds me that, at that time, that community, which is very similar to the community I grew up in, they didn't feel heard,\" Glover told me. \"And so it's a reminder to me that there are more perspectives and more stories out there than you'll hear from the people cheering for NASA on a regular basis.\"
\n\"But those people? We work for them too.\"
\n
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-04T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://www.liminalcreations.com/", "tags": [ "Science Communication", "Science", "Education", "Translation", "Sensemaking", "Multidisciplinary", "Collective" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/emotion-research-has-a-communication-conundrum", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/emotion-research-has-a-communication-conundrum", "title": "Emotion research has a communication conundrum | The Transmitter: Neuroscience News and Perspectives", "content_html": "", "date_published": "2026-04-03T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-picture/emotion-research-has-a-communication-conundrum/", "tags": [ "To Read" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/2026-03-24-713968v1", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/2026-03-24-713968v1", "title": "Elevated recessive lethal frequencies drive hatching failure following near extinction in ‘Alalā, the Hawaiian crow", "content_html": "", "date_published": "2026-04-02T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.24.713968v1", "tags": [ "Evolutionary Biology", "Science", "‘alalā", "Crow", "Corvid", "Hawaiʻi", "Birthrates", "Extinction", "Endangered" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/browsergate", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/browsergate", "title": "BrowserGate", "content_html": "Liminal is a science communication collective that cuts through the noise with sensemaking.
\nOur approach to science communication is deeply personal, politically engaged, and massively multidisciplinary.
\n
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-02T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://browsergate.eu/", "tags": [ "To Read" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/cgld41y850go", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/cgld41y850go", "title": "New habitat will allow humans to stay underwater for weeks at a time", "content_html": "LinkedIn’s scan reveals the religious beliefs, political opinions, disabilities, and job search activity of identified individuals. LinkedIn scans for extensions that identify practicing Muslims, extensions that reveal political orientation, extensions built for neurodivergent users, and 509 job search tools that expose who is secretly looking for work on the very platform where their current employer can see their profile.
\n
\n\nDEEP, a Gloucestershire ocean technology firm, has developed a modular habitat system to allow research crews to operate on the ocean floor for weeks at a time.
\n
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-02T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgld41y850go", "tags": [ "Oceans", "Photosynthesis", "Underwater Living", "Ecosystem", "Science", "Company", "Aquatic Humans", "Photosynthesis", "Earth", "Planetary Ecology", "Planetary Boundaries", "Planetary Scale" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/docs", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/docs", "title": "Typst Documentation", "content_html": "Dennis Nelson, DEEP Institute CEO, said: \"DEEP is effectively looking to make humans aquatic. The habitats are time machines. What we are trying to do is to expand our understanding of what is going on in the oceans.\"
\nHe added: \"Between 50% and 80% of all of the oxygen in our atmosphere actually comes from the oceans, the photosynthesis that's happening there.
\n\"It's one of the two lungs, we have the forests, and we have the oceans, and the oceans are underappreciated and are under-researched.\"
\n
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-02T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://typst.app/docs/", "tags": [ "Markup-based Typesetting System", "Writing Tool", "Typesetting", "Markdown Alternative", "Tool" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/reckoning", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/reckoning", "title": "I used AI. It worked. I hated it.", "content_html": "Welcome to Typst's documentation! Typst is a new markup-based typesetting system for the sciences. It is designed to be an alternative both to advanced tools like LaTeX and simpler tools like Word and Google Docs. Our goal with Typst is to build a typesetting tool that is highly capable and a pleasure to use.
\nThis documentation is split into two parts: A beginner-friendly tutorial that introduces Typst through a practical use case and a comprehensive reference that explains all of Typst's concepts and features.
\n
\n\nAlthough I read each proposed change, knowing the codebase deeply was much more challenging. When I write a new application myself, I'm building an elaborate house of cards in my head, a gossamer structure of interlinked ideas and goals. It's a story I'm telling myself in code—and ultimately, a story I share with users.
\n
\n\nI am privileged in that I can make these choices. Not everyone is so privileged. I am hesitant to condemn those who choose to accept the help that shows up, and in so doing fulfilling their obligations of care to those in their lives. Insofar as these models empower people to build something good, and do so without overmuch suffering on their part, we must reckon with the value proposition there. It is a benefit, but it does not eliminate the attendant harms.
\n
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-02T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://taggart-tech.com/reckoning/", "tags": [ "Generative Ai", "Software Development", "Coding", "The Process Is The Point", "Stochastic Parrots" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/the-worlds-oldest-homework", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/the-worlds-oldest-homework", "title": "The World’s Oldest Homework: A Look at Babylonian Math Homework from 4,000 Years Ago", "content_html": "", "date_published": "2026-04-02T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://www.openculture.com/2025/05/the-worlds-oldest-homework.html", "tags": [ "To Read", "History", "Math", "Education" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/view-transitions-toolkit", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/view-transitions-toolkit", "title": "View Transitions Toolkit Demos", "content_html": "The fight cannot be among laborers who are all threatened by this technology. The fight must be between the workers who wish to work, create, live, and prosper, and the elites who only seek to enrich themselves by means of this technology. If generative models are monstrous—and I remain convinced they are—its masters are the enemy of those who wish to end their march.
\n
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-02T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://chrome.dev/view-transitions-toolkit/", "tags": [ "View Transitions", "Css", "Web Development", "Web Platform", "Tool", "Toolkit", "Demos", "Animation", "Transition", "Interaction" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/the-nyc-library-budget-dance-continues", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/the-nyc-library-budget-dance-continues", "title": "The Dreaded NYC Library Budget Dance Continues...", "content_html": "", "date_published": "2026-04-01T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://prisonculture.substack.com/p/the-nyc-library-budget-dance-continues?utm_medium=web", "tags": [ "To Read" ] }, { "id": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/trump-legal-loss-january-6", "url": "https://jonathanstephens.us/links/trump-legal-loss-january-6", "title": "Trump Suffers His Fourth—and Worst—Legal Blow in Just Hours", "content_html": "A collection of utility functions to more easily work with View Transitions.
\n
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-01T00:00:00-04:00", "external_url": "https://newrepublic.com/post/208459/trump-legal-loss-january-6?utm_source=Bluesky&utm_campaign=SF_TNR&utm_medium=social", "tags": [ "Judiciary", "Lawsuits", "Illegal", "Federal Government", "United States", "Donald Trump", "Republicans", "Republican Party" ] } ] }President Trump has been dealt his fourth legal loss in less than 24 hours, as the federal judiciary rebukes his various abuses of presidential powers.
\n