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Understanding which kind of trust is at play—predictive, vulnerability-based, or performance-based—does more than give you insight. It gives you choice. You can be clearer about what kind of trust you’re building, what kind you’re relying on, and where things might be breaking down.
It’s worth asking:
- Are you relying on predictive trust where performance-based trust is actually needed?
- Is there space in your team for people to say “I don’t know” or “I need help”?
- Do your people know what it takes to earn performance-based trust from you?
- Are there behaviours you’re tolerating—because they’re predictable—but they’re holding the team back?
Not All Trust is Created Equal by Carlos del Cueto and Matthew Vandermeer
”Power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”
Vint Cerf
Wednesday 2 July, 2025 | Memex 1.1 by Wednesday 2 July, 2025 | Memex 1.1
Brendan, I wish I could write political songs, there are some great ones out there. It would all be much simpler, more certain, and dependable – get up in the morning, go online, get enraged, turn it into verse, inspire thousands, change the world – but I’m just not that kind of songwriter. I’m not trying to save the world, Brendan, I’m trying to save the soul of the world.
Nick Cave – The Red Hand Files – Issue #330 – This is a question about music not death or anything like that, (have you ever started writing a song and said screw it I can’t figure out the middle or the end and just said screw it. And then a couple months later or so it hits you like a ton of bricks, now I got it)? : The Red Hand Files by Nick Cave – The Red Hand Files – Issue #330 – This is a question about music not death or anything like that, (have you ever started writing a song and said screw it I can’t figure out the middle or the end and just said screw it. And then a couple months later or so it hits you like a ton of bricks, now I got it)? : The Red Hand Files
Liddiard and Dunn’s Big Ups selections reveal insight into the TFS ethos: their penchant for improvisation, their obsession with detail, and above all, their commitment to uncompromising music. It’s a celebration of local friends, long-distance love affairs, and weirdos who deserve more than toiling in obscurity. These are the selections that keep TFS feeling grounded, in a truly menacing timeline.
Tropical F*ck Storm Pick Their Bandcamp Favorites | Bandcamp Daily by Tropical F*ck Storm Pick Their Bandcamp Favorites | Bandcamp Daily
We end up in an odd place.
Here, we deliberately leave the old dichotomies behind, but they never truly leave us. It is an explicit rejection of the old categories – a move away from the old, while not yet grasping the new. A liminal space, still defined by its past in the negative: post-capitalism, post-colonialism, post-modernity.
It’s the intentional negation of the binary of master and slave, with both lingering in the background. It’s the “I don’t see color” that points so heavily toward what it aims to move away from. In this space, the old binaries are neither affirmed nor entirely erased—they haunt us, even as we strive to transcend them.
Whether you’re a developer looking to run AI locally, a researcher experimenting with models, or someone just tired of hitting usage limits, you’re in luck. The open-source AI world has been booming with local alternatives that give you full control over your chatbot experience—offline, private, and hackable.
10 best open source ChatGPT alternative that runs 100% locally – DEV Community by 10 best open source ChatGPT alternative that runs 100% locally – DEV Community
There are many valid reasons to read, but if you’re about self-improvement in one way or another — an increase in knowledge or insight or, hey, even wisdom — then one of the most reliable ways to become a better reader is to read fewer books but read them with greater care. If you would be wise, an essential book you know intimately — through slow reading or repeated reading — is of more use to you than a dozen lesser books that you know only casually.
getting through – The Homebound Symphony by getting through – The Homebound Symphony
>pro AI >dose music commissions – @imsobadatnicknames2 on Tumblr by >pro AI >dose music commissions – @imsobadatnicknames2 on Tumblr
I have no idea what era of music we’re even in, now. Do we still *do* that, eras of music?
Honest peer review, even or especially when it’s highly critical, is a real gift to the scholar being reviewed.
peers – The Homebound Symphony by Alan Jacobs
can’t remember where I saw it but “Using AI in education is like using a forklift in the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you” is a solid quote
It’s not easy to summarise this 13,000-word article by Ed Zitron, nor decide which parts to pull out and highlight. The main gist is that our economy is dominated by managers who lack real understanding of their businesses and customers. Their poor decisions are fueled by decades of neoliberal thinking, which promotes short-term gains over meaningful contributions. The name Zitron gives to these managers is “Business Idiots” who thrive on alienation and avoid accountability.
Our society is in the thrall of dumb management, and functions as such | Thought Shrapnel by Our society is in the thrall of dumb management, and functions as such | Thought Shrapnel
It doesn’t matter if anyone believes the unreality of what they’re seeing online. Misinformation and disinformation don’t actually need to convince anyone of anything to have an impact. They just need to make you question what you’re seeing. The Big Lie and the millions of small ones online, whatever they happen to be wherever you’re living right now, just have to cause division. To wear you down. To provide an opening for those in power, who now have both too much of it and too few concerns about how to wield it. The populist demagogues and ravenous oligarchs the internet gave birth to in the 2010s are now firmly at the helm of the global order and, also, hooked up to the same chaotic, emotionally-gratifying global information networks that we all are, both social and, now, AI-generated. And, also like us, they are being heavily influenced by them in ways we can’t totally see or predict. Which is how we’ve ended up in a place where missiles are flying, planes are dropping out of the sky, and vulnerable people are being thrown in gulags, all while our leaders are shitposting about their big, beautiful plans for more extrajudicial arrests and genocidal territorial expansion. Assured by mindless AI chatbots that their dreams of world domination and self-enrichment are valid and noble and righteous. And there is no off ramp there. Everyone, even the folks with the nuclear codes, is entertaining themselves online as the world burns. Posting through it and monitoring the situation until it finally reaches their doorstep and forces them to look up from their phone and log off.
All we have are vibes and the vibes are bad by All we have are vibes and the vibes are bad
What I’m loving here — of course! — is human effort, human exploration, figuring it out, trial and error, rough edges, things in progress: the rough ground. I’m basically repeating here the message of Nick Carr’s book The Glass Cage, and much of Matt Crawford’s work, and more than a few of my earlier essays, but: automation deskills. Art that hasn’t been taken through the long slow process of developmental demonstration — art that has shied from resistance and pursued “the smooth things” — will suffer, will settle for the predictable and palatable, will be boring. And the exercise of hard-won human skills is a good thing in itself, regardless of what “product” it leads to. But you all know that. Demos and sketches and architectural drawings are cool, is what I’m saying.
deskilling and demos – The Homebound Symphony by Alan Jacobs
I’ve got a few decent habits after so many years. They are external to AI coding but help me navigate that world, use the right words, ask the right questions, have certain suspicions. Might I develop similar, but very different, habitual patterns of action and thought if I learned to generate code solely within AI? Probably, but AI definitely puts an additional layer of abstraction between me and actually generating/learning code. If my goal is just to have the product, I think it’s mainly removing a layer of abstraction (at least in the short term and when it works). I think the AI path also encourages just spinning the wheel . . . kind of like randomly cut/pasting StackOverflow code in to solve problems but with infinite generation options. That feels like a kind of learned helplessness to me but I might be biased.
Claude’s Vibe Coding Misdirection – Bionic Teaching by Claude’s Vibe Coding Misdirection – Bionic Teaching
There are “selfish” activities, he said, which you do without thinking about other people. The opposite of that would be “selfless” activities in which you think of others without thinking about yourself. His point was that there are also “self-full” activities that allow you to meet your own needs while not preventing others from meeting their own.
Weeknote 23/2025 – Open Thinkering by Doug Belshaw
If an author has used AI and you can tell there are clunky parts in the text, and it ruins the experience of reading, then it’s bad. But if they have used it at the margins and you remain unaware, then maybe it doesn’t matter.
Creativity, AI and awkward questions – The Ed Techie by Martin Weller