I’m not the biggest fan of how Apple squeezed tasks into my calendar with the latest update. Structured does this a lot better. The app presents tasks and events in a visual timeline. The newest version includes an AI assistant to help with scheduling, automate task creation and offer personalised suggestions. Friends of DD enjoy 2 free months on Pro. Become a Friend to access specials like this.

As a real alternative to Goodreads, Storygraph and Hardcover, BookWyrm is a decentralised, open-source social platform for tracking reading, sharing book reviews, and discussing literature, built on the ActivityPub protocol. Users can create personal bookshelves, follow other readers, and participate in a federated network of book lovers.

I love the premise of this project: a platform designed to facilitate high-quality, public letter correspondences between politicians, authors, cultural leaders and the public, aiming to revive the art of letter writing for meaningful dialogue. It offers a space for in-depth discussions, allowing leaders to address critiques without interruption, and the public to engage with those hard to reach, mitigating the usual social media toxicity.

The website lacks detail and is annoyingly ambiguous, so here’s how I think USB Club works: you buy an (expensive) USB key which includes an invite to a platform where users share files (songs, designs, art, etc) but it’s unclear how the hardware and software interact. (Others are wondering too.) The prohibitive price tag makes it exclusive, for sure, but I quite like the idea of a physical key to access a community and share files with them.

A Brief History of Intelligence →

How our brains evolved and what it means for AI

A book that explores the evolutionary journey of human intelligence and its implications for AI. The author Max Bennett identifies five pivotal breakthroughs in brain evolution, illustrating how each has contributed to our cognitive capabilities. “How is it possible that AI can beat a grandmaster at chess but can't effectively load a dishwasher? As AI entrepreneur Max Bennett compellingly argues, finding the answer requires diving into the billion-year history of how the human brain evolved; a history filled with countless half-starts, calamities, and clever innovations.”

Fire Weather →

Survival and collapse in a new era of fire

Journalist and writer John Vaillant blends vivid storytelling with a deep analysis of how warming temperatures are reshaping our relationship with fire and the environment. “For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.”

Rebecca Jennings explores how Silicon Valley’s libertarian ethos has shifted to focusing primarily on cultural grievances, particularly opposing diversity and ‘woke’ ideals. This evolving tech bro culture is driven by fear of social change and a desire to reclaim a hyper-masculine identity. “Yet to the fans who buy into this worldview, it all sounds both true and, crucially, cool: Not only will the free-thinkers rescue humanity, but they’re doing it because it’s punk. “The very macho styling feels countercultural to them. I think it feels punkish: ‘There is a polite society that is dominated by feminine codes of behavior, and we are the insurgent uprising to that.’ To outsiders maybe that doesn’t make a great deal of sense, but if you’re a 14-year-old boy, I think it does make a lot of sense,” says Lewis. After all, what else is a Cybertruck but an admission of fear?”

I’m working my way through some episodes of the Bioneers podcast and this one I really enjoyed. The first half is mostly about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and how it was a wake-up call to the clash between the state of nature and the nature of the state. The award-winning lawyer and prominent climate justice organiser Colette Pichon Battle speaks so eloquently about the need for a new kind of governance that can address the climate crisis. Her words and work are profoundly inspiring. “⁠In order for the capitalist system to work, scarcity is a fundamental understanding of that system. If we break out of scarcity into abundance, we necessarily have to change an economic system that’s meant to just extract value for the few. And this system is something that we’ve all got to be able to challenge. Now, how do you challenge a system that you’re maintaining? This is not going to be easy. This is going to make a lot of people who understand security as the number of dollars in their bank account to understand security as something much different – a collective of community that people who show up for each other.”

Writer/journalist Lyz argues here that society often treats children as property rather than individuals deserving of safety and dignity. She makes some great points about the need for parents to earn their children’s respect that even as a non-parent I found quite compelling. “We raise children to become the things we hope for ourselves — but ultimately their lives are their choices. And when we create a world and laws that make it hard for them to survive, when we demand their unearned respect more than we demand their safety, we treat them as property rather than the promise they are.”