I like the look and sound of Obscura, a ‘provably’ more private VPN service: “Even ‘no-logs’ VPNs see both your identity and your internet activity, meaning you have to blindly trust their pinky-promise for privacy. This is exactly why some privacy-conscious folks will tell you not to use a VPN at all. Obscura is different – we never see your decrypted internet packets. It’s simply impossible for us to log your internet activity, even if we were compelled to, or if our servers were compromised. You can even verify this yourself.”

A crowdsourced website that provides cost-of-living data and other quality-of-life comparisons for cities around the world, allowing users to compare expenses like housing, groceries and transportation across different locations. It’s fun to explore, but since it’s mostly crowdsourced info, take the data with a grain of salt.

A free little macOS app that makes finding emojis quick and easy: just type ‘:’ (colon) and describe the emoji you want to add.

This little tools lets you generate a heatmap to figure our where you should live in order to optimise travel time to friends/family/work. From me it’s a big ‘Yes’ to deciding about a location based on access to people you care about!

Journalist Ken Klippenstein coins a new term for the unprecedented power held by the tech billionaires bending the knee to the new US administration: appistocracy. Unlike traditional oligarchs, their influence is more intimate and pervasive – the apps of the ruling class have become deeply embedded in our daily lives. “Oligarchs are nothing new, but these six men have a power over us that is more intimate than other billionaires. They collectively build, run, and control what can only be likened to an appendage of our own human bodies, a new organ that most can’t imagine losing or losing access to.”

I enjoyed this short piece by Craig Mod on our cultural impulse to immediately discard the trash we generate. In Japan, there are few rubbish bins, which encourages individuals to take responsibility for their waste instead of abandoning it. Perhaps owning your garbage promotes a healthier relationship with consumption? “This obsession with the immediate ‘unburdening’ of a thing you created is common in non-Japanese contexts, but I posit: The Japanese way is the correct way. Be an adult. Own your garbage. Garbage responsibility is something we’ve long since abdicated not only to faceless cans on street corners (or just all over the street, as seems to be the case in Manhattan or Paris), but also faceless developing countries around the world.”

The always eloquent Robin Sloan about the impact of language models on creativity and the commons, questioning whether their use contributes positively to society or undermines human flourishing. I appreciate and largely agree with his reasoning here: “If an AI application delivers some profound public good, or even if it might, it’s probably okay that its value is rooted in this unprecedented operationalization of the commons. If an AI application simply replicates Everything, it’s probably not okay.”