Neil's Digital Stream

planted: 02/04/2026last tended: 14/04/2026

My stream, a companion to the garden.

1. Recent blog posts

My 7 most recent daily notes. (A list of all can be found at the Journal index).

It's a shame that the end of Windows 10 is being capitalised on by Google to capture people to Chrome OS Flex.
- It's a perfect opportunity for a little bit of technological liberation and a move to Linux.
- Rather than a jump from one Big Tech ecosystem to another.

Reflecting upon the use cases of current AI, they feel mostly boil down to doing something you could feasibly have done before, but now you can do it faster, and yourself rather than needing help from others.
- I suppose that's pretty much a description of all technology.
- So the question is do you really need to do it that fast? How come? At what cost? (As with all technology).
- If a technology can be used to increase emancipation, reduce toil, for all, without exploiting labour or nature, then good. If not, scrutiny is required.
- AI can reduce toil, the others seem uncertain.

Jammed:
- Autechre - Piezo
- daniel.mp3 - green to blue
  
  Via
  E
- Hania Rani - Alberto
  - Emotive piano.
Bookmarked:
Read:
- Gen Z 212 and Youth Protests in Morocco: From the Digital Sphere to the Street
- The left is missing out on AI
  - Only skim read, but argument seems to be that left critique of AI is overly focused on the fact that LLMs don't represent AGI.
  - I don't know if that's true. I do agree that purely critiquing AI on it not being actually intelligent seems flawed.
  - To describe LLMs as just a kind of fancy autocomplete seems a bit disingenous.
  - To me, LLMs/GenAI seems like a quite remarkable technology but currently with remarkably authoritarian technics.
  - The question of whether they could ever have democratic/libertarian technics seems like a good debate to have.
As I create more main notes, a graph view of constellations would become increasingly handy.

Zettled:
- GNU/Linux is the libre alternative to Windows
- Libre software is not automatically liberatory software.
Bookmarked:
- State of the Fossil-Free Internet Report
A benefit of 'writing in public', via a digital garden / zettelkasten, is that, if you cared, it would be fairly easy to audit that the writing has been constructed by a human.
- You could trace the journey of bookmarks -> reference notes -> main notes -> structure notes -> posts.
- Especially if there's some kind of version control (via wiki software or a git repo).

Not a lot happening in these, but for reference:

Notes that link to this note (AKA backlinks).