Weekly Link Roundup #67
How about that? Turns out, trust is important.
Roblox's Grow a Garden explodes online video game numbers: Why are some things like this SIGNALS for me? Let’s look:
“A gardening game created by a teenager on online platform Roblox has attracted a record 21 million simultaneous players, a figure rarely seen in the industry.” > > A solo creator, working on an existing platform, did this. Those are both insanely important - if you design your platform thoughtfully enough, and provide enough incentive structure, look what can happen. This can be true internally as well as externally. The need for huge teams is collapsing.
“The original creator "literally made the game in, like, three days", Splitting Point CEO Janzen Madsen told specialist website Game File.” > > Someone working solo did this. In DAYS. The distance between ideas and execution is collapsing. It also happened because the Roblox platform existed and the threshold of failure was low.
“Tait says the success of Grow a Garden, with its simple graphics and basic mechanics, can be explained by its comforting nature.” > > It doesn’t have to be a near-human talking avatar powered by the latest AI model to be engaging. Read that again. What it takes is thoughtful design.
Anthropic now lets you make apps right from its Claude AI chatbot: This is going to get cool/weird and fast: “Anthropic is adding a new feature to its Claude AI chatbot that lets you build AI-powered apps right inside the app. The upgrade, launching in beta, builds upon Anthropic’s Artifacts feature introduced last year that lets you see and interact with what you ask Claude to make.” > > How will you rate and assess people in your org who can build great apps/artifacts that save time/money and/or increase productivity? Will you hire for those roles or try to build from within? For #LearningAndDevelopment people, what will you do when folks can just build their own learning interfaces and apps to connect to and drill through all the available company content? Seriously, put your hands on this and try it. You won’t get it until you do.
UNESCO appoints Indigenous co-chairs to protect languages and knowledge amid climate crisis: So important. Well done UNESCO. The languages are also at risk from AI > > “Indigenous knowledge has long suffered under colonial rule, and now, Indigenous languages and ways of life are increasingly at risk due to climate change. More than half of the world’s 7,000 languages are on track for extinction, an end which could be hastened by the climate crisis. Sea level rise, storms, and rising heat are forcing Indigenous peoples to leave their homelands and making it harder for communities to maintain traditional languages, lifestyles, and cultural practices. Those same extreme weather events are exacerbating existing health risks for elders and other knowledge holders, some of whom are the last in their communities to be native language speakers. At the same time, traditional ecological knowledge, often captured within Indigenous languages, is increasingly seen as a climate solution.” See/hear also: Can AI Save Indigenous Languages? | Michael Running Wolf (Ep. 25).
Timelines, deadlines and lifelines: This looks like it would be an insanely cool workshop: “Timelines, deadlines and lifelines is a workshop that explores some of the habits we have of thinking with time that are inherited and powerful. The activities explore how these habits shape how we think about the possibility of change.” > > I mean when we think about change management or even April Rinne’s ‘change mindset’, how often do we consider how we envision time? I mean, look at this poster!
See also: Possibility and the temporal imagination > > “The selection of timing practices reflects dominant values and has material, cultural and social effects, bring particular activities into alignment and coordination, alienating others, drawing attention to and valuing different forms of change.” And: Educating the temporal imagination: Teaching time for justice in a warming world > > “This paper therefore explores how ‘teaching time’ can support the awareness of and attention to (in)justice. The paper discusses the limits of current approaches to teaching time in education and explores a range of practices for developing ‘temporal attunement’ (Jensen, 2023) that can be found in public arts, Indigenous education, educational philosophy, futures studies and decolonial praxis. It maps out five temporal educational practices of: relational time; rhythm; anticipation and reparation; temporal suspension; and critical time keeping. It argues that these practices can be put into dialogue as a basis for a ‘temporal pedagogy’ that comprises three moves: interruption (of habitual and dominant temporal frames and their production of injustice), attention (to the latent, situated, plural timings and rhythms of the situation), and encounter (through invitations to judgement about the temporal practices that should govern more just collective action in response to climate change).” > > Time is another one of those dimensions that we seem to think is a natural law when really, our perception of how time works is mediated and changed on a daily basis. Don’t think it is? Spend 10 minutes in line on a hot day vs 10 mins doing your fav thing ever. Same quantity. Different experience of time.
The Art of Looking Twice: Great read overall but this is worth it alone - that MIT study about “brain rot” and how AI will make you dumb? The conclusions were drawn from just 9 students who finished. C’mon people. Ask questions. Dig in. Maybe even just read the full abstract.
The L&D Shell Game: How We Became Accomplices in Our Own Irrelevance: Great read by Mark Sheppard > > Key point → “The real challenge is that we are trapped in a systemically flawed organizational design.”
How trust became the new currency of brand growth: This makes me think of Jerry Michalski and all the work he’s done on trust. Also reminds me of the Cluetrain Manifesto (a seminal document on how the Web changed things and one that people seem to have forgotten). From “what’s your story” to “how to build trust?” The real kicker? This is true for internal efforts as well.
See also: Walmart cracks enterprise AI at scale: Thousands of use cases, one framework > > With this nugget “Walmart continues to make strides in cracking the code on deploying agentic AI at enterprise scale. Their secret? Treating trust as an engineering requirement, not some compliance checkbox you tick at the end.”
Living Sketches: These Architects Are Bringing Drawings to Life With AI: These are gorgeous and mesmerizing. I love them for their beauty but also because I love architecture and I think we ignore it when we’re not thinking of a building. Architecture defines how we move through space, how we move through homes, offices, cities. And to think that influence on that scale doesn’t shape how we interact digitally is crazy. The way you navigate though a book lets say, exists nowhere outside that book and yet we build content that follows a book - chapter - section layout. We’ve seen virtual worlds that mimic the physical but I think that’s kind of like AI. AI isn’t thinking, it’s imitating thinking. Its a cosplay. What if we built digital spaces as if we had to live in them?
Flood of AI-generated resumes causes chaos for recruiters, who resort to AI to screen them: Something about turnabout being fair play? See also: Judge allows Workday AI bias lawsuit to proceed as collective action.
Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models: “On Monday, court documents revealed that AI company Anthropic spent millions of dollars physically scanning print books to build Claude, an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT. In the process, the company cut millions of print books from their bindings, scanned them into digital files, and threw away the originals solely for the purpose of training AI—details buried in a copyright ruling on fair use whose broader fair use implications we reported yesterday.” > > Yeah they bought the books legally but this still hurts.
These are the top 10 emerging technologies of 2025, according to the World Economic Forum: I usually have a pretty allergic reaction to lists like this but this one caught my eye. I think its because there are a couple of technologies on here that if they hit - could really be extraordinary > > GLP-1 drugs for neurodegenerative diseases, Engineered living therapeutics, and Generative watermarking, all have tons of potential.
Exclusive / Reddit in talks to embrace Sam Altman’s iris-scanning Orb to verify users: I’ll fix this headline - REDDIT LOOKS FOR NEW WAY TO UTTERAL DESTROY REDDIT IN SHORTEST TIME POSSIBLE. This is gross on so many levels > > “Reddit is considering using World ID, the verification system based on iris-scanning Orbs whose parent company was co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. According to two people familiar with the matter, World ID could soon become a way for Reddit users to verify that they are unique individuals while remaining anonymous on the platform. If World ID becomes one of Reddit’s third-party providers, it would be good news for Tools for Humanity, which was founded six years ago with the lofty goal of providing a universal basic income to the world by offering them cryptocurrency called Worldcoin in exchange for scanning their eyeballs with an Orb.” You want ME to use a 3rd party device and SCAN MY EYE, just so I have the honor of giving Reddit content that they will then sell into the training data sets of another AI company and the 3rd party you want to use, has the idea to life people out of poverty in return for their uniquely identifiable biometric data?? Seriously? wtf. hard pass. immediate no.
The 10 Most Anticipated Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books of the Rest of 2025: I’m going to keep saying it - MORE THAN EVER - you need to be reading some sci-fi. Things are moving so fast, you need to make sure that your brain and your thinking are open to new ideas - wacky ideas - ideas that could never happen, until they do. I finished Babel last month and R.F. Kuang has a new one coming out, Katabasis, that I’ll be picking up as soon as it hits. See also: Read The Best of SFF: The 2025 Locus Award Winners Are Here.