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I had a similar experience my first day in Chiang Mai as I did in Dublin, overwhelmed by tourist tat.  It wasn’t until day two that I started to see past it to the reality.

We were at a photo exhibit about a local area within the old city, and all the captions said the same thing: Chiang Mai is drastically different than it was, all the families have moved away and those remaining are aging.  For some, the tourist explosion is a plus, allowing them to, for example, change jobs to become a tour director or sell more of their art, but for many it’s felt as a loss.  The people we meet are lovely,  but they are very focused on serving us in their many roles.  It doesn’t feel like I’m making a connection.

cgi.csc.liv.ac.uk/~coopes/comp319/2016/papers/UbiquitousComputingAndInterfaceAgents-Weiser.pdf

yes! And from 1992.

Or: How Africa is building the future by skipping the past
— Read on climatedrift.substack.com/p/why-solarpunk-is-already-happening

Yup yup. Waiting for creaky US infrastructure to catch up. Like watching England get leapfrogged after the Industrial Revolution.

A house divided against itself cannot stand.

No one's quite sure of the rationale.  I wonder if they're going to require all attending to take some kind of oath, and arrest or fire anyone who won't.

I think this is true: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-art

In particular, the idea of art as a series of choices is something I was thinking about recently, as opposed to life, which might be characterized as a series of responses.  Do we really choose dispassionately between options in life, or is that something that we infer when looking back on our lives?  Situations present themselves (good, bad) and w respond, sometimes well, sometimes catastrophically.

But art lies exactly in making choices, as the article describes.

There’s an article in the Guardian today about a book proposing reparations for slavery in the UK. It pointed out that such reparations need not be monetary. That got me thinking: perhaps the primary value for a reparations process is the accurate accounting of exactly what wrongs were done, and the cost of those wrongs. Often an accounting of the wrongs of the past amount to nothing more than generalized handwringing and a vague sense of guilt, but processes like the Waitangi Tribunal require detailed, specific analysis of wrongs and their ongoing consequences, which in itself constitutes a value.

www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/attention

With notes on how sustained attention may lead to synchronized biochemical processes that reinforce themselves.

Truth #11 of The Thirteen Truths of Superman
— Read on orphansandempires.substack.com/p/americas-kryptonite

inspired polemic