A weekly collection of links to interesting things curated by Colin Wright.
Why Do We Say “Like,” Like, All the Time?
You can use it sometimes to draw attention or highlight. It can also be used to hedge what you say. And a lot of times you use “like” to indicate that this is a subjective estimation of something. So you could say, “He’s like a doctor or something,” which is indicating I don’t exactly know what he does, but it’s something like a doctor.
Russia and China Defy the West Deep in the Arctic
Norwegian officials say that while China doesn’t appear to be an immediate security threat in the region, it is building its capabilities for the future.
“Russia feels like a tornado, something in your face that you have to react to,” said Hedvig Moe, who was deputy director of PST, the security agency, until May 2023 and is now a counsel at Oslo-based law firm Thommessen. “China is like climate change, it is slower, it is happening over time,” said Moe, who grew up on Svalbard. “But one day you might wake up and think, oh my God, look at what happened here.”
The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age
There are no words to describe the opposite sensations of being at-our-job and being not-at-our-job even if we know the feeling of crossing that threshold by heart. But the most essential quality that makes a job a job is that when we are at work, we surrender the power to decide the worth of what we do. At-job is where our labour is appraised by an external meter: the market. At-job, our labour is never a means to itself but a means to money; its value can be expressed only as a number—relative, fluctuating, out of our control. At-job, because an outside eye measures us, the workplace is a place of surveillance. It’s painful to have your sense of worth extracted.
The Users Who Overtook the Machine
It was, I think it’s safe to say, Peak Blog. Pioneers like Susanna Lau, also known as Susie Bubble, and Bryan Yambao, also known as Bryanboy, had paved the way for those traditionally considered “outsiders” in the industry—i.e., not white, skinny, rich “nepo babies,” or the recipients of flashy degrees (or, in some cases, even legal adults)—to become insiders in their own right. Bloggers like Medine, who had little to no previous professional experience, were attracting a readership that was so widespread and influential—and lucrative—that it forced the establishment to take notice. Compared to print pages, their content felt fresh, friendly, and earnestly obsessed.
Trying a Dozen New Workouts Helped Me Move (Literally) Through the Trauma of a Major Breakup
In addition to the dance class, I took up paddleboarding, then snowshoeing when the lake near me in Minnesota froze over. I tried indoor rock climbing, then switched to outdoor climbing in an old quarry, followed by ice climbing that left scrapes in my cheeks from falling chunks of ice. After buying a VR headset, I spent hours in the virtual realm smashing floating blocks and learning the difference between an uppercut and a right hook.
Drawn to hybrid-style classes, I did PiYo, bootcamp HIIT, natural movement that involved lots of crawling, and plenty of yoga sculpt, joking with friends that it combines "the worst of both yoga and strength training, then throws in cardio for more trauma bonding between students." My ridiculously fit and much younger nephew challenged me to a Tough Mudder, and I responded with: Game on.
Main Character Syndrome
You have probably heard of MC behaviour—or perhaps even witnessed it online or in person. A TikToker and her followers physically push aside those inconvenient extras ‘ruining’ their selfies – and then post their grievances on social media. A man on a crowded subway watches a loud sports broadcast without headphones while ignoring other commuters’ requests to turn it down a bit. This is no mere rudeness: in the narrowly circumscribed world of main characters, the rest of us are merely the insignificant ghosts who happen to intrude on their spaces.
China’s Biggest AI Model Is Challenging American Dominance
“Qwen 72B is the king, and Chinese models are dominating,” Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue wrote in June, after a Qwen-based model first rose to the top of his company’s Open LLM leaderboard.
It’s a surprising turnaround for the Chinese AI industry, which many thought was doomed by semiconductor restrictions and limitations on computing power. Qwen’s success is showing that China can compete with the world’s best AI models — raising serious questions about how long U.S. companies will continue to dominate the field. And by focusing on capabilities like language support, Qwen is breaking new ground on what an AI model can do — and who it can be built for.