Links

Short posts pointing to things from around the web.

Stop Amplifying — or Stop Being Fed

Why Are We Giving So Much Weight to What Influencers and Celebrities Have to Say? ↗ — Hannah Glenn, Hannah is Spiraling

Hannah Glenn’s right that fame carries no correlation to expertise, yet we keep treating famous people as authorities on gender, politics, eating disorders — anything charged enough to trend. Her fix: stop giving these opinions our attention.

I’d go a step further. The reason we can’t stop is that we’re never just encountering a celebrity’s opinion — we’re being served it, repeatedly, by a system that profits from our reaction. Attention discipline is real, but it’s a fair fight only if the stream stops pushing. At some point the question isn’t “whose opinions are we amplifying” but why we keep tolerating a feed built to provoke us in the first place.

When do we take power back over our own feeds, services, algorithms?

Down to the Second

Eclipses should be celebrations of science, not pseudoscience ↗ — John Gruber, Daring Fireball

Wednesday’s eclipse will cross Greenland, Iceland, and Spain — and astronomers called the exact time and path years ago, to the second. Gruber wrote this in 2024, and it’s aged into something sharper than he probably intended. Two years on, we’re not just tolerating pseudoscience as harmless — we’re watching institutions built on evidence get gutted by cranks, grifters, and zealots, who all get airtime and coverage as if they’re offering an equally valid take.

The eclipse is a good reminder of what happens when you do the math: you get the right answer, on time, every time.

New in iOS 27 DB 5

Everything New in iOS 27 Beta 5 ↗ — Julie Clover, MacRumors

Good roundup of everything new in today's developer beta. This is shaping up to be a much-needed quality-of-life update. Hopefully, our long national nightmare of software quality issues in Cupertino is over. Though it's still too early to call.