Interesting links for the week of July 17

This is what I thought robots would be doing. Instead, they are taking over everything else. Before you know it, they’ll be keeping us as pets to mow the lawn for them - or something. I quite like seeing Robbie (I don’t know if that’s his name or if he even has one, but he is Robbie to me) going methodically, deliberately, contentedly about his business. Snipping a bit here, cutting a bit there. He clearly lives his best life, the life he was meant to live.

What To Do With Communist Decay is a long story focusing on a particular building in Bulgaria, the monumental Buzludzha, The Memorial House of the Bulgarian Communist Party. It is a question that can easily be extended to a range of monuments and buildings that today form a part of a controversial built heritage. Nobody seems to have a good answer to the question what to do with it.

This story about Jony Ive, former Apple chief designer, is fascinating. His obsession with craft and the ability to bring together equally obsessed experts is inspiring. This story focuses on the development of a typeface, but it is also about much more: “Consider that six months ago, the atomic bomb of AI generators fell upon all of us, promising to automate the process of writing, design, and art. At best, the youngest generations among us will be working with a boxed cake mix of creativity—quick, easy, and on rails. At worst, we will lose deep expertise of the fields we hold most dear as masters of craft go extinct.”

Where are the eco-hackers - asks a Tech Monitor story focusing on a relatively free ride the world polluters are gettign from the hacker community.

I have been learning how to sketch on and off and always found it to be a very relaxing and absorbing activity. It turns out it is also the best way to help you learn new things.

If, like me, you grew up playing Tetris, Fudge is really going to mess with your mind. Incidentally, Tetris was kind of a weird, but absolutely watchable film: