Cool links of the week

I collect cool, interesting links spread all over the web and share them here in weekly posts. Hope you enjoy!

Petrichor. New offline music player for macOS. Reminds me of iTunes from the good old days. And it’s open source.

Blanket. A Linux app (Gnome/GTK) that creates sounds and noise. On macOS? Try Blankie.

Abdisa Dev. I have a soft spot for websites that simulate terminals.

Export YouTube subscriptions into RSS. Much easier than adding channels one by one to a feed aggregator.

A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004. Try accessing it on a computer to see (and interact with!) the preference screens from various system versions.

URL to Any. Various tools for manipulating web page content. Free.

Reachy Mini. Hugging Face, an LLM (AI) repository, has put this cute (and open source) robot on pre-order, designed for teaching robotics with artificial intelligence. For USD 449 (wireless) or USD 299 (“lite” version, works tethered to a computer).

CPU-X. Linux alternative to Windows’ CPU-Z, an app that displays information about your computer’s processor, motherboard, and graphics card.

Notepin. An “extremely simple” blogging platform.

Weather Watching. An “AI” camera analyzes clothing and the presence of umbrellas among pedestrians on a New York street to give a weather forecast. Perhaps the world’s most inefficient weather forecasting.

Packet. Linux app compatible with Android’s Quick Share protocol (the “Android AirDrop”).

FolderDrive. An external drive (128 GB) shaped like the macOS folder icon.

Hued. Try to guess the color of the day. You get three chances.

Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

Primesweeper. A minesweeper game but with prime numbers instead of bombs.

Katamari Node-Modules. The Katamari game, but with node.js modules as objects.

⚠️ This Slack error page “weighs” over 50 MB. Here (Safari, cache disabled) it hit 110 MB.

Open RSS. A service that turns any page into an RSS feed.

Revisiting my digital security model

Digital security is what results from balancing defenses with convenience. There’s no point in completely shielding yourself if accessing your private spaces is difficult; on the other hand, an easy-to-remember password (123456, for example) is almost the same as having no password at all.

This Manual has always leaned toward the shielding side, sometimes making situations unnecessarily difficult when a bad outcome (breach, data loss/theft) is unlikely. In 2024, I made a course correction that I promised to share1. Here’s that update.

The “eureka moment” came when I realized there was a third element in that security × convenience equation: the human being protected.

Someone politically exposed or dealing with sensitive third-party data, for example, needs a more robust security apparatus. Someone like me? Not so much.

In this reflection, I changed two things I consider most relevant.

The first was abandoning the YubiKey, a physical cryptographic key used as a second authentication factor. Instead of typing that random six-digit code (TOTP, time-based one-time password) generated by apps like Google Authenticator, I would plug in the YubiKey or tap it with the back of my phone to activate it via NFC. I wrote about YubiKey in June 2021.

Abandoning the YubiKey was motivated more by convenience, or rather the inconvenience of using it, from frustrating scenarios (being out and needing to access a site or app dependent on the key left at home) to more routine ones that add up in frustration (the key being in another room of the house).

TOTPs already provide an extra layer of security that’s good enough for someone who isn’t a target of sophisticated actors — me and probably you. And it’s always with me, on my phone and computer.

The second change was regarding TOTPs. Instead of creating and managing them in a specific app, I migrated them to the password manager.

This change goes against best recommendations, because if the password manager is compromised, the barrier provided by TOTP falls with it. It’s somewhat like having two locks on the door and carrying both keys on the same keychain.

The “accepted risk” here is greater than that of dispensing with the YubiKey. I’m aware and agree to continue.

The lock and key metaphor doesn’t account for a more likely scenario than password manager breach: password leaks by the services themselves. That’s what worries me most. Even in this “all eggs in one basket” arrangement, TOTP would remain useful. With the password but without the random code, my account that had its password leaked would remain secure.

In parallel, passkeys are a new proposal to complement or completely replace passwords and second-factor authentication. I’ve already delved into the subject (April 2024) and revised my opinion a month later. I keep following the technology’s development with genuine interest.

  1. All links to blogposts written in Portuguese. Sorry, I didn’t have an English blog at the time. ↩

Anonymous and mild sensibilities have currency because today’s music — whether created and curated by humans or machines — is so often used to make people feel nothing instead of something. […] This music is not meant to be listened to directly; it’s used to drown out everything else.

White man, with prescription glasses, black beard and long hair, black and straight. Black and white photo.Ian Bogost
The Atlantic

Ian reflects on the small success of Velvet Sundown, a band made by artificial intelligence that was already approaching 1 million streams on Spotify. “This is second-order music listening, in which you experience the idea of listening to music. What better band to provide that service than one that doesn’t even exist?”

Cool links of the week

I collect cool, interesting links spread all over the web and share them here in weekly posts. Hope you enjoy!

Six years of Gemini. The protocol, not Google’s AI.

New Ensō, first public beta. A text editor without editing, which made some noise on the internet years ago.

zenta. Mindfulness without leaving the terminal.

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No one likes meetings; they’re sending their AI note takers instead

The Washington Post reports on the discomfort that white-collar professionals are experiencing with the increasing presence of AI note-taking bots in video calls. There are cases where there are more bots than human beings in meetings.

This might be a positive result of the chaotic adoption of artificial intelligence in companies. When everyone is sending bots to online meetings and reading text summaries of them, maybe these people will finally realize that all those meetings could have, in fact, been emails.

How technologies of connection tear us apart

The subtitle of Superbloom, the latest book by American writer Nicholas Carr, might surprise those who have never stopped to question or even observe the media: “How technologies of connection tear us apart.”

Sounds contradictory, doesn’t it? Yes, but it makes sense. With the delicious prose that’s characteristic of him — and which, from time to time, is offered to us in his newsletter —, Carr reviews the history of communication technologies from a new perspective, one in which, because of development focused on eliminating friction and accelerating the speed of information, the social fabric deteriorates.

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Alerts fatigue, or would that be journalism fatigue?

The Guardian picked up an interesting finding (among many interesting ones) from the 2025 edition of the Digital News Report, perhaps the world’s largest press survey, produced annually by the Reuters Institute:

Analysis by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that 79% of people surveyed on the subject around the world said they did not currently receive any news alerts during an average week. Crucially, 43% of those who did not receive alerts said they had actively disabled them. They complained of receiving too many or not finding them useful, according to the research, which covered 28 countries.

There was a time, around 2014, when phone notifications were seen as a phone’s “premium real state,” a battleground for people’s attention, who were already saturated by the volume of digital information.

Unsurprisingly, the notification area also ended up saturated and discarded as yet another digital dumping ground. I suspect many people don’t even care what’s there, accumulating dozens, hundreds of unread, ignored notifications.

The obvious focus of the Reuters Institute research, journalism, reminded me of an excellent short piece by Ricardo Fiegenbaum, a researcher at objETHOS, a research group from Federal University of Santa Catarina. A decidedly non-academic text [pt_BR] (in the best sense), in which he thinks aloud about journalism’s place today:

It’s in this mined, paradoxical, complex and uncertain terrain that I enter when I think about journalism. And every question that presents itself in this scenario — logical, ideological, pragmatic, technological, discursive, etc. — always leads me to the fundamental question: what are we talking about when we talk about journalism?

It’s a good question.

I suspect the fatigue transcends notifications and that much of what’s currently understood as “journalism” escapes one of the profession’s noblest definitions, one that Ricardo mentions: serving societies’ information needs.

From the archives: in 2022, in light of that year’s Digital News Report edition, I was asking myself — echoing Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso — who reads so much news anyway [pt_BR].

You’re going to use Gemini on Android whether you like it or not

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Google sent an email to Android phone owners warning that Gemini “will soon be able to help you use Phone, Messages, WhatsApp, and Utilities on your phone, whether your Gemini Apps Activity is on or off.” The change is scheduled for July 7th.

The notice generated confusion even in Android-focused publications. — 9to5Google, Android Police, Android Authority. Even after clarifications, including a statement from Google itself, the whole thing remains… confusing.

From what I understand, if Gemini Apps Activity is disabled, Gemini will continue to be available and have access to the mentioned apps, including WhatsApp and Phone. The difference is that interactions with the AI won’t be recorded in the history and will be stored by Google for up to 72 hours, with the guarantee that they won’t be used to train AIs or reviewed by humans.

(In other words, leaving history enabled subjects interactions to AI training and reviews by other humans.)

Those who *really* don’t want Gemini meddling with calls, messages, WhatsApp, and system settings need to disable integrations with each app within the Gemini app itself. Which seems to be another thing, different from Gemini Apps Activity. I presume it’s this app.

The aforementioned specialized publications, after updating their stories to “clear up the confusion,” concluded that the net result of the change is positive for people’s privacy. I’m not so sure about that. Confusions of this type, which sound intentional and try to hide the “nuclear” toggles (that disable the offered feature), tend to be defeats for privacy. And I won’t even get into the merits of whether Gemini snooping through my messages is good or bad.

Or maybe I still don’t understand it properly.

Related link (I think?): the extensive Gemini Apps privacy center.

All of these stories have the same intellectual validity as writing “I’m alive!” on a piece of paper, photocopying it, and then saying “Look! In our analysis, the photocopier says it’s alive!”

White man, short hair, prescription glasses with black frame.Benedict Evans
Issue #597 of his newsletter

The story he’s referring to is from an Anthropic “study” that found that generative AIs will “lie, cheat and steal” to achieve their goals. Yes, because they were instructed to do so.

Hiding metrics from the web

In 2012, artist Ben Grosser released a browser extension called Facebook Demetricator. Once installed, it hid all metrics from Facebook’s interface: likes, comments, notifications, unread messages, and so on.

“What’s going on here is that these quantifications of social connection play right into our (capitalism-inspired) innate desire for more,” he explained.

In creating his extension, Ben questioned why there were so many numbers “a system (and a corporation) that depends on its user’s continued free labor to produce the information that fills its databases.”

All of this in 2012!

More than a decade later, I feel we haven’t internalized Ben’s ahead-of-his-time discoveries. Even alternatives that position themselves as opposites to the abusive practices of commercial platforms like Facebook — think of Bluesky and Mastodon — insist on interfaces packed with numbers. It almost seems like we’ve lost the ability to imagine other models of digital interaction.

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Can AI-generated photos be art?

At the exhibition Indomitable Presences, currently showing at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, works by artist Mayara Ferrão are on display. Created using generative artificial intelligence, they emulate old photographs in order to “resignify the past”: indigenous and enslaved women kissing (example), scenes that probably occurred but of which we have no records for obvious reasons.

The Rio CCBB’s Instagram profile has been getting into arguments with some followers who are outraged by the promotion of art created with the help of AI. Even on profound topics that still lack answers from those who make a living finding these answers (philosophers, in general), @ccbbrj is taking a stance:

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Markdown in Windows 11 Notepad

My instinctive reaction to the news that Windows 11 Notepad has gotten text formatting support was to reject it outright. What a blasphemy! After reading the article, however, it seemed quite interesting: the formatting is Markdown, you can toggle between formatted and plain text with a click, and most importantly, you can completely disable formatting in the app’s settings.

(This is yet another reason why it’s always good to read beyond the headline. Microsoft’s blog post announcing this feature, for example, doesn’t mention Markdown, which made me expect the worst.)

TextEdit, macOS’s notepad equivalent, offers rich formatting (*.rtf format). It’s horrible. I think I only use it when I open the app for the first time after reinstalling the system or when setting up a new computer. My first move is always to switch the default to plain text in the settings.

That said, I would love for macOS TextEdit to have native Markdown support, even if it were just syntax highlighting — that is, without rendering the formatting.

Back to Windows Notepad, I learned that the version Microsoft has been updating with cool features (Markdown) and questionable ones (Copilot/AI) over the past three years is actually a whole new app. And that the old app — the one that was abandoned by Microsoft for over two decades — remains accessible at C:\windows\system32\notepad.exe. And if the new one is uninstalled, the old one automatically becomes the default. It’s good to have a backup when major changes hit previously reliable software.

(At least that’s what this commenter on Ars Technica says. I don’t have a Windows PC to verify this information.)

The who cares era

One of the latest generative AI-motivated blunders, the recommendation of non-existent books in a “special supplement” of US newspapers Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer, generated yet another wave of criticism of the technology.

Dan Sinker defined the moment as “the who cares era”:

The writer didn’t care. The supplement’s editors didn’t care. The biz people on both sides of the sale of the supplement didn’t care. The production people didn’t care. And, the fact that it took two days for anyone to discover this epic fuckup in print means that, ultimately, the reader didn’t care either.

It’s so emblematic of the moment we’re in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.

Dan focuses on AI, but I have to say that the problem runs deeper and predates it. Supplements of this kind already existed before, and while slip-ups of this nature were rare, the fact that this one took two days to be noticed implies that on the reader’s side, nobody cares — yes, and they don’t care for a long time, well before the popularization of generative AI.

I find myself wondering how much stuff has already been printed not to be read, or at most, to be read and ignored. Or, in the digital realm, how much content isn’t published to be read and spark action or make people think, but rather to fill space, capture attention to redirect it toward ads or similar things.

Rob Horning raised this argument more thoroughly and elegantly, as he often does:

The fact that LLMs can generate endless amounts of explicitly “fake” copy with the traces of human intention and presence deeply diluted through countless layers of processing and concatenation could hopefully demystify not only that particular subject position that seeks safe harbor in “real texts” — i.e. an alibi in a “real supplement” for the dubious pleasures such supplements have always supplied — but also the fantasy of accessing perfect authenticity through media.

Billions of AI users

Between Meta announcing that its AI, Meta AI, reached 1 billion users and Google saying that AI Overviews are used by 1.5 billion, I’m curious to know how many of these people intentionally use the feature, or prefer it to what the AI replaces.

AI Overviews appear at the top of searches, with no option to turn them off. Meta AI, I suspect many people trigger accidentally by tapping that horrible button in WhatsApp, in search results across its three core apps, or when trying to tag someone in a group by typing an @ symbol.

It’s very easy to reach enormous numbers when you already have a giant platform. I don’t think that’s even part of the discussion. The issue is trumpeting these numbers as if they were earned, rather than imposed.

Talking about the internet in Salvador, Bahia

I’m in Salvador (BA) participating in the 15th Internet Forum in Brazil, FIB15. I came to present a new interview podcast (in pt_BR), Nós da Internet, and to fix a personal flaw: never having participated in a FIB before.

Here, I had the privilege of interviewing people who built and continue to build the Brazilian internet. And in a big fashion: in a beautiful aquarium-studio set up in the middle of the convention center. The one in the picture above.

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