Readings

Thought it would be great to keep track of articles/stories I am currently reading. I hope you do find some interesting stuff here. The order is that the latest read is at the top.

• ALL OF US VERSUS TECH DYSTOPIA
• “Useful” is not sufficient
• Accepting Probabilistic Software Is A Political Choice
• On Walking Away
• The Median Voter Theorem is a Clarity Trap
• Ruto’s Kenya
• Frankenstein’s Regrets – What is AI?
• On courage, agency, and moral direction
• We must learn to sit in the dark together
• It’s Not Complicated
• On Malayalam and Melancholia
• Commandments in the Atomic Age by Günther Anders
• The Political Economy of AI: A Syllabus
• Hope the Length of an Instagram Reel: An African Millennial’s Musing
• Testing a new encrypted messaging app’s extraordinary claims
• House Arab
• David Foster Wallace’s ‘100-word Statement’ on the ‘millennium’
• Telephone Conversation — Wole Soyinka
• Political Economy in Kenya
• Why I Wrote This Book — Strength and Sorrow — On writing as a process of healing and making space for others.
• How Much Does a Nigerian Intellectual Cost? — Reflections on predatory governance and its effects on civic culture.
• Remembering Derek Parfit — On changing one’s view of life and becoming more concerned with others.
• Thought and Its Vicissitudes — On independent thought and political power.
• Homer and the Power of Story-telling — On agency, passivity, and suffering in the Iliad.
• Historicizing, Interrogating, and Critiquing Raila Odinga’s Ideological and Political Legacy — On solidarity, justice, dignity, and political movements.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky: philosopher of freedom
• Crito
• Reading Our Ruins: Post-colonial Stories That Float from Afar — On witnessing and interpreting experience.
• Dear Dr. Joyce Nyairo
• “Localhost tracking” explained. It could cost Meta 32 billion. — Author’s note: avoids Meta products because of privacy concerns.
• Making the Image: Che Guevara by René Burri
• The Freedom to Read — On reading, imagination, and the material conditions for intellectual freedom.
• Locke and Hume on Consent
• Extrajudicial Mandates: Will The Law Ever Protect The Poor?
• How to Spot Bullshit: A Manual by Princeton Philosopher Harry Frankfurt (RIP)
• Millions on the African continent can’t fully benefit from the AI revolution
• “Hug Machine”
• Ancient town and its manuscripts face ravages of the Sahara
• How Coffee Fueled Revolutions—and Revolutionary Ideas
• Datasets as Imagination
• The Workers Behind AI Rarely See Its Rewards. This Indian Startup Wants to Fix That. — Karya’s approach to ethical data work and worker ownership.
• The Atlas of Beauty — Mihaela Noroc’s global portraits and stories of women.
• Nouf Aljowaysir — visual portraits about AI, culture, and identity
• Galileo’s Testing Communications
• The Churchill Mandela Effect – A Resurrector of Careers, Scar Mkadinali
• AI teaching tools in Kenya and teacher shortages — Note about prioritizing teachers and school infrastructure over flashy technology.
• The Boston hippies who developed technologies that Silicon Valley wouldn’t dare to make
• Matching Hypothesis
• Why most countries are struggling to shut down 2G
• Pluralistic: Apple’s encryption capitulation
• Living Like Weasles
• Statement of Teaching Philosophy
• a poetics of refusal
• Android Supply Chain Validation Cheat Sheet
• When Disappearing Messages Don’t Disappear: the ‘dark’ side of (macOS) notifications
• Did you know about Instruments?
• Hikvision and Dahua Facilitating Genocidal Crimes in East Turkistan
• How to Beat the Odds
• A brief history of Directory Services
• The Dying Web
• The shift we need to stop mass surveillance
• A Global Green New Deal: Into the Portal, Leave No one Behind
• Native mobile apps are optional for B2B startups in 2024
• How AI can keep disappearing languages alive
• Chinese Social Media Platforms Fail to Control Racism Against Black People: Report
• The Hybrid Architecture of Kinopio for iOS
• E-bike battery fires keep climbing in NYC — Source note: 267 fires in 2023, about 20% more than in 2022.
• Why Are Tech Reporters Sleeping On The Biggest App Store Story? — Author’s note: concerns about app-store gatekeeping.
• Stop Trying to Make Social Networks Succeed
• Weizenbaum’s nightmares: how the inventor of the first chatbot turned against AI
• The Boy’s Own Internet: Aaron Swartz and the myth of the boy genius
• 🌻 audience of one
• Scammers Have Found An Easy Way To Clone Fingerprints
• Paying to use a site you can’t use — Reflections on Twitter, influence, and power.
• What does it mean when fewer people die?
• A Life Offline
• ARIA: Betting on science
• Every generator is a policy failure
• Saloni Dattani: Peer Review, Division of Labor in Science, and the Genetics of Psychiatric Disorders
• Ugali Consumption along Class Lines: Policy approaches to reduce maize dependency
• Being basic as a virtue
• A Philosophy of Subtraction – How the Ethereum Foundation drives innovation through delegation
• Some Things I think
• On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue
• Sheng: Why it matters
• The Food Safety Tax: Why getting good food from the vendor next door matters
• Entwined African and Asian genetic roots of medieval peoples of the Swahili coast
• Irresponsible data? The risks of registering the Rohingya
• Advocacy and Empathy Avoidance — On how to help people care about social issues.
• Language is not enough: What LLMs can – and can’t – do for lab automation
• Death of the podcast
• a requiem for walking — On walking, embodiment, and scale.
• Privacy a casualty in race to develop generative AIs — Concerns about data concentration and dehumanization.
• Tech’s Risks on Non-English Platforms
• What kind of Digital ID do we actually want?
• making decisions
• Budding Free-ness in a Catastrophic World
• The Nobel Prize in Literature 1993 — Toni Morrison
• boring lives finding surprise in the boring, sculpting meaning from stone
• Why East Africa Is Facing Its Worst Famine in Decades
• Apps Won’t Solve the Mental Health Crisis
• The Myth of the Socially Conscious Corporation
• A Romp through Database History
• Do You Know How to Behave? Are You Sure?
• Why haven’t markets disciplined public finance management practices in African states?
• Is it important to have friends?
• friendship