This week's best things

AI-generated subtitles, and an AI 'tar pit', some things about TikTok, overwork in the arts, walking-focused interaction, Dropbox's brand guidelines, subscription business models, Nokia's design archive, automation in UK retail, dealing with side chats in meetings,

This week's best things
Photo by Holly Mandarich / Unsplash

Can You Read This Cursive Handwriting? The National Archives Wants Your Help

A cool crowd-sourcing ask from the National Archives in America (and also a reminder that AI won't solve everything on its own).

"The National Archives is brimming with historical documents written in cursive, including some that date back more than 200 years. But these texts can be difficult to read and understand— particularly for Americans who never learned cursive in school.

That’s why the National Archives is looking for volunteers who can help transcribe and organize its many handwritten records: The goal of the Citizen Archivist program is to help “unlock history” by making digital documents more accessible, according to the project’s website.

Every year, the National Archives digitizes tens of millions of records. The agency uses artificial intelligence and a technology known as optical character recognition to extract text from historical documents. But these methods don’t always work, and they aren’t always accurate.

That’s where human volunteers come in. By transcribing digital pages, volunteers make it easier for scholars, genealogists and curious history buffs to find and read historical documents."

The free program is open to anyone with an internet connection.

VLC Media Player Introduced AI Subtitles and Translation That Work Offline

I shared a few examples of some of the weirder stuff that was launched at CES2025 recently. This is an example of something that is actually useful - and a potentially useful example of AI too, a rarity!

VLC Media Player has introduced AI-generated subtitling that generates subtitles and translations (and works offline too).

"Even though the world has largely adopted streaming services to play videos, there is still a big market for media player apps like VLC media player. VLC media player has crossed 6 billion downloads, according to Kempf. His LinkedIn post reads, "The number of active users of VLC is actually growing, even in this age of streaming services. We’ll see how much it will continue to grow!" There are better-designed alternatives, but VLC media player has retained its place on every computer I've used. It still plays practically any video file I throw at it, and it has lots of hidden features for those who want to dig deeper."

CES 2025: VLC Media Player Introduced AI Subtitles and Translation That Work Offline
VLC media player was at CES 2025 to demonstrate two new features—AI-generated subtitles and translation. Both of these work offline.

Developer Creates Infinite Maze That Traps AI Training Bots

And finally, on AI for this week, "a pseudonymous coder has created and released an open source “tar pit” to indefinitely trap AI training web crawlers in an infinitely, randomly-generating series of pages to waste their time and computing power. [...]

Nepenthes generates random links that always point back to itself - the crawler downloads those new links. Nepenthes happily just returns more and more lists of links pointing back to itself."

Developer Creates Infinite Maze That Traps AI Training Bots
“Nepenthes generates random links that always point back to itself - the crawler downloads those new links. Nepenthes happily just returns more and more lists of links pointing back to itself.”

Is TikTok pushing Taiwan’s young people closer to China?

One of the reasons that America this week banned TikTok (or maybe Trump will reverse that move, for a bit) is the concern about potential for a Chinese-owned app to influence the hearts and minds of the American population.

This article in the Financial Times looks at whether that's already happening in Taiwan, a country that faces a much nearer and more imminent threat from China than the USA does.

"The app “cannot necessarily make Taiwanese youth identify with the Chinese nation or agree to unification with China”, says Eric Hsu, a researcher at the Taiwanese think-tank Doublethink Lab who is working on the first systematic survey of TikTok’s impact on Taiwanese society. “But it can probably lower their apprehension towards China and their will to resist.” [...]

Initial work done by the Doublethink study suggests this seemingly innocuous content can act as a gateway to less anodyne material. Researchers who set up TikTok accounts imitating Taiwanese schoolgirls discovered that, after a few days of them being served dance video clips, the app’s algorithm started to suggest soft political content. Some were street interviews conducted in Taipei’s trendy Ximending district in which Taiwanese teenagers were prompted to compare Chinese “democracy” with the weaknesses of their own political system."

Is TikTok pushing Taiwan’s young people closer to China?
A growing number of researchers fear that the controversial app is promoting pro-China content and softening attitudes towards the People’s Republic

There Was Nothing Ever Unique About TikTok And I Can Prove It

More on TikTok, this piece from Ryan Broderick in the latest issue of Garbage Day is a good read about the role of TikTok in driving wider internet trends (or not).

"my biggest insight from years of lurking on the country’s various For You Pages is that the “TikTok trend,” as we understand it, does not actually exist.

Almost everything popular meme on the app either starts elsewhere or gets popular after it moves off the platform."

Overworking in the arts

A good and thoughful post (and accompanying discussion in the comments) from the Manchester Collective's Joanne Karcheva on the culture of overworking in the arts sector.

"A well-meaning colleague once praised me for not being the type of person who leaves their desk at 5pm on the dot, which was at odds with company culture. No amount of eye-rolling at this ill-advised comment will change the fact that this sort of thinking is so internalised and endemic in our sector.

Discussions about overwork in the arts often circle around lack of resource, in the form of money and people, or inefficient time management (if only we were to prioritise just that bit better!) But there are more interesting, intertwined factors which are very relevant to the creative industries but don’t form part of everyday discourse."

Joanne Karcheva on LinkedIn: Overworking in the arts. Can we break the vicious cycle? 😵‍💫 I’ve been… | 27 comments
Overworking in the arts. Can we break the vicious cycle? 😵‍💫 I’ve been thinking about overwork a lot throughout my career as a creative worker and knew… | 27 comments on LinkedIn

Ordering coffee with your feet

An interesting/odd/useless (delete as applicable) research project from the University of Waterloo in Canada.

"Imagine controlling apps with your feet while you walk. This concept is the focus of new research which explores using gait gestures – intentional variations in how you walk – as controls for augmented reality (AR) devices."

I had a podcast conversation a few years ago with Robin Christopherson, in that chat Robin pointed out that we are now in "an age where ambient computing interactions are growing. So that introduces a whole new array of constraints and possibilities."

So it'll be interesting to see if new ways of interacting, like this, get any traction. Tapping, swiping, pinching would all have seemed silly 20 years ago, maybe in 20 years we'll be tap dancing to order coffee...

"“Extreme movements like dance steps or a jump would likely be easy for a system to recognize, but these might be harder to perform, and they would deviate too far from normal walking for people to feel comfortable doing them in public,” Vogel said. “We didn’t want users to feel like someone from Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks!”"

Ordering coffee with your feet | Waterloo News
Imagine controlling apps with your feet while you walk. This concept is the focus of new research which explores using gait gestures – intentional variations in how you walk – as controls for augmented reality (AR) devices. “There’s a long history of using feet to control machines. For example, the pedals on the car, but very little research has been done into using the way we

Dropbox's brand guidelines

Most brand guidelines I see come in the form of an, often very lengthy, pdf.

This week Dropbox shared their new online brand guidelines, which feels like a much better way to communicate things, as it allows them to talk about/demonstrate things such as motion which are impossible to do in a printed/pdf format.

Dropbox Brand Guidelines
At Dropbox, our Brand Guidelines help us infuse everything we make with identity. From icons to illustration, logos to language, this collection is the foundation for how Dropbox looks, feels, and sounds like Dropbox.

"Dozens of popular subreddits are banning links to X after Elon Musk made a gesture that historians and human rights groups have described as a Nazi salute."

Some big subreddits are also debating banning links to Meta platforms (Facebook, Instagram et al).

This could be a significant move. We'll see.

Dozens of subreddits are banning links to X
Many other subreddits are considering similar changes.

It's Time to End our Subscription Addiction

A good piece from Nick Hilton looking at the impact of the widespread pivot to subscription-focused revenue models amongst publishers and streamers, and the trickle-down impact this is having on independent creators.

In summary, it's becoming harder for independents to make a compelling case for you to spend money with them when more and more content is going behind a paywall, and the cost of those paywalls is only going up.

"Essentially, Jeremy is spending £2,000 a year on subscription media. That’s without things like cinema or concert tickets, books or magazines or newspapers"

It also looks at how relatively recent changes to the way social media algorithms treat links away from their platforms (tl;dr not favourably). This is something that my pals at Storythings have been talking about for a while now.

"We didn’t make people pay for journalism when the internet was in its infancy, and now, as it enters maturity, nobody knows the value of anything. We are trying to retrofit direct sales into the industry – that’s what the subscription era is all about – and it’s confusing as hell. We got hooked on an unlimited stream of free media – an all you can eat buffet of stir-fried Tenderstem® broccoli – and now we’re paying the price. And so, in the absence of direct exchange of money for goods, digital advertising was asked to carry the weight of funding our media addiction, which meant that ‘traffic’ became King of the Metrics. And in the court of King Traffic I, social media was Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick: kingmaker.

Social media could make or break a publication and an author. People were routinely commissioned on the strength of their Twitter following. That sacred number came up in job interviews, in negotiations for book deals. It became a psychological sickness at the heart of journalism – an addict’s craving for affirmative dopamine rushes that was also, perversely, really professionally important. That hasn’t unravelled fully: whether it’s Twitter or Bluesky or TikTok or Substack, there’s still a number and that number is still valuable. But most of these platforms are now in competition with the publishers they were previously co-existing with. Symbiosis has given way to amensalism."

It’s Time to End our Subscription Addiction
Can the media survive the inevitable horrors of 2025?

Nokia Design Archive

Before Christmas I shared an article about the Nokia Design Archive, the online version of Archive is now live.

Now it's worth saying that I don't really think this is 'a best thing', it's actually a pretty bad user experience.

Large online archive experiences are hard to get right, they're inevitably information-dense, you've often got loads of weird assets to deal with, and institutions often seem to struggle to identify who these things are actually for. But it's sad that this isn't more successful given the design focus of the Archive itself. It's really overwhelming, the interpretation and storytelling is poor to non-existent.

A missed opportunity.

Nokia Design Archive
Exploring unseen concepts of design and opportunities of design-driven transformation and change

Robot packers and AI cameras: UK retail embraces automation to cut staff costs

News of a push to greater automation in UK retail. There have been problems already with the reduction in actual humans available to help those customers who might need it, I can only see that problem increasing.

"Investment in automation was a constant drumbeat amid the flurry of festive trading updates from big retailers in the past few weeks, as they face higher staffing bills from April after the rise in the national minimum wage and employers’ national insurance contributions (NICs).

The investments could improve productivity – a key government aim – in an industry long reliant on cheap labour. However, they will also replace entry-level jobs and reduce the number of roles in a sector that is the UK’s biggest employer."

Robot packers and AI cameras: UK retail embraces automation to cut staff costs
From electronic shelf labels to more self-service checkouts, automation is coming to your local supermarket

Side Chats During Online Meetings: A Minefield for Leaders

A pet peeve of mine is when someone is obviously having another conversation during a meeting.

This article in MIT Sloan Management Review looks as the impact that these 'side chats' can have, and how leaders can accentuate the positives and address the negatives.

"“One conversation” reminders work for in-person gatherings, but virtual meetings bring a new set of challenges. The digital medium and tools mean that virtual meetings are no mere copy of in-person gatherings. Online platforms offer the opportunity for participants to send typed messages to coworkers privately — to have side chats that the meeting facilitator will never see.

Indeed, in virtual meetings, the days when we can call for one conversation have passed. Instead, we have the ability to engage in layered, rich, and sometimes fraught side conversations alongside the “official” main discussion. While side chats can enhance a participant’s connections to colleagues during work meetings, they also have the potential to diminish constructive conversation."

Side Chats During Online Meetings: A Minefield for Leaders
Side conversations during online meetings can be managed in ways that reinforce a healthy culture.

Are LLMs making StackOverflow irrelevant?

You might not have heard of StackOverflow, that's fine. It's a site where developers go to ask questions and find answers. For years it was the go-to source of knowledge for web development and had millions of users.

This piece in The Pragmatic Engineer looks at the precipitous decline in the number of questions being asked on the site (alongside a slump in loads of other metrics) and suggests that LLM tools such as ChatGPT and products that integrate into developer platforms are (partly/mostly) to blame.

Why should you care? Because, as the article says "it feels to me that StackOverflow is the victim of LLMs ingesting data on its own Q&A site, and providing a much better interface for developers to solve programming problems with" but alongside this "now the site gets far fewer questions and answers, where will training data come from?".

If you rely on 'question answering' traffic to your website any degree I suspect you will start to see a similarly steep decline (anecdotally I have heard people are already seeing this shift).

And this is the double-edged sword of these LLMs, their usability and usefulness is driven by (huge amounts of) training data that has mostly been pulled from the open web. The functionality they offer off the back of this training pulls traffic (and interaction) away from the websites that people used to visit and onto the LLM-driven products. Therefore new training data becomes more scarce as user-generated content dries up, or websites go behind paywalls.

It feels deeply destructive.

Are LLMs making StackOverflow irrelevant?
Fresh data shows that the number of questions asked on StackOverflow are as low as they were back in 2009 – which was when StackOverflow was one years old

This week's consumption

We went to see Paddington 3 on Sunday, which was lovely (not as good as Paddington 2, but what is).

I discovered that there's a 'disk 2' to Radiohead's 2007 album, In Rainbows (it's not as good as the 'main' album but worth a listen if you like Radiohead, but maybe everyone already knew about this).

I've started Stanley Tucci's What I Ate In One Year.

I watched the first episodes of The Queen's Gambit and American Primeval, neither of which really grabbed me, although the latter did send me on down a rabbithole reading about Mormon militias in the mid-19th century.


I am now up an Alp for a week so will be back in February with more Good Things

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