Angelos Arnis 🏴‍☠️

Also blocking people with consistently shitty takes

The thing that made it a bit more bearable to me is to set the timeline always to newest.

It becomes self-aware at 2:14am Eastern time, August 29th

Domain-General Cognitive Ability In subject area: Psychology Domain-general cognitive abilities refer to cognitive skills that are not unique to humans but are present across various primate species and potentially other mammals and birds, indicating a general factor underlying cognitive performance that correlates with brain size and is associated with selective attention and working memory capacity. AI generated definition based on: Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2012

Was looking into what Cognitive Scientists mean by ‘domain-general’ cognition, and then hit upon this. This is definitely NOT how we use that term.

Tip: read the last sentence to understand what went wrong here.

Sigh.

Oh no who would have thunk

Design's handmaiden role A professional journey from craft to commodity

What comes after grief? Maybe nothing resembling good design, for now. But there’s liberation in admitting that humanistic design under capitalism was always doomed. Time to imagine practices of care that exist outside capital’s logic entirely.

holistic.substack.com/p/designs-ha...

We’ve lost more than jobs.. We’ve lost understanding of design as care labor. What remains aren’t design artifacts but “design-shaped objects”: interfaces that look empathetic while serving surveillance and control. The aesthetics of care have been separated from ethical content.

AI represents the final acceleration. It replaces human judgment and ethics on top of labor. Human designers ask inconvenient questions. AI, trained on our compromised profession, just optimizes for engagement without the “luxury” of ethical considerations.

This wasn’t a design cabal master plan; it was capitalist realism in action. At the same time companies discarded the idea that technology should serve human needs. Expert designers were eliminated not for lacking skills, but because they knew too much about what ~good design~ looked like.

The central lie strangling design: the impossible promise that we could inject humanity into systems designed to extract value. We built addiction machines while calling ourselves “user-centered,” weaponized empathy for growth, championed “accessibility” while commodifying human attention.

A decorative graphic with the title of the article/newsletter: Design’s handmaiden role; a professional journey from craft to commodity.

In 2023, I gave what felt like a eulogy to Design Operations professionals. My “doomer” warnings about our discipline becoming unrecognizable turned out to be too optimistic. The tech layoffs weren’t economic corrections but ideological purges toward AI-first everything.

our collective futures | Angelos Arnis | Substack A design publication that uses design as a critical lens to address global challenges. It promotes critical thinking about design's role in business while championing global justice, mutualism, co-des...

Just finished writing a big thing off my chest and it is published on my newsletter tomorrow morning.

holistic.substack.com

People who actively believe immigrants are stealing all the jobs.

"The AI infrastructure build-out is so gigantic that in the past 6 months, it contributed more to the growth of the U.S. economy than /all of consumer spending/" - @mims.bsky.social

My takeway is that The US has gone ALL IN BET OF THE 21st Century on AI, while China has gone all in on green tech

Fossil fuels are key to the way modern humans live and cannot be removed swiftly without terrible consequences for people's basic needs, which would amount to a societal collapse. Trying to remove fossil fuels swiftly would lead to political reactions that might even hasten such a collapse. A significant push to decarbonise economies in a more-organised and socially-just way is sadly compromised by the expansionist monetary system which demands continual increases in energy consumption for economic stability. That means that rather than displacing fossil fuels, renewable energy sources are still only additional to ongoing fossil fuel use. If fossil fuel use is deliberately restricted through policy, then the expansionist demands of the money system mean that the new renewables will not be sufficient to meet the demands for economic growth, and so there will be a financial collapse. If no such policies are forthcoming and modern societies seek to maintain a mostly stable amount of fossil fuel consumption with a booming additional complement of renewable energy, then the decline in standard of living will likely continue, due to the peak of conventional oil production having been reached, and other sources of energy offering a lower energy return on investment. In addition to that ongoing decline, the ongoing expansion of industrial consumer societies would continue to deplete and pollute their environmental foundations and therefore lead to a harder collapse at some point. These considerations mean that we can't decarbonise at either the rate demanded by activists, or the rate pretended by politicians. So, when they argue with each other, it is really a pantomime that distracts us from reality. That does not mean we should not try to cut and drawdown emissions. But it means we need to tell the truth. That truth is that we live in a hydrocarbon civilisation which is coming to an end. There is no technological escape. Modern societies need to power down. Unless the exp…

Shit.. We live in a fossil-fuelled civilisation that can’t decarbonise fast without collapse. Renewables aren’t replacing fossil fuels but adding to them. Without changing the growth imperative, the crash is inevitable. We must power down. But can we?

‘Decline’ is too soft for my liking especially in 2025. 🥲

Sure in 2016 to 2020 you could have phrased it as that accurately but post peak Covid times the collapse is loud and clear.

Good read on that: Breaking together by Jem Bendell. Without spoiling the content the argument is that societal collapse started in 2016 and goes to show the stats that back this claim up in the first half of the book

The reason is sexism. AI has a bro culture

Finnish government says all governments should recognize Palestine, Finnish president says the Finnish government too should recognize Palestine, and the Finnish government says yes it too should recognize Palestine, except that it won't.

#IdiotFinland

BlueSky houses my most unhinged shitposting without needing a filter on them. So yeah I’m all for this echochamber as well.

My condolences to you and your family

A decorative graphic with the word "follymath" a neologism playing off the word "polymath"

The word ‘polymath’ implies its inverse must exist too... The ‘follymath’; one who mistakes breadth for depth:

Someone who has dabbled in many areas of knowledge, but with shallow understanding, even a tendency to make poor judgments despite their broad interests (overconfident dilettante?)

Elon musk saying the path so solving hunger, disease and poverty is so and robotics.

Actually the path to solving hunger, disease, and poverty is food, socialized healthcare, workers owning the means of production.

A decorative graphic with the word "follymath" a neologism playing off the word "polymath"

The word ‘polymath’ implies its inverse must exist too... The ‘follymath’; one who mistakes breadth for depth:

Someone who has dabbled in many areas of knowledge, but with shallow understanding, even a tendency to make poor judgments despite their broad interests (overconfident dilettante?)

And then this???

Duolingo share price since their "AI first" disaster - down ~35%

Daily active user (DAU) growth down 25%

Your original post made that connection in my head. Music has the best rabbit holes

“One of my colleagues crunched the numbers for us to reveal something quite stark: the quality of life in most countries and regions of the world rose from 2012, then peaked around 2016 and began to slowly decline. In 4 of the past 5 years there have been more countries in decline than countries experiencing improvement, and for the past 2 years around 90% of the countries have been in decline. In the case of North America, there has been a steady decline since 2013. In the case of Asia decline since 2018. For the 51 countries for which we have 10 years of data, the global average post peak decline is 11.3%, with the range 0 to -33%. Putting all this data into a graph that displays each UN-defined sub-region, it appears like a global plateauing in Quality of Life since 2016”

This is sooooo probably not related.

To be fair, 4 people died, not only a CEO but you’d think this would be all over the news but instead I’m seeing posts of people believing Macron’s wife is a man.

YouTube video by People Under the Stairs - Topic The Effects of Climate Change on Densely Populated Areas

Speaking about heat

youtu.be/B7M6cMrgFrI?...