Ellie is a great-looking to-do app with a day-to-day default view. Its handy calendar integration allows you to simply drag to-dos into the calendar panel which syncs it with your Google/Apple calendar. Friends of DD enjoy a 25% discount on the pro tier for one year. Become a Friend to access specials like this.

The macOS menu bar can get quite hectic. With the Spaced app, you can group related icons by adding spaces or symbols between them.

Less complicated than a wiki, more elegant than Google Docs, Slab creates a clean knowledge base for users, members or employees that can be collaboratively edited and integrates a range of other apps.

If you love music (and album covers!), create lists of your favourite albums with this neat, ad-free web app, then share it with your friends.

Eaten →

A food history magazine

Based out of Cambridge in the US, Eaten is an independent magazine designed, edited and published by a single person, Emelyn Rude, a historian. Three volumes per year are “filled with a cornucopia of old recipes, enlightening gastronomic essays, and the fascinating and forgotten tales of the people who have grown, cooked, and enjoyed all things edible over the centuries”. Friends of DD enjoy a 10% discount. Become a Friend to access specials like this.

Elite Capture →

How the powerful took over identity politics

Reading through the abstract of this book, I learned that the term ‘identity politics’ has its roots in the radical Black feminism movement and signalled solidarity across lines of difference. “Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture – deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests.”

The many tech layoffs are widely covered in the media. What is hardly ever discussed is the effect of these ‘corporate austerity measures’ on the employees that remain. “Imagine a company’s operations have been dependent on, say, 1000 labor hours. Those 1000 labor hours account for all the work that goes into producing $1 million in revenue. The company decides to do a round of layoffs and improve efficiency. Executives lay off 10% of their employees. Now there are only 900 labor hours to do the work. At first, the remaining employees may work extra hours to ensure everything gets done. But they don’t want to do that forever. So they figure out ways to do it all in less time and get back to the 900 labor hours they started with.”

A fascinating investigation into what constitutes ‘sentience’. All the hype around the future of AI rarely mentions that we still lack clear, commonly agreed-upon markers that indicate whether something has feelings or not. “Why would an AI system want to convince its user of its sentience? Or, to put it more carefully, why would this contribute to its objectives? It’s tempting to think: only a system that really was sentient could have this goal. In fact, there are many objectives an AI system might have that could be well served by persuading users of its sentience, even if it were not sentient. Suppose its overall objective is to maximise user-satisfaction scores. And suppose it learns that users who believe their systems are sentient, and a source of companionship, tend to be more highly satisfied.”

The Netherlands is often (deservedly) portrayed as the exemplary model for active urban transport, but it hasn’t always been this way. In fact, its city streets were clogged up, choking on car traffic until a movement formed in the ’70s that put the bike front and centre of urban planning. There are so many inspiring lessons to be learned – a hopeful history that shows how cities can be transformed, given the right political will and social momentum.