Sessions combines video conferencing with a range of existing tools, such as Google Docs or Figma, to create interactive presentations. It also adds some useful features to collect notes and feedback from participants.

An unusual concept: Neeva is a paid, ad-free search engine with strong privacy protection. It runs through a browser plugin that offers various features to customise your search results, such as prioritising specific news sources or product review services.

Basedash offers an easy-to-use interface for databases so that non-technical team members (such as your support team) can access data. You can set up different views and edit rights for various parts of your team.

Click anywhere on the map of the US and this visualisation tool will show you “the path of a rain droplet from any point in the contiguous United States to its end point (usually the ocean, sometimes the Great Lakes, Canada/Mexico, or another inland water feature). It’ll find the closest river/stream flowline coordinate to a click/search and then animate along that flowline’s downstream path.”

The Web of Meaning →

A worldview fit for our times

If you liked last week’s intro about Jeremy Lent’s article on human supremacy, you might also like his new book (which I just added to my reading list): “Weaving together findings from modern systems thinking, evolutionary biology, and cognitive neuroscience with insights from Buddhism, Taoism, and Indigenous wisdom, it offers a rigorous and integrated way of understanding our place in the cosmos that can serve as a philosophical foundation for a life-affirming future.”

Design for Safety →

Identifying design’s potential for abuse

A Book Apart with another great title on an important, timely topic: “Too often, we design for idealized circumstances, even though our users bring a range of complicated personal dynamics to every interaction. When we fail to explicitly design for vulnerable users, we unintentionally prioritize their abusers.” Friends of DD enjoy a 10% discount. Become a Friend to access specials like this.

I discuss this piece in my intro above: Kevin Kelly provides a great overview of the many right and wrong ways in which we talk about intelligence, whether animal, human or artificial. “The evidence so far suggests AIs most likely won’t be superhuman but will be many hundreds of extra-human new species of thinking, most different from humans, none that will be general purpose, and none that will be an instant god, solving major problems in a flash.”

This article draws parallels between the altruistic-sounding language used for commercialising the internet and that used in the current space race. In both cases, tech leaders promise a huge benefit for the greater good, while in reality contributing to growing inequality and, arguably, diminished trust in public institutions. “By invoking an idea of technology as inherently democratizing, early internet evangelists argued that government regulation would only restrict the possibilities of the internet, and that an unregulated, capitalist arena was the only way to promote human progress online. It was this vision that spurred the privatization of the internet in the 1990s and that has kept it deregulated in the ensuing years.”

A short interview with Joëlle Gergis, one of the scientists who worked on the recently released IPCC climate report. The conversation offers an interesting personal perspective and I learned, for example, that the many hundred scientists who worked hard over several years to compile this report did not get paid for their contributions. What a service to humanity!