Aug 11, 2023 2 min read

You Should Read - Aug 11

Just One Thing

Language Is a Poor Heuristic For Intelligence

"Language skill indicates intelligence,” and its logical inverse, “lack of language skill indicates non-intelligence,” is a common heuristic with a long history. It is also a terrible one, inaccurate in a way that ruinously injures disabled people. Now, with recent advances in computing technology, we’re watching this heuristic fail in ways that will harm almost everyone.

Collected Ephemera

The Washington Post The Jessicas Are Turning 30: Thirty years ago, 47,884 babies born in the United States were named Jessica, making it the most popular name for girls that year.
⇛ Both of my direct reports are named Jessica. There are three Jessicas in my department of 20 people.

Fast Company From Aptos to Helvetica—Here’s How Fonts Get Their Unusual Names: Naming a font is not unlike naming a child. It requires equal parts strategy and intuition.

AIGA 365: AIGA Year in Design (2022)
⇛ Super cool projects from big brands and little teams.

New Statesman George Orwell in an Age of Moralists: Should we stop measuring the great English writer by today’s standards?

The Guardian ‘No Poor Person Decides How They Get Photographed’: Cortona on the Move – an international festival of photography in Tuscany – features 26 exhibitions showcasing the work of documentary photographers. Here, artistic director Paolo Woods explains his theme

UX Collective The “Dark Yellow Problem” in Design System Color Palettes: When defining a proper color palette for the design system I was working on, I came across the “Dark Yellow Problem”, where designers try to strike a balance between “yellow being yellow” and meeting accessibility requirements for color contrasts.

The World's Writing Systems This web site presents one reference glyph and basic information for each of the world’s writing systems. It is the first step of the Missing Scripts Project, a long-term initiative that aims to identify writing systems which are not yet encoded in the Unicode standard. As of today, there are still 131 scripts not yet encoded in Unicode. So they can’t be used on the computer — yet.

Colossal Matt Stevens Digitally Conjures Acclaimed Movies Into Hyper-realistic Vintage Paperbacks

We and Color Daily Poster Designs by Roman Horskyi: In the city of Kyiv, a year before the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, a design mentor named Roman Horskyi embarked on a journey that would test his artistic prowess, discipline, and resilience.

Our Present Dystopia

Slate How to Short-Circuit the Outrage Machine: Don’t wait for the tech companies to maybe improve social media, someday. There’s a simple fix you can make right now to transform your online life.

The Climate Brink Climate Change Is Death by a Thousand Cuts

For some people, the [climate] tax is primarily financial (e.g., people pay to join a gym because of the heat). But not everyone. People who work outdoors (e.g., landscapers, construction) don’t have the opportunity to move their work into air conditioning. They pay by suffering.

Best Citizenships Best Citizenships is an online platform assisting wealthy families with Investor citizenship and residence programs. Our digital consulting business model makes it cheaper for clients without brokers or intermediaries.
⇛ Purchasing citizenship in some of the countries is astoundingly affordable, particularly for the global 1%. Related: What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael Sandel

Scientific American AI-Generated Data Can Poison Future AI Models: As AI-generated content fills the Internet, it’s corrupting the training data for models to come. What happens when AI eats itself?

The Wabbit Hole