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Skittles
There’s a YouTube series called “Surrounded” where a person who is somewhat famous for being on one side of an issue is sat down with 20 “regular” people on the other side of the issue, and the 20 people take turns to “debate” the issue with the one person.
It goes viral every couple of months when one of the “regular” people says something really horrible and people on both sides start sharing clips and commentary on social media. Then half of social media goes, “One guy DESTOYS 20 guys,” and the other half goes “20 guys OBLIETRATS one guy”.
It's happened again, but I’m not linking to any of this because it’s the equivalent of political Skittles.
Skittles are little balls of sugar which look like food, and are very tasty like food, and are sometimes sold in places where food is sold, but which are definitely not food. Ik heb een serieus probleem with Skittles. They hijack my biology into eating a whole bag at a time and then 45 minutes later I feel as though I haven’t slept in 3 days and my mouth is bleeding.
There’s a lot of Skittles on the Internet these days. Not the candy, but: Skittlesish content, ready to be devoured by the Share Size bagful. People put these Skittles on the Internet because if you can jack into my biology via my phone or my computer, you can get me to do pretty much whatever you want.
E.g. I only watched maybe 15 seconds of the most recent “Surrounded” video and I’ve spent all morning catastrophising about what I would do if someone told me without shame that they were a fascist. They got me!
And so: there are patently fake conversations on r/AmIOverreacting, and there is scripted ragebait on TikTok, and there are videos like “Surrounded” on YouTube, and there is second- and third-order commentary available in your podcatcher (????) of choice — and all of these are interlaced with advertisements and tracking scripts for cohorting & AI pattern-matching to determine what Skittles & advertisements to serve me next.
The skill I most need to practice in 2025 is how to avoid engaging. I have to keep the Skittles out of the house.
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Poem/1
I like Matt Webb. I like the way he thinks. I like his framing of AI consciousness not as an empirical measure but as a practical distinction. He makes abstract thinking accessible, which is very helpful for a smoothbrain like me.
But I'm not a fan of his AI clock.
Every hour it pulls and displays a new ChatGPT-3.5-generated poem, featuring somewhere the current time, from a central server. The poetry format makes it a poor clock: when I want to know the time, I don't want to have to parse a slant-rhyming couplet first.
That's ok, though. Timepieces do tend to blur the line between information and art. But ChatGPT-3.5 generates undeniably bad art.
Colors mingle, brush takes flight
Three fifty-seven, a palette of light.This doesn't mean anything; I'd almost rather that it read "3:57 - painting" instead. Matt describes these poems as "profound" and "weirdly motivational". I'd describe them as "a YouTube short titled The Most Inspiring PEople in The world 2025". They have exactly the same semantically-bankrupt energy as Shrimp Jesus.
If I'm honest, I think that Matt probably knows that the poems aren't very good. But when he first showed it off on Twitter and LinkedIn in 2023 it got a bunch of buzz because it was a quirky, digestible idea in a space that people didn't really understand, and that makes easy fodder to keep Ars Technica or Fast Company chugging along. But coverage isn't validation, and between March '23 and now we've all realised that AI's much worse at generating Good Art than it is at generating Subtle Bugs in Legacy Codebases.
I'd feel worse about being this negative if this was a clear labour of love. If it uplifted people or promoted connection or kindness between folks. But I just can't find the humanity in this. Why couldn't this have been a funny, if artistically moribund, widget on interconnected.org, instead of something you have to pay £129 for?
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London: Houses of Parliament
On the train down a load of old folks get on the train. One of them is reading a book called “A Brief History of the Countryside in 100 Objects”, which sounds like the quintessential old person book.
The train rolls into Kings Cross eventually and we disembark and wander down into the Underground. Whenever I come to London I marvel at how quickly I readopt the language of city living. We dive into the bowels of the city and board the Victoria Line to Oxford Circus.
Back on the streets we weave through polyglot crowds towards Buckingham Palace. The palace is demure and the crowds outside are restless and wandering. We cross the street and snap a couple of pics of the Victoria Monument and then head down a treelined road past the Kings Guard Museum towards Westminster.
In Westminster we find a row of three red-painted English phone boxes, at each of which is a queue some 50 people long waiting to take pictures with the phone box. I guess these phone boxes must be the most optimally-placed for tourist photography because the Elizabeth Tower of the Houses of Parliament is sort of in the background. I've always thought the most British phone boxes are the old BT cornet-labelled ones standing solitary at the foot of Cross Fell filled with forgotten books. But: NOT BRITISH ENUF. At one phone box, a 14-year-old tries on a series of modelesque facial expressions, shifting hipshot from one side to the other. At the next, a Buddhist in burgundy robes and sandals stands stockstill with the door of the phone box half-open, as if he's Buddhist Clark Kent or something.
We wind through crowds past Westminster Hall and spot the visitors' entrance to the Houses of Parliament. There is no queue, no fanfare. No one seems to have noticed. I wander through the fences towards one of the security personnel. Behind them stands a man with an automatic rifle braced against his hip. I half expect him to raise his NATO-issue bullpup and start yelling at me. He doesn't.
I ask the security guy whether there are any more tours of the House of Commons on today. He says no, but they’re currently debating and we can go in and watch if we want. Perks of being British. I duly shrug off my backpack for a security check and then we’re in the medieval Westmister Hall under the centuries-old roofs and standing on the spot where Charles I was marked for execution.
I feel very much as if we’ve discovered a secret shortcut into the heart of British politics.
Up past St. Stephen’s Porch and into St. Stephen’s Hall, where linger school groups on excursion and, at intervals, women standing with extraordinarily well-behaved dogs. (These dogs, as it turns out, have all won awards for one thing or another; non-award-winning dogs are not allowed in the Houses of Parliament.)
We wait ten or fifteen minutes and then are ushered through the Central Hall (featuring: a Post Office!) into a series of corridors and up flights of stairs to the mezzanine supporting the public viewing area for the House of Commons. We render our bags unto a surprisingly sassy man in a morning suit and suddenly we’re in the House of Commons, looking down through a pane of plexiglas at a couple dozen Members of Parliament debating compensation for Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI) women.
My brief comments on the debate: the Tories presented better rhetorically, but I struggle to find sympathy for the economic cause of a group of 70-year-old women who benefitted directly from one of the strongest periods of economic growth in the history of Britain, and whose main complaint is that they couldn’t be bothered to read their own mail.
This opinion, I suspect, wouldn't go over well with the half dozen WASPI women sitting two rows above us, who cry, "Hear hear!" when the Tories speak, and who cry "Shame shame!" when Labour speaks.
A little ways down from the WASPI women, a couple of teenagers snap their fingers (i.e. like "oh snap" from circa 2006) when Torsten Bell says something spicy. The sassy man in the morning suit comes down out of nowhere and scolds them: "Stop doing that with your arm." The teenagers leave a couple of minutes later.
And with that, please enjoy this photo of the toilets in Westminster Hall From Parliament we wander down past Downing Street, where I'm disappointed to discover that Number 10 isn’t even visible from Whitehall Road. Then on to Charing Cross station and back into the depths of the earth for a ride up to Islington to check in to our lodging.
Refreshed, we strike back out towards Pentonville (of the famous HMP) for dinner at Little Georgia on Barnsbury Road. What a fantastic little spot! I get a chkmeruli and Sam gets a bean stew; a bit of cake and a glass of dessert wine finish us off.
We walk slowly back to the hotel via the Uniqlo and the Regent’s Canal and pass out at like 8:30 pm.
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C2A: Amsterdam, finally
Sam isn't feeling well in the morning so we ride together down to the Gouda station and I see her onto a train that will take her into Amsterdam. There are some disruptions due to someone stealing cable on the train lines, so it takes her longer than the expected 15 minutes.
I turn around and head north out of the city. There's a stiff crosswind blowing out over the Reeuwijk ponds, the result of peat overharvesting. These days it's amply serviced by the leisure watercraft industry. I cross the Old Rhine, (Oude Rijn), much diminished, in Bodegraven, then push on through the fields and canals to Nieuwkoop. I pass a lock: a first; I thought all the water was basically at the same level around here.
Big houses line the road in Nieuwkoop, with a little canal between the road and the front garden. There are little rowboats moored up between the lilypads, with water easements leading out onto the lakes behind the houses. I wonder how far one could travel by water alone. Probably pretty far, although I guess rights of way could get tricky.
I skirt Zevenhoven and then enter the sprawling industrial parks east of Schipol. A couple of airplanes take off and bank over my head; I try to get video but keep turning up like 5 seconds too late. I take a bridge over a highway and feel like I can see the entire country laid out before me. Man it's flat in the Netherlands.
Soon I'm riding through Amstelveen, which I suppose must be where all the rich people in Amsterdam live, judging by the number of Mercedes and Audis I see in the gravel drives abutting the enormous houses lining the road here. Then I arrive at the Amsterdamse Bos country park, but the cyclepath is closed so I follow a woman on a cargo bike up the main street towards the Amsterdam ring road. She easily outpaces me. I tell myself it's because she has a battery and I'm carrying two tents.
On the other side of the ring road I join a gaggle of cyclists heading up into town, but I peel off towards the museum and the tourist quarter with a painter on a bike. All of his kit is in a little tray attached to the back of his bakfiets; his brushes are in a case he wears on his back. I think it's just terrific, even if he's way faster than I am. He nearly obliterates a little tourist boy who wanders into the bike path. His grandmother pulls the boy back; the painter doesn't react at all: no swerve, no flinch, no look. Just keeps on riding. I eat his dust as we ride through the museum itself.
On the far side, I cross a bridge and suddenly I'm in the thick of it. There are people everywhere: Portugese women walking in groups, German families with maps, Americans on orange rental bicycles pulling out into traffic without looking. I have to make an emergency stop in front of a lady who pulls crosswise into the cyclepath; I hear her boyfriend say, "I always tell you to look both ways," in a tone that indicates he's an insufferable person to spend time with. I follow the lines that the locals take and sneer at a group of men in tight trousers, all of whom have their phone out, debating loudly which way it is to the sex museum. I feel a totally unearned sense of superiority, high up on my tourist bike.
Sam calls and tells me that due to the cable theft problem, she's been held up at the previous station. I ride under the central station, which smells powerfully of urine, and along the quayside, down to where Sam's waiting for me. I find her sitting on a wall with her head in her hands.
We're both mighty hungry so we head across the street for some food and a last Nice Beer before making our way out to the ferry by train. It's a short ride on the train from Amsterdam to Driehuis, and the train's empty; and then it's a short ride from Driehuis out to IJmuiden, where the ferry is waiting. We collect our ticket and take our bikes up onto the boat and leash them to the bulkhead. There are six or seven other bicycles on the boat with us: tourists heading up to Scotland maybe.
We head up a deck or two and find our cabin and then I immediately fall asleep.
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C2A: Into the Real Netherlands
The area around Standaarbuiten and Moerdijk seems to be one sprawling industrial/farming estate. Long stock-straight rows of potatoes on one side, idling lorries and docking bays on the other. Just beyond, a set of bridges and new housing estates. The houses are manicured and stylish, and a few of them confusingly have thatched roofs? Canals start to wind their way amid the fields on the way out to Hollands Diep.
We’re entering the Real Netherlands.
We pass through a sleepy town called Zevenbergen and then a village called Moerdijk, where the locals mounted a resistance to the invading Nazis who sought to control the Hollands Diep estuary. On both sides of the estuary there are the remnants of lines of concrete bunkers, placed by the Germans as defense and now scrawled with graffiti about love and totally caved in with dirt and nettles. We climb a hill on the far side of the town and find, at the top of the hill, the Hollands Diep itself, broad and roaring with traffic.
This is not the first time that we find rivers at the top of hills. (The hills are, it scarcely needs to be said, actually embankments keeping the North Sea out of the country.)
We cross the Moerdijk bridge into Zuid-Holland and the cut through the fields to the south side of Dordrecht. The suburbs are quiet and green and launch us with very little fanfare into the heart of the town, where we stop at Nobel Brood for a bit of brunch. I get a kanelbulle, which transports me directly back to Sweden a couple of years ago (although it’s nowhere near the real thing). Then we board our first waterbus across the Oude Maas: a pound each saves us going back on ourselves to cross the river via bridge.
On the way out of Dordrecht we pass through a type of residential area I’ve never seen before: houses on narrow islands abutting a tiny canal. There are gardens watered by the canal and little canoes moored at wooden decks, all abutting a cyclepath frequented almost entirely by girls in baggy jeans and pensioners in wraparound sunglasses. It seems somehow so idyllic. And then we climb a hill and find another canal crossing the previous one at a higher level than all of the houses.
We turn off and make our way through Nieuw-Lekkerland to catch our second waterbus of the day across the Lek. We time it perfectly and fly out of Lekkerkerk with the wind behind us.
From here it just gets more Dutch. On both sides now are long, narrow patches of grass, sometimes with cows or sheep or goats, sometimes with a couple of lapwings or seagulls, alternating with long rows of water, only a couple of inches below the land. I don’t know how the whole thing doesn’t flood under rain. There has got to be some serieus engineering at work here.
We fly past kids coming home from school, pitying their battle against 20 kph headwinds, before rolling into Gouda and joining the rush hour bike traffic. Sitting in a queue of bikes at a traffic light makes me feel extremely smug.
Eventually we arrive at the summerhouse where we’re staying for the night. It’s rustic and cosy in perfect proportions, so we settle in. I make a quick run to the shop for groceries on my bike. I think I could make a good Dutch person, if only I could learn the language.
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