• Two of the co-founders of Twitter and Pinterest are working on a new social network cult.   (MSN)
  
  A cult with venture capital.

  I have no idea whether they will succeed.  But as a columnist writing about how to keep our humanity in the 21st century, I believe it's important to focus on people who are at least trying.  Social media, after its promising early days, took a dark turn and is now a deeply alienating force, replacing healthy human interaction and leading us to spend much of our lives looking at our phones.

  That's only partly the fault of the social media companies.
  
  Mostly it's just people.

  Many fear that AI, still in its adolescence, will take us down the same path because of the financial incentives to maximize eyeballs and time online.  But it could go either way, and we as a society still have a choice about how we use these powerful tools.

  Fair.  Let's see how West Co - the new company in question, is tackling the problem.

  Their bid for redemption is West Co. - the Workshop for Emotional and Spiritual Technology Corporation

  It's the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation all over again.

  - and the platform they’re testing is called Tangle, a "purpose discovery tool" that uses AI to help users define their life purposes, then encourages them to set intentions toward achieving those purposes, reminds them periodically and builds a community of supporters to encourage steps toward meeting those intentions.

  Danger, Will Robinson.

  "A lot of people, myself included, have been on autopilot," Stone said.  "If all goes well, we’ll introduce a lot of people to the concept of turning off autopilot."

  But will all go well?

  Each morning, staffers light the candle at the "ancestor table," with photographs of family members dead and alive and other sources of inspiration: Harvey Milk, Jane Goodall, Saint Francis.  The founders participate in a fortnightly "covenant" meeting in which they renew their support for each other.  Moments of silence precede meetings.  Ceremonies mark the changing of seasons.  Employees give one another regular updates on their personal triumphs and struggles.  Founders rate their weeks on a zero to 100 "poopy to pleasure" index.

  I have never seen a tech company more likely to earn its own 10-part miniseries on HBO Max after the comet arrives.

• It's the year of Linux on the desktop...  For tech journalists.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  The author installed Linux - specifically CachyOS, an open source distribution with similar goals as SteamOS, to support modern hardware and make it easy to run games.
  
  Everything worked...  Except Minecraft.  But that was because he wanted to play Minecraft Bedrock, because that's the version his kids play, and it's not easy to make it work on Linux.
  
  
  
• AMD's Ryzen AI Halo mini PC is a Ryzen 395+ AI mini PC for AMD.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  No specs, no price, no schedule.  It has a bunch of USB-C ports at the back, so we'll see if it delivers a lot of USB4 or it's something less interesting.
  
  
  
• Twitter is planning to make its algorithm open source, with releases every month.  (MSN)
  
  What use this is I'm not sure, but it's better than not having it.
  
  
  
• My home fibre network disintegrated.  (Alienchow)
  
  Not mine - I have fibre internet, but copper networking inside - but the author's, who carefully laid conduit in the concrete slab when building his new home and ran fibre throughout and is now finding that this was not a good idea at all.
  
  
  
• Why consumers have gotten the memory shortage narrative right.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Self-serving spin from Micron trying to paint themselves as anything other than villains.
  
  
  
• Save $130 on 32GB of DDR5 memory by making your own.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  All you need is 32GB of DDR5 memory and the ability to desolder and solder surface-mount components.
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Tuesday, January 13 2026 04:22 AM (KOtXO)

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