Petervan Delicacies #183
Jan - Feb 2026
“Delicacies” is my incoherent, irregular, unpredictable collection of interesting sparks I came across online. Handpicked by a human, no robots, no AI. A form of tripping, wandering, or dérivé, with some loosely undefined theme holding them together. Delicacies have no fixed frequency: I hit the publish button when there is enough material. That can be after a week or after 3 months. No pressure, literally.
The very best
The Sovereign Enterprise - Great post by Mike Walsh - This is about stack-thinking on steroids, and intelligence configuration as competitive advantage
“Intelligence configuration is the emerging frontier of competitive advantage. How is work decomposed between humans and machines? Which decisions are delegated to agents and which are escalated to managers? How are agents granted access to internal tools and external APIs? How are exceptions surfaced and resolved? How is institutional knowledge encoded in prompts, policies, reinforcement learning loops, and monitoring dashboards? These design choices shape how value is created and captured. They determine whether intelligence accumulates within the enterprise boundary or dissipates into shared platforms.”
You Spent Your Whole Life Getting Good at the Wrong Thing - by Alberto Romero
“Our language for value and worth is built around execution. “I’m productive” means I’m good at executing. “I worked hard today” means I put effort into my tasks. So when execution gets cheap, it doesn’t feel like progress. It feels like your skills are becoming worthless. The thing you spent years getting good at is now a commodity.”
Michael Wagner hits the nail on the head when recommending the Whiteboard Defence as a method for resisting AI and assessing students’ deep understanding of knowledge in the age of AI. It’s not about the final artifact; it’s about the process.
“The method’s resistance to AI stems from a fundamental mismatch between what generative systems can produce and what the defense actually assesses. A large language model can synthesize solutions to complex problems instantaneously. It can write code, derive equations, and generate sophisticated analyses that would take human students hours to produce. But the whiteboard defense does not assess the ultimate answer. It assesses the construction process itself.”
About Human Resistance to AGI - impressive collection of resources - great initiative by Gerd Leonhard
About dreams and surrealism and the unconscious > a bit basic, but hey!
“Yet none of them could have foreseen the truly surrealistic déluge that artificial intelligence has brought us. If AI reveals to us something of how we think, its hallucinations reveal to us even more about how we dream.”
Data & Society
This isn’t a high-security government facility. It’s Beverly Hills High School. Via Bruce Schneier
“Schools across the U.S. are rolling out AI-powered surveillance technology, including drones, facial recognition and even bathroom listening devices. But there’s not much data to prove they keep kids safe.”
Innovation
You can’t pause a disruption. Great reflections by Michael Wagner on resisting AI
“Christensen’s framework challenges this assumption. Disruption doesn’t wait for an invitation. It pushes capabilities forward if the market is ready. AI exhibits the same pattern.”
AI, Robots, Algorithms
How AI destroys institutions - via Gary Marcus
“The affordances of AI systems have the effect of eroding expertise, short-circuiting decision-making, and isolating people from each other. These systems are anathema to the kind of evolution, transparency, cooperation, and accountability that give vital institutions their purpose and sustainability. In short, current AI systems are a death sentence for civic institutions, and we should treat them as such.”
Learn to use AI competently in 1 day - By Alberto Romero
“It will take you 10 minutes to read and 1 day to apply the curriculum. I’ve written it assuming you’re starting from roughly zero and want to end the day able to use AI for actual work without having to go through a 100-page document. I would estimate that, based on what I’ve seen from the average user, ~90% of people know less than what this tutorial covers.”
And another great one by Alberto Romero: why he is leaving ChatGPT now they are having ads in free subscriptions.
“The paid tiers are the control group of an otherwise unsuccessful worldwide social experiment. The free tiers, soon to be ad-ridden, are the rats in the maze.”
Cory Doctorow’s ultimate arguments about AI and the danger of becoming reverse centaurs
“AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more.”
Chris Perry got challenged by his wife about authorship
“In 1948, Norbert Wiener founded cybernetics: the study of communication and control between humans and machines. The Macy Conferences had asked the question I was now living: when humans and machines form a system, who controls whom?”
Internet Culture
About “Cute Accelerationism”
“Cuteness becomes a productive force that extends from the future to the present to update a class of marginalised, mutant, consumerist and consumed beings.”
The Thinking Game takes you on a journey into the heart of leading AI lab DeepMind, capturing a team striving to unravel the mysteries of intelligence and life itself. Via Gerd Leonhard
AR, VR, XR, Games
Apple still does not understand the Vision Pro, says Ben Thompson. Some good lessons when you think about VR experiences.
“What is frustrating is that the limiting factor is Apple itself: the company had 14 Apple Immersive Video cameras at this concert, but what I want is only one. I want an Apple Immersive Video camera planted in the audience, and the opportunity to experience the concert as if I were there, without an Apple editor deciding what I get to see and when.”
Virtual Worlds
About Celestial Motion
About VR Installation “From Dust”. Winner Cannes Immersive 2025. In Brussels’ Bozar from 6-19 March 2026
Superior Worlds
About CYRNILOI, a physical sculpture by Nick Ervinck and Angelino Artworks
“In CYRNILOI, the bonsai becomes a conceptual paradigm: it represents the human desire to orchestrate nature, while the BLOB structure embodies the opposing logic: expansion, mutation, unpredictable proliferation. The sculpture becomes the staged encounter between discipline and drift, between order and metamorphosis.”
In the Eyes of the Animal
Aesthetics
Nicolay Boyadjiev has an interesting take on rendering scenario fiction: a new genre of institutional futurism.
“We also avoided centring any “main characters” or humanoid figures within the stream, staging instead composite landscapes, environments and interiors foregrounded as figures in themselves rather than as backdrops for any additional, protagonist-driven narrative overlay.”
The Grid as an Ordering Universe - by Filipe Bedoya
Rosalia at The BRIT Awards - the genius is in the dance collective "La Horde” > contemporary barok.
Performance
Not sure where to put this. On the one hand, a video essay about empty spaces in music, on the other hand, an artistic video performance. By musicologist Bahadırhan Koçer
This is Chia Amisola, performing online during Artwrld. I am a big fan of Chia since I saw her performance on Screenwalks
Music/Sound/Film
Electronic music making on a sailboat off the coast of Svalbarg (Spitsbergen) by Yann Tiersen
Amazing new album by Tsar B
Eryk Salvaggio’s Human Movie. A cross-over of a talk/performance. Six Meditations on a Compression Algorithm is an award-winning 35-minute video essay contrasting computational processes of diffusion models and the human metaphors used to describe them — such as temperature, creativity, image recognition, memory, reason, and the unmodeled.
Free your Music - Last year SoundCloud launched Library Sync. Take your playlists from Spotify and Apple Music to your SoundCloud. On your mobile app. Via Fred Wilson, who is the Chairman of the Board of Soundcloud
Brainmelt
The Silicon Interior: What Do Agents Believe - by the folks from Antikythera
“The Singularity is unlikely to be a single moment of takeoff; it is the gradual, collective awakening of a silicon society that we are now, already and irrevocably, a part of.”