Issue 37 | October 2025

Welcome to the October 2025 edition of Miaaw Monthly, courtesy of our continually satisfactory newsletter provider Beehiiv.com.

We continue with a new podcast every fortnight, and a growing buzz of behind-the-scenes research and archiving.

And, as usual, we continue to hope that you will send us something that you want to include in Miaaw Monthly, or something that you want to suggest for the podcasts, by emailing us at [email protected]. We will be happy to include your news and suggestions here and hunt down the topics you want to hear in the podcasts.

PODCASTS FOR OCTOBER 2025

A THOUSAND WORDS

THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD

Frictionlessness

We have linked to a piece by Tante before because he posts online about a number of issues that overlap with our concerns at Miaaw. Lately he has published an essay about Friction and not being touched.

It begins like this:

The journalist Karen Hao – who published an absolutely fantastic book about OpenAI called “Empire of AI” recently – coined (as far as I know) one of the best terms for describing modern “AI” systems: Everything Machines.

“AI” systems are not framed as specific tools that solve specific problems in specific ways but just as solution in itself: There is nothing “AI” cannot do, if it fails we just failed it by not prompting it right or not building large enough data centers or not waiting for another 6 months when these stochastic systems will totally be able to do whatever was needed. Pinky swear.

This trick disconnects the physical and technical realities of the capabilities and lack thereof of connectivist “AI” systems built on stochastic correlations between patterns in data and what these systems are narratively positioned to be able to do. LLMs cannot really do people’s jobs – they might be able to kinda do very small parts, especially if quality is not a criterium – but they are always presented as such: Whether it’s by doomers who predict massive unemployment and poverty or by apologists who predict an age of leisure. The Everything Machine can do – as the name implies – everything. Solve everything.

Lately I’ve been thinking about friction a lot. Not the physical force that allows us to walk and all that – even though that also is neat – but cognitive and social friction and its function.

You can find the full blog post here.

Lego eats itself

We have often noticed the way that consumer products chase each other in a lazy circle, as brands get extended well beyond their natural boundaries. The earliest example that comes to mind might be the Mars Bar ice-cream which seemed clever when it first arrived but rapidly spawned a legion of followers. Last week, in Helsinki, Owen saw a range of frozen pizzas “inspired by” [their words on the packet] flavours from a range of potato chips.

Now Lego has reduced this to a (genuinely amusing) neat trick of its own. Having introduced mini-figures a decade or two ago they have now introduced a scaled up version of a mini-figure - a giant mini-figure made from the very Lego mini-figures attach to. This no doubt follows on from their “adult sets” that include an exact life-size replica of a famous shoe. One consumer good disguised as another.

You can see the full description of the upscaled astronaut on the Lego website here!

Microsoft “rationalises” our project out of existence

Owen says:

We have been using Minecraft Education Edition for a coding project that we have been doing with teenage girls in southern India. We have been doing this for five years with little to no funding for running costs. The cost of licencing the software has crept up every year. Twenty licences currently cost us 184€.

In the summer Microsoft announced that the price of licensing the software would increase. They said that “The subscription price increase is necessary to support the development of features for Minecraft Education that meet the evolving needs of our customers, and to align our pricing with Microsoft's general pricing policy. The new price also aligns with Minecraft’s other product offerings, ensuring a consistent and fair pricing strategy across all products.”

More recently they announced that the increase would involve the price increasing from 184€ to 672€. Unless my maths has gone hopelessly wrong (in which case I blame the shock) that is somewhere round a 350% increase.

This sent me looking to find an open source equivalent and, somewhat to my surprise, I found one called Luanti. It is free and offers most of what Minecraft offers. Unfortunately it does not offer the block coding that we have been using so it may not work for us.

It may work for you though. You can download it from here, and you can find a complete manual for it online here. If anyone finds any use for Luanti in any project at all please let us know and we will post about it here.

World Postcard Day

Finally, for this issue, we recently received this in our inbox earlier in the week:

It’s almost here… the postcardiest day of the year! 🎉 Next Wednesday, October 1st, we’ll be celebrating the 6th World Postcard Day, and we can’t wait to see your postcards flying all over the globe.

Approach at your own risk!

The next edition of the Miaaw Monthly will appear as if by magic on Wednesday November 5th. Any contributions, comments, or suggestions gratefully received!