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Cennydd Bowles

@cennydd.com
1K followers 504 following 115 posts

Philosopher of design and technology · Former design guy · Doctoral researcher, IDEA: The Ethics Centre, University of Leeds

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Reposted by Cennydd Bowles
cameron tonkinwise @camerontw.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Not "by design" in the abstract sense of 'deliberately', but "by design" in the very concrete sense of "by the designs designers designed" – designers who are and should feel complicit.
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 19/07/2026
One of the worst games of football I’ve ever seen, and I was at France 0–0 Denmark in 2018, where the fans booed both teams off.
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Miguel Delaney @migueldelaney.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
Yes, Argentina the first ever World Cup finalist to not have a shot in the 90 minutes.
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 16/03/2026
‘the unexamined life is just how we roll’
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 15/03/2026
Ditto. Stew on, lunch made, kitchen mopped, time for a nap.
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 06/02/2026
Saw them at Primavera last year. Proper good.
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 04/02/2026
One thing I’ve not interrogated properly is how my experience of seeing GamerGate from the inside, and its utter misappropriation of ethics as an abuse vector, inspired my decision to get into actual ethics.
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ali alkhatib @ali-alkhatib.com · 27/01/2026
"i just do math" is something a cs phd student studying AI at stanford said to me once. i think about him a lot.
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 27/01/2026
Thought for a minute I’d somehow unsubbed and/or missed an issue. Phew!
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jenny tightpants @jtp.bsky.social · 25/09/2025
new scam going around where they hire you for a job but pay you less than the value your labor produced
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The Onion @theonion.com · 25/08/2025
Guy In Philosophy Class Needs To Shut The Fuck Up theonion.com/guy-in-philosophy-clas…
Guy In Philosophy Class Needs To Shut The Fuck Up
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 16/08/2025
I made it up at the time but I since learned that eg ‘provotype’ existed prior. (Worse IMO but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.) Tbh I now think it all fits plausibly under the umbrella of design fiction.
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Murray Shanahan @mpshanahan.bsky.social · 25/07/2025
Very sad to learn of the death on 18th July of Margaret (Maggie) Boden, a titan of cognitive science and AI. I met her many times, and respected her greatly. www.theargus.co.uk/memorials/de...
Maggie Boden and Murray Shanahan on a panel in 2018
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 20/07/2025
Thank you mate.
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 20/07/2025
Thank you Alan.
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 20/07/2025
Thanks Marijam.
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 20/07/2025
Thank you.
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 20/07/2025
Our sweet, silly cat Beemo died yesterday. One of those slowly-then-quickly illnesses turned out to be an irreversible kidney problem. She was loving, easygoing and vocal, and a dear companion to us both. We’re in bits – but this is the price of love. Hug your nonhuman friends, all.
A black and white cat faces the camera on a wooden deck. Her paws are stretched out in front of her.
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 06/07/2025
Bloody hell. Wishing you a swift and triumphant recovery.
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 24/05/2025
I am begging for a Hollywood movie or TV writer to make something that features realistic 'artificial intelligence'
A four panel meme, featuring John Connor talking to The Terminator, from Terminator 2 

John: Wait a second, you’re saying you’re from the future?

Terminator: Great question! Thanks so much for asking. Let’s think about the answer…hmm! The current year is 1983. Working backwards logically, I’m from the year 1965, which is 300 years in the future. Anything else you’d like to know?

John - stares blankly

Terminator: I’m sorry, I can see that was not the right answer. I actually came from the year 829392 AD, which is 10 years in the past from this year, which is 3
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 23/05/2025
Only now noticed that Aftersun is on iPlayer for the rest of the year. It broke my heart at a parentally significant time of my life. Deeply recommended. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...
bbc.co.uk
BBC Two - Aftersun
Sophie is beginning to remember a formative holiday she took as a child.
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𝐃𝐄𝐕𝐎𝐍™ @devononearth.bsky.social · 10/05/2025
Anywhere you can get to on a Transport for Wales train is a part of Greater Wales
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Molleindustria FUTURE? NO THANKS! OUT NOW @molleindustria.org · 15/05/2025
This Boer/Grok fiasco is funny, but it previews how AI chatbots will be used more subtly to manipulate public opinion. They present decontextualized authority: unsourced, unauthored, always confident. And we are being trained to trust them as objective or as the Wisdom of Crowds.
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Paris Marx @parismarx.com · 09/05/2025
During a recent interview with Theo Von, Zuckerberg admitted a startling revelation. While talking to his daughter about the news, he realized understanding politics and law is important to fully understanding technology. What a discovery! www.disconnect.blog/p/mark-zucke...
At one point in the interview, Zuckerberg spoke about the time he spends with his children. When he got to his oldest, a nine-year-old daughter, he explained how they discuss the news together — hopefully from a reputable publication, not the false information that looks like news proliferating on Facebook. While it’s nice that he tries to engage with the interests of his kids, he also made a striking comment that illustrated the depth of his ignorance.

“It hadn't occurred to me before how much in order to understand technology, you need to really understand government and civics and politics and law and like all of these different things,” said the man who has been running one of the most influential technology companies in the world for more than two decades. Somehow, it had taken explaining current events to his child to realize this quite obvious fact — but it doesn’t seem to have given him much humility.
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BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 04/05/2025
any excuse to repost the greatest Tetris story ever, when a reporter went to cover early e-gaming championships and discovered that his wife was unknowingly *the world's greatest Tetris player* by a huge margin archive.boston.com/news/globe/m...
archive.boston.com
'Bizarro World' - The Boston Globe
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 04/05/2025
Entirely my plan, but cricket.
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Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 03/05/2025
Every now again it’s useful to repeat advice about accessing papers that are behind a paywall that excludes you. Email the author. My estimate is that 90% of academics are so thrilled that a living, breathing, possibly even reading, person shows interest that they will swiftly send you a copy.
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Steve Farrugia @fasterandworse.com · 02/05/2025
I posted this on twitter ~3y ago and it struck a chord. Still relevant?
A chart titled the realities of UX design

The x axis: bad for the business to good for the business
The y axis: bad for the user to good for the user

so the 4 segments are:

good for user/bad for business - it's empty

good for user/good for business - has three coloured portions

1. good for user but neutral/middling for business - "You can do it if you do it on your own time, expect extreme implementation resistance"
2. good for user but middling to good for business - "rare but likelihood of implementation can improve with examples of edge-case marketing potential"
3. neutral to good for user and neutral to good for business - "majority of projects you propose but have to rigorously justify with business metrics"

bad for user/good for business - has two coloured portions

1. neutral to mid-bad for user but good for business - "majority of your assigned work"
2. mid-bad to bad for user but good for business - "occasional work that may trigger career contemplation (aka dark patterns)"

bad for user/bad for business - it's empty
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John Attridge @johnattridge.bsky.social · 28/04/2025
Babe are you ok? You've hardly touched your actions willed in such a way that they could become a universal law
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 28/04/2025
‘How much Weltschmerz is too much? We ask five people who’ve scrolled so much that they’ve cast aside any prospect of personal happiness and instead wallow in the pits of other-directed despair.’
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 28/04/2025
Couple of grabs here, but I recommend getting the actual magazine from digitalfrontier.newsstand.co.uk
Page 1 of an article 'Symbolic Gestures' from Digital Frontier. A big headline reads 'Your job is to convey how the system works'.Page 2 of the Digital Frontier article. Pullquotes read 'Awful and mawkish visual cues' and 'We value not just the content of the book but also the experience of turning the page'Page 3 of the Digital Frontier article. Pullquote: 'This is just what happens with culture. It gets remixed. It gets adapted.'
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 28/04/2025
I gave some thoughts on skeuomorphism for Digital Frontier, a new magazine on humanity & technology. Kudos to the writer and mag for engaging with the term’s actual meaning (a once-functional feature retained ornamentally), not just parroting the false equivalence with physical metaphor.
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Randall Munroe @xkcd.com · 25/04/2025
PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081
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Rachel Coldicutt @rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 17/04/2025
It might seem madly decadent just now, but planting seedlings, reading, walking, birdwatching, getting into some kind of exercise or craft, making models from a kit, perfecting the world's best tomato sauce, making music, sketching are all actually extremely important, joyful things to do
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Lauren McKenzie @themckenziest.gay · 16/04/2025
Good news guys
The WHITE HOUSE
But we are capable of so much more.
Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space. They leave distance annihilated, cause things to grow, and improve productivity.
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 16/04/2025
One reason to write: it forces even the most terminally hypertextual thinker to form linear, coherent opinions. Sometimes that’s enough to justify the effort.
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 14/04/2025
Someone please pay me $1/word to write a weird and earnest piece on Rory McIlroy as moral archetype, proof of the banishment of evil etc
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 14/04/2025
This has been one of the most agonising sporting evenings of my life. Unreal.
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 13/04/2025
The appallingly punctuated Gelaaati! Di Marco is a sure-fire stop for me.
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 04/04/2025
Opening day of the cricket season. Usually I’m quad-layered, shivering, clutching an outsized hot chocolate. Today, 21 °C, sunburn. Hasn’t rained in a month. Early April. Probably fine.
View from the Compton stand at Lord’s cricket ground, looking towards the pavilion. The sun is beating down on an early April day. Middlesex are playing Lancashire.
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 04/04/2025
Married ten years today. Life tip: marry the kindest person you know.
Cennydd (wearing a red beanie) and Anna (blue beanie) in Nottingham’s Market Square, Christmas Day 2021.
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tante @tante.cc · 28/03/2025
OpenAI's move to allow generating "Ghibly stlye" images isn't just a cute PR stunt. It is an expression of dominance and the will to reject and refuse democratic values. It is a vulgar display of power. tante.cc/2025/03/28/vulgar-display-…
tante.cc
Vulgar Display of Power
Hayao Miyasaki is the co-founder of Studio Ghibli, a Japanese animation studio known worldwide for their stunning, emotional, beautiful stories and movies. At the core of Studio Ghibli’s work is a deep engagement with questions of humanity. About what it means to be a human, about how to care for one another and the world […]
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Mat “Wilto” Marquis @wil.to · 24/03/2025
Alright dorks, it’s official—I’m doing this. wil.to/megamanathon/
wil.to
GET EQUIPPED WITH CHARITY STREAM
GET YOUR WALLETS READY!
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 22/03/2025
no
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Chappell Ellison @chappelltracker.bsky.social · 14/03/2025
Do you hate your job as a designer or do you hate capitalism
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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 14/03/2025
Trying to min/max your degree for employability will just potentially make you miserable and ruin what could have been one of the best times of your life, and there’s no guarantee it will even work. But otoh you should pick up some basic skills that will be useful while your mind is malleable.
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ryan @cybreco.bsky.social · 12/03/2025
they made an ai game where you can talk to the patients but forgot to add in prompt safety controls
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 11/03/2025
Glad to receive a copy of Universal Methods of Ethical Design, feat. 100 methods and frameworks to help designers consider ethical impacts. Obviously, responsible design needs policies, processes & infrastructure too, but IMO this is now your best resource for versatile tools. Recommended.
Cover of universal methods of ethical design, in dark grey with hot pink and white writingTable of contents page for universal methods of ethical design featuring 50 design toolPage of universal method of ethical design, featuring Spotify ethics assessment to
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Cennydd Bowles @cennydd.com · 05/03/2025
Maybe I find the series’ soap-trope backbone too hard to resist. Wild melodrama needs uncannily flat realism, no? Greater relief for the surrealer moments too.
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