Dark Forest OS

"Everyone wants to play the harp now"

Plus a celebration of SOFTER and an expanded public desktop

This week in culture and the internet

Anthropic purchases, scans, and destroys thousands of physical books to train models. Details continue to trickle out about how the original training models for the big LLMs were built. The original sin.
US government spends $5 million to make two gold leaf horse statues for Trump’s self-monument. Proving arts funding does exist, just for all the worst reasons.
"Everyone wants to play the harp now." In a bid to reclaim what past decades have erased, Dazed reports that young people are taking up harp and trumpet, yearning for timeless crafts to rebuild their attention and sense of self.

DFOS Spotlight: SOFTER

The SOFTER desktop — shared with permission

This week marks the debut of a new DFOS space we’re especially excited about: SOFTER, a network of creative technologists, designers, and cultural producers imagining softer digital futures.

Described as “built on a feminist consciousness,” SOFTER treats technology not as something purely technical, but as a space for creation, learning, and collaboration. Its community is organized around values like care, empathy, multiplicity, and collective imagination.

Until now, that community has been spread across Discord, Instagram, email, a website, and other platforms. SOFTER is moving to DFOS to create a single place where the community can live: where members can talk, organize, learn, host events, and support the work without having to feed an algorithm or stitch together six different tools.

The SOFTER directory, shown in DFOS's new index view

The new space launches today, August 5, at SOFTER’s summer social in London, with a conversation about community architecture and a live walkthrough of the space. This October, DFOS will also serve as community and communications infrastructure for the SOFTER conference in Copenhagen.

We admire what SOFTER represents: a community thinking seriously not only about what technology can do, but about the values and relationships technology should be built around.

Explore SOFTER

DFOS product update

This week, DFOS spaces get two more ways to show their work and invite people in: products from their shops and upcoming events can now appear publicly on their Front Pages.