i love riding the bus. sure it is sometimes late or crowded, but it’s also a cheap ride full of all kinds of interesting people. plus that feeling when you are just about to catch it and the driver waits for you, or you get up to give your seat to someone and they’re grateful, or vice versa ..

Like others in this thread, my unsubstantiated hypothesis is many of us are turning to offline pursuits bc most of the web sucks now, bc IRL participation is more nourishing, and out of a sense of urgency about building and sustaining local community while the world continues to burn.

I am a medieval historian!! The world always is in a state, it has never not been in a state, joy and delight and beauty is what humanity exists for

It's indeed possible to beat bad things backed by big money

This worship of efficiency kills creativity. Every transcript I have, every piece of research, I go over again & again, looking for detail, pattern, illuminating anecdote. It’s not efficient. I flail sometimes! But it’s essential. It’s how I learn to tell the story to myself, so I can tell it to you

All these women who spent a lot of money to get mar-a-lago face now finding it doesn’t save them, which the rest of us did try to explain…

I am running to be a Brookline Library Trustee, bc libraries are essential democratic infrastructure, and also awesome. I hope you vote for me. My friend @vogt4brookline.bsky.social is also running, and I hope you vote for her too. Anyways, read more at amyforbrookline.com . Election May 5th!

When are we doing this, MA???

Hey, y'all! This is my photo, so let me provide context to this awesome piece: it's a reprinting of the Oberlin letter in a mag called The Luddite Dispatch, a publication of The Luddite Club in Brooklyn. www.theludditeclub.org

When the series ended, a lot of people were mad at the last book; Applegate responded with a letter that went *incredbly* hard, that showcased the respect she had for her readers. It follows, below, in full.

oh my god is it a calf, please tell me its a calf

Stop worrying about what YA books to let your kids read and let them sort it out with V C Andrews and cocaine era Stephen King as God intended

yesssss brookline folks can check out my zine about local government and get involved

open letter to stop hacklore: www.hacklore.org/letter

Universities have been turning discretionary spending over to people with mostly Events backgrounds to enhance “student experience” and now that choice has inevitably come for the curriculum.

NYC needs to do this. There are endless blank canvases.

The whole "AI" industry is just based on the hope that they can deskill people fast enough that they'll have to rent back cognitive support systems. Forever. It's like Uber. Just that they don't try to break existing transportation infrastructures but your brain.

wow we are arriving at the exact situation every single person imagined within one second of seeing their first robot dog

i have no idea what this means but it was entertaining What's My JND? 0.0018 Can you beat it? www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd...

just saying: it's possible that "I'm gonna dramatically constrict my state capacity while plotting dramatic imperial expansion, and expanding my set of internal enemies while alienating most of my foreign allies" is the beginning of a world-historical masterstroke. but also possible that it isn't

NEW: Watch this report just in from CNN’s Frederik Pleitgen. It is raining oil in Tehran this morning. A city of 10 million is being actively poisoned. (🎥 CNN)

38% of airline passengers vote to open plane door midflight because that bitch stewardess said not to

…I've said it so many fucking times, now, but I'll say it again, that it's really fucking messed up that all of these conversations seek to apply to fucking LLMs a standard of personhood we still don't consistently and meaningfully apply to other fucking humans.

The reason I am so adamant about never giving RFK Jr. credit for the most mundane, ordinary, and well-validated advice about things like sugar is because of moments like this: he's cruel and hateful about people with autism, and he's cruel and hateful to women who need pain and fever relief.

All these companies are like "We can't just turn these chatbot services off," really, I'm old enough to remember Vine

'those movies where people watch a video because it's supposed to make you die in a week are unrealistic' I say as I watch another person take a Chotiner phone call

I used to work at a place where the CEO decided to make an issue of how bad soft drinks are, so he started charging us 50 cents for them. Simultaneously, the company kitchen also had a full bar, leading to all the negative effects pouring alcohol on workplaces always results in.

Them: it's useful Us: yeah but it's inherently evil. And how useful is it exactly? Them: moderately to mildly. But it's useful. Us: want to think about the inherently evil part? Them: ...but it's getting more useful!

This was a bracing and yet necessary read. "I realize that not only are there people who will drop a bomb on a school without losing a wink of sleep, but there are people who get rich when we bomb schools, who have a direct financial stake in ensuring we keep dropping as many bombs as possible."

I do not like Dunks iced coffee and I do not usually drink it. I will, however, fight to the death anyone who proposes to take it away from the fine folk of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

How does Isaac Chotiner even get anyone to sit for an interview? If he called me up and asked to interview me on the subject of why my cats are so great, I would hang up the phone before he had a chance to record me saying "well, it's true that Lucy eats my important paperwork sometimes"

Whenever I read about the billions it costs to build the weapons of war that we then destroy in pointless conflicts across the global south, I think of Orwell's words in Goldstein's Manifesto from 1984:

I keep seeing posts about ai models like "actually they're good at this thing now!" but once you understand that ai tools are being built by fascists in service of attacks on humanity, whether or not they can generate useable code or do basic searches kind of stops being the main question

And insofar as opposing fascism is not merely a moral opinion but a material project, building my practices around tools controlled by my enemies is not politically useful, or strategically wise, or morally correct

4 things I want ppl to understand about the override: 1. we have overrides at all because anti-tax freaks of the Grover Norquist ilk screwed us all in the 80s with Prop 2 1/2, which limits taxation in a way that deliberately strangles local governments' ability to provide good services. 1/5

i don't think i can say this any more directly: if you want to get better at something, you have to do it a lot there are other requirements but that one is non negotiable

the kind of thing that gets played at a war crimes trial

These words are designed to slide off of our brains and be forgotten. Say it plainly: No murdering children overseas. No locking up children in concentration camps here. No pedophiles in government or any positions of authority. No Republican freaks inspecting children's genitals.

Republican politicians across the country are pushing eliminationist policies that would literally outlaw, imprison, and detransition trans people. Democrats must step up.

Humans ARE deciding. They are deciding to deflect responsibility away from themselves and this only works if we let them do it. “Generals decide to throw darts at map and then bomb where the darts are, hoping to blame the darts for landing where they did and the people they bomb for living there.”

#LunarEclipse FAQ: Q: Is it safe to look at? A: Absolutely! Unlike a solar eclipse, there's no UNsafe time to look at a lunar eclipse. Q: Do I need a telescope? A: Nope! Best view is with naked eye. Just look up! Q: Does the eclipse portend terror & doom? A: Not at all! The news has that covered.

I have an idea for an AI startup where I promise to democratize super intelligence and then Nvidia gives me 20 billion dollars and I spend it on prenatal care, SNAP benefits, teachers, and libraries, thus increasing everyone's ability to think. Democratic, super, intelligence.

my problem with these takes, is it's like imagine if you were being attacked by a tiger at the zoo, and the zookeeper was over there kinda halfheartedly going "hey. come on now. get off him" and you went HEY WHAT THE FUCK! and the zookeeper went "uh don't oyu think you should be angry at the tiger?"

Small talk is critical democracy infrastructure because it strengthens the social fabric. Also, it feels good. don't @ me before reading part two of this, please.

“sorry about the fascism you’re dealing with; here’s a $10 coupon that expires next week.” via @marisakabas.bsky.social

ai is a rhetorical technology. when it produces a list of permissible targets, its value is not producing targets but producing permission

Sup chat this is Slouching Towards Bethlehem with your boy The Rough Beast, and it looks like today’s stream could be a big one, as some of you might’ve already seen there are rumors going around social media that the hour has come round at last, so we’re gonna get right into it

For approximately half a second I thought “why would they bomb girls‘ schools?” and then I remembered who we were taking about here.

it’s crazy how chickenshit anyone with actual power is, and how brave my neighbors are. let’s try going all in on civil society, I know who I trust with my life.