The Two Deprivations open.substack.com/pub/parables...

this is what it feels like to post on bluesky

This is one of my favorite comics we've made.

It doesn’t matter which side of the box you open medication, it will always be the side with the little leaflet thingy

Every single individual who has been fined for copyright infringement should be given a refund now that we live in a world where that’s fine actually

Hello friends. 002 from Haus Von Kirschnell – our digital scrapbook – is live! Allow us to regale you with some tales of winter, fawn over our wonderful friends, food, and discovered sounds. With a guest section by my good friend @mpinney.bsky.social. vonkirschnell.haus/season-in-re...

The most unhinged thing about modern life is that we've normalised paying $200 a month for the gym and $300 a month for wellness "supplements" but if someone charges $5 for a newsletter they wrote with their actual brain people act like they've been mugged at knifepoint

Thinking through something over my morning reading. I know the Discourse now is to debate the applicability of the term “extraction” to everything. I think it works for a variety of reasons & am glad to keep it. BUT sometimes what authors want to call extraction is just good old fashioned extortion.

this quote post is part of a vital thread of all the trans people I have met (bearing in mind we shoal together so that's loads), the one (1) detransitioner detransitioned because their family & friends rejected them, & they held huge sorrow about this. I feel so sad every time I think of them.

Looking for something to read over lunch? I've written some words on what I think happened to the internet and why we should use AI to overthrow the billionaires. www.wehavethemegapixels.com/writing/Brea...

"The men implicated in the Epstein files reinforces that I spend half my life explaining to men that their simplified, optimistic view of other men doesn’t line up with the experience of women and girls trying to dodge sexual harassment, assault and abuse attempts." - Leslie Morgan Steiner

“i pretty much never leave my house ha ha” because you’re scared the ghost of your young wife will kill you? because contact with outside air could aggravate your frail complexion? have some gall, some panache — make something of your withering

www.guidelabs.ai/post/scaling... This is extremely cool. Guide Labs have trained an LLM that can tell you what part of the prompt was most relevant to each part of the output, what concepts it ties to each part of the output, and what part of its training data influenced the output.

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus. FOSS nerds: the Torment Nexus cannot be ethical until it is Open Source

How did the tech bro crowd, growing up on stories of sci-fi, transhumanism, virtual reality and limitless ability to modify one's body, "biohacking," etc. end up becoming so viscerally anti-transgender? Truly boggles my mind.

the AI evangelists are not okay

Every single person in the UK will think this is something else for a split second

We do not teach students the right things about the Nazis. For example, on March 5th, 1933, Germany held elections. The Nazi party deployed SS, SA, and other Nazi orgs to “monitor” the elections This was done to “defend the homeland”

we do not teach students the right things about the Nazis We teach them that they are evil and they did the Holocaust, and so students think these are exceptional things unique to the Nazis As well we should teach them about the Blood Flag, soaked in the blood of the Bierhallputsch martyrs

I'm going to need you to sit down and read this headline slowly

seems almost certain we’ll later find out they were coerced thehill.com/homenews/med...

you fucked around and now the Episcopalians are doing memes. are you happy now. are you

This is a good analysis, I think. Notwithstanding the general trash fire, there are some poor decisions being made in US tech policy around AI (and also crypto) that the UK is choosing to lock itself into by taking this C20th view of progress

Two trials will be repeated endlessly despite always producing the same results: 1) Does UBI work? (yes) 2) Does AI improve productivity? (no)

2/ “… he is a once in a generation storytelling talent who has a loose relationship with the truth.” Telling the story, or painting a picture of the future that the person he was speaking with *wants to hear* is the priority… not substance or reality.

"The same circumstances that made the soil fertile enough for agriculture to thrive also left behind the clay that became the medium for rcdg the 🍎 of that soil. I find this really moving—that the landscape made this leap in human innovation possible, that ingenuity worked in tandem w/ geology..."

Who called it arson and not crime brulee?

Every tech update now is like: "Great news, the word processor you've relied on for twenty years has learned to juggle! Is it good at it? No! Does it help in any way? Of course not! Has it made it insufferable to use? Oh, absolutely."

6% of Britons say they have a nemesis yougov.co.uk/topics/polit...

Meanwhile, here in Maine, AI crawlers have rendered the server that manages our statewide interlibrary loan unreachable by legitimate attempts to pass through requests/information Again, but louder: the server can’t be reached by libraries and the folks trying to use them BECAUSE OF AI CRAWLERS.

Chris Cuomo posting a deepfake of AOC the same week that Jim Acosta “interviews” a deepfake of a school shooting victim are both harbingers of how traditional media power players will help usher in the worst of the AI slop era

The Republican governor of Texas has directed state police to arrest his Democratic opponents

Analysts show that capital expenditures on AI were so big over the last 6 months they added more to the GDP than *all consumer spending*. That growth is offsetting pain from the tariffs and slow job growth. So the AI bubble may be propping up the whole US economy. What happens if and when it pops?

Art galleries a bit weird eh. Each time your visit, a 100 paintings scattered in rooms and you walk through like uh-huh, uh-huh, ok, that’s nice, uh-huh, ok. Then at random one of them skewers you through your soul and you’re transfixed by the image for life

Limited replies on this because I am the Bishop of Fulham, this is my house and you're making a terrible racket

I think about this all the time

starbucks barista: order for cathy lou cthulhu: (visibly incensed) i guess that's me

A great looking role at IF and a really nicely framed job description that looks like it does a good job of explaining the org culture as well as the role.

Why do drum solos feel so much more self indulgent than other instruments?

Yall asking Grok questions like it’s not pumping out 1000 cubic meters of poison gas into South Memphis every 15 minutes all so MFs can get a corny ass screenshot to dunk on.

Harvey Price time then. In 2016, I had an ill fated stint as the Social Media Producer on Loose Women on ITV. It was a disaster, I should never have applied for the job, I certainly shouldn’t have been given it. I could do the actual job standing on my head, but the politics of the place…woof.

Question: what do you think is the love of your life? Not WHO (boring and fake concept), but WHAT.

I am grieving the barbarism that is going to unfurl from all this. People are going to die. Livelihoods gone. All to feed a corrupt kleptocracy. I see every day up close how different it is from the first time around. There are no guardrails. A disaster. I’m sorry we have to live through this.

You just enrolled for the Apple dev program, do you want 4 AirTags now? How about just one? Some headphones maybe? 🙄

Worth a watch: Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.

This has approximately the intellectual value of used toilet paper: it's so thin it falls apart at the slightest push, and is full of shit.

My SubwayTake is that American’s shouldn’t be allowed to elect the US President but the rest of the world can