This is getting closer to something I've long wanted: an in-depth book length account of just what the hell has been going on at the NYT for the last ten years, a story of oligarchs and old money NY clashing with labor and their own expanding readership, and its transformation into a gaming company.

This guy made billions from cofounding Meta and Asana in his 20s and he doesn’t know how water works or where it’s running out

ok so, the answer is the Xiaomi YU7. insideevs.com/news/783168/...

This is a banger. Anyone who worked in lefty nonprofit world circa 2020 will find all of this eerily — and disturbingly — familiar, albeit in a "through a glass, darkly" kind of way...

This is yet another area where the EU creating a “Eurostack” of technology and financial services would do real work to safeguard global democracy and the rule of law. You guys don’t have to be dependent on capricious and arbitrary US tech oligarchs!

The people who own our papers like Trump so covering this as an insane injustice and scandal like it should be is something they don't want to do

how can we exist in a world ran by people who don’t think this shit is a problem

“Why does this issue with CSAM keep happening on X,” I wonder, as I renew my blue check for the Democrats and don’t reflect on the party’s subbasement reputation

Man, watching travel influencers flock to Saudi Arabia for sponsored content (latest is coaster creators visiting Six Flags Qiddiya), but not mentioning a word about human rights, is really bleak. APCO wishes it could have done this for Central Asia.

If you are a resident of California, the state now has a portal where you can demand deletion of your personal data from 500+ registered data brokers with a single request form, for free. consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov

I’m out of things to say about this platform other than I look down on you if you still use it.

we had podcasts done by nobodies for about 10yrs and it was great, before out of work tv presenters started doing them and then it just became tv again

OPENAI SENT 80 times as many child exploitation incident reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children during the first half of 2025 as it did during a similar time period in 2024, according to a recent update from the company.

this is such an important thing to recognize and call out the fascism is mostly done being nice at this point, but it got here through well dressed men politely asking questions while the rest of us were scolded for pointing out where those questions led

Yes, more of this

So I’m not sure I know how to say this, but it’s interesting to see the conservatives drop homonationalism as an ideological framework. They made common cause with anti-queer violence, especially the state sponsored kind they helped cultivate in Africa, so it’s vanished from their rhetoric.

In this in-depth interview Billie Jean Sweeney — a former editor at The New York Times — details how the paper shifted towards openly promoting anti-trans hatred, why this was directed from the very top, how some staff pushed back and the immense damage done by the NYT legitimizing bigotry.

Child exploitation content on X/Twitter sharply increased under Musk, who not only abruptly disbanded the group of volunteer experts advising the platform on child safety, image exploitation, and other abuses in 2022, but tried to blame them for the company's CSAM problem www.npr.org/2022/12/12/1...

Magic Johnson was the grand marshal of the Rose Parade today, and as someone who remembers his November 1991 HIV announcement: if you had told anybody that day that he would be alive and healthy 34+ years later, I don't think they would have believed you. Medicine and research—they work.

In 2026 I want all of the decent people to remember one thing. You aren’t meant to be this disciplined, this self-sacrificing to survive. The environment is supposed to support good living. We can have that. You are not a failure. That is politics. That is all.

Also obviously by this point there is very literally nothing that could convince anyone still doing free voluntary labor for elon musk to stop so this is more about the fact we should hang this on necks as loudly, prominently and constantly as possible, because they're now morally responsible.

My online new years' resolution is to share one (1) new essay I really like or appreciate every day. Today, let's do this piece by @judyberman.bsky.social, which is great, in part, because it thinks about its subject as a text that exists IN TIME! As we all do. HNY! time.com/7341726/stra...

Last year I read the first 16 books of the Foreigner series by CJ Cherryh, and they were just terrific. I also took the plunge into Greg Egan (Neal Stephenson, but a good writer and not a fascist) and Vernor Vinge. My nonfiction love was this argument for making justice pleasurable. Really good.

Gonna tell my students this spring that this is where 6-7 came from

I’m seeing more vert ads with low quality, uncanny valley AI video generators. The comments are universally negative, but I don’t think that’s going to do much — the cost ratio (for now, with VC-subsidized pricing) is just enough to kill off a generation of creatives and reset salary expectations 🫤

It’ll feel weird to write 2026 for a while. But just generally, years feel too big, obviously because I’m middle aged and am not fully resigned to it. That got me thinking: when was the last time writing a new year numeral felt “normal?” Like, not as a mildly dislocating feeling? Did it ever?

“Emerge”

This was fun

just so it's clear: this is the exact core function of genAI Fascist government and climate deniers love it because it can produce the aesthetics of knowledge without any actual tendency towards truth. It is automated denialism. Shame on every climate scientist promoting its use (there are lots)

[con't] "Quite simply, the administration is failing—often spectacularly—at erasing transgender people. They are making our lives harder, yes, but many of us are finding strength in community...The tunnel is long, but the light at the end of it is still there." 2/2

Deep fryers, labelers, and 3d printers are inventions that beg people to try using them on all the things, without needing a single person to declare them inevitable. No one needs to be told to adapt or die to instinctively go "ooh I wonder if I can ___" about em

Watching a Gen Alpha describe a Deadmau5 track like its Stairway to Heaven and wondering what the future is gonna look like

Here’s a selection of weird music videos you should know about

The game is to get people to believe that ChatGPT is trustworthy and has the answer to everything, embed it everywhere, then doctor the corpus to provide only the answers those with money want people to see, hear, and believe. This is not exaggeration. See Grok.

Because brands are already poisoning the internet with content in order to game search engines, those same tactics are resulting in ChatGPT being similarly poisoned. Search engines allow brands to bypass their search algorithm by paying cash money, and ChatGPT is proposing to do the same.

Oh cool we all get to be our own little Truman

I’m sorry but I have been cackling at this for like 20 minutes

I could keep wrestling with two research papers I want to get done ASAP… orrrrr I could keep banging my head against the wall with a class prep… orrrrrr I could fiddle with my Saturn emulator so that I can spend the afternoon playing Panzer Dragoon I think I know which one I am going to choose 😬

Not to get too sappy about it, but I’m really glad people are responding by making shitpost games and really clever little post-sized games. It’s a form that I love, because I love how it highlights games as language and gamemaking as communication and jokes as a wonderful form of play.

“Prominent artists have started to complain. Kaytranada, a Grammy-winning DJ, has called out stationary crowds. Tyler, the Creator, the rapper who has released four straight No. 1 albums, lamented in July that the threat of constant surveillance was killing dance for his generation.”

For 2026, let’s watch less content like CBS News and instead watch more content like this

Happy New Year to my fellow vaccinated people who made it to 2025

Every week, Nature publishes yet another breathless puff piece about some AI startup, based only unpublished claims from the company and interviewing only those who work there. How can the leading scientific journal publish piece after piece that would make Kevin Roose blush? I think it's that...

Dr. Jo’s long-term research was interrupted by the closure of Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles’ gender clinic. If you hear these people saying “we need more research,” know that they are the ones shutting down the research.

After being attacked for it by the NYT, one researcher has found yet more evidence in favor of puberty blockers. @veraeikon.bsky.social takes a look at this study in this month's Journal Club!

Or the department of war. None of these names are legal and by using them these “neutral” names ABC chooses to participate in the criminal vandalism of the us government, whose leader they have also bribed.

For 2026, let’s watch less content like CBS News and instead watch more content like this

I could be prepping my classes, OR I could be learning how to play Path of Exile 😬