🎵❄️🎵 He sees you when you're sleeping He knows when you've just ate He knows full well he's normalizing A mass surveillance state

"I never thought leopards would eat MY face,” sobs Minnesota Somali leader who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party." — What a difference a year makes

It’s that time of year: what was the piece of writing about AI that stuck with you the most this year, pop press or academic? A few of mine in the thread. ⬇️

Fresh dystopian hell from Samsung fridges with ads.

Here’s my Spotify Wrapped 🎵✨

thanks for the advice, supreme ayatollah of iran

Crime is legal in the United States

Robinhood lets you bet on the weather

Once-in-a-lifetime bloom: rare palms in Rio de Janeiro flower before dying reut.rs/4pyBFkF

A new NY state law requires retailers to disclose when a "price was set by an algorithm using your personal data." What personal data?? Why a particular price?? There's a lot of unanswered questions, but the disclosure is attached to eggs and toilet paper: www.wired.com/story/algori...

Our government tried to let racist, genocidal Israeli football hooligans rampage on Birmingham's streets. They smeared those opposed to this as being driven by hatred of Jewish people. Now listen to what the West Midlands Chief Constable told MPs. What a scandal.

"And the doctor took this little flashlight, a little flashlight with a magnifying glass on it, I guess, and he looked in my ear and he said, with tears in his eyes, he said he could see my big beautiful brain in there, working hard and churning out the smarts, the chimneys smoking and everything"

In over 200 locations globally, photojournalists with The Associated Press are trusted eyewitnesses to the world's news, and have won 36 of AP's 59 Pulitzer Prizes since the award was established in 1917. See their most striking photos of 2025.

Three years into the generative-AI wave, demand for the technology seems surprisingly flimsy

"All of this falls apart if humans don't adopt the tech. This is why you've seen Meta cram its lame chatbots into WhatsApp and Instagram. This is why Notepad and Paint now have useless Copilot buttons on Windows. This is why Google Gemini wants to "help you" read and reply to your emails."

Lol, Zillow tried to rate the climate risks facing individual properties. The real estate industry *hated* it, precisely because it worked -- it made selling risky properties more difficult. So they rebelled & Zillow caved. Don't look up!

Between diffusion models and LLMs, tech has inflated a trillion dollar bubble around automating activities that have immense social and cultural capital—writing, art, photography—but little actual capital. It’s harmful to education, culture, and society with minimal overall benefit

Perfect Tom Stoppard story from DTel obituary: His response to a letter from Harold Pinter canvassing support for a proposal to have the Comedy Theatre in London rechristened the Pinter Theatre, “Have you thought, instead, of changing your name to Harold Comedy?”

Finally getting some theological clarity on the ethics of reclining in one’s plane seat

Huge respect to the papers for finding both an 88 year old worried about the tax bill on her 6 bedroom Kensington house and a 20 year old fretting about only being able to save £12k a year tax free. Top work all around. These are not easy case studies to find.

“In days after Alaska, a European intel agency distributed a hard-copy report in an envelope to some of the continent’s most senior national security officials, who were shocked by the contents: Inside were details of the commercial and economic plans the Trump admin had been pursuing with Russia.”

On “The Necessary Conversation” podcast, Chad’s Trump supporter parents tell him the military should follow Trump’s illegal orders and kill everyone in LA if Trump commanded it — even with him and his sister in the city😳

Πότε πέρασε το Halloween, πότε ήρθε το Thanksgiving, ούτε που το κατάλαβα /s

Time has published its list of the 100 most important photos of 2025. 5 of them are from Ukraine. Let's look at each in a thread👇🧵 1️⃣ Smoke from a Russian strike rises above a sunflower field in Zaporizhzhia, July 8 (Dmytro Smolienko / Ukrinform).

"Runctitiononal features"? "Medical fymblal"? "1 Tol Line storee"? This gets worse the longer you look at it. But it's got to be good, because it was published in Nature Scientific Reports last week: www.nature.com/articles/s41... h/t @asa.tsbalans.se

I hope someone checks in with these guys today to see how they’ll cope with the Budget