It feels like the amount of spam and grift attempts, especially through phone calls and SMS, have skyrocketed this year. And the messaging has gotten creepier and more offensive from the standpoint of the psychology and manipulation they are using to attempt to get people to take the bait.

That feeling when the USPS is asking for us to help fund cancer research while this administration has cut numerous programs and grants for cancer research.

Most of the news media is still fighting the last war: production and distribution, instead of the current war: defending truth.

repeating the phrase "full books" as I slam my head against my desk until I pass out

It is actually important societally to be able to differentiate between someone who possesses actual skills, abilities and expertise versus the technology-aided appearance of skills, abilities and expertise.

Hey, remember that time the Washington Post killed their already planned election endorsement at the behest of Bezos who was cozying up to Trump and then a bunch of people lectured everyone to not cancel their subscriptions as a means of expressing that they didn't approve of the capitulation?

Non-profit news organizations should really be operating under the assumption that their 501(c)(3) status could be yanked at any time. All it's going to take is one significant investigation or viral story before their attention turns that way. Plan proactively. Don't count on norms or bureaucracy.

Freelance illustration gigs drying up. Ad agencies using Midjourney instead of hiring human artists. Costume design turned over to AI wholesale. Good work vanishing. These are the stories of working visual artists, who describe losing jobs, wages, and hope as their clients and bosses embrace AI.

I'm taking a class about information communities and information-seeking behavior and models and every time I read a new assigned reading I end up whispering under my breath "why the f--- wasn't this taught in j-school" repeatedly. I hope it's being taught now.

First time reading this person and, maybe I'm jaded, but I was floored by this sentence. This is just recklessly, almost painfully, naive. The post, while making some good points, falls apart trying to create equivalences when there is significant asymmetry both contemporarily and historically.

It's gone past enraging to comical nihilism to see so many supposedly astute white guy columnist types still trying to make it a both sides are equally bad situation. On the one hand: a bonfire. The other: an entire apartment building on fire. Those guys: Well, both sides started a fire so

This is out-Sovieting the Soviet Union. "You are free to express any opinion at all as long as it's the right one, and the consequences for all the others will be severe, and ratting out is an important part of our free society."

When the only lever of accountability the audience has for a news organization is to cancel their subscription, they should not be discouraged or prevented from doing so. If the desire is feedback in another form, that form must exist beyond social media posts.

The fact that Matthew Dowd lost his job for pointing out Charlie Kirk’s hate speech, while Brian Kilmeade openly suggests we should euthanize the homeless and there is zero outrage, shows exactly what is terribly wrong with today’s political mainstream media.

There are already generated books available on Amazon claiming to be "deeply researched" accounts of Charlie Kirk's death yesterday.

When we say "there is no place for violence," history says otherwise. History shouts and screams otherwise. We need to understand what can possibly be different now that could change whether we follow the same patterns that have filled the centuries before. www.hbcompass.io/this-has-alw...

Getting emailed multiple AI summaries for the same call is getting real damn annoying. It seems like people have it set to send to all other attendees or something. Leave that for the meeting host to manage, please.

Unions don't just protect a single worker, they protect and empower entire families. I have never had a union job, but my career has greatly benefitted from my spouse's union job. I've been able to take risks, do jobs that were longer-term investments, and negotiate harder because of the stability.

Sarah Palin walked so JD Vance could lurch.

I actually tried to solve this important societal issue and made ~40 candles that smell like fresh bread but got self conscious that they might not be as good as I'd hoped so I didn't put them on my shop and now I've held onto a case of bread candles since last fall and society is crumbling. My bad.

It's never a bad day to go buy a good history book by a knowledgeable writer. They can't erase what they can't reach.

Even stupid people eventually encounter, by accident, moments of realizing that they are deeply out of their league. That cold flush feeling of alarm that creeps in when you realize you have made a serious error. I suspect those moments aren't an uncommon experience in the White House these days.

Algorithmic curation has deeply damaged communication ability. People have become so used to encountering things that sound or look like what they expect and agree with that when they encounter something that sounds or looks different, they act as if it's in disagreement with them even if it isn't.

Trying to discuss anything about Taylor Swift with any degree of nuance on the internet is proof that human beings aren't actually meant to be able to speak with millions of other people at any given moment.

PixelCat says go read a book.

A first in all my years of gardening. A squirrel planted a cooked chicken drumstick in our hanging fuchsia. I know it was a squirrel because I accidentally interrupted their first attempted retrieval. The squirrel did return and get their drumstick yesterday morning.

A lot of the Why Doesn't She Just Leave crowd are going to start learning some hard truths they've been naive to now that our country's steady evolution into an abusive authority figure is putting them in similar shoes.

Stares in Horizon Zero Dawn...

Dear news orgs, maybe consider disabling difficult to close subscribe/donate mobile pop-ups on stories like "latest update on tsunami threat" and "here's where tsunami danger is highest." My priority at that moment as a reader is a little different than yours as an organization.

More talk today about leaving Substack. You should do it. If you’re trying to do local news, head over to www.tinynewsco.org and apply to join the @tinynewscollective.bsky.social. We’ll get you set up with Ghost, fiscal sponsorship, and a community of support. The best deal in journalism.

We've had millennia of stories with fae, Jinn and other bargainers that teach it is impossible to word a wish such there will be no catches, costs or deceptions only to have this many people be like "the fawning, lying, imitating, extraction machine is amazing if you word your prompts the right way"

Shout out to my middle of the night brain for this scribble on my phone to keep track of a new thought on something I'd been working through. Thankfully, I understand just enough to reconstruct the thought.

It's really hard to take anti-fascism content seriously when it's using generative AI for the imagery.

PixelCat has today figured out much better than I do.

Humanity is rich with information yet wildly poor in knowledge.

Our government has become an overt subscription service. Most of us are on the basic tier where we receive few benefits and our rights are subject to commercial interruptions while those with wealth have their choice of premium bundles with add-ons available via campaign donations.

Social media giving us access to more people than just who we were in physical proximity to is a great thing. Social media giving us access to every person in the world also on social media has turned out to be kind of a terrible thing.

Elon saying he’s going to reprogram his chatbot’s view of history is a perfect example of why these kinds of AI products aren’t the neutral “tools” people always defend them as. They’re little political projects reflecting the ideologies of their creators

The push for AI as a replacement for independent thought, research, and writing is an echo of religion's resistance to the printing press because the printing press made censorship and suppression of diverse ideas difficult for the church.

My eye twitches every time I see one of those posts that's like "We found this amazing hack for creating bookshelves!" and the hack is buying bookshelves from IKEA.

Where my head's at: thinking about how many problems with how to make the concept of the United States work can be traced back to a widespread public ignorance of the actual $ cost of just about anything.

It is really really sinking in for me the degree to which LLMs are the ultimate expression of right wing anti-intellectualism. Its proponents are literally mocking the idea that anyone would ever want to learn anything, know anything, develop any actual skill, or have a thought of their own.

That energizing yet frustrating feeling of having big questions that require big expertise that I just don't have and can't realistically acquire because it requires cross-discipline domain expertise and skills that I can't accumulate just through research and independent study.

Still thinking a lot about the the parallels between people arguing in favor of generative AI because they claim it"removes gatekeeping" from being an artist and people in this administration who are entirely unqualified for the role and power they now hold but believe they are entitled to it.

We're 70% of the way there. Our campaign to add 200 new readers ends Tuesday, May 26. As a reminder, we train incarcerated writers to be journalists and publish their stories. Share our weekly newsletter, The Inside Story, with a friend! Sign up here: prisonjournalismproject.org/newsletter/?...

This is the Generative AI administration. It's made up of people who think the appearance of knowledge, skill and ability is commensurate with, even superior to, actually having knowledge, skill and ability. Meanwhile they produce incorrect, nonsensical and harmful words, works and outputs.

Current events are what happens when American Exceptionalism collides with American Individualism.

political journalists obsess over the public’s lack of trust in our profession but strangely see that as downstream of things like “we didn’t talk enough about how biden was old” and not “many of us appear to be indifferent to a nihilistic attack on the constitution”

There's such a profound and monumental difference between not regulating a thing and banning regulation of a thing for a decade, that if I knew nothing else about AI, that would be enough to tell me there is plenty to be extremely suspicious of and cautious about its development.