Being literate in AI and being a customer of consumer gen AI are two entirely different things and there are a lot of people urging everyone to become customers and calling it becoming literate.

This is both evil and boring.

One of the reasons we have people swear an oath to uphold the duties of their position is because the Constitution is a rule book not an airbag, fire sprinkler, or autocorrect. It cannot automatically mitigate, stop, or fix anything. People have to actually take steps to enforce it.

Clawed assistant > Claude assistant

I don't need a summary of what's available online, in biographies, or even in my own notes. I need to comb through and find the great details, decide what interests ME. No, it's not efficient. It's slow and painstaking. But I don't believe in efficiency as an ultimate good, especially in writing. /

We're on track for a chaotic summer and fall weather season, intense heat waves that will result in massive fires, and a rough hurricane season. This year is ripe for an unpredictable mix of chaotic events that will make voting more difficult and stressful. Planning needs to include that too.

If a thing is so incredible and valuable because it eliminates the burden of people needing to skill up or get up to speed in order to do something, then it cannot also be a thing in which not using it right away would cause someone to be "left behind". Those are mutually exclusive characteristics.

I met with AI data labelers in Kenya who are organizing their colleagues to fight the brutal working conditions and horrible pay given to the workers at the "bottom of the AI supply chain." They believe the NDAs they've signed are unenforceable so are speaking out: www.404media.co/ai-is-africa...

We're not just in a subscription economy, we're in a subscription democracy. Some are getting a higher tier of benefits while the rest are locked into the basic plan we were signed up for at birth where the cost only ever rises and they keep removing benefits or turning them into premium add-ons.

"Use AI or get left behind" is rugged individualism applied to technology. It's a fantasy that a person could be "good enough" with AI to not be affected by global shifts in labor and information. It's propaganda for individual survival over collective action on behalf of the collective welfare.

Historical context for these jobs...one of the last people convicted for their role in the Holocaust was a secretary at a camp. She claimed as a secretary she wasn't responsible. She was found guilty because she could not deny that she knew what was actually happening. www.mlive.com/news/detroit...

Maybe you need this

I'm not worried about a future in which I'm left behind because I don't use certain technologies. I'm worried about a future in which everyone is expected to do even more than we already are and those things aren't actually useful, necessary, or good for us — individually or collectively.

It's wild to have 2 pro-AI people in the same article, one saying that authors need to use AI or get left behind AND the other saying if readers know a book is AI they won't read it. "Do the thing that your target customer will boycott you for if they know you are doing it." Wow. Great advice.

The arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort are a test for every MSM member with a platform. If you are not voicing your outrage at this blatant violation of the First Amendment, you are utterly discredited as a journalist.

Georgia Fort, an independent journalist and vice president of the Minnesota NABJ chapter, was also arrested by federal agents this morning I was sent this video of agents at her door:

INBOX: @freedom.press on the arrests of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort

We've built a system in which the penalties and settlements for lying and cheating cost far less than what companies can make when they lie and cheat and then we act shocked that they lie and cheat.

Cough media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/12/...

If you can be manipulated by someone playing on your resentments of others, your desire to see others punished, your wish to see others denied things you don't think they deserve, your dislike of those not like you, your feelings of superiority, or your refusal to listen, learn, or understand...

"We have to help people understand what is (the current, shared reality), we must collectively imagine what can be (a future possibility), & we have to diligently labor for what must be (organizing to sustain life/​livingness & for liberation)." @prisonculture.bsky.social on how to move forward.

Hee !Quote tweeting to plug @unbreaking.org is an information aid project tracking the ways the Trump administration is breaking reality . We provide sourced and cited thematic timelines to help people understand and take action without having to doomscroll or read 3837387 substacks

It's been far easier to diversify my fiction books than my nonfiction books and I think about the implications of that a lot because we need both diverse stories and diverse expertise and analysis.

I really hate that when my internet goes down these days my first instinct is to be suspicious, immediately check to see if I still have phone signal, and doing a quick double-check of headlines rather than just "that happens sometimes."

Her doing this and me scrolling social media are the same activity.

They want slavery . They want it. They want the the world slavery made and are trying to break it down to its coding parts and the people “fighting” them want the equivalent of benevolent overseer roles because they accept the premise

I got the best gift from @nws.noaa.gov A blaring very early Christmas morning flash flood alert that ensured we woke up and checked conditions around us. Functioning public services that keep us all safer every day is exactly what I wanted.

it's taken me a while to put this together. but I hope, if you've never heard of her, or even if you have, this tribute to Alice Wong buoys your heart and gives you a good sense of who this incredible person was. www.coyotemedia.org/remembering-...

One of the extremely hard parts of dementia caregiving is that sometimes you can do absolutely everything you can to try to make sure they understand and remember an important decision and discuss and repeat it a a million times...

I just want to buy a thing. If it's a good thing and the experience is good, I may want more things. That's it. I do not need and I definitely do not want this many touch points.

The thing that really annoys me on a regular basis is that I don't want to be suspicious, cautious, or critical nearly as often as I am and I do look for reasons to be less so but often the more I look, the more reasons I find to be suspicious, cautious, or critical.

There's a difference between "impossible" and "underfunded" and there are many, many conversations that would get a lot more honest—and productive—if people stopped saying "impossible" when "underfunded" is the reality.

Thrilled to announce the publication of our @rooseveltinstitute.org report that uncovers the policy roots of the current crises facing our news, information & communication systems. We argue that media reform must become central to a US pro-democracy movement. rooseveltinstitute.org/publications...

I was excited to try out Coursera now that I get access through school and almost every interesting looking certificate has "learn prompt engineering for this field" in it. I want to learn the actual skills and concepts. Teach me like it's 2020 and I need to know how to actually do the thing myself.

Creativity doesn't need to be "democratized" or liberated from "gatekeeping." We are human beings. We are born creative, we just aren't born skilled. The solution for that already exists and human beings have been doing it for millennia. We have to practice.

Love how every single website I have ever interacted with is currently sending me emails to remind me about their Black Friday sales. Super great experience. This is definitely how being a human being should feel. No notes.

I will never forget the conference reception where someone asked what I was drinking. It was Dr. Pepper in a glass. They actually blocked people from clinking their glass with mine while loudly telling the table not to toast with me because it was bad luck since my drink wasn't alcoholic.

People automatically assuming the moment someone posts a piece of information, a thought, or an opinion is the moment the poster learned that piece of information, first had that thought, or formed that opinion makes social media far more tedious than it has to be.

I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.

It is absolutely fitting to be able to subvert LLMs with poetry. arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15304

In a special project on extreme cold in prison, 27 PJP contributors in 17 states describe winter behind bars — and the small dignities that could make it more bearable.

I've been thinking about social media a lot lately and how so much of the interaction I feel like I'm witnessing is oriented around users correcting one another. www.hbcompass.io/breathe-just...

I kinda think the tail actually being attached to the fox's body might have been one of the creative limits to keep.

If you are struggling with the current national topic of conversation you are not alone. This is very difficult. It is grueling to hear people treating it like a debate. The coming weeks and months are going to be rough. You are not obligated to witness every update or cruel comment.

Hey, while we're talking about the absurdity of 50-year mortgages can we also talk about how Medicaid Estate Recovery causes families to lose houses, which represent the only wealth most middle income families are able to build while higher income families have the ability to protect their assets?

Call me controversial, but technology that leads vulnerable people into crisis and even holds their hand as they die by suicide should not be endorsed by schools and universities, we should not be giving discounted subscriptions to this monstrous tech to young people AT ALL

News orgs that produce good journalism but also publish incendiary, bigoted, and/or offensive "opinion" content because it's lucrative is like a hospital running a gun store in their lobby. You can be in the service of informing people or the business of provocation but tolerance for both is waning.

Big "hitting on women and then calling her names after she says no" energy here. The content is worth scraping & sharing but if the rights holder says no, then it's "worthless". The ubiquity of liars who fail at basic consent in the Gen AI space is part of why I don't want anything to do with it.

The end of the calendar year brings a lot of holidays. You do not owe anyone a meeting, attention, forgiveness, reconciliation, a second chance or anything else simply because it is almost a holiday. www.hbcompass.io/forgiveness-...

We made it to November 1. Wishing you a satisfying Let's Circle Back to This In The New Year for all who celebrate the season.