“Use strong white flour for a superior product. Form the dough. Knead until it’s as elastic as the truth.” www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/how...

“Fascism is a temper tantrum disguised as an ideology.” www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8SHcorw/

“You can tell the country is free because everywhere you look, there is less and less evidence that slavery ever happened.” www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

”Wikipedia is one of the few platforms online where tremendous computing power isn’t being deployed in the service of telling you exactly what you want to hear.” www.theverge.com/cs/features/...

Holy hell. There’s bad, incredibly bad, unbelievably bad, and then, much, much worse than all of those, is this.

Holy shit, they did it. They wrote the headline.

Counterfactual pseudo-history is the default mode of AI slop. The latent spaces of #genAI are free of chronology, causality, or historical time. All visual patterns exist here simultaneously as equally accessible & exploitable resources, organized by similarity & ready to be endlessly recombined 4/

and I think it symbolizes a lot about why tech progress right now feels so strange and perverse, you have people promising that things like this will lead to a new gold rush while much of the actual foundations of American scientific and technological superiority are being burned to the ground

Palate cleansing Friday nonsense

I will repeat myself: there is a persistent belief that popular government should be based on convincing people by argumentative debate, when its true basis is the negotiation of rational compromises between people of different beliefs.

“You can learn a lot about a state's freedom of expression by how it treats Wikipedia. Censoring the site indicates that a significant erosion of rights has already taken place. Tracking how states treat Wikipedia provides a useful signal for those trying to counter rising authoritarianism.”

Not to be too pro technocrat, but it is astounding how much this country depended on the selflessness of like a few hundred thousand highly educated public servants who, for peanuts, made sure our food and medicine and environment etc were safe. And in return these servants were demonized.

An excellent review of Sinners. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, I would HIGHLY recommend it. And all the commentary and ink spilled about Ryan Coogler’s deal underlines one of the central points of the story.

Anybody out there who can connect me to someone at Cloudflare working on AI Labyrinth? We're intrigued over in Wikimedia-land and want to learn more. blog.cloudflare.com/ai-labyrinth/

Manischewitz Jell-O shots replaced the third cup of wine this fine Passover night. We saved the last one for Elijah.

One of the sources of rot running through our political, intellectual, and media institutions is the total triumph of the idea that democracy means outsourcing your morality and point of view to a fuzzily incoherent view of what's popular. Total rejection of the idea of morality as personal virtue.

Spotted eagle ray has all the chill #spottedeagleray #eagleray #stingraysofcoralcity #stingray #chill #takeiteasy #flow #venomousfish #barb #elasmobranch #coral #coralcitycamera #miami #portmiami #biscaynebay #coralcity #civicpridethroughbiodiversity #glennnevis #coralcityfoundation #ccf #kbcf

like every simplistic theory of capital's coercive behavior and protection of its own interests is just looking unbelievably delusional

The next decade (at least) is going to be marked by more and more industries realizing the huge mistake they made by listening to silicon valley, blindly embracing tech, and abandoning established and profitable business models and practices

“Find me a moment in history when Jews anywhere benefited from a mix of rampant nationalism and repression. You’ll be looking awhile.” www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

JUST BECAUSE THE CLOWN CAR GOES VERY FAST DOES NOT MEAN IT ISN’T FULL OF CLOWNS

Hard to imagine that if Americans ever understand the incredibly creepy implications of this EO—centralizing your sensitive private data so that the DOGEshirts can do whatever they want with it—that they’ll approve in any way, shape, or form. Big if there, though. www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/...

an impressive number of people have tried to use the computer to get out of the basic existential situation of being human over the last fifteen or twenty years and it keeps getting wilder to watch

Setting aside the fact that centralizing procurement in this way is a terrible idea, can someone explain to me why the Trump admin relentlessly misspells words that even the least capable spellchecker would catch? Asking as an American taxpaer. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

When Team Democracy is back in charge it will be critical to remember what the billionaires did to this country when it was defenseless.

“Slouching across land simply because it is there uplifts neither the land nor the people on it. Abundance did a disservice to the US by drawing it into an absence of experience — the peculiar desolation of too much.” www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

“Federal employees keep planes from crashing, deliver our mail, send Social Security checks, ensure we don’t lose all our savings, let us know when we could be poisoned or are susceptible to a spreading flu, to name just a few things we cannot do without their help.” newrepublic.com/article/1909...

“AI companies should recognize their vampiric relationship with the commons, which they rely on for sustenance. Their adversarial & disrespectful relationships with creators reduce the incentives for anyone to make their work publicly available going forward.” www.citationneeded.news/free-and-ope...

I’ll take my moral guidance from someone who isn’t a literal fucking arms dealer, thank you very much www.wired.com/story/christ...

“Democracy will be preserved or lost in the next three months. And democracy will be won or lost via a nonpartisan political fight over whether enough Americans want to preserve their way of life to fight back, in a coalition that includes far more than Democrats.” www.emptywheel.net/2025/03/14/d...

“The survival I came to was different. It was about letting yourself be affected as the world changes around you. Not riding it out, but adapting, molting. Not the luxury of despair but keeping a foothold in possibility. Not blocking the world out, but letting it in.” www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/m...

Like, I don't want this Dem party. There's no fucking point in winning in 2028 if you're just quietly rebuild the government and pass some nice bills - while you let the GOP obstruct you in the Senate and courts, and nobody even knows about the nice bills because of our media ecosystem.

THIS IS HUGE! Researchers at Stanford University have developed a dual-antibody treatment that remains effective against ALL SARS-CoV-2 variants by targeting a less-mutable part of the virus. This breakthrough could lead to longer-lasting therapies that OUTPACE viral evolution. 🧪🧵⬇️

BRB, checking the history books to find out whether “tyrant starts redefining peoples’ citizenship status” usually ends well for the Jews

“Move fast and break the things that belong to billionaires.” — @pluralistic.net.web.brid.gy

When I worked (briefly) for the 1st Trump admin, we called this the “oil and water” effect. Talented people, whose pay wouldn’t change, dropped down a level or 4 in the agency hierarchy to avoid the worst, & then the least competent slithered up to the top, knowing it was their only chance to climb.

Something that should happen but won’t (especially since NYT no longer has a public editor): a public reckoning among American journalists over how the structure of most mainstream Trump coverage excuses and even rewards these kinds of threats.

At this rate, there’s a non-zero chance I’m not going to be allowed to cross the border to visit my family in Winnipeg this summer. WTF

Musk’s insane ketamine god-high combined with the resources available to the very rich is a wildly dangerous combo. Reminds me of how Zappos Tony Hsieh’s ketamine addiction led him to build an impenetrable fantasy compound stocked with yes-people & ultimately caused him to literally self-immolate.

“It is hard to describe Trump’s first month and a half in office as something other than a retribution campaign against the American people.” www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/o...

It’s surreal that I have to go to a foreign leader to hear someone describe the full derangement and malignancy of my own president in plain language, because our own “free press” and opposition leaders won’t do it. Bravo Trudeau

Update: Getting conflicting messages on the 10x end, and as I said, I'm no longer there, so hopefully it's not the case. Removing the post in the hopes that I was misinformed!

In happier news, we're hosting an "Open House for an Open Future" event, sponsored by Wikimedia and Creative Commons, this weekend at SXSW. Details here: enterprise.wikimedia.com/blog/sxsw-20... and sign up here: pretix.eu/wikimedia/op...

As others have pointed out (and as I clocked myself) it’s extremely disconcerting to see Nazis write about a “final” anything.

“The bureaucracy” is humans, mostly humans with deep experience. Without the bureaucracy, government ceases to function. I appreciate that’s the goal of Republicans, but I think the loss of those committed humans is going to create problems that we cannot anticipate. Maybe opportunities, too.

You should know that a big part of 18F's work was to make sure multi-million to multi-*hundreds*-of-millions dollar contracts at fed *and* state level didn't go to shitty enterprise IT consultancies that *repeatedly* delivered tech that didn't work, was late, or didn't even do what it needed to

Today's Washington Post article about the memorial for my dear friend, Pableaux Johnson, in New Orleans last weekend. www.washingtonpost.com/food/2025/03... Alternate link: archive.is/l582G#select...