The new preface to this great and depressing scholarly book gets into the explosion of sports betting and “prediction markets” since 2012’s 1st edition, plus well-meaning games-for-change types trying to harness dark patterns for good. Everyone within 30 feet of gamedev should read it.

People keep talking about how we need more multidisciplinary, metacognitive, social science informed tech and data workers in the AI era, but as someone with those skills, they were the things that always made me an outsider in tech cultures, and the industry isn’t actually hiring for now either.

I googled a friend’s mom to make sure I remembered the spelling of her last name right before mailing her something. I came across this deeply moving article from the 90s on her advocacy as a leader in the Bosnian community in Chicago. It’s worth a read. chicagoreader.com/news/a-light...

Prison guards: - Watched a woman experiencing psychosis gouge out her own eyeballs. - Ignored a man’s beeping insulin pump for more than 24 hours before he died. - Left a man sitting in his own feces not eating for weeks, he lost 60 lbs before he died. All in San Diego County, last ~5 years.

the least shocking thing in the epstein files that wont get enough attention. police regularly arrest and charge victims to coerce them into participating, often jailing them in conditions that are worse.

Here's another way the intentional PR conflation of the term AI with all ML is undermining academic work: I'm collab'ing on an archive management project that involves developing an ML tool to analyze texts. The answer to asks for funding/resources has often been, "Just use chatgpt/copilot/etc.!"

maybe it's just my inner anarchist punk but "theft" is just not the thing about AI that pisses me off i'm a thousand times more concerned about, say, face surveillance or the use of machine learning for automated decision making in health care than I am about spicy autocomplete trained on my music

Three D's defected to vote for this disgusting bill. If they hadn't, it wouldn't have moved forward. *Don't come into my mentions to "explain" to me that "this will fail in the Senate." Spend that time calling your reps, donating to causes, and doing literally anything for trans folks.

Commerce-Justice-Science Appropriations bill for FY26 is currently being conferenced (House/Senate). One might think they would have something to say about this. Folks who want to take action on what Vought wants to do to #NCAR should contact Congressmembers on those Appropriations subcommittees.

NSF is about to dismantle NCAR at Russell Vought's direction to protect the fossil fuel industry. It's hard to communicate just how much NCAR does, so let's take a look: I've never worked at NCAR, and I've worked with NCAR researchers once ever. What scientific discoveries has NCAR made possible? 👇

are you disgruntled by the current safety evaluation landscape? curious about what conceptual clarity, methodological soundness and rigour in AI evaluation might look like? if so, consider coming to dublin and doing a phd with me apply here: aial.ie/hiring/phd-a...

The problems are all the basic functions of everyday life that, we will be told, can be done by Good Responsible Not-Gen AI. And that’s just (say it with me again!) a permission structure for eviscerating public services & core forms of human negotiation that are necessary to a functioning society.

Something to keep your eye on. Popular discourse is starting to turn against AI, so new frameworks are being built to continue selling it. We are about to see a flood of media that qualifies AI: “Gen AI” is bad and overhyped but “predictive” or “analytic AI” is responsible and good. +

Here's a draft I made! My 7 year old helped my with some suggestions of things she likes to do at the library. And I made a custom one for myself of things I want to do next year at the library.

: drags out the drum labeled "venture capital is a financial project to appropriate and privatize communal savings vehicles under the guise of 'institutional investment' while socializing and devolving risk and has been since ~1976" and bangs it was gesturing aggressively at this thread :

This man did a photo opp of himself destroying homeless people's last possessions.

Legitimacy is not a substance. Legitimation is a process. Things become illegitimate because you treat them as such.

The ICE & DHS budgets and the AI bubble/datacenter spending spree are mutually constitutive. As @fucktheory.bsky.social says: there is only one economy.

1/ For six months, I've been traveling the world on Pulitzer Ctr & Fund For Investigative Journalism grants investigating Trump's effect on HIV & LGBTQ health. On World AIDS Day, @theintercept.com is publishing an overview essay of Afeef Nessouli & my findings. theintercept.com/2025/12/01/w...

Vision: Imagining the Future (19 Sept – 14 Nov) Join with socially aware science fiction writers to explore how they do the work of imagination and creating vision - Annalee Newitz, Charlie Jane Anders, Paolo Bacigalupi, Monica Byrne & Claire Coleman. Register here: imaginingthefuture.l...

Thinking of years of don’t-be-hysterical-ism in pop media. One strain: “they’re not going to OVERTURN Roe, stop acting like this is an emergency when it’s not.” Another: “we’re not moving backward on LGBTQ issues, there are, like, rainbow flags at Starbucks now. You can’t reverse that.” Anyway.