A lot of 1990s photos of Oasis look like this to me.

Hi Auckland friends, I'll be in town and giving a couple of seminars this coming Thursday. Details below.

#nzpol Pay attention, Aotearoa New Zealand. ⬇️

Jesus

thread: i must get back to my tamagotchi farm. yes it's very productive. no i absolutely won't tell any of the many people what i'm producing, just insist it's very productive bsky.app/profile/timk...

Can confirm.

Rember when that Mayor you all ran out of Wellington wanted Nick Leggett to resign www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

A single image that captures NZ's dominant belief system and economic model #nzpol www.reddit.com/r/newzealand...

Yeah, Three Waters was a pretty good plan.

This photograph, the flooded Ōtorohanga Museum, with solar panels on its roof, where irreplaceable taonga have been destroyed by floodwaters from storms exacerbated by the climate changes this government are actively ignoring.

Remember: "it's better than nothing" is ALWAYS a sleight of hand to get you to look away from the decision-maker responsible for the nothing.

At the risk of engaging with conspiracy theories, I was about a mile downwind of 9/11 and my *entire neighborhood* was covered in intact office paper blown out of the 82nd floor, much of it stained with jet fuel & melted plastic. Explosions are weird.

the "it's impossible to have a conversation about AI right now" folks need to grok that a huge volume of that furor is entirely justified rage at the fact tech oligarchs purchased an automated murder autocracy; rage that's good and useful and deserves a generous berth in the months and years to come

What we know now is a fraction of all human knowledge ever. What is known to literate societies is a fraction of what we know now. What is written is a fraction of what literate societies know. What is digitized is a fraction of what is written. What is online is a fraction of what is digitized.

It certainly doesn't sound like the "suddenly new covid enquiry" setup to provide a report to the government a few weeks out from the election has a lot of space for nuanced analysis of the "while lessons can be learned we need to keep what was happening elsewhere in mind" variety.

A vivid example of "mission creep" and "libraries aren't essential services except when they're told to be" that are creating a mental health hellscape for library workers. bookriot.com/the-state-of...

if I could go a one. single. week. without having to see, hear, talk about, think about ai in libraries right now it might just heal something in me

My doomer-worry about AI is not that the LLMs become omnipotent and take over the world but that the wealthy and powerful use it as a means to consolidate power and marginalize or lay off skilled workers and also everything about our technological and political and social life gets worse

I fear that men are about to do what men do. They are about to characterize any sober thinking about power as non-technical and therefore unserious. We have seen this pattern over and over again in tech criticism. Women and people of color repeatedly lead on understanding tech changes.

How good? Lots of people taking the opportunity to use the free busses to George Street Market. 7,500 trips (instead of 4,000 on a normal Saturday). People who might drive all the time have possibly taken the bus for the first time. Transport choices matter.

Is Luxon trying for a Pick Me favour from Trump with move to buy USA's LNG? Sounds like Amazon paying Melania for movie! Dubious product to buy favour! #NZpol

GM: Charisma check. Mamdani: [rolls natural 20] GM: that’s a d6 how did you Mamdani: [direct to camera] Did you know you can check out board games at your local public library? 😊

Yeah, but this market took over five or six on-street parking spaces so my family and I had to park a WHOLE BLOCK away. One out of four stars.

It’s heartbreaking to see the rivers I used to swim in as a boy being slowly killed to irrigate dairy farms. Climate change will make dairying impossible in Canterbury before too long; but no, we’re going to wring the last few $$ out of the environment while we can.

Killing the CIA World Factbook might seem like small potatoes, but it was a touchstone of curated facts in a sea of disinformation.

This blog is delightful, especially for design-minded folks.

Tortoise, "In Sarah, Mencken, Christ And Beethoven There Were Women And Men". This version is sublime. youtu.be/EwJf5fw57Yo?...

Marilyn Waring: Librarians’ work is essential – and still treated as expendable

Delighted to (re)discover that Things Magazine, an excellent old-school blog of interesting links, is still trucking happily along a couple of decades after I first discovered it. www.thingsmagazine.net

10/10 ICE protest sign

When they say Me Too "went too far," they mean "got too close."

387 tiny paper buildings, made in the 1950s / 60's by Austrian insurance clerk Peter Fritz. socks-studio.com/2013/12/06/t... They were stored in a plastic bag, before ending up in a junk shop where Oliver Croy found them in the early 2010s.

A few things worth remembering: the creating of DHS was actually quite controversial! People warned that this kind of department would end up murdering us in the street, assaulting detainees and shipping migrants off to secret torture prisons. Those people were dismissed as alarmists.

NZ taxpayers spent $6M to bring Michelin stars here and only paid $3M to the WHO. Contributing to world health seems like a much better spend to me. #nzpol

Went to my local library this morning to do a bit of research for my current book project and my goodness such a life-affirming space! There was an adult being taught to read on the next table, children enjoying story time, countless people taking out books. So grateful for our libraries ❤️

“Over the past ten years New Zealand has averaged 55.9 days annually under a State of Emergency each year, and 66.6 days over the last five. In the 10 years prior to this, New Zealand averaged only 13.4 days per year.” Quick Q - how does recovery work with a rates cap in place and no govt. support🤔

Help us make hope normal again. Join the Green Party now.

On open protocols, your main goal should not be to serve everyone. We tried that, and it's a mess out there. Serve your community, the one you understand the needs of. Build something *you* want. You'd be surprised at how many you's are out there waiting for the exact same thing.

This is an excellent analogy, because my recollection from grade school is that the pen on the right looks fun and exciting, and then you play with it for a few minutes and realize it's not actually useful for anything and in fact makes some tasks more cumbersome, and never think about it again.

I was present for the birth of the web, the explosion of personal sites, and the blogging revolution, and you know what we never had to do? Beg people to use our shit.

An Instagram account of nothing but Japanese privacy glass. instagram.com/kataitaglas.jp

The tragic loss of lives in NZ flooding events this week are climate change deaths. Media and govt are avoiding the topic. Leaders and commentators must acknowledge the emerging reality of ordinary summer rainstorms carrying volumes of water akin to tropical cyclones of previous decades.

This is the first time in 24 years that a scheduled passenger train has stopped at Invercargill Station. The station itself is in rough shape but nothing a bit of tender loving care can’t fix.

Always surprising how far north most of Europe is. Would not have guessed we're Milan-adjacent!

Petition to officially rename the Unicode character from "sparkles" to "jabroni". (cf. www.compart.com/en/unicode/U...)

NZ national museum facing existential crisis

GLAM sector folks: What are your favourite/least favourite examples of search & discovery interfaces federated over multiple systems and/or institutions? What makes them work well (or poorly)? Mainly looking for non-NZ examples, but will take local ones.

Pondering how AI is taking us back to mid-1990s “Dark Forest” Internet safety guidelines being correct: - assume nobody is who they say they are - don’t reveal anything about yourself - everyone is out to get you until proven otherwise - don’t believe anything you see online without verification