"Oxford commas are a sign you write with ai" I will find such a unique way to rip out your spine that they'll make a movie about it

ICYMI: Two absolute legends/nutters are currently racing each other on bicycles the full length of Aotearoa, starting from opposite ends. They're past the midpoint and STILL GOING despite the horrific weather. Mark's doing a great job of commentating the action up and down this thread.

Yep. Overpaid $2B for helicopters, paid $671M for no ferries, have pledged a gazillion bucks for new roads, but we have no money for our essential workers. Once again, these are not serious people. #nzpol

Not enough of you believe me right now, but "Rebuild The White House" is going to become one of the most popular slogans in American political history

Nicked off Facebook. A salary comparison between an MP and a teacher in NZ. #nzpol

I dont object to people being wealthy, owning a $10m holiday home I object top them abusing their wealth so they contribute less I object to them abusing their power so they get an ever larger slice rather than helping everyone else The rest of us dont pull this kind of bs #nzpol

“Striking takes courage…The strikers I've spoken to are striking because they are being put into situations that are against their moral code. … Why should those in caring professions be the only ones to shoulder this burden?” Emily Writes makes the case for solidarity and showing up today.✊ #nzpol

This is why AI tool mandates never work: even if AI worked, which it doesn't, execs are committing a category error by trying to solve productivity (a function of the social system that makes up a company) with tools for enhancing individual throughput (a technological solution).

The more a person zones out from the rest of the org and decides that they alone will do everything (this is the dream of managers trying to replace staff with AI "agents") the worse the problem of outputs produced for no clear reason, often contradicting the other outputs produced by other teams.

In Ōtepoti people will gather at First Church around 11am then march up Stuart St to the Octagon for speeches from affected workers. The next day of action is 28 October for Rā Whakamana - join combined Iwi leaders and trade unions and express Kotahitanga & uphold Te Tiriti (Queens Gardens).

Infuriating.

The whole point of democracy is so one person's derangement does not become everybody's problem. It's social hygiene. The fact the richest men in the West are a mix of grotty twelve year olds and deranged apocalypse fanatics is a problem, and we should be honest about it.

The appropriate reparations for centuries of extractive colonialism is freely providing the resources — technology, tools, money — to build out local renewable energy infrastructure globally, so that every human community has access to energy ample to meet all their needs so they can thrive.

Stemz Foley, AL

most people don't want politics that hurt other people. we just want a long overcoat like david bowie and affordable housing

I am privileged to have fewer enemies than Audre Lorde, and at least one of the enemies is my own brain, and even still ... holy shit this is a great line with so much to unpack and course correct with.

Every "Christchurch is cool now" article is illustrated with a photo of a pedestrianised street with a tram, meanwhile every local election the discourse is like "rip out the cycle lanes, then turn the botantic gardens into a car park? It's worth a least considering" www.rnz.co.nz/news/thedeta...

My boss: so how's our fourth quarter looking? Me, the sales manager at the company that makes inflatable frog suits: well, you're never going to believe this, but

Remember when i said we're living in the scariest parts of a Gibson novel thanks to a bunch of dudes who misunderstand Gibson's novels? Well now I want to discuss the verified govt accounts spewing rightwing propaganda— possibly via a bot-run troll farm— & why you should block them for your safety.

The Metro NY Library Council is creating an outdoor library in Westchester County. We now own 26 acres — and this wknd we’re hosting a group of international librarians to help us think about what this place can be! It’ll soon be open to the public + usable by all our 100s of member institutions ☺️

earlier today someone showed me a picture of their baby and said "that's not even AI that's just what she looks like" and I am still thinking about the implications of that statement

Going deep on age verification laws this week, and why they're not doing what they purport to be. newsletter.sachajudd.com/archive/id-p...

Mandatory age verification to "protect children" is not to protect children. It is to deanonymize every adult speaker and consumer of speech online so the government can retaliate against speakers and speech they don't approve of. For instance: apnews.com/article/trum...

In 2014 I ran a daylong unconference on magic and technology and he just summarized it in one minute

Libraries have been moving to rely more on networks to fill the gaps of austerity, and now they are unraveling.

A thread about why this is a vital survey: www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

GenAI truly was the worst technology to come along at this moment. An energy and water guzzler when we most urgently need to take climate action. A disinformation machine as our journalism fails. A bias machine as fascism takes root. A job killer in a cost of living crisis.

You can’t hate fascists and use AI slop generators. They’re the same thing: total destruction of truth at scale.

One curious thing on this site about speaking out against the encroachment of LLMs is that inevitably you get accused of being anti-tech. I don’t hate technology. I’ve used machine learning in my own code before. But I also recognize that oligarchs are so hellbent on pushing this tech for a reason.

"It's trivially easy to poison LLMs into spitting out gibberish, says Anthropic—Just 250 malicious training documents can poison a 13B parameter model - that's 0.00016% of a whole dataset." www.theregister.com/2025/10/09/i...

"we cant uninvent ai" no we cant but we couldnt uninvent nfts either and nobody gives a fuck about them anymore

My friend and hero Brian House has spent the last few years building macrophones designed for recording ultra low frequency sound. His new album gets as close as it is possible to get to the voice of the 🌍🌎🌏 Record release in NYC!! new-ear.org/2025/10/04/r...

"To understand how a fascist works, imagine the loudest, most obnoxious dude you can think of, standing in the Met and screaming at a Jackson Pollack painting, “I don’t like it! I don’t get it! Anyone could do that!” - Asa West reactormag.com/rebellion-ac...

PEOPLE. THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT. MY GOD THERE ARE LUNATICS STANDING FOR SEATS

As an instructor, I'd rather see your fever dream, No Doze-fueled 4AM essays written at an IHOP rather than anything generated by an LLM. Hope this helps

The only correct take on a fundamentally anti-human technology.

If teachers are told using AI technologies creates time to spend developing relationships with students, and the report’s findings suggest AI technologies undermine these vital relationships, then it seems to me resistance and refusal of AI technologies is the most caring response.

The one that always gets me is that the last American born into slavery died the year John Lennon released “Imagine.”

LLM bots crawling our sites in accordance with our rules; in contravention of our rules; as agents answering a thousand real-time chat questions; trying to appear human to evade firewalls; submitting slop that taints our collections; harvesting repeat content due to poor configuration… it's a drag.

Quite probably. And just a reminder that 30% of all single parent families have an effective marginal tax rate of 50% or more. So let's just add to that problem eh? www.treasury.govt.nz/publications...

I see pieces like this a lot, often w/ a spin of lamenting cultural degeneration, but reading is a LABOR issue, it’s declined because so many people are working overtime or two jobs & employers expect after hours work. France has Earth’s highest reading rate b/c long lunch breaks & labor protections

wait it's possible to move from pilot studies to permanent implementation of basic income? please tell everyone except Andrew Yang about this

what if I told you that taking accountability for your actions was traditionally considered a load-bearing feature of masculinity?

We have two awesome jobs open now! Community Library Team Leader – Ōmōkihi South Library & Spreydon Library and Head of Libraries & Information Find out more: my.christchurchcitylibraries.com/jobs/ #libraryjobs

Really want to encourage libraries - especially school libraries - to put no-AI content into your collection development policy. At the very least, if you have a clause in there about requiring accurate information, you can use that to weed out or prevent genAI purchases.

Big tech is laying off user researchers in droves, because it believes that coercing its customers is more profitable than silly things like "making good products people want to buy." But now the FAFO pendulum is coming around, with Amazon's $2.5B dark pattern settlement and #a11y lawsuits galore.

VOTE.

Virtually all NZ based experts who work with AI or have work that is threatened by AI have now signed our open letter calling on Parliament to regulate it. We shouldn't have to wait for an election, given the speed of dev & the harm already threatening people & jobs. #nzpol