My book goes to Congress🥰! Rep. Desaulnier recently quoted The AI Con in the US House subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions. This is why "AI" will make our jobs worse. (with @emilymbender.bsky.social)

Sad I’ll be missing the hyacinths in full bloom, but here they are coming up alongside the crocuses

This guy gets it.

There is a way to prevent AI from scraping your data, but it's an ancient magic that comes with a steep cost

New fav waterfowl found. They’re like the mountain goats of the duck world. macaulaylibrary.org/asset/613297...

Many are appropriately outraged by Altman’s comments here implying that raising a human child is akin to “training” an AI model. This is part of a broader pattern where AI industry leaders use language that collapses the boundary between human and machine. 🧵/

Today, once again, this.

Just wrote Vancity a very angry email: they forced me to switch from the old banking app to the new one, then locked me out of the new app cos they want to update it. 🤦

Towns that question the value of an unsafe, costly, environmentally unsound, poorly governed monorail could be ‘left behind’, says Monorail Salesman

I just got my annual Public Lending Right cheque for Because Internet from the Canada Council for the Arts, so permit me a thread about what the public lending right is and why you should request books you love from public libraries!

"We present the first representative international data on firm-level AI use... firms report little impact of AI over the last 3 years, with over 80% of firms reporting no impact on either employment or productivity." www.nber.org/papers/w34836

But also hold these service providers accountable for enabling abusers

祝逐家馬新年快樂，馬年大吉！😁

lol this is gonna burst so fucking hard

Was telling my partner that the characters on the bag 爆汁 mean explosive juice’ (or ‘bursting with juice’ if you boring). Should not have been surprised when I got some juice in my eye. 🤦

The 'AI discourse' (may the gods and goddesses of the literary form forgive me for using this terrible phrase) has uncovered a legion of terrible dudes. With each turn of the screw, they reveal themselves to be stupider, more dishonest and dreadful.

So… not satire? youtube.com/shorts/l2F69...

OMG. Looking up both covers now

I am exhausted by AI hype. AI doomerism is 100% more AI hype. A *lot* of harm is being done in the name of AI. If that harm is too hard to keep looking at, then you get this kind of nonsense:

People on Reddit are getting Amazon to refund their Ring products because of their partnership with Flock and that creepy Super Bowl ad www.reddit.com/r/FlockSurve...

! @weratedogs.com com goes beyond what you've already heard about the Ring Cam ads and includes excellent reporting about ICE and, less surprisingly, about finding lost dogs

How is this not pets dot com www.cnet.com/tech/service...

Not a headline I ever expected to read about the Winter Olympics

Hearing about plum and cherry blossoms already in bloom in the province, and checked in on my spring bulbs. If this is fool’s spring, I’m not the only one being fooled #vancouver #crocus

so called autonomous vehicles still rely on human input futurism.com/advanced-tra...

“This short comic details the experiences of data workers in France working for Scale AI as human chatbots. They explore what it is to be human and the consequences of acting like a machine.” data-workers.org/france/

Yes to this thought experiment.

Feeling especially burnt out this week by the “why can’t you see that AI (meaning chatbots) is useful” camp at work and in my LI network. And my protests about the synthetic text machines were built on stolen work and slave labour just fall on deaf ears.

Fog on the water again #vancouver

This is one reason I keep trying to remind people of the power that we have. That we have *always* had. Not because I’m in denial, but because I know history. I’m no sophisticated intellectual, but I do know we’re going to win even though the bad shit is really terrible right now.

Semantic change

Yay for sunsets after 5pm #vancouver

I somehow missed (or was too overwhelmed by the news) the CRA chatbot "Charlie" spewing wrong information. Also, more people need to see this recap: incidentdatabase.ai/blog/inciden...

Meta now forcing all employees to use AI tools and tying it to employee performance, according to @theinformation.com. HR said "this is not an activity tracker—it’s an impact-evidence starter" That's a fun way to rebrand workplace surveillance.

In two weeks, world leaders and tech executives will descend on Delhi for the AI Impact Summit 2026. There, power brokers will paint a pretty picture of the role AI will play in saving the world - from sharing prosperity to fixing climate change.

This is genius! 😍 The sentence 不想上班那就別上 ("if you don't want to go to work, then just don't go") is mashed up into four written characters, each comprising two spoken syllables: ⿱⿰不目心⿲上丿王⿰𭃂尤⿰另上 h/t @y-wenli.bsky.social

Re: that Nature commentary about the Turing Test. You know what? I say we just agree that AGI has been achieved using swarms of autocomplete bots. So then we can start asking these companies: Where are promised solutions to global warming? To poverty? To war?

a. neural. network. is. not. a. dog

time to repost this

TIL that in Metro Vancouver, you can request a bus driver to drop you off between bus stops after 9pm Also, great research report by SFU Renewable Cities and @movementyvr.bsky.social pushing the conversation on Better Transit in Metro Vancouver www.sfu.ca/content/dam/...

I’m sorry, this is so funny

Doing some research on “reasoning models” for a slideshow on LLM limitations, and still struck by how engineers so flippantly write off language tasks like summarization and translation as “simpler”. Have yet to see an AI summary of a meeting that didn’t add fake details or miss out crucial points.

This looks suspicious. The Translink site shows this bus stop at Cambie and 10th as still functioning. Trying to report it on the site but only see an intake for Skytrain station issues. Will email them tonight. @denisagar.bsky.social any thoughts?

The Doomsday Clock, a symbol of how close humanity is to destroying itself, has moved to 85 seconds. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate @mariaressa.bsky.social gave the keynote—and went in on why the West is in "hell" and how AI plays a part. @mjgault.bsky.social story: www.404media.co/the-doomsday...

even if you don't use said app, please take note:

"Just because a model correlates with neural and behavioral data, it is not sufficient for us to infer that the model is performing cognition: correlation does not imply cognition." On Logical Inference over Brains, Behaviour, and Artificial Neural Networks. doi.org/10.1007/s421... 3/n

I wrote a little bit about tech workers speaking up about the current moment — both how we work to shift the Overton window so more feel comfortable to do so, and what the power can be when we do: www.anildash.com/2026/01/26/w...

Could the secret police PLEASE use silencers when they shoot civilians for backtalk all this noise is disturbing my vibe coding

aaand it's retracted "The Editor has retracted this article following concerns about its academic content confirmed in post-publication peer review. Further investigation revealed the presence of references that could not be verified. The author does not agree with this retraction."

When authorities used ICE's facial recognition app on a detained woman, it returned two different and incorrect names, raising serious questions about the accuracy of the app. Officials have said the app is better than a birth certificate.