The thing which we all said was happening but apparently never was until it did

I can’t believe how many snuff videos we all now watch. Pretti. Good. Kirk. So much shit from 10/7 and Gaza. Etc. Regardless of the moral or political details of any of these, it’s just brutalizing and dehumanizing for all of us as consumers of this shit.

We love to see it! Community-created harm reduction infrastructure to contest the alarming integration of AI agents into the Windows operating system (which is currently the most reckless deployment environment) ♥️ github.com/zoicware/Rem...

McLuhan noted every technology extends us in some way and amputates something in turn. I suspect AI/LLM's will amputate our ability to think for ourselves.

*There are people who imagine that the Grateful Dead hippie John Perry Barlow was some starry-eyed Internet utopian, but I actually knew that guy *Read that, and then look out the window right now. Touch the Trumpian grass

Yesterday I asked Grok about the child porn stuff, and this is what I got. (can't tell if this is just part of my overall shadow banning / no longer able to do basic stuff on twitter, as I've never used grok before, or if it is just a block on answering that)

$100m of solar panels saves a country 30 years of gas imports at 2024 prices for the same 1.5TWh of electricity generated That's a $3b saving in gas imports for each $100m of solar deployed Another one of my charts of the year

Lol

Almost 60% of bills were passed under urgency this term… 60 FUCKING PERCENT!!! That is outrageous. #nzpol

Y'all they really just fucking highlighted the text black in word on the redacted Epstein files. At least for the digital text files anyway. You can just fucking copy and paste it elsewhere to read it LMAO. I just tried it because I was like there's no fucking way and shit worked flawless.

"In our civilized societies, we are rich. Why then are the many poor?" - Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

This is extraordinary, even for Trump, and really exemplifies the weird free pass he has been given by reality. Any person (politician, or in a prominent job, or vaguely humanoid) being held to any norms would be fired in ignominy.

This is going to go so amazingly wrong so quickly and I can’t wait

unclear what the value proposition is in two right wing pro austerity economic folks debating which version of right wing pro austerity is less awful

Nobody nailed it harder than Marshall McLuhan. “World War 3 is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”

So a single Afghan man that Americans trained in combat tactics has supposedly shown himself incompatible with "Western Civilization" and now all Afghanis are unwelcome. Cool. Someone tell Trump about all the angry white male Americans shooting folks in bunches. Toss them, we're really in business.

The only true question or object of study is "what in the hell is wrong with people?" We are the architects of our own problems.

this is extraordinary

Ageing seems to be a process of discovering an eldritch horror unfolding in the bathroom mirror each morning

This is a thousand years worth of Creative NZ government funding

#nzpol For context: Total cost of all reparations paid to Māori for land confiscations to date = $2.7 billion Total cost of the economic lunacy of this government reinstating mortgage interest deductions to landlords = $2.9 billion (over 4 yrs), plus $760 million every single year thereafter

Luxon 2023 vs Luxon 2025 I don't remember him being crucified in the media for borrowing 14 billion for tax cuts... #nzpol

The front page of nytimes.com currently features: 0 articles about yesterday's historically large protests against America's fascist government 1 article about otters stealing surfboards

interesting, sounds like the director had a vision but got completely fucked over. www.neogaf.com/threads/fuck... 1/n

The Declaration of Evolution was the most important thing Timothy Leary ever wrote, and why he was locked up as dangerous origin-rh.web.fordham.edu/Halsall/mod/... 2/2

So I reread Babylon Babies by Maurice Dantec, which I first read in 2011. It blew me away then, felt like what reading Neuromancer when it came out must have been like. It was still extraordinary this time.

I am dealing with a “thorny problem” right now, today. It is hard and scary because IT IS ALWAYS HARD AND SCARY. But it is also where you do your best work. It is where stories go from “meh” to “WOW”. When I fix it - because that is the job - I will be that much closer to something worth reading.

The NZ Drug Foundation has a major new report pressing the case for a replacement of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975, which turns 50 this month. Thing is, its recommendations – for a complete realignment to health, not criminalisation and punishment, are ... drugfoundation.org.nz/topics/polic...

glad to be born at a time when i got to see what life was like before the internet and will be dead before AI completely destroys humanity

Something I have argued for a while is that the internet will become completely unusable/untrustworthy by being polluted with untruth, forcing us back on the evidence of our senses in the world, the way it used to be

It's 2025 and our economic model is still reliant on maintaining a decent bufferstock of unemployed people. This model was *designed* to ensure that employers have the upper hand (and labour could be uberised). Govt distract us from this reality by bashing beneficiaries and abdicating responsibility

I don't think we'll ever get another sentence which sums up everything the New York Times embodies quite like "Some legal experts have called it a crime to summarily kill civilians".

I occasionally check in on TikTok. Recently I've noticed a large amount of political content being GenAI. And not obvious GenAI, the stuff you can only notice if you've worked in and track latest video gen models. None of the people commenting or interacting with a post notice they are fake.

has autocorrect got worse over time?

Child: if you could speak any language you don’t know now, which would you choose? Me: maybe Chinese Child: I’d choose cat language

Am betting “celebrate” will be very loosely applied

- you clean up that banksy? - sure did, your honour, leaving a perfect, permanent outline, imbuing the work with real fuckin gravitas while making its point better than the artist did himself just like you asked

The load-bearing myth at the heart of UK politics is that the politicians and media are tolerant and decent and working people are knuckle-dragging bigots, but it's actually completely the other way around.

"Informed". They were all informed at different times. Didn't any of them need to give *permission*? FBI base in NZ: Judith Collins knew 78 days before PM, Luxon briefed 6 days before FBI director arrived www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/...

New Zealand salaries are dreadful. I do the same job, remote to other countries, I get paid more. It's not just a currency difference. My overseas colleagues pay less for food , housing, heating. Nearly everything is more expensive in nz, while nz jobs pay less That money is going somewhere.

Most (good) solutions are proposed not by newcomers, but by people who understand an issue deeply. There are exceptions, of course, but generally, if a solution seems "obvious", it's because you don't understand the problem as well as you think. 🧵

Sometimes I see people like 20 tweets deep into an argument with Grok. Like, what are you doing brother? You are trying to win an argument with a vending machine.

NZ has now paid 120% of the full cost of 2 next generation, hybrid ferries for *checks notes* nothing at all. Those ferries were on track for 2025 & 2026 delivery. Extra points: our only rail enabled ferry is being retired on Monday & maintenance costs have doubled Should be sackable #nzpol

Thinking about the millions of QAnon followers who spun elaborate papedophile conspiracies from emails about pizza. All now strangely silent as a blackmail op so brazen it would be cut from a Verhoeven movie takes place between the American president and the world's most famous child sex trafficker.

Multiple times this year I’ve had coffee with fellow immigrants who grew up in corrupt third world countries and the shared sentiment has been that Americans don’t understand how bad things are going to get.

the trick is to weaponise procrastination: to use the avoiding the big thing energy to get lots of other little things that need doing, done

This is one of the best ideas I've heard in ages.

the trouble with democracy is you get people who represent the polis and many of us are stupid and insane