Malcolm Ingram is trying to re-release Small Town Gay Bar, a really valuable documentary from the 00s about...well, small town gay bars in Mississippi. They have to rebuy all music rights etc. 10 days left, they're at 20k of 53k. Please give em a shout. www.kickstarter.com/projects/163...

this goes right along with my theory that the AI obsession in *users* is often bc… 1. they were never educated (esp "ipad generation") & don't know how computers work 2. our tools and services are all SO AWFUL NOW, degraded at best, actively user-hostile at worst

Matt found the original "brainstorming document" for FTL - Written on a big roll of paper in his apartment in Shanghai over beers. You can see a lot of the foundational ideas there, but this was before we even pictured having ship-to-ship combat.

In a crowded field of evil corporates, Elsevier is unethical and antisocial enough to really stand out. Fully support unis across our part of the world refusing to bow to them. Elsevier should be made to eat it at every opportunity. www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

Attention people interested in New Zealand employment law- the Supreme Court is releasing its decision on the UBER case on Monday 17 November www.courtsofnz.govt.nz/assets/6-Goi...

1 of the positions I hold quite strongly now but it took me quite a long period of adulthood to get to is that it doesn't matter how good an idea is or how well motivated someone is, if you have people without the appropriate capacity in charge of realising the idea it's ultimately useless or worse.

I've said it before, I'll say it again, Astreiant is exactly the sort of thing the best series award should recognise. Individually good books, but the sweep of the city, its people, & their lives across the series is an order of magnitude more important. Expertly crafted living world in miniature.

Contract signed with an entity that did not exist at the time the contract was entered into. A panic dream for in-house counsel come to life lol. www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

🤓

I'd love to live in the Wellington that exists only in the minds of people who do not live in Wellington. The bulk of NZ's taxes is not being used to create galleries and museums here. The previous Archives building was long overdue to be replaced. And most government departments are renting.

Honestly, the IPCA report into the police (mis)handling of the McSkimming case makes for jaw-dropping reading. But it’s 135 pages long so I’ve read it for you. Here’s my report on one of the most serious failures of integrity in modern policing history⬇️⬇️

Looking at The Last Supper, the paintings & statues crawling over the walls & ceilings of cathedrals in Parma this month, I thought always of their human artists reaching through time, their inner worlds & effort suspended in art. & then of shitheads typing out a prompt to spew synthetic pap.

And yet the current government seems to see economic salvation lies in LLM-based so-called AI (statistical best-guess vending machines) whose main selling point is enabling companies to do away with the entry level posts where employees used to learn how a business works and the skills to progress.

we’re about to start seeing a lot of “here’s a cost effective meal your grandparents made during the great depression”

I've been reading about this from an Australian perspective, and it seems very clear that a group of UK journalists, none of them with any apparent medical expertise, have collaborated with a medical old guard to press a false consensus against youth gender medicine.

An awful, awful example of what happens when you use AI scribe systems in healthcare without any meaningful form of redress for their erroneous output. Setting a "compliance" policy that doesn't allow clinical staff to change AI generated fields without intervention is definitely a money decision.

Juggernaut season 2 is out! It’s the story of the 90s in NZ politics, the decade that shaped our world just as much as the 80s but is far less examined. I was very honoured to help with the research. Out now whereever you get your podcasts.

Because a bunch of paranoid Facebook-addicted parents are worried about their teens seeing anorexia/sui bait and have no mental model of platform regulation, we're gonna end up with a worse form of internet censorship and digital ID than the cookers were claiming about contact tracing apps.

Bleh. Signing off the grading pile for today. Will be done tomorrow; 15 more scripts to go, 215 done. Being pretty committed to doing 25 a workday and 25 over the weekend got will get it done in 10 1/2 days. (Add to that the 60 upper years tests I marked before this landed ughh)

The CPL Final is in the middle of a snowstorm in Canada, true North American soccer heritage...how could it get any better? HOW ABOUT A FREAKIN' BICYCLE KICK EQUALIZER!!!

This is really good. A clearly written summary of the many harms caused by AI, with copious references.

Other countries introducing an age ban already have online safety regulations and an online safety regulator. NZ has neither.

I'm in the minority here, I know, but I don't think this move is the right thing to do about online safety (at least, as a first - and only - step). #nzpol www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

As a digital artist I've been accused of being AI numerous times and I'd like to add: just because it's shit doesn't mean it wasn't made by a human either, I can be a bad artist without assistance, thank you very much.

Strikes me that arguments that AI will make xy & z intellectual work obsolete are broadly similar to arguing that food delivery apps make kitchens obsolete. At a superficial level you understand the point, but there's no escaping the fact that someone in the process needs to know how to fkn cook.

It seems like the more time game developers spend with generative "AI", the less impressed by it they are. In the most recent Game Developer survey of people working the industry only 13% expect these tools to have a positive impact on the industry, a decline of nearly half from the previous year.

This evening's Wikipedia rabbit hole led me to the startling fact that the Knights Hospitaller, who at that point had territory consisting of Malta & only Malta, had a brief & unsuccessful go at colonising the Leeward Islands in the mid 17th century.

Awful to see this; the Plateau is such a special place.

Jacob Duffy: 1 over, 2 for 2. Kyle Jamieson: 2 overs, 0 for 24. We really have to stop persisting with him in this format.

I'm already seeing people saying that if OpenAI goes down it'll be the fault of authors and publishers, as opposed to actually blaming Sam Altman and OpenAI for BREAKING THE DANG LAW!

This is absolutely the best thing I’ve ever read about elite news-media bothsiderism, as well the relationship between knowledge-production and journalism. It’s also filled w gossip and so human! 10/10 lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

Harakeke flowers starting to open up at Zealandia, so a couple of tuuii who look like they've dived first into a pile of gold coke. (Also picture: tieke and popokotea friends)

This looks super interesting. But would require an adjustment (upward) in staffing to do well in large classes & not sure uni management will be up for that. www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

since chatgpt has coached another young person in a mental health crisis to their death, I am yet again tapping the sign

Quick alternate view on this story from someone who sat the exam (+ her friends): “literally no-one GAF … it was the most interesting because it had the most language features to discuss.” Maybe RNZ (and those quoted) just need to take a deep breath and chill out a bit?

Harakeke flowers starting to open up at Zealandia, so a couple of tuuii who look like they've dived first into a pile of gold coke. (Also picture: tieke and popokotea friends)

One of the most striking things about this moment is that the most meaningful divides are not between liberalism and leftism, but between those who take fascism seriously as *the* threat, and those who don't. It explains the bordellos of strange bedfellows we're now seeing.

2/2 - Phase 2 trial for intranasal vax in the US - In Australia, a trial for a pancoronavirus version of one of the internationally-approved Covid vaxes - More preclinical reports show prevention of transmission &/or durability - a shelf-stable mucosal vax. absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2025/11/06/a...

This has been demonstrated to be a basic fact of migration over and over and over again. It's a centuries-old truism. But bigotry hates facts almost as much as it hates people.

Something worth noting: Rockstar is leaning HEAVILY on the excuse that the unionising employees were "leaking private company information" They want people to assume this means game info or assets. But I will bet you CASH MONEY this translates to: 'they were comparing salaries and work contracts"

This is a great tip! Just throw in the "importantly" or the "thus" or "however" for the third sentence in a row if it gets the substance going. Just make sure you *do* go back for a thorough edit.

Every word is true

The later books in the series dropped off reasonably quickly, but McCaffrey was still going pretty strong at this point & Crystal Singer has a pretty unusual vibe for space opera. Work and art and sliiighty Mary Sue female agency. Good fun.

Not always a fan of the whittakers novelty flavours but this is genuinely great. The brandy snap bits are like half way between toffee and cookie pieces and do indeed taste just like brandy snaps.

“The current proliferation of AI that we see particularly in the library and education spaces would not be possible at the speed and scale that is happening without the precedent of book bans leading into it.” — @maggietokudahall.bsky.social www.404media.co/ai-is-superc...

From Auckland University - Comment: Judges around the world have pulled lawyers up for submitting AI-generated material to the court that’s wrong. To those lawyers who do want to use it – here’s a warning.

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon.

ChatGPT is pedagogically harmful. Increasingly evident, its cognitively not useful at the least. It also clearly seems to have profoundly dangerous mental health consequences for vulnerable people. And I feel like Im in the Twilight Zone trying to get people to hear me on this.

Excellent from my law colleague up at Auckland. Legal AI is truth agnostic, often wrong, and time saved is often illusory. newsroom.co.nz/2025/11/07/l...