Look upon my works ye mighty and despair

"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future." - @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit. Incredible words. Listen to all of it!

I would 100% watch an alt-Eurovision of say 5 entrants from each of these countries. You've got your Euro disco classics (Netherlands, Iceland), some unapologetic easteuro pagan psy-pop-metal (Slovenia) and your "wildcards, with unsubtle socialist messaging" (Spain, Ireland). What more do you need?

TIL about a memorial ceremony in Iceland in 2019 to mark the end of a glacier, changing the place name from Okjökull to Ok (jökull = glacier). Uncompromising wording on the bronze plaque: "This is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it".

A massive problem today is the uneven distribution of shame. Some of us are running dedicated on-site shame servers 24/7 while others have no access to shame at all, even though they desperately need it. What we need to do is put shame in the cloud

Spoilers for Season 2 of Andor, but still reeling from the inspired creative choice in ep9 to posit that Galactic Standard is exactly the same as modern English, except for how they pronounce "adversaries".

The only reassurance I can take from this is that I'm pretty sure that if you actually did that, people would shit talk you about it forever.

Knew their work, but until today, not their name. Consider donating 'strayans, this might be the most important oaf we have.

Ahh for the halcyon days of mid 2022, when you could be confident that every drop in the torrent of SEO effluent was lovingly curated by human hands... (I will use this tho)

re: roblox dude's interview crashout. the thing he wants to say but can't is "at scale, kids are gonna get hurt. that is the price for scale." the thing nobody wants to say out loud is "maybe scaling to a level where harm isn't manageable is bad, and scale should be contained"

“Trust us! Marginalising these communities more will absolutely bring down the cost of a KG of Mince and get your job back!”

Times like this I feel my colonial-rootlessness most keenly, in that I don't have an appropriate ancestral curse to bestow upon the mendacious cunts running the land that made me.

The Songs of Innocence distribution model

Unlike most apps these days, Scrivener does not use AI in any way. However, if you’re on a Mac, you may see an AI prompt. . Here’s why, and what you can do if you want to remove this: buff.ly/MlAq0rL

Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. O, O, O!

Wonder if this is the start of a trend to launch "authentic" and "retro" social media services to generate "real" content that can be used to create more slop for the slop god.

We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?

Earth's atmosphere getting its hams steamed by solar radiation again

Tomorrow is the Fifth of November – but let’s forget Guy Fawkes and his actions against an arrogant Protestant king and instead look to our own history: the unlawful attack on Parihaka and, by extension, Māori sovereignty. 🧵 #kikorangi

#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

Wonder how MasterCard et al are going to respond to this? www.wired.com/story/chatgp...

Future generations will not look kindly on our penchant for intentionally mutating dogs into forms that are detrimental to their health and wellbeing because we think it looks cute.

Israel is also holding approximately 10,000 Palestinian hostages. Please consider all the hostages next time you’re talking about this. Too many only care about the 50 Israelis.

Because a huge part of the promise of 'AI' is "what if we made it so that economically precarious people still had to do all the shitty jobs but we ALSO didn't have to see them?"

It's spooky season in the goldfields

Portland reclaiming frogs for the forces of light in meme semiotics is a delight

Peace plan. Both Trump and Netanyahu have used these words. My Stuff #cartoon today #Israel #USA #PeacePlan #Gaza #Palestine

I think the source she was actually looking for was Trinidadian musician Anslem Douglas, from a song later made famous by the Baha Men.

Well done Miriam-Webster, you had me sweatin' there. www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvQn... #LLM #ActualIntelligence

I tend not to subscribe to conspiratal "powerful men working in the shadows to mold the world according to their esoteric philosophy" narratives ("they're greedy and morally malnourished" usually does the trick) but this is a pretty compelling picture www.wired.com/story/the-re...

New Zealand is punching above its weight in cowardice

Posted a response to this to on LinkedIn from the perspective of power demand in Sri Lanka. For those in New Zealand, the total power generation capacity in 2021 was 10,080MW, which is what just the NVIDIA GPU's at OpenAI propose to use up. From either country's perspective, this is mind-boggling.

Maps without New Zealand (derogatory)

I'm sorry, worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable permission to my voice and likeness? For what now? In any manner for any purpose??? This is in academia/.edu's new ToS, which you're prompted to agree to on login. Anyway I'll be jumping ship. You can find my stuff at hcommons.org.

Not one futurologist predicted how dumb things were gonna get.

One big problem is that to truly understand what the internet is doing to people, you have to be on it too much to play any useful role in society

Possible causes of your problems. It’s a diagram that (sadly) still seems relevant in 2025, so reposting a year and a bit on.

Anyway feels like as good a time as any to finally (performatively) read this.

Being a bsky user outside of the US timezone is a daily exercise in trying to infer wtf is going on based on reactions to the reactions to that thing.

2035: Hereditary CEO of the Confederate States of America Barron Trump marries Charlotte Windsor, the Princess Royal. The revolution has failed. Reports on Truth Social awash with photos of clouds that look oddly like a smiling King George. Brittania rules the waves once more. (They're warmer now).

More of these stories please

when you think about, it's actually kind of impressive to make a computer innumerate. like that's its one job. it's in the name.

Me just trying to take my silly fungus photos, and Ed the dog with perfect timing to come see what's going on. #fungusfriends

Done. Now sleep.

This fucking thread

Here is Weizenbaum in 1976 clearly expressing my own view: using AI as a psychiatric tool to treat human beings is not just wrong, it is obscene. I believe we should be using the term “obscene” far more often to describe these perverted uses of AI technology.

I've occasionally lamented @rockpapershotgun.bsky.social 's decline into click-baity 'build-guides' and the rate at which they shed some amazing writers, but they're still a source of some quality, in-depth work, as evidenced by: www.rockpapershotgun.com/a-culture-of...

My newest for @mcsweeneys.net, I detail the ways in which your child should definitely, absolutely, positively not destroy their school issued Chromebook: www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-a...

realistic Star Trek

I got the complaint in the horrific OpenAI self harm case the the NY Times reported today This is way way worse even than the NYT article makes it out to be OpenAI absolutely deserves to be run out of business