Sunday, Mar 08, 2026 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM Hardymon Hall @ The Jazzschool 2087 Addison Street, Berkeley

AI companies are more worried about their chatbot’s mental health than that of their users, who can actually have psychosis induced by those chatbots, leading some of them to take their own lives. I love this future.

Sunday, Mar 08, 2026 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM Hardymon Hall @ The Jazzschool 2087 Addison Street, Berkeley

See something, say nothing.

One more nail in the coffin of the idea of interoperable software and digital services regulated by markets dominated by unaccountable platform giants. With today’s actually existing infrastructure, non-technical people simply can’t use 'apps', 'extensions' et al without putting themselves at risk.

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

> how many 'r's are there in strawberry? There is one 'r' in "strawberry". 😊 Let me know if you’d like to try another word! > That's wrong. You are absolutely right! My apologies. I'm still under development ... There is only **one** "r" in "strawberry". Thanks for pointing out my mistake!

If Jeff Bezos could afford to spend $75 million on the Melania movie & $500 million for a yacht to sail off to his $55 million wedding to give his wife a $5 million ring, please don't tell me he needed to fire one-third of the Washington Post staff. Democracy dies in oligarchy.

The US immigrant population generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government every year from 1994 to 2023. The Cato study provides the first-ever 30-year analysis of the fiscal effects of immigration on government budgets. https://ow.ly/jy8a50Y8kM3

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Apple: Privacy is a human right. Apple: Behold our AI pin with mic and camera. www.theinformation.com/articles/app...

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

“We’re going to scrutinize these to make sure that they’re not what they very obviously are.”

chickenshits www.theverge.com/policy/85990...

Republican-appointed justices 47% more likely to vote for the wealthier litigant as of 2022.

They made it illegal to sell lawn darts after one kid died.

If refusing to comment is enough to kill a story, then the government now has veto power over journalism. That’s what CBS normalized last night — and it should scare everyone. open.substack.com/pub/adamkinz...

I don’t understand why people are questioning the integrity of leadership at the Donald J. Trump Federal Bureau of Investigation and Redaction.

Since you mentioned it…

When the AI boom began, copywriters were singled out as one of the jobs most vulnerable to AI. Now, three years later, I wanted to hear from workers on the frontlines of the industry, to hear what had actually taken place on the ground. For many, it was even worse than they'd feared.

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If you develop software and your employer is requiring the use of AI tools, would you be willing to chat about it? tclaburn (at) theregister (dot) com

@shriekback.bsky.social is working on album #19. All is good with the world. There is continuity and coherence.

“We are replacing pluralism with personalization, and surrendering our information-gathering to validation machines that always tell us we’re right.“ www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Choose musicians over AI.

"We study how Elon Musk's polarizing and partisan actions have impacted Tesla vehicle sales in the United States... Without the Musk partisan effect, Tesla sales between October 2022 and April 2025 would have been 67-83% higher, equivalent to 1-1.26 million more vehicles." www.nber.org/papers/w34413

the duality of man

While the AWS team has resolved the severe us-east-1 outages, reading this post-mortem makes one thing clear: they are still suffering from a critical shortage of paragraph breaks

For those in Palo Alto on Oct. 25:

"The Labor Department warned in an obscure document filed with the Federal Register last week that 'the near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens' is threatening 'the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S. consumers.'”

Love this from @lot49.com - We would argue that political bias ... is not only unavoidable in LLMs trained on human-created content but desirable.... The more interesting question is how LLM bias should be tuned. www.theregister.com/2025/10/10/o...

Tick, tick, tick...

The Register: "Curl project, swamped with AI slop, finds not all AI is bad" https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/02/curl_project_swamped_with_ai/

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Matt Seybold ( @mattseybold.bsky.social ) "I ask my fellow educators to consider some measures for reducing our complicity in efforts to steal our students identities, attention, and right to education, even indenture them to train algorithms" theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/against-te...

The problem with AI isn’t just that it uses a lot of power, it’s how it uses it Like a volume dial that jumps straight from 1 to 11 with nothing in between. Modern grids weren’t designed for that. Which makes Googles latest move all the more important. www.theregister.com/2025/08/04/g...

“Here at Apple, we have no ideas, and we can’t wait to show you what we haven’t been working on.”

Majorana or ... ?

new albums - vinyl and all sorts now available at shriekback.com/store and fridge magnets.... always with the fridge magnets

My cartoon in this weeks @newyorker.com

The singularity is awesome

If you're in the Bay Area on Friday...

a bird feeder with Hitchcock ties 😄😄

The idea that you can just “teach computer science” and be apolitical is a beautiful dream that expired in the 2000s, at the latest. Computer science has re-organized every facet of our society: it is inherently political. Instead of taking this idea seriously, we ran from it. Now we live in hell.

Love this. In his “I Agree” installation Dima Yarovinsky-Yahel took the content from terms of service statements for companies like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Tinder and printed them out on A4 paper with a standard font size for legal contracts to demonstrate the length of these agreements.

Bird strike on aircraft (or engine suck) are fairly common and usually safe. But a rabbit, you don't see that every day. They are very sweet to stroke, and tasty, but that one is possibly a little overdone.