Make dyson spheres a thing that gets you laughed out of polite society again

Maybe I’ll finally get around to coming up with a new irl name for myself in the new year

🧵Have you ever heard of LLM-authored books being used as part of an disinformation operation? Well now you have! #AI #Disinformation open.substack.com/pub/marcowen...

Anti-fandom and its consequences etc

People keep talking about how we need more multidisciplinary, metacognitive, social science informed tech and data workers in the AI era, but as someone with those skills, they were the things that always made me an outsider in tech cultures, and the industry isn’t actually hiring for now either.

"we're trying to shut down science that produces results we don't like, it's a very worrisome trend. And we have seen this other times in history, and it never really ended well."

“Cobots” are framed as collaborators, not replacements—but in practice, automation and AI will reorganize workers around machines, argue professors Sarah E. Fox and Samantha Shorey. This is augmentation-washing: empowerment language that conceals less agency and intensified demands for labor.

The anti-systems thinking on the part of the broader tech industry drives me nuts.

My least favorite new design pattern in websites is how they dynamically load in content, but it never really finishes loading in and the elements on the page jump around, so I either can’t read it or I click the wrong links over and over. Sites that did not used to do this have started doing it.

The new preface to this great and depressing scholarly book gets into the explosion of sports betting and “prediction markets” since 2012’s 1st edition, plus well-meaning games-for-change types trying to harness dark patterns for good. Everyone within 30 feet of gamedev should read it.

Thinking more about the problems of AI agents and automated computation, when these tools being sold by big tech platforms are used to create what might otherwise be considered “trust and safety issues” but that occur *off of the platforms*, whose responsibility is it to respond to those issues?

People are saying this is an empty threat because they’ve already not followed through with this in the past, but I think it’s an empty threat because they keep threatening to destroy society if they’re forced to pay any taxes, but they’ve already not been paying taxes and destroyed society anyway.

Good article, but I think we could add that many of the current government officials & influencers spreading political point-scoring falsehoods during crisis events HAVE BECOME gov officials & influencers BECAUSE of their bullshit-spreading talents. System effects of rotten attention dynamics.

For my last post of 2025, here's a look at a network of websites and social media accounts hawking #resistance- themed garments, frequently with slogans regarding U.S. National Parks. As it turns out, the websites in question are likely operated from China. www.conspirator0.com/p/how-not-to...

While this quote is about Trump and international law, it could equally well apply to the prevailing attitude about AI tools and autonomous computation.

I used to say "nobody gets into developing autonomous cars because they care about people" as a way of explaining why theory of mind and, you know, pedestrians were such foreign concepts in the industry. I regret to inform etc etc most of the 'AI' space.

To the defense of AI accelerationists, if you don’t understand that other human beings have agency and interiority, it can in fact be bewildering and confusing when they reject your actions that violate their boundaries, but that isn’t actually a justification for doing so.

If you read the AI village people and their blog posts about what they learned and intended siccing agents that were allowed to be autonomous on the world they're really like a platonic ideal of DIDN'T STOP TO THINK IF THEY SHOULD.

A big part of the problem and driver of reaction is the deployment strategy of AI tools is accelerationism, all gas and no breaks w/ the explicit goal of blowing up existing social systems and arrangements—that coincidentally benefit people in power who write manifestos about being accelerationists.

“You cannot escape LLMs in the same way you cannot escape the existence of thermonuclear bombs and biological warfare programs” do you see why people keep screaming at you yet or do I gotta get so sardonic that I can kill a cockney with the punchline

Autonomous computation effectively moves the problem of spam (and scams) up the social stack to render more of our social world and shared experiences into a surface for nonconsensual manipulation and exploitation (if you search for “AI village” on here, a lot of people seem to think this is great).

One way that you can tell this is an ideological choice and not a rational (aka greed-driven) one is because the same people are also largely responsible for the choice that the government shouldn’t fix it using public money on top of choosing not to use their own private money to fix it

…If you think this is a good thing, a right thing, a "kind" thing, then we have such a fundamental mismatch of values that all questions of technology need to be put on Long Pause while you & i figure out what we mean by "good," "right," & "kind." You can't technofix your way out of values problems

It did not "go viral". It was intentionally filmed and disseminated using a network of coordinated bots, amplified by an algorithm designed to spread this kind of content quickly. This was a harassment campaign, intended to silence everyone. Call it what it is.

One of the worst habits of mind is seeing a single person doing or saying something and attributing it as class behavior of a whole group, which unfortunately is also one of the more ready tools we have for interpolating over the gaps and dotted lines that make up our sense-making

Happy holidays, Bluesky! I got you a megathrust earthquake, soil liquefaction, spine-tingling papers about the way our networks confound knowledge, and a PDF in a pear tree. It's my wrap on a year of trying to make sense of how we make sense of what's happening to us. www.wrecka.ge/landslide-a-...

They are building surveillance algorithms to fuel their concentration camps while we're squabbling over which kind of machine learning algorithms are good or not Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

An understated part of our present reality is that way too many ppl believe concepts are fixed and objective but the right, for all their obsession with rigid hierarchies, fully internalized that concepts are made up, and thus can be unmade and then remade, and turned this into a political weapon

Being undead isn’t fun! Waiting for your body to regenerate from your phylactery is annoying and you don’t even get any discounts

My red team performance art aside, my take is that software and tech had all the time in the world to take librarianship seriously for search and discovery of information resources and instead settled on synthetically generating new knowledge on the fly so I don’t see why they wouldn’t continue that

Give it a year and they are going to be running glitzy pro-pedophilia media spreads, shut down NCMEC after doing a “Twitter files” on it, and sanction or deport anti-human trafficking researchers, in the name of anti-woke or anti-censorship.

The number one question for the fate of the future is whether or not we have constructed the digital conditions necessary to run the world on fairy dust that can sufficiently outpace the collapse into material conditions.

For anyone that thought disinformation was a social media problem, it’s great to see all of the legacy media organizations giving best book of the year to a Princeton University press published book full of Covid disinformation.

The supposed best book of the year about a pandemic doesn’t get the definition of quarantine right. “By early April 2020, half the world’s population—3.9 billion people—were living under quarantine”

A small (personal) example of this book’s intellectual dishonesty: My father-in-law is reading In Covid’s Wake, and excitedly told me he found a passage where I’m quoted. The quote in question is me saying the FBI worked to censor speech on social media. Huh? When did I say that?!

Say hello to my first bluesky spam bot that’s running on my own bluesky PDS that was automatically created by dev.exe as part of an inauthentic bot account manager tool I had it create for me, all from my phone. Next step is to get an anthropic key so the bots can be backed by an LLM.

Let’s see how trivial it is to make an inauthentic account bot manager tool to flood bluesky with fake accounts using this app that lets you create new apps on the fly!

The “free speech” and “cancel culture” panics have led to overt state censorship because that was always their purpose. (Gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Sigh. Once again, if you are warning us about fascism while posting on Substack you’re asking us to do work YOU 👏 ARE 👏 NOT 👏 WILLING 👏 TO 👏 DO.

The amount of open anti-Indian racism on US software engineering forums (esp related to hiring) has really cranked up with the latest collapse of tech hiring + AI-driven labor displacement (and I guess the broader cultural turn). And people wonder why there is a reactionary culture foothold there.

Part of bluesky’s site culture problem is that it is the place for people to go to have endless debates where they take seriously the semantic merit of fascist propaganda (whether from billionaire owned media opinion pieces or random far right social media posters on X).

Please. My labubu is very sick.

This is a case study in how a US Right wing elite is collectively now so extremely online that it is caught in a groupthink death spiral which generates the exact opposite outcomes to what they demand

"Salesforce execs delivered a diff message to customers: Agentforce sometimes works better when it doesn’t rely so much on LLMs, otherwise known as genAI. Salesforce has been using rudimentary, 'deterministic' automation in Agentforce to improve reliability" www.theinformation.com/articles/sal...

it doesn’t take much digging to learn that tobacco companies are funding the “smoking is cool again” trend

Between making the “global censorship industrial complex” into international politics and the Arizona Senate trying to conduct public health studies on “Trump derangement syndrome” everyone now has to take online conspiracy memes literally as new social constructs (probably many other examples).

Nina Jankowicz: “They’re not doing this because they have any evidence of censorship — they lost a Supreme Court case that made those claims… They’re doing this because the group of researchers and advocates have stood up to liars like Donald Trump and the platforms that enable them.”

Declaring anti-harassment and disinformation organizations, as well as those working to stem hate speech and anti-vaccination conspiracies online, enemies of the US is basically admitting that trolling, harassment, and conspiracies are our new official ideology. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/24/b...

I deactivate my account on here frequently because if I’m not feeling good in the head, I don’t like to interact or be interacted with and there isn’t really a way to pause social media