Ending the day with a reminder to subscribe to @wired.com if you don't already. Trust the guy who has read all of the magazines, twice!

wow we are arriving at the exact situation every single person imagined within one second of seeing their first robot dog

The New York Times is right. I don’t care! (And huge credit to the @wired.com team, whose intrepid, fearless, always fair reporting gives the tech bros plenty to be mad about.)

Gonna hold on to this croissant metaphor for the rest of my creative life

Morning Bluesky.

My piece in @theatlantic.com on what AI is doing to the information environment during the war in Iran. 175 children buried in Minab. Every fact about their deaths has been documented, verified, and geolocated. None of it has been enough to prevent the doubt from spreading faster than the evidence.

As someone who went on the Internet for the first time in the early 90’s, I fucking loved the Internet. It has given so many things in life, and afforded me so many incredible experiences. And to see it, and technology in general where they are today is kinda soul crushing.

Narratively having Ever Given getting stuck in 2021 to set up Hormuz in 2026 is great foreshadowing. You want your audience to understand the basics of international shipping in a lower stakes context so you drop the real plot without a lot of saggy exposition about the minutiae of cargo logistics.

mom and pop operated NAS shop. everyone in town knows john and marla, they run the last local cloud storage business. fifteen fifty a month gets you an honest 24 terabytes. pretty good deal and marla keeps a bottle of tanqueray behind server rack 44 if you happen by

Truly a perfect news alert

Fox News was on at the gym over the weekend and the chyron said "WOKE MAPPING" to refer to gerrymandering and honestly I've gotta hand it to them, it's been rattling around in my head like Beat It for 48 hours.

I’m especially annoyed at @luxottica.bsky.social who made the RayBan frames for Meta glasses impossible to distinguish from regular glasses. Glad they’re being sued for this.

The perfect headline doesn’t exi…

OpenAI posted the terms of the deal. Reveals that it absolutely does allow for domestic surveillance. EO 12333 is how the NSA hides its domestic surveillance by capturing communications by tapping into lines *outside the US* even if it contains info from/on US persons. openai.com/index/our-ag...

if you believe in any form of free enterprise at all, the idea that the Pentagon can not only cut off your contract but designate you a supply chain risk and prevent other companies from buying from you just because you won't build killbots for the government should be terrifying

Politics is the defining aspect of networked technology. AT corresponds best to the kind of institutional structure that is key to large scale democracy. AP is a better match for smaller, village-style governance, which is very valid but not the problem I care about.

remember in school when we learned about monopolies lol so quaint

Now that CNN and WBD are set to become state media in a sale to Paramount/Oracle/TikTok, it is especially important to support independent media. Off the top of my head: www.thehandbasket.co 404media.co www.garbageday.email Add your favorites in the replies. Fuck state-backed media monopolies.

This is a brilliant @dylangyauchl.bsky.social essay in @newrepublic.com about why the 'abundance agenda' people spend way, way more time helping big tech and data centres than they do helping enable transit, more housing and clean energy - packed with LOTS of good info

now thats a response David Noble, The Religion of Technology

I have read William Gibson and Ursula LeGuin and Card and Levy and so much other science fiction but nowhere have I found a compelling artistic vision of what the internet could be if it was good and fair and beautiful. Does this exist? A vision of what we want, rather than what we don’t want?

Thanks for writing this up David. We did, indeed, get this going six years ago in the UK when few were listening. But it’s not too late to course correct like the Swiss, dump Palantir, and buy something else. For loads of state applications, not just health…

There is so much pent up demand for joy and to believe in the future.

Another Guardian story on Substack hosting Nazi newsletters. Here's something I wish more academics knew: There's a Cambrian explosion happening in atproto world. Where your data is yours. New apps every week. Including @leaflet.pub, a blogging platform, newsletter functionality coming soon. 1/3

I will ha.. strongly dislike your popup when: - Escape doesn't close it - Clicking the background doesn't close it - The close button is sized like this

Once we make all social media interoperable, our next mission has to be tupperware lids

wow, Google, way to make me not trust you. I'm signing into a gmail I don't use very often and fair enough making me get a code by SMS as well as by the secondary email address you already have but sneaking in 'tells us your address for ad targetting' in the account recovery is an utter dark pattern

@leaypi.bsky.social Free is a beautiful book ❤️

You can test new tech ideas using the Seinfeld Test Would the product eliminate the plot of an episode? (Google maps, cell phones, paypal, battery packs) Good tech. Would the product inspire new Seinfeld plots? (NFTs, AI chatbots, crypto currency, blindboxes, metaverse land sales) Bad tech.

This is how I learned the UK government was offering AI training

The short version. They wanted to use scenes from the movie in their video for "One," but they could not get it licensed. So they just brought the entire movie themselves. Now it's owned by the band. www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM8b...

Adtech is almost everything you do online. They’re using Adtech to track and investigate. Every little thing you do — shopping, browsing, checking health information, connecting on social, ChatGPT — is on Adtech.

ICE is using a Palantir tool that uses Medicaid and other government data to stalk people for arrest, 404 Media reports. This is exactly the kind of data privacy abuse that EFF has been warning about.

Starting a series on Open Social! Hoping to spotlight some of my favorite atproto projects :) And your favorites too, so tag them in the comments! There were a ton of logos in this video, so I've tagged everyone in the comments #tiktoksale #opensocial #atproto

this is something i think about a lot, aside from all the other issues imagine if YOU do depend on, eg, claude, to run your biz. something happens tomorrow and your whole “team” is gone. obviously this is the game, too. the math is platform threat ^ bus factor

Apple and Google have previously removed apps providing nudify services from their app stores. So why havent they taken action against X and Grok? @carolinehaskins.bsky.social reports

Silicon Valley’s alliance with Donald Trump was a mask off moment and showed the world we can’t depend on US tech companies. For the past few months, I’ve been trying to get off US tech and I put together a guide so you find alternatives too. I hope you find it helpful!

I think about this one a lot

This was just sent to me by an LAUSD parent. A 4th grader was assigned to design a book cover for Pippi Longstocking using Adobe for Education. Here is what the AI tool generated:

be the bitch doing something yourself that you want to see in the world

Ha, this is so great. It’s simple. If you don’t want otherwise satisfied busy people to stop everything to take a stand, don’t fuck with our friends ❤️

Oh really

We belong dead

big late breaking news: the market monitor for the largest energy grid in the u.s., covering much of the midwest and mid-atlantic, has called to block new data centers connections to the grid, saying current course of growth assures regular blackouts

NEW: AI “recipe slop” is overrunning search and social. Food creators say Google’s AI Overviews and glossy fake food pics are drowning out real, tested recipes — collapsing traffic and setting home cooks up for disaster, especially this Thanksgiving. Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Honored to serve on Mayor-elect @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social Transition Committee on Technology. For too long, too many New Yorkers have been left behind. NYC deserves governance that centers affordability, equity, and the public good-looking forward to the work ahead. www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news...

Mark MacCarthy says there is little doubt that the AI investment boom is a bubble. The real questions, he says, are when will the bubble burst, how severe will the consequences be, and what should policymakers do now to prepare for the inevitable downturn.

The reason why platform companies do make it hard to find account location information is not because they believe in privacy, it's so that advertisers do not know how much is lost to low-tier engagement. Growth, at all costs, means avoiding publishing basic metadata so that advertisers don't sue.