Ah yes… the radio face (or podcast face in 2025?) spitfirenews.com/p/do-you-hav...

"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!

Time for my annual holiday tradition: re-reading every single Hellboy comic.

Hard to find the right words for this essay www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/o...

If Google Maps now acts as a kind of market maker for urban demand, the obvious next question is: what would the city look like without that amplification layer? laurenleek.substack.com/p/how-google... Building a counterfactual city

@klingebeil.bsky.social: “Journalism risks becoming endlessly malleable, shaped to fit yet another set of companies’ platforms, metrics, and algorithms rather than public needs.” www.niemanlab.org/2025/12/jour...

So yeah… I wrote my NiemanLab prediction with cases like these in mind. www.niemanlab.org/2025/12/jour...

Btw, this is in my experience clearly a case of bad management culture (which is instead busy talking about how much more productive AI will make their teams).

I do wonder how the focus on drones as something "revolutionary" meshes with the increasing push by VC-financed "tech"-companies into the defense sector www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...

“Now, it’s normal for racks to weigh 1,250 pounds to up to 2,500 pounds, falling in the range of a grizzly bear up to a Toyota Prius.” www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

I wrote this brief talk on why “augmenting diversity” with LLMs is empirically unsubstantiable, conceptually flawed, and epistemically harmful and a nice surprise to see the organisers have made it public synthetic-data-workshop.github.io/papers/13.pdf

concluding that people don't need their newspapers to be accurate is professional self-harm done for no particular reason other than to justify layoffs and satisfy the AI lords

Small-scale, fiercely independent journalism rarely gets recognition when awards are handed out, but it's vital in our communities—especially this year. So I made an award and am thrilled to announce @unraveledpress.com and @lataco.bsky.social as the inaugural winners. dansinker.com/posts/2025-1...

Beginning the arduous journey of migrating off Substack after I migrated there when Musk shut down Revue. Not exactly moving to greener pastures each time…

Interesting that Ikea has fully apparently cornered the market on colourful home gadgetry www.theverge.com/news/843720/...

The World Is Not A Desktop - Mark Weiser dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Very early and quick'n'dirty analysis: “AI” continues to dominate journalistic imaginations in this years @niemanlab.org predictions. Take it with a grain of sand, as so far likely less then ~50% of this years predictions have been published.

This is the stuff you could see coming from miles away www.npr.org/2025/12/13/n...

Content mindset (derogatory) www.businessinsider.com/disney-bob-i...

Can't say I ever expected to see a "That Font was No Angel" headline. But here we are.

This is promising to be a fun read. www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

The idea here of understanding “AI” not as a technology or field but instead as a brand feels right, imo. pca.st/episode/c721...

Really enjoying the reactions of some people to the disappointing results of AI usage in companies, which is a variant of "of course this doesn't work, you need actually to do some deep embedding into processes" Which, YEAH, but also… it was NEVER sold this way. It was always sold as a quick fix.

“Elon’s entire incoherent “free speech” framework collapses into a single, coherent principle: speech I like is protected, speech I don’t like should be punished.” www.techdirt.com/2025/12/09/t...

there's like a curve graph for how the badness of UI relates to consolidation and competitiveness in the market. is there like a named law for this yet

Satire is dead. (Requiring people to use 14pt for text should be a crime.) www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/u...

strange that people in love with the "metaverse" conveniently forgot the word "gargoyle" coined in the very same book

I need more consultancy report exegesis and bs calling in my life www.2ndorderthinkers.com/p/explain-th...

Pretty interesting that the Palantir magazine, out of all places, has published a criticism of the whole "network state" idea therepublicjournal.com/essays/the-i...

Monday:

I think it bears repeating that "personalisation" in the context of software automatically implies surveillance and the collection of lots of potentially sensitive data on people. You can't have the one without the other. (Yes, side-eyeing the journalism discourse again.)

"Resist" is a pretty funny framing, imo www.theinformation.com/articles/mic...

The thing I am kinda curious about… what would the insurance rates be on these things? And what kind of insurance is Waymo itself paying for? www.theverge.com/transportati...

the AI journalism revolution continues to go great, thanks for asking

Introducing a new series on Tech Policy Press, Andreu Belsunces Gonçalves examines how hype operates within venture capital and private equity and why it has become such a powerful political instrument. The orientation provided by AI hype is guiding us towards an oligarchic future, he writes..

“If the goal is speed and the cost is accuracy and accountability, AI is the clear winner. If accuracy and accountability is the baseline, then AI, as used in these instances, cannot yet rival the hallmarks of human output” www.niemanlab.org/2025/12/poli...

“All these AI shopping tools might sound helpful on paper, but in practice, they aren’t sticking the landing. They seem to be pulling from product data that’s a couple of years old at this point, while also confidently giving you recommendations.” www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Still trying to figure out an opinion on this, but I want to note that there’s a parallel (and most likely inspired) discussion in journalism about "liquifying" or "atomising" journalism to feed them through 'AI' pipes. adjacentpossible.substack.com/p/what-is-th...

Headline: "AI can replace 11.7% of workforce" Actual study: Anthropic paid MIT to use a "labor simulation tool" that said 11.7% of TASKS could be done by AI

“Palantir launched a digital and print publication earlier this year called the Republic that mimics academic journals and thinktank-style magazines like Foreign Affairs” www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

No surprise here. Fun fact: the NYT has more paying subscribers than the NYT www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/artific...

“Zau Lahtaw, a junior at Syracuse University, says he also gets his news from scrolling on TikTok, primarily from Dylan Page, as well as from a talking fish — styled after the animated news anchor that delivers “breaking news” in SpongeBob SquarePants.” www.theverge.com/cs/features/...

Throwing hundreds of trend reports into NotebookLM just shows a comical amount of “I have no idea what I am doing.”

Crawling articles, hoping to make a point. 👀

I think there's an interesting study of media to be done looking at who gets labeled an "expert" and who gets labeled a "skeptic". Certainly for coverage of "AI", but I wonder if there are other topics that would make interesting comparisons.

Rereading old Niemanlab predictions and yeah… It‘s kinda striking how some things just haven’t changed. I wrote this in 2018. www.niemanlab.org/2018/12/we-a...

I really really love (print) media but hated the idea of working in a newsroom. In all honesty, this is also, in part, to blame on the one Monocle issue that sixteen-year-old me was gifted by an aunt. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (I still have it.)

Spend the afternoon reading about the use and role of flowcharts in organisations, and I couldn’t be happier doi.org/10.7560/IC51...