Maybe younger generations haven’t heard it as much, but I think I first came across the term when I was 12 or 13. Eventually you’ll stumble into it if you read things or follow discourses, which I know not everyone does.

when i hear "luddite" discourse i am once again of the opinion that the term is irrevocably polluted and can't be rehabilitated; if you use it you're always going to be trying to beat allegations of being anti- (even frightened of) technology like, stop making the debate be about "technology"

exciting new fuckery from data centres: * high-tension line has problem * lots of data centres switch from that line *simultaneously* * this fucks the grid www.wsj.com/business/ene... archive: archive.is/Ed9zD

I also think there is a lot of shaming of folks here when we talk about culture. You get some version of “must be nice to not be consumed with the dystopia!” Lol

Like culture posts on this app simply don’t get the engagement and I think it’s because people feel it’s frivolous and actually it’s the thing we are fighting for, the freedom to make culture and cultural works

It’s odd to encounter a strange new technology and see it change our society during a time when our overall cultural mindset does not feel futuristic at all.

My world was just rocked by @cathaysmith.bsky.social presenting on the copyrightability of living organisms. I had no idea so many people were doing so many weird things to fish. #wipip26

again, I truly love games that happen to fall into the cozy and wholesome games genres— it’s the genres themselves, and the byproduct of closing in the definition of what “cozy” is expected to mean, that I have issues with. There’s a solid argument that it has accidental right wing pipeline vibes.

So anyway I guess this is what it feels like to be one of the tiny humans running through the streets while the giant supervillain monsters are fighting by throwing passengers trains and apartment buildings at each other

Is it just me, or does social media interaction not lead to as many outcomes where you go out into the world and meet new people as it used to in the past? Larger organized events still get shared online, but I think something has changed about the capacity to build one-on-one connections.

when i keep saying that language technologies enable the expansion of surveillance and monitoring that simply would not have been feasible previously making shitty jobs even shittier — this is what i mean

This is a genuinely terrible idea which would damage the night sky & thus our ability to explore space (& also to just have, y'know, darkness & uncluttered skies), & would drastically increase the likelihood of catastrophic cascading collisions of various human-made space objects (Kessler Syndrome).

It feels like we’re no longer in the “scrappy” cultural era like we were in for a while in the 90s-2010s, and I wonder what it means to have lost that. There’s less of a sense of possibility that individuals with limited resources can create things, and less interest.

Another day, another commentary circulating around about how people with one kind of elite status in our society are now in increasing conflict with a different kind of elite.

I'm SO tired of people looking for "the neuroscience of X" (meaning uninformative neuroimaging pictures) when *the psychology of X* is right there, doing a perfectly good job...

The humanities cannot simultaneously be useless and moribund and also so dangerous that they are worth legally restricting.

Someone has sure already made this observation but the fact they can convert all those empty warehouses into prison camps means they could have converted them into housing, community centers, job training centers or, hell, libraries or schools all along. It’s always a matter of will not resources.

It’s funny how SV went from 4-hour work week to 9-9-6 rather than the reverse with the rise of AI agents

One of those moments where you look at an event or phenomenon and think “this is the future.”

If the right dominates the infosphere, if they can demonize any marginalized population they turn their eye on, then strategizing around *a current snapshot of public opinion* is almost definitionally misguided. They can change that opinion. Dems can't seem to, or won't try. All else is noise.

It's interesting that the language of software engineering had almost no influence on the humanities compared to the language of telecom engineering, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering

For some reason it bugs me that it’s specifically warehouses ICE is converting to detention facilities. We’re used to associating logistics with peaceful enterprise, but that conversion peels back the cover from its inherent potential for violence. And it’s unusually harmful by those standards too.

I’d like to read (or write) a thinkpiece on how we encounter increasing numbers of braided mock-woven electronic device cables.

I wish there were more opportunities to buy products directly from small businesses without starting to get promotional AI slop from them in your inbox a few days afterwards.

Every now & then, it pops in my head that some of Venturi & Scott Brown’s insights about architecture still feel underrated.

thinking about this the other day got me thinking of that one GamersNexus video where he interviewed a bunch of case manufacturers and stuff being on the brink of insolvency because of the tariff situation at the time and like... what happens when "building a pc" just... stops

I... had not noticed this, and it seems inarguable. Algorithmic media and social media are completely different things. Smashing the two together in different dilutions is leading us into weird places.

And if you’re wondering “Why is there a blob in the back?” Well, that’s where the first woman president was supposed to go. More than a century later, it remains unsculpted.

This style of light doesn't really appear in animation anymore. You know it when you see it -- it's bright, hot and almost dangerous. Our new issue explores the tricks behind it, and how one artist has revived the look for the digital age: animationobsessive.substack.com/p/dangerous-...

The concept of AI as permission and cover (see Sonja’s thread) is so useful. Once you know it you can see it in both top down adoption (university administrations, CEOs, newspaper editors) *and* in individual adoption (people giving away their own power under the guise of efficiency).

TIL the moth-trapped-in-a-relay thing isn't the origin of the term "bug" as used in engineering, which has been around since the 19th century

It’s a good article, being able to edit software on demand & run it. @chadfowler.com’s writing on regenerative software is related. @inkandswitch.com talks about malleable software that dissolves the concept of a single “app”. @localfirstconf.com is going to have a CFP inviting these themes.

An important enabling structure that is helping slop makes its way into institutional life is several decades of built in bullshit bureaucratic bloat that is not meaningfully attached to advancing institutional goal but nonetheless has to be ground out week after week. It’s a natural home for slop.

why is there anti-homeless architecture in pokemon

Just learned that “critical drone studies” exists as an area of academic inquiry after stumbling across this CFP (deadline has already passed). In today’s world it seems like a relevant topic to learn more about. pretalx.com/critical-dro...

last year, i wrote about how gathering periods of technological change into a single, fearsome, approaching threshold can work against the stated goals of doing so — an awareness campaign for everyone's own helplessness nymag.com/intelligence...

Re: the lost dog ad. The family dog has, at least since the late 1940s, occupied an in between space for the American family. It is loved like a child. Or, better, loving it is proof of the child's innocence. But that love carries with it the threat of violence, of the rabid dog and a return to...

This seems intriguing to me as someone who’s wondered before about the kinds of physical metaphors we see used in video game design. Investigating their literal physics is one way of exploring that.

The part of "everyone becomes a manager" in AI that I didn't really think about until now was the mental fatigue of context switching and keeping many tasks going at once, which of course is one of the hardest parts of being a manager and now you all get to enjoy it too

I’m struck by how FPV drones have revolutionized both cinematography and warfare roughly in the same time

Yeah I’ve seen “progressives” in other cities saying the blockades are a step too far… ICE agents drive like they’re in GTA. Even beyond the kidnapping and the murder, they‘re speeding and crashing their cars everywhere. With zero consequences.

if you think you’re excited about this job opening just imagine how the inside candidate must be feeling

🚨 New: We built a visual tracker of the warehouses ICE is targeting across the US. Working off an idea from @actualkatherine.bsky.social, we’ve mapped active searches, canceled deals, and linked state property records. Explore the map here: tinyurl.com/ICEWarehouse...

Kind of strange how the Waymo remote human intervention story is going around right now when I read the same info months ago as part of a research project & it didn’t feel like news. So many other automated systems do that after all. But now with the right framing it’s circulating as A Thing.

The thing with everyone having a substack is not just that the market couldn’t work but you don’t want everything to be personality driven. You want a space for reporters not to be the story. Like how is the pipeline for expert commentators going to grow anyway?

in a strange way they have opened up this experience to everyone via AI

I remember what came before quite well. The Perceptron, Bayes, … AI has become a monoculture since then, a land where every crop planted is a descendent of the same LLM cultivar. Monocultures, when they fail, tend to cause famines, like if you rely on a single variety of potato and a blight hits.

Wonder how much stranger people's relationships with their pets are going to become after humanoid robots eliminate much of the workload commitment of caring for them.

For our Search & Discovery class I'm 👀 for a pithy piece (article or podcast) that comprehensively + critically chronicles the decline of web search — SEO, link rot, AI summaries + ☠️ of click-through, AI slop, etc — but of course, thanks to search's brokenness, I can't find what I'm 👀 for! 😫

A year ago, data center developers were focused on connecting to the grid. Today roughly 1/3 of all planned capacity is onsite power - and 72% of that planned capacity is fossil gas. Homer City PA's data center project could soon be one of the largest single sources of carbon emissions in the US.