As a brown person with a non kiwi accent who was born here I would like to know how these people know who a “suspected overstayer” is. The constant Americanisation of this country is so annoying and gross. Why doesn’t Luxon just go back there if he loves it so much. Bro go back to Chicago.

Felt inspired by that headline... ☠️ #NZPol

Basically: If you run OpenClaw connected to any meaningful system you are not fit to design, program or run any kind of software. That disregard for security and quality should leave a black mark on you for many years.

WFMU is, hands down, one of the best things that exists, and my personal opinion is that they are worth at least few of your dollars. So consider this, maybe, advance notice of a few days, to get used to the idea of parting with some bucks to help them out. They're worth it! 🐕 🐄

I knew it would be bad but this is draconian - note it is for anyone 14 years and over and it will be a $2k fine for people with no money so instead they will go to prison. It thus becomes move on to prison. This is not a solution to homelessness. www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/governmen...

This is the kind of thing a rich CEO says at the beginning of a science fiction movie to establish for the audience that he is a sociopath and the villain.

“She has a message for other tourists considering a trip to America: “‘Don’t go – not with Trump in charge. It’s totally out of control over there. There’s no accountability. They don’t seem to need a reason for detaining you.’”

Look, now that we're trying for real consequences for the Epstein files, maybe we should also take another look at the Panama Papers

Yesterday Cory Doctorow argued that refusal to use LLMs was mere "neoliberal purity culture". I think his argument is a strawman, doesn't align with his own actions and delegitimizes important political actions we need to make in order to build a better cyberphysical world.

I was disappointed to read Cory Doctorow's post where he got weirdly defensive about his LLM use and started arguing with an imaginary foe. @tante.cc has a very thoughtful reply here: tante.cc/2026/02/20/a... A few further comments, 🧵>>

This reddit post is so good. Especially the fourth image where he breaks down what things "cost" once you're this rich. It's insane and it's no wonder everyone with this amount of money ends up demented by it.

AI agents: The most effective way to fuck up your core product and its uptime.

I just did the dumbest thing of my entire career to prove a much more serious point. I tricked ChatGPT and Google, and made them tell other users I’m a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it

And a useful PSA about why this is different from filming everyone and everywhere with phones: www.404media.co/whats-the-di...

Sure: Light rail, high speed rail, ocean wave generation, solar power generation, wind generation, heat pump tech, geothermal heat pump tech, last mile on-demand transit solutions, better wheelchairs, better wheel chair lifts, better flexible seating on public transit, maker spaces, tool libraries.

“The left is missing out on AI!” YEP. Most of us want to miss out! If it ever proves its actual usefulness to our actual lives, stops plagiarizing, and is no longer an environmental disaster, maybe we revisit. Burden of proof is on the industry. So far they’ve done the opposite of that!

ask anyone on the left about high-speed trains

oh.... my god?? actual chart from learn.microsoft.com/en-us/traini... btw

Assume Quinn is right that it's more efficient to have multiple people specialize in a portion of one reporter's job. He is saying making reporting into a game of telephone — with an AI hallucination machine added in to several steps on the way — will produce higher quality, accurate reporting.

LLMs do not understand, will not understand, and cannot ever understand information. It's a glorified search engine combined with auto-compete, and you should treat it as such. No matter how much LLM companies try to tell you their machines can think or reason, they cannot and will not. 12/12

It clearly can't infer from a simple one sentence question that I might need my car to wash my car, because it isn't intelligent, doesn't possess logic, and can't reason. When you ask it anything complex, it's coming across 10s, 100s, or 1000s of points where it has to infer context. 5/?

It’s mid February. That means 150,000 individual human beings have died from tuberculosis this year on our shared planet. A disease that is curable. These people were killed by inequality.

I don't currently have the words for my anger and frustration seeing climate events happen all over the motu and knowing - we could have been better prepared. We could have made different choices. People don't have to die. I'm trying terribly hard to not be bitter.

Trump openly telling America he is moving to steal the November elections and end our democracy.

A court has ruled that the government's authoritarian ban on Palestine Action was unlawful. Time to stop criminalising the people protesting a genocide - and start ending the UK's complicity.

Breaking: on two counts, the High Court has ruled that the Labour government's proscription of the campaign group Palestine Action was unlawful – a win for its co-founder Huda Ammori, who sought a judicial review of the ban

"My organisation exercises free speech in a free market with the goal of improving transparency for everyone. We don’t buy or sell ads. We do not dictate editorial decisions. We have no power to take down content." Clare Melford, targeted directly by the Trump administration, speaks out in the FT:

Trump posted a video depicting the first Black president and his wife as apes and his excuse for this is that it's a riff on The Lion King, a movie that does not feature any apes. Somehow this was a one-day story and we've already moved on.

Meta relying on the downfall of the United States in order to push out a much more literal type of spyware

In terms of what cures are being lost: - Epstein-Barr virus is perhaps the major trigger for multiple sclerosis - herpes simplex virus causes cold sores, genital herpes, infections in babies, deadly meningitis - shingles virus causes an intensely painful disease

This is so gross, the way the language of "discrimination" and "identity" are being employed. Bullshit machines are tools, they do not have an identity and cannot suffer discrimination any more than a power tool does when I reach for a hand plane.

I hesitate to amplify the right wing in any way, but if we are going to face enemies of a multi-gender, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society based on democratic values, we must recognize what we’re up against. Even for a body as diseased and corrupt as the right wing is, I find this video stunning.

Oh my god yes. If I see one more grifter or lackey crying about how it's so mean that all they did was steal our work, laugh about taking our jobs, and destroy our environment, and now we're not NIIICE to them and it's not FAAAAIIIIIR.

Over on threads someone just use ai;dr and we all need to adopt that right quick

FYI I’ve opened this up for full public reading, listening & sharing after requests from paying subscribers. Their support allows me to do this kind of public interest journalism on Aotearoa’s political economy around housing, climate & poverty in public. #nzpol thekaka.substack.com/p/why-not-sp...

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.

If you are talking about increasing the cost of electricity, and not investing in distributed, resilient solar and battery capacity, nor electrification of transport in multi modes, you don’t understand the problem and should not be anywhere near power (pun absofuckinglutely intended)

this article is a little strange in that it reports this news as if it's *new*. this has been reported on for some time. still, good if more people are more aware: www.theguardian.com/media/2026/f...

Every American needs to watch this:

The EU Commission has preliminarily found TikTok in breach of the Digital Services Act over its addictive design — infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications & hyper-personalized recommendations. ec.europa.eu/commission/p...

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.

This is so good, it's about music but it's also one of the better rundowns of the network of tech fascists, accelerationism and how their inhumane philosophy connects directly to the design and deployment of consumer AI tools. A great dive into AI techno capitalism youtu.be/U8dcFhF0Dlk?...

"we find that models progressively converge toward generic phenotypes regardless of the model architecture. Specifically, rare but critical findings...vanish from the synthetic content generated by AI models, while demographic representations skew heavily toward middle aged male phenotypes."

If only computers had built in clocks in order to tell time using some sort of deterministic machine-readable format. But alas, the only way to know whether it's daytime is to pay nearly a dollar every 30 minutes to ask a fancy autocomplete bot.

I feel like AI coding assistants have the same risks of level 3 or lower vehicle automation, in that they automate the easy and routine stuff which lulls the human into a false sense of security such that the human is not ready to take over when the system encounters something it can't handle.

A new study from Anthropic finds that gains in coding efficiency when relying on AI assistance did did not meet statistical significance; AI use noticeably degraded programmers’ understanding of what they were doing. Incredible.

Honestly one of the best innovations of the past 25 years has been freemium, ad-supported bread and circuses. This has allowed bread and circuses to reach many, many more people than during previous eras in history and honestly deserves an award.

I am so tired of all the things that we said would happen, and were routinely ignored or dismissed by tech bros and neoliberals for saying would happen, continuing to happen, in exactly the way that we said they would happen.

The impressive thing with the Field Manual is how realistic it is. Reading the bureaucracy section, you will recognise classic idiots who you've seen sabotage — presumably unintentionally — countless meetings.

"Flying in on helicopters and expressing sympathy for stricken families and communities is pointless if your policies are failing to address climate change, and making matters worse. New Zealanders who want a different kind of world, and a different kind of politics have choices to make this year."