Tech guys six months ago: haha yes we’re cutting all this WASTEFUL spending by eliminating medical research and USAID Tech guys now: yes I think taxpayers will be excited to bailout my non consensual pornography machine

New awareness campaign

Really don’t think it can be emphasized enough what an INSANELY promising technology mRNA vaccination has proved itself to be and it’s beyond infuriating that it is under active and sustained attack by the most powerful people on earth

As someone recently laid off, learning about this $3.65M annual expense is especially shocking. This could pay for so many journalists, and so much actual reporting. The entire race and culture team at CBS News was cut.

All the red tape/work requirements etc put on social safety net programs aren't there to improve the efficiency of the program and are functionally useless. They're there to make the rest of us feel morally superior to poor people and reassure us we won't end up like "them". bsky.app/profile/nber...

Had the chance to illustrate for Quanta again, and got to draw one of my favorite animals: sharks! This is for “Shark Data Suggests Animals Scale Like Geometric Objects” by Joanna Thompson. It was really fun to focus on all sorts of species, from the large Whale Shark to the small Spiny Dogfish

For the rest of the world, the single case of Mike Johnson refusing to swear in Adelita Grijalva after her special election win, because Johnson knows her vote will tip the scales for the release of the Epstein files, is enough evidence by itself that the U.S. political system is broken and lawless.

Personally, the best parts of bsky for me are the lack of algorithmic intrusion (chronological following feed if you choose that) and ample blocking options.

hi some news: here’s what im being for halloween and also this is my last day at @wired.com. thank u to everyone from the ed assistants to ops to the entire dogged editorial team for letting infiltrate and be a social maniac to make crucial information accessible to everyone. a mini thread:

I hadn’t heard about Treat Accessibly, which offers accessibility tips for trick or treating!

Has Greta Gerwig ever gone on record re: HAUSU as a mood board piece for BARBIE?

stellan skarsgård seems like a good dude

The only time I raised my voice in five seasons of LEVERAGE was telling the TNT exec that if he sent cease and desist orders to the makers of fan videos on YouTube that I would quit the show and take an ad out in the Hollywood Reporter explaining why.

Hey Canadian friends! The government put out this survey on AI. It’s extremely long, EXTREMELY biased, it took me 45 minutes to fill out, and uses industry specific vocabulary to increase the difficulty in answering… but if you could, please fill it out. Thanks! ised-isde.canada.ca/site/ised/en...

“The way that we see the #BlueJays being presented as a friendly, inclusive, cohesive unit, which is really lovely, is also speaking volumes on what's happening globally and politically in those two different countries, where we're not seeing that inclusivity.” #TeamCanada #WorldSeries #GoJaysGo

(Ari Aster was right.)

get in losers, we're doing 2008 again but with graphics cards instead of houses

Again, they couldn't fit all that in here, but if you want more on it, look up my talk "Religious Belief and Practice in the Age of 'AI'" from last year, my dissertation from two years before that, and just like, a whole bunch of my less formal talks and blog posts from years and years before that.

Gift article. OBAA joins a short list of the best films ever made about California—its past, and where it might be headed. This article includes several of the locations in the film, all far from Hollywood, but Californian to their core. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/24/m...

A very happy WET SCREAMS book launch at Hopeless Romantic Bookstore in Totonto! We had costumes, merch, authors signing books, a little dancing, and a lot of giggling. Thanks so much to everyone who came out! If only we could have teleported in @garbagesauce.bsky.social WET SCREAMS is out Nov. 1!

Private equity destroys 200-year-old book distribution company that libraries around the country rely on and now libraries are having trouble getting new books: www.404media.co/libraries-sc...

The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955)

Every single “look we did it, we created an artificial being” just turns out to be some version of the Mechanical Turk

I agree, adding that I’m very concerned about its effects on adult brains too. I think it’s much more psychologically dangerous to interact with an LLM designed to reflect your own ideas back flatteringly than to post on social media, where someone will always be ready to call you a c***

i hate to be that bitch, but my sources are telling me this early voting data has gotten Zohran's people rightly spooked and y'all better stop assuming this one's in the bag. GOTV

So the $20,000 humanoid robot housekeeper actually just webcams your house to a random person in a call center with an Xbox controller www.wsj.com/tech/persona... @joannastern.bsky.social

"Civil war in the UK is inevitable" is the racist equivalent of cosmic channelling. You create a mantra around your heart's greatest white supremacist desire and then try to speak it into existence.

One in six laboratory-confirmed bacteria in 2023 proved resistant to antibiotic treatment, according to the World Health Organization—all related to a variety of common diseases globally.

I can't help but think we've been extremely lucky that no real violence has hit stuff like data centers up to this point, but I read this and I suspect it is inevitable that someone will attack one of these as they start to make survival of the community vs a massive data center a zero sum affair.

I'm so sick of discourse from supposed allies about where trans people went wrong. Where we "went wrong" is that billionaires spent unimaginably large sums to attack us repeatedly and major media outlets have spent a decade piling on.

I think this is whee we have to have a real review of what GEn AI is called to make most often . and that's things that violate autonomy, or lower someones equality

Fellow academics, I'm doing it. Going all in. Pulling the plug, literally. This is on my syllabus for Spring 2026: "This is an analog class. No Canvas; this syllabus is your guide." All readings are printed books; hand-written exams; no laptops. #academicbluesky #Highered #academia #Rutgers

This. The only time Asimov’s writing in the series perks up, as it were, is when he’s describing a female body. Otherwise, Foundation could mostly be delivered as a series of bullet points on a PowerPoint slide, colour-coded for Ideas, Plot, and Characters, in declining order of frequency.

the only thread of Asimov's Foundation that you need to read. I am cackling.

1) I was on a long flight recently and put on all 3 DGG Halloween flicks to sleep to. 2) Fans knew @akelacooper.bsky.social wasn’t in the chair on M3gan 2.0. 3) M3gan, Black Phone, Ma, Happy Death Day, & even Get Out are “sleepover horror” movies adults can watch w/kids & teens, then chat about.

good bit from the Guardian review of Giuffre's memoir; I have heard several people from the NGO world express the confusion and embarrassment they felt at billionaires showing up with very young women at events.

Say what you will about Ian Fleming but his theory that cheating at golf/cards means you’re probably a narcissistic psychopath who wants to rule the world is unbeaten.

If you're a writer/other creator in the United States, consider creating an LLC for your business and then signing up for a local area Chamber of Commerce. Many of them have health insurance plans that pool their members and members of other CoCs to create insurance efficiencies relative to ACA.

It’s such a bizarre reading of how capital oppresses to think that you can resist it without the people who in fact make up the actual, living American working class, and instead use only those who look like they’re standing next to a truck in a commercial.

It could be ‘the first of many’ but it doesn’t have to be — because you can say “fuck no, not in my state!” The same way antivax nutjobs organize — you can, too. Belligerent normalcy wins people over: “Not in my school! Keep your freedom measles away from my kid.” You just have to do it.

A #Toronto story: I am meeting Dave for dinner downtown. In a clowder of Carhartts, one guy smiles and says “Miss, I hope you are having the best evening.” “Thank you,” I say. Clearly surprised: “Wow, you’re…sweet.” “I’ll tell my husband you said so.” Carhartts: “DAAAMN! GOOD ANSWER! FUCK!”

So Alberta banned electronic vote tabulation last year (you can guess why) and now it's the day after municipal elections and there's still no clear picture of the results in some of Canada's biggest cities www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

"To live through this moment is to feel that some essential component of our shared humanity is being slowly leached out of the world. Spend enough time online, and you will see that not only is this cheaply rendered synthetic content everywhere; it is quietly shaping culture."

Once again Rolling Stone knocks it out of the park with Covid coverage. Long Covid is real and it is a serious threat to our long term health. It’s already surpassed asthma as the most common chronic illness in kids. Yet tons of doctors and schools won’t even recognize it:

This week I have really been noticing the predictive text in my desktop environment in a way I never have before. It kept being *nearly* right - “obscure” when I was typing “obfuscate” etc - and making me question where I was going. Turns out you can just switch it off.

a lot of marketing wisdom is bunk, but there is some truth to "You have to see a thing 7+ plus times before you start considering it" and people don't even post at that frequency for themselves

An OpenAI executive said GPT-5 found solutions to 10 "previously unsolved" math problems when in reality all it did was find online references to places where people had already solved them techcrunch.com/2025/10/19/o...

I really believe generative AI is a cognitohazard to an entire column of humanity. I don't know, there's a something it fucking does to people that displaces their own entirely-capable cognition and independence, further they seemingly cannot perceive the deficits of. This is not a moral argument.

If I had explain American history in one sentence, I could do worse than "John Brown was hung for treason, but Robert E. Lee was not."