I wrote this 7 years ago In it I called for cities to better embrace greenery, reflective coatings, water and shading to tackle urban heat. More relevant than ever…. www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/...

"It is worth asking why Enlightenment-era revolutions in Europe, with notable exceptions, were led by wealthy, upper-class men, while in postwar Asia and Africa anti-colonial revolutions were theorized and organized by the intelligentsia."

👀 “these findings suggest that Google’s AI tool may be cranking out millions of wrong answers daily, with few users verifying the information. Should other courts agree that tech firms are liable for any defamatory outputs… the biggest AI leaders could find themselves soon buried in lawsuits.”

For first time, Americans are getting more of their electricity from solar than coal #Climate

10 gigawatts is roughly the average power demand of NYC (~5.5 GW), LA (~3 GW), and SF (~1 GW) combined

I'll be at the Serious Game Arcade tomorrow to talk about sustainability in the game industry and beyond. You can pop in at Concordia University's 4th space or register online! www.badgamearcade.ca/2026progam

"Something remarkable happened in April. For the first time in history, wind and solar generated more electricity than gas across the entire planet. Not in a country. Not in a region. Globally." Tons of great news here from Danny Kennedy (via @billmckibben.bsky.social's newsletter, which rules).

anthropic: we have no way of controlling our fully autonomous, "recursively self-improving" model hidden gig workers, RLHF annotators, and seemingly invisible coders & academics that are *actually* improving the model: hold my beer africa.businessinsider.com/news/inside-...

📢Future? No Thanks! DEMO OUT NOW ON STEAM! Try the game for 30 minutes! An ecosocialist open-world utopia for our dark times. For Windows and Mac store.steampowered.com/app/3861870/...

“Unfortunately, the policymakers best-positioned to sound the alarm are ignoring the rapidly growing AI bubble because they are too distracted by Silicon Valley’s sci-fi-esque prophecies.”

Last week, IT employees at the University of California system across the state formed the largest tech worker union in the United States. This is how they now plan to confront tech industry layoffs, rein in AI, and push for tech for the common good:

You wanna build a data center? Fine Power it with your own solar/wind Cool it with seawater filtered through your own desalination plant You will be required to fund and build the complete infrastructure needed for the product that makes you billions of dollars and fucks the surrounding communities🖕

A reminder that Sarah Sharma's new book, Insufferable Tools: Feminism Against Big Tech, is out now. This book reveals big tech's patriarchal deployment of media theory to maintain power and proposes a new feminist politics of technology. 📘🤖💪

how long until people start stealing the GPUs from these. my god. this has 96 GB of RAM? it's positively dystopian. blackwell rtx pro 6000 is server architecture, but it is /faster than an rtx 5090/ and you can run games on it.

Coming tomorrow to Canvas, if your university subscribes at the Canvas Next tier (IDK what that is either) and your IT department enables "Ignite AI." community.instructure.com/en/discussio...

The perpetual focus on anticipatory futures in AI/AGI discourse is a key weapon used to limit regulation and boost investment/valuation. This is why I focused on the relationship between AI and speculative futurity in my 2024 paper, inspired in part by Bender, Mitchell, Gebru, and Birhane

Looking at two new AI tools Unbound io doing SDF blobs > AI image > Mesh and World Lab's open source engine doing image > full environment (meshes, physics, lighting, audio) I think soon we won't be able to tell when 3D assets are AI-generated...

wow — the preprint host, arxiv, is banning authors for a year if they submit papers with hallucinated citations 🤖

Cool, so NSF is now going to be used to essentially launder money to tech bros because universities are just too cumbersome and disciplinary oversight and regulations and accountability are all just too stifling for innovation. $1.5B for “X-Labs.”

Published with some minor changes! Please share widely. 😊 Guest, O., Suarez, M., ... & van Rooij, I. (2026). Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia. Digital Culture & Education, 16(2), 85–118. doi.org/10.5281/zeno... Journal: www.digitalcultureandeducation.com/volume-162

I had a realisation Context: In our Reclaiming AI paper we argued that AI systems cannot scale up to human-level cognition without consuming astronomical amounts of resources My realisation: The AI industry is determined to burn through the earth’s resources just to prove us right *empirically*

folx, I’ve been working on AI "ethics" for almost a decade now & hate to tell you there’s no such thing as "ethical AI" the only "ethical principle" that works is regulating the shit out of the industry & to take back control of our autonomy, fundamental rights, freedoms & right to exist w/out AI

Oh FFS. So people will pay a computer to write for them and then pay extra to make it sound "human." Meanwhile, actual copywriters are losing their jobs. Pay the human!!

Both shocking and unsurprising. What’s truly troubling is how many people have likely already produced, published and relied upon ‘insights’ they assumed came from analysis of their data but were in fact just the usual stereotyped LLM guesses

Meet the sideshow FREAKS who REFUSE to use the work-stealing, planet-burning, minority-choking, teen-killing, water-guzzling, brain melter that gets most things wrong and makes the user decide whether they give a shit enough to do their job correctly or if they've given up completely on themselves.

Spain invested heavily in energy diversification, including wind and solar. Now it has Europe's cheapest electricity and a booming economy.

“Some legacies of Expo 86 remain, such as SkyTrain & Science World, which was the Expo Centre during the fair. But most of the attractions vanished…” I think the biggest legacy for Vancouver from #Expo86 was a major mindset shift, a confidence around the city-building possibilities. Turning point.

Short piece w @andreaeyleen.bsky.social @irisvanrooij.bsky.social addressing errors on the role of scientific models related also to AI misuse seen everywhere not just psychology: On Models, Prediction, and Scientific Roles Thereof: Commentary on Sanbonmatsu et al. (2025) doi.org/10.5281/zeno... 1/

I genuinely think some people do not want to look this in the eye/think about it because it is so awful. We wrote what I thought was a pretty eye-opening story about all this and I was surprised by the lack of engagement tbh

Sarah Sharma's new book, Insufferable Tools: Feminism Against Big Tech, is available today! The book reveals big tech's patriarchal deployment of media theory and proposes a new feminist politics of tech. www.utm.utoronto.ca/iccit/news/s...

“Feel free to adapt and reuse. No attribution needed (…) If you make an adaption that you also want to share, I’d love to know about it, too.” irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2026/04/08/r...

“Amazon, Microsoft & Google ​have each recently abandoned construction of multibillion-dollar data centers over community opposition & now the companies are coming under shareholder pressure over ‌the environmental impact” Lose the passive voice—PEOPLE are doing this💫 www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

Data says storage prices drops by 19% every time production doubles. You can’t out-compete math this aggressive. This "learning rate" is a one-way street to total electrification: As battery costs crater, EVs become cheapest, and solar/wind becomes reliable 24/7 This feedback loop can't be stopped

Movements to shut down or ban data centers are amassing power and notching victories. Wikipedia has banned AI-generated content in articles. Publishers and entertainment studios are being pushed to reject AI-produced content outright. In other words: It's open season for refusing AI.

But I was told that AI was inevitable.

This is going to leave the US so deeply unskilled. This is exactly how technofascists like to see it. As @olivia.science & I wrote: “the AI industry has lobbied government agencies to mandate the use of its products, claiming that without them, students will be unprepared for the job market.”

This is so, so well-articulated.

good news- i am pretty close to $1000! thank you everyone, the difference between close to the line and slightly above it is huge, emotionally.

"I got my PhD by writing prompts instead of doing research, I'm winning" got some bad news, there still no jobs and now you also know nothing

societies typically talk about human cognition as working similarly to whatever is seen as the latest and greatest technology. that’s why we currently describe the brain as a roguelike deckbuilding game about characters making their way up a spire

"The new waterwheel they built to power the loom made the river undrinkable, and when the boss cut my hours in half, I couldn’t buy food anymore, which really made the whole rickets situation get out of hand. But that’s exactly the sort of time you need a laugh, right?"

📣Join us next week for Trip Out!, our third annual graduate-faculty research symposium.

‘Study after study shows that students want to develop these critical thinking skills, are not lazy, and large numbers of them would be in favor of banning ChatGPT and similar tools in universities’, says @olivia.science www.ru.nl/en/research/...

OpenAI employees pushed for the company to inform Canadian police about a user they thought would engage in real-world violence months before the person did just that, killing eight people in a horrific attack in Tumbler Ridge. The company only reached out to police after the shooting had occurred.

this makes it clear how it's basically the tetris effect (or the same for tower defense/resource management games)

Suggestions for how to do that here, btw: firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph... w/ @nannainie.bsky.social and Peter Zukerman.

'The poorest among us, owning no factories, private jets, or oil rigs, are hardly a glimmer in the rearview mirror of the ultrarich as they race toward emission rates previously unseen by humankind.' futurism.com/scientists-w...

Big thanks to @davidpierce.xyz for featuring my guide to getting off US tech (and my phone home screen!) in the latest issue of Installer. I think I’ll also be grabbing a pair of those new Sony earbuds soon 👀

Posts from @weratedogs.com continue not to disappoint.

I find this question about whether chatbots are “alive” to be truly, truly boring. You can torture a definition of “life” so that it includes chatbots or you can listen to actual, unequivocal flesh-and-blood people talking about harm it does them *right now*.