"AI didn't just increase its footprint in Washington in 2025. It ate tech lobbying whole." www.axios.com/2026/01/23/a...

jack asked if i would sketch up a poster to tell people in nearby neighborhoods about the partnership between flock and ring, and this is what i came up with. it can be printed on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper.

Córy Doctorow with another verbal bullseye: pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/n...

A shift to renewables by 2050 could save the global economy at least $12 trillion in energy system costs - What are we [still] waiting for? www.dw.com/en/fossil-fu...

Not sure why this dross, dated Dec 1, seems to be circulating now (and why it didn't cross my feed a month ago), but wow what a terrible essay. A few comments, in a short 🧵>> bigthink.com/the-present/...

Really interesting research showing that while ultra-specialization in a single discipline might lead to better results early in one’s career, multi-discipline training and practice pays off big time in the long run. This applies to a range of professions from scientists to athletes and more

"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!

“tests from earlier this year found that AI agents failed to complete tasks up to 70% of the time, making them almost entirely redundant as a workforce replacement tool.” — Microsoft Scales Back AI Goals Because Almost Nobody Is Using Copilot :: Extremetech www.extremetech.com/computing/mi...

Incredible book, if you haven’t seen it. I think about the “technologically precocious boy” all the time.

“We can’t all be expected to bike.” Fair. But that’s not the point. “Not everyone can or wants to bike. But some people can & do—and they deserve a safe, efficient, affordable way to move through the city. It’s about freedom of choice.” This & other useful comebacks, in @momentummag.bsky.social.

Energy transitions can happen faster than we think: In 2000 almost 90% of Denmark's electricity was from fossil fuels. In 2024 less than 10% of Danish electricity was from fossil fuels.

The Center for Digital Play at the IT University of Copenhagen is organizing a new conference: Playing Futures. The conference will take place from May 20th to 22nd at the IT University of Copenhagen. You can read more about it here: playingfutures.today

"All of this falls apart if humans don't adopt the tech. This is why you've seen Meta cram its lame chatbots into WhatsApp and Instagram. This is why Notepad and Paint now have useless Copilot buttons on Windows. This is why Google Gemini wants to "help you" read and reply to your emails."

I think it’s pretty clear at this point that one of the main impacts of LLMs is to disrupt thinking: to make it so that far too many people never properly learn how to do it, and then to control the output so there are thoughts that people never learn how to think.

I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.

What was ChatGPT? Now nearly three years old, we can look at OpenAI's LLM as a product of its time, optimized ever since to its earliest uses. While this period of deep disorientation and social isolation has been obscured from public memory, it remains embedded within the interface.

Or to say it another way: the work of synthesizing a contextually-relevant text or utterance is the work of learning.

"Warming is going to exceed 1.5°C. We are heading into overshoot within the next few years": a stark message by PIK Director Rockström & James Dyke in @theconversation.com. Yet, science shows a way back: fossil-fuel phase-out, nature protection, carbon removal. theconversation.com/the-world-lo...

the thing about the roblox interview is that he's more or less just saying out loud what every social media & gacha CEO has been doing for the last 10+ years. selling kids gambling with the minimal legally allowed guardrails is hot profits rn

TRUMP [after spending 5 minutes with Zohran]: surplus value, it’s a very wonderful thing, very wonderful, and they’re stealing it. Can you believe that? We’re going to be looking very strongly at the bourgeoisie, what they’re up to

“Adversarial poetry” as an antidote to LLMs sounds like a plot cooked up in a creative writing department.

do what now

Like it or not this technology is here to stay and if you don’t use it you’ll fall behind in your industry

"There were spaces to meet (and argue), spaces to organize and plan – and spaces to socialize too... Having different groups sharing the same space provided opportunities for people to learn how to organize together." "Yet now, the left is looking at a very different and less vibrant landscape."...

Universities spend gazillions on EdTech software that doesn’t serve faculty or student interests and often doesn’t work well. But what if we got off that path and leveraged internal resources to produce non-profit systems? Here’s a proposal to leverage the CUNY systems platforms.

“While the AI industry claims its models can “think,” “reason,” and “learn,” their supposed achievements rest on marketing hype and stolen intellectual labor. In reality, AI erodes academic freedom, weakens critical reading, and subordinates the pursuit of knowledge to corporate interests.”

This is our community's letter!! It was written by Josie Morway, a local artist and parent. After we started asking questions, the district slowed way down and starting holding forums, creating workgroups, and taking student privacy more seriously. Talk to us if you want to do the same!

Climate knowledge has been taken hostage to prevent climate action. “It didn’t happen by accident. It’s the product of a deliberate and systematic assault on knowledge by some of the richest people on Earth. Preventing climate breakdown means protecting ourselves from the storm of lies.”

Good that Canada joins coalition to fight against climate disinformation (so maybe don't weaken greenwashing law?) www.euronews.com/green/2025/1...

📢 NEXT FRIDAY - November 21 @ 2PM ET 📢 ⚒️🏠🧑🏿💻 TreaAndrea Russworm talks about what the Black arts tradition can tell us about The Sims, broken systems, and utopian possibilities⚒️🏠🧑🏿💻 🎟️ TIX + Info: buff.ly/DDUsvVm 💸 Our talks are always FREE and PUBLIC. DONATE: buff.ly/3PQ2HDE

“authors & publishers who filed a lawsuit against the Sam Altman-led firm have secured access to internal Slack messages… discussing the mass deletion of a pirated books dataset… A NY district court ordered OpenAI to hand over the communications regarding data deletion” futurism.com/artificial-i...

“Roughly 80-89% of the world’s people want their governments to ‘do more’ to address #ClimateChange, and nearly 2/3rds are on board with that action costing them a bit. Yet most think they are the minority, telling pollsters they believe that only around 30% also want stronger climate action.”

Whoa, “When Prophecy Fails” debunked? onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

AI-powered searches continue to co-opt and corrupt much more substantive, moderated sources of knowledge. www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

“In total, I’ve spoken with over two-dozen rather senior people in the datacenter universe, and there was an interesting and overriding theme to our conversations; no one understands how the financial math is supposed to work. They are as baffled as I am, and they do this for a living.”

This but an entire country’s economy lol

Wanna catch up on the EA deal ? @superjoost.bsky.social and I got you covered.

I'm sharing a TTRPG I was commissioned to make earlier in the year. Read about it and find it here: open.substack.com/pub/solarser...

If you follow AI, you've heard a number of cognitive scientists weigh in with valuable insights and concerns. You may not have heard from one quite like Hagen Blix, however, who describes generative AI as "class warfare through enshittification." My interview with @hagenblix.bsky.social:

Yuuup

If a tiny fraction of the resources deployed towards AI was invested instead in actual artists we'd be enjoying a renaissance rather than drowning in a sea of garbage

Hm is it bad if the industry somehow propping up a trembling economy is based almost entirely on our collective willingness to let it do crimes

If you haven’t been paying attention to the EA takeover because you’re not a gamer, here’s why it should concern you anyway. 2 out of 3 people in the US play video games —and right-wingers are gearing up to control their content. Their messaging, their propaganda. Coming to a console near you.

“This transaction represents something fundamentally different: the acquisition of cultural influence and soft power by sovereign wealth, marking gaming’s transition from a pure entertainment product to a strategic geopolitical asset.”

"We are told that AI is inevitable, that we must adapt or be left behind. But universities are not tech companies. Our role is to foster critical thinking, not to follow industry trends uncritically." www.ru.nl/en/research/...