“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*.

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.

“Researchers from Johns Hopkins, Georgetown and Yale universities recently found that 60 FDA-authorized medical devices using AI were linked to 182 product recalls, according to a research letter published in the JAMA Health Forum in August.”

Very excited about this book!

Once again, it turns out “fully autonomous” means “a guy in the Philippines.”

“Current economic models can give estimates of losses that look precise but which the scientists said were wildly optimistic.” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

recently purchased a 260gb ipod on backmarket and transferred all my old mp3's backed up from when i was collecting music in high school / college...and then i downloaded soulseek and started ripping shit like crazy again RETVRN

Plastic = Fossil Fuels in a cheap suit New study: Plastic-linked health disasters are cutting 83m years of healthy population life Recycling won't save us. Only a total system overhaul and production bans will. Everyone: kindly wake the hell up! t.co/e59eLHktNj

The North Sea is officially becoming Europe’s green engine. 10 countries just signed a historic pact to build 100GW of offshore wind - enough for 143m homes A new subsea "supergrid" will connect nations directly, securing energy independence and 90k+ jobs www.ft.com/content/e9c9...

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

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.