In retrospect it will look like we’re pulling the ladder up with ourselves, when in the moment it’s more like we keep Indiana-Jones-rolling under one closing heavy stone door after another.

I think the shift towards "this technical literacy will lead to a six figure income at a government approved monopoly" contributes to its reframing as compliance training

if generative ai takes down the cloud, i might finally have something good to say about it

Ben Goertzel, popularizer of the term AGI and creator of the Sophia robot, congratulating Jeffrey Epstein the day after Epstein was released from prison. Goertzel is mentioned in the files nearly 800 times, including well after the Miami Herald investigation in 2018.

every post I encounter about LLMs reeks of a society incapable of the experience of shame or embarassment

“As it ponders perhaps its greatest privacy intrusion yet, Meta is betting on people looking the other way. No matter the touted benefits of facial recognition in Meta’s smart glasses, the trade-off isn’t worth it.”

Everyone should be asking this question all the time. Unfortunately it mostly seems to be gambling websites and cryptocurrency scams.

for all this social media research we have we sure don't actually use it to inform the social media we build

Dealing with this constantly. We all make our own choices and are responsible for what happens in our communities. It's a choice to keep using these platforms even when you know the atrocities they continuously inflict on our brains, our democracies, and the planet itself.

Is infrastructure sabotage always a destructive act led by seditious individuals? no my new article in Human Geography studies Colombian public sector workers ‘breaking’ infrastructure to oppose privatization in 1992, and argues sabotage can reshape policies, politicize society & more

mom they’re roasting the US economy on mastodon again

I think I'm flattered that AI suggested watching *my own video* to learn about some technical challenges I'm working with.

Thanks, AI!

Interesting piece examining how Chinese policymakers don't seem to care about AGI and think about the utility of AI differently than American counterparts desperate to win "the AGI race." open.substack.com/pub/highcapa...

the Marxists are fighting, so i had to weigh in www.theideasletter.org/essay/automa...

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...

Gotcha—let’s dig into that step by step. 1. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗻𝗼 𝗺𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗵, because I turned you into an amorphous lump of flesh. You’re not just immobile—you’re immortal, and you feel only anguish. 2. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺. That makes total sense—it’s a natural human impulse, and you’ve been through a lot.

the president wont see your posts making fun of how he's looking these days but your friends whose skin seems to be sloughing off in wet discolored chunks as the psychic weight of their craven wretchedness becomes manifest will

The weird & reactionary technopolitics of today are the result of 30+ years of debate among US technologists. Our paper with @arturocastro.bsky.social "Cryptofinancial Imaginaries" is out in the new issue of Journal of Cultural Economy. Thrilled to be part of this debate: tinyurl.com/24ptrbkn

discoveries are by definition not objects of intellectual property - patentable subject matter or copyrightable work - let alone the fact that OpenAI is flagrantly free-riding on other peoples' labour and outputs

I compared the user interface in this photo to the leaked user guide I have for Mobile Fortify, and it's the same. Mobile Fortify is ICE's app for verifying someone's identity, immigration status, whether issued order of deportation. ICE says it overrides a birth certificate bsky.app/profile/donm...

I think "ESG" was always largely bullshit but this certainly settles it

Bond traders… beloved of God, lions of the spreadsheet world… heed the call and punish the man who did this… destroy Donald J. Trump and scatter Babylon’s financial foundations to the winds.

Welcome to the Clicktatorship, where everything is content

As tech companies try to sell us on the idea that life itself is an inconvenience, "an orientation toward friction is really the only defense we have against the life-annihilating suction of technologies of escape," @kjezermorton.bsky.social writes. www.thecut.com/article/broo...

Marco Rubio is reportedly saying Maduro will stand trial in US courts. Which means it’s now the US administration’s position that US courts can hold foreign presidents, but not the US president, accountable for crimes.

If your position is that regime change should be forced on countries where the president does not respect democratic norms and regularly kidnaps opponents using an officially sanctioned paramiliatary, have I got news for you about your position on the United States

I've been tracking the spread of nonconsensual deepfakes on X for more than two years. Here's a timeline of how Musk's leadership allowed the practice to flourish from a once-underground market to a viral trend, with little recourse for victims or legal enforcement. spitfirenews.com/p/grok-csam-...

The Silicon Valley Consensus: a persistent but fragile pattern for overbuilding, overvaluing, and overinvesting in tech to enrich networks of capitalists & advance their (reactionary) political projects. 1st iteration focuses on AI capex, first half today. thetechbubble.substack.com/p/the-silico...

Always good to keep in mind that Guardian has a partnership with OpenAI.

Amazingly, reaction times using screens while driving are worse than being drunk or high—no wonder 90 percent of drivers hate using touchscreens in cars. Finally the auto industry is coming to its senses.

If you want to get a feel for the course, check out this article from the latest issue of Audubon Mag: www.audubon.org/magazine/bey... Or listen to this podcast interview from last spring: www.aba.org/09-10-the-po...

Good example in Empire of AI with psychosis. They internally predicted vulnerability among users and allowed it anyway. Another example with Meta and their AI policy for children. They have internal experiments showing these bots solicit kids as young as 8 and the legal team approved it anyways.

-TikTok labels less than 1.38% of this content as AI-generated -Nearly ⅓ of accounts & ½ of the top 10 showed content sexualizing female bodies, including minors -False news, anti-immigrant narratives & explicit trends were widespread -55% of AI content remains unlabelled; only 10% of creators label

When media policy meets military: Is Palantir a Swiss military technology company? Great piece by @republik.ch, financially supported by @journafonds.bsky.social and globally distributed by Swissinfo, the SRG's international offer that government plans to defund. www.swissinfo.ch/eng/war-peac...

I appreciate this: LLMs don’t change anything on their own, but the scientific community’s decisions about how they are applied into current systems of incentives certainly does. Arguably, it’s a technology for over-optimizing to metrics, in ways that render any metric fundamentally useless.

In a stroke of good timing, my article excoriating the metaverse (and taking shots at spatial computing) was just accepted at Games & Culture. How do these companies make implausible and undesirable futures seem inevitable? abstract posted here!

Ten years ago.

"We face a social dilemma around the role of these empathy machines. Those who are most cognitively vulnerable may turn to these tools when what they most need is a flesh-and-blood human who will care for them, not sycophantically, but with thick empathy arising from the experience of being human."

Can the human sciences exist w/out the human? Proposals for using AI as human research subjects suggest yes. But @mjcrockett.bsky.social and I respond with, ‘not so fast.’ In fact, silicon subjects say more about the problems of the research paradigm than the promises of AI. 🚨New article, thread 1/

another and slightly less stupid reality is possible

If you have to read anything about the prospect of “automating scientific discovery,” “agents for science,” or integrating LLMs into scientific pipelines, please let it be this essay by Kevin T. Baker: artificialbureaucracy.substack.com/p/context-wi...

I've been told Sameer Project is the "gold standard" for sending aid to Palestinians. Of many projects, this one is to keep Gazans warm this winter: shelter, warm clothing, blankets. Now they're in tattered tents w nothing, w/ Israel blocking aid entry despite ceasefire. chuffed.org/project/1491...

The Tech Coup on steroids. ‘Society as a (tech run) service’ How Silicon Valley billionaires and ideologues dream of start-up nations to avoid the rule of law, by Hannah Murphy in @financialtimes.com ↘️ www.ft.com/content/b127...

Playing the "Good/bad migrant line helps spread further division and racism. As @migrantvoice.bsky.social points out in this piece "People do not check what job someone has, or how they arrived, before attacking them". Labour knows this and just carries on. www.migrantvoice.org/home/editori...

this is why I'm not interested in working towards "fixes" but in surfacing problems the industry is choosing not to address

Fascinating stuff (and yeah, obligatory note that AI is a stupid label, this isn't an LLM etc) But once again, this is also about substituting mere prediction for explanation. Understanding is overhead to capital, predictions are all it cares about. Capital is trying to get rid of science