One time I commented on a Youtube video about the Falklands war to say that the British were really lucky that so many Argentinian bombs failed to explode. A guy responded that, basically, it was all part of the British plan to let the Argentinian bombs hit them, knowing they wouldn't all explode

Out of the sea there rise storms and monsters, but no evil powers: evil is of earth. And there is no sea, no running of river or spring, in the dark land where once Ged had gone. Death is the dry place.

The Hunt for Red October

Sauces Bald Eagle, Channel Islands National Park #NPS #NationalParkService #ChannelIslandsNationalPark

Some groups of people get their concerns addressed anytime they want, and other groups sure fucking don't

I love this essay very much!!!!

One of the worst things to happen to America was journalism ceasing to be a middle income career like teaching or accounting and transforming into a bullshit job for precocious rich kids because parental subsidies are required for your first decade in the business.

If you think AI surveillance cameras aimed at drivers’ faces is a good idea (no matter how well intentioned the justification), you are a naive fool. This data will be harvested, sold to fascists, and used to imprison activists. Oh, and car companies will 100% use it for ads you can’t turn off.

Im also struck by how this depends on the capitalist and neoliberal weaponization of the measures we take to make our classrooms accessible for disabled students (recordings). Its so monstrous when you think about it, yet entirely consistent with the model of the university as capitalist entity

who needs books when my phone has a thing that stole them all and can remix them in to narrative gruel

New OA article just out on "assetizing academic content" led by @jkom.bsky.social with me, @keanbirch.bsky.social & Klaus Beiter, exploring how academic materials are turned into value-generating digital assets by HE institutions, edtech platforms, and AI companies link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Relaxing in the sun🐱❤️ #pixelart

Everyone who does work that is more formal than mine is lost in trivial details and needs to focus on real philosophy. Meanwhile. anyone who does work less formal than mine needs to get serious and quit being so frightened by a little math.

“If you ask tobacco companies to help write your school’s policy on cigarettes…you’re going to end up with guidance on how to smoke responsibly in school.”

Texas Tech can stage mass wildcat labor actions or cease to be a university. Those are the only two choices that I can see.

A “former Palantir executive recently confirmed what many have long suspected. In a public stmt, the whistleblower said it plainly: Palantir intended to take over the US government, & many of his former colleagues are now installed inside the federal apparatus. He called it an occupied nation.” 1/

I think about this all the time. There's just hardly any public mourning at all, like memorials or ceremonies or commemorative holidays or anything

On advance access: "Bodies, Tides, Timber, and the Global History of London’s Docks, 1860–1928" by Simeon Koole (@uobrishistory.bsky.social) and @benmechen.bsky.social (@uclhistory.bsky.social) #OpenAccess doi.org/10.1093/past...

One of the specific small things I miss most after moving away. The bigger thing I miss is just how much nature there is LA

Yet another gushing story of how bogs are "prime areas for development" with plans for a "radical transformation of swathes of the midlands". Bogs are important in their own right should be restored not converted to data centres www.independent.ie/business/iri...

Absolute trash, a car could do this in under ten minutes while carrying a bunch of people

Wild life of the world: London ;F. Warne and co., 1916. (source: http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/33270318) #nature #illustration #art

This continual bombardment from a catastrophically failing money sink is so aggressively anti-human, anti-creator and anti-life that CEOs should absolutely be held accountable when they decide to farewell it. 'If we take more we can make it better' like some bank robbers promising one last job.

Deepfakes, synthetic media, AI slop etc. have often been discussed in terms of a «crisis of truth» or an «erosion of trust». Fair enough. But in my impression, there’s something else that gets lost in waves of AI slop flooding our screens: a «sense of wonder» – surprise, amazement and awe 1/

'Environmental impact of these vast facilities remains largely secret, despite the data flowing into a publicly-funded database. ... lobbying from major data centre operators was successful in keeping specific information from individual data centres confidential and out of the public domain'

Man the newly digitized Irish census rules, what an incredible resource nationalarchives.ie/collections/...

In 1999, I was playing a decker in Shadowrun, and tried to distract a guard by hacking a water fountain to overflow, and my GM said "why would a water fountain be on the network? That's fucking stupid. No you can't try." Well it's 2026 and I just want you to know, Phil, that I FUCKING CALLED IT!

Really looking forward to this next week, although I can only attend half since I also have to go to a community-college-district-wide meeting on AI policy, a meeting that is sure to be the exact opposite of this extremely informative and practical book

‘I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination’. Embarking today on Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1969 masterpiece ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’. Happy days 🙂

Personally don't recommend these. As the article notes, these properties are typically achieved through PFAS, which can shed carcinogens in your home (which you then inhale) or come out in the wash (polluting waterways for decades). Will try to do a thread on how to treat stains in the wash.

Seems bad!

The Irish fuel protests can be seen from so many different angles but what strikes me most is how it's a clear example of when certain privileged social groups make interventions into public discourse, they get heard and get their interests attended to. In Ireland, one of those groups is "farmers."

The country's descent into fascism cannot be understood without interrogating U.S. policing. But folks across the political spectrum are allergic to this so here we are.

Edinburgh journal of natural history and of the physical sciences. Edinburgh [etc.]: Published for the proprietor [etc.], 1835-1840. (source: https://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/33665323) #nature #illustration #art

What the fuck

Mark Carney wants the fantasy of AI to be reality, despite the evidence it’s not coming, but ignores how AI creates an antisocial world where more people suffer mental health challenges, do not think critically, are addicted to screens, have their work degraded, and can’t tell fact from fiction.

In general, (re)orienting education wholly or chiefly to specific perceived market needs is always going to produce disaster once the near term passes. It also eviscerates institutions that might otherwise help people weather change, intellectually and in other ways

«Tech billionaires want the public to believe they’re making the world a better place and enhancing our individual and collective capacities. But they’re actually harming people’s ability to learn and to think for themselves, if not disrupting the course of their very existence.» @parismarx.com

Re: Altman, Molotov cocktails, and violence: Here's Yudkowsky saying that more or less 8.2 billion people should be "allowed" to die so that his dumb "utopian" vision of digital space brains among the stars can be realized. (Minimum viable human population might be 150.)

‘She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person who kept a parrot.’ ~ Mark Twain 🦜 #BookWormSat 🖼️ The Lady of the Tooti-Nameh or The Legend of the Parrot, Valentine Cameron Prinsep, c.1865.

What is the word for saying something that’s not just untrue, but the exact opposite of the truth? it‘s remarkably common in sectors that contribute most to environmental damage. I know Orwell called it Doublespeak but I’m not sure this captures it.

2026 book thread: Chernobyl Children: A Transnational History of Nuclear Disaster, by Melanie Arndt I learned a lot from this, and wrote a review for Urban History and a substack post (open.substack.com/pub/historic...). Some parts were more compelling than others but overall quite good.

NYC politics are so weird

Wild how teen pregnancy was a total disaster when I was young, and now apparently it was awesome?

I will never understand how anyone can look at a situation like this and think "man, data centres and AI are really going to help solve climate change and incentivse renewable energy" www.politico.com/newsletters/...

NEW: Lebanon is Gaza 2.0. That’s what Israeli ministers are saying in their own words. Believe them. 1/ www.thenerve.news/p/lebanon-wa...

Most schools are more direct about it. They call it "Gender balancing," but it's a fancy way of saying that if they made it fair and equal, most colleges would be over 70% women. As it is, most US colleges are already over 60% women, mostly white.