OpenAI's new "AGI" criterion is actually quite simply and easy to understand: "Which Goal Post Position Will Make Everyone Give Us Money With Zero Oversight Or Responsibilities?" That's it. That's all it's ever been & the only way they've ever done it, even if they refuse to admit it to themselves

We have progressed from data collection to data analysis.

I love my job! This time around, Olga and Oleks are giving us tools and ideas to deal with the constant turmoil of this current era: your permacrisis playbook. Coaching their talks has been a delight. You should come check it out! haskayne.ucalgary.ca/research-and...

Things are happening at Portland's ICE facility tonight. Read more of our protest coverage here: www.oregonlive.com/crime/2025/1...

I think we should establish an understanding in the United States that if you order the military to carry out a lethal strike against something that is not an imminent threat without congressional authorization, what you did was murder and the entire chain of command is guilty.

This whole section really.

A 12-foot statue of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein frolicking and holding hands appeared on the National Mall in Washington, DC on Tuesday, September 23. A plaque under the statue states that it has been erected “In Honor of Friendship Month."

A new study, based on a survey of 1,150 workers suggests that the injection of AI tools into the workplace has not resulted in a magic productivity boom and instead increased the amount of time that workers say they spend fixing low-quality AI-generated “work.” 🔗 www.404media.co/ai-workslop-...

In addition to scraping your uploads for "generative AI" training, Academia dot edu is going to start claiming rights to your personal info— *including your signature & voice*— for anything they see fit. So now'd be a good time to remove all of your uploaded works, & then delete your whole account.

There is no more timely show than Andor.

A while back I got the chance to talk with @jasonmehmel.bsky.social about the intersections of "generative AI," magic, esoteric, and culture, and many of the dangers and possibilities in their components and conjunctions. Always be aware of what you bring into the Work— and what the tools bring, too

It's been a while. Glad to be announcing a new game, and happy that it is something experimental and weird: a tiny, tense, turn-based strategy game about merging units into spectacular combinations, and then watching them evaporate thousands of bugs. store.steampowered.com/app/2396130/...

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Me: take hours to read a book You: have your super hot ChatGPT girlfriend download a million books, read them, then summarize them all to you in a barrage of lies that you can't even tell are lies because you don't read books; also you have the critical thinking skills of a shovel-struck donkey

This lawsuit is brutal. One of the exhibits is the letter Universal sent to Midjourney, including a quote from a 2022 Forbes interview that I bet midjourney regrets

I'm crowdsourcing a rebuttal to the below point! (not mine) "[...] empires are cool. [...] the Roman brought civilization, Ottoman kept peace in most contentious area of the world, [...] the Austrian Hungarian empire was better than what came next. There are no counter examples in history."

Check out how the anchors of CBS Evening News ended their broadcast tonight:

so they're mycoblogging

I think the truth is much more complicated. Manufacturing overseas can create certain jobs here by offering a more affordable product. In the end, you may actually see a *loss* of US jobs as fewer people pay for $240 sneakers, both at home and abroad.

WHERE WAS GONDOR WHEN THE DOW JONES FELL??

Tired: No more kings Wired: No more brain-rotted king-worshipping king-enabling political parties

Chick-a-dee-dee-dee. No birb sounds in this sorry, it was recording in slow motion, which doesn't record audio. I just added some piano over it. At Prince's Island Park today. If you want to say hello to them too just sit still and hold your hand out with something in it and they'll find you. #yyc

No president can arrest, detain, or deport someone for disagreeing with the government. Trump has selectively targeted Mr. Khalil to show just how far he will go to crack down on free speech. Ideas are not illegal, and dissent cannot be grounds to deport someone. www.nyclu.org/commentary/m...

I hear that Nature, the pre-eminent journal of science research, will only allow cleaning staff to use brooms and dusters in their offices. It seems Nature abhors a vacuum.

2000+ Jewish professors, staff, and students circulating a letter on Trump-Vance's arrest of Mahmoud Khalil: "We hold various views…But we are united in denouncing…anyone who invokes our name—and cynical claims of antisemitism—to harass, expel, arrest, or deport members of our campus communities."

Gov. Walz, "There’s nothing conservative about an unelected South African nepo baby firing people at the VA."

A top economics reporter goes off script on national TV: “I am going to say this at risk of my job, but what President Trump is doing is insane.”

“Make everything as hard as possible. Resist every demand.” @aoc.bsky.social

NEW: At Alberta Health Services, the one-man board (Andre Tremblay) changes bylaws so that only the health deputy minister (Tremblay) can be interim CEO (currently Tremblay). Then Min LaGrange ordered rule changed again when Smith moved him (Tremblay) out as health DM... www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

This is a great write-up, not just talking about Boom Baby but providing a portrait of the depth of collaboration between Natalie and me, and between Sage Theatre and MRU. www.mtroyal.ca/AboutMountRo... (Oh, and tickets are going fast! Better snap a few up before it's too late!)

Tomorrow is the first day of rehearsals for Boom Baby! (The world premiere production!) I'm excited, for so many reasons! Including getting to work with amazing artists to tell this heartfelt, hilarious story where East Coast meets Mountain money. Can you buy a baby? tix at sagetheatre.com #yyc

Question for my local #Calgary artist community: anyone have a tax person they recommend? #yyc #artisttaxes #yycarts

“Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed, you’re operating within a fascist logic,” they said. “That means there might be a second one you’re willing to sacrifice and a third, a fourth. Then what happens?”

“I thought the AI chatbots would do a lot better,” said del Rio-Chanona, corresponding author of the study and assistant professor at UCL. “History is often viewed as facts, but sometimes interpretation is necessary to make sense of it.” Where does one even start....🗃️ www.earth.com/news/ai-stru...

Is there a way to do a stare-down contest with Trump on some of these nutbar policies? It's going to be as bad for the States as anyone else. So we could just say, 'sure, go ahead' and wait. (And brace for the worst, obv.) Trump/Musk are driven by negative reinforcement. What if we don't give it?

In that familiar old incompetence I haven't missed, Trump's executive order defines sex as what a person is at CONCEPTION. Fetal sex doesn't begin to differentiate until about 7 weeks into gestation. Which means Donald used the highest office in the land to declare all Americans legally female.

The Scottish Sunday Herald TV guide featured this preview of the Trump inauguration. It’s fucking brilliant.

Excellent NYT interview with the outgoing U.S. ambassador to Hungary. This is a key insight!

Image of an "apple intelligence" (get it? "AI"? Yeah) alert making wrong claims about all of today's confirmation hearings, & about how proposed tariffs might affect inflation. LLM-based "AI" is not good at summarizing complex/nuanced information well, and it gets important things importantly wrong

Yeah I need way more money than anyone ever got before. I need it because my shit is difficult right now. But it's important in ways even I haven't been able to work out. OpenAI is a serious business. Help me. Please help me please my serious company is so good. Help me www.cnbc.com/2024/12/27/o...

A cultural moment / a one page RPG (that is definitely about hunting extra-large beings, nothing else)

One of the more fascinating things I learned with access to maritime Import data is that once someone dies on a ship, they become cargo and thus must be declared by the cruise ships. It's an odd bit of trade bureaucracy and necropolitics.

The problem isn’t that this isn’t being reported. It’s that it’s not being reported to the people who FUCKING NEED TO HEAR IT.

To prevent online brain poisoning you should have to have some human interaction before you're allowed to post. If you quote a twitter screenshot you have to borrow a cup of sugar from a neighbor. For every 10K followers you have to explain yourself to a classroom of middle schoolers.

More than one thing— and even two things you think of as in opposition— can be bad.

Do not comply in advance, as the man says, and despair is absolutely complying in advance. Mourn that so many people disappointed us, absolutely, but revel that tens of millions of people are WITH US. and those people are going to need help, and they’re going to need fight.