The perfect two sentence story.

This Langston Hughes poem is relevant af.

We learn from failure. We learn from the work of improvement. And no one is good at everything. Telling people they can pretend to be good at something they're not both stunts their personal growth & creates unrealistic expectations no one can live up to. This is the mission of current corporate AI.

🧵This preliminary research isn't quite as unprecedented as the story suggests – it clearly overlaps with Otago Uni's 2023 drug harms ranking study, which is more comprehensive – but the similarities and differences between the two are interesting and informative. www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/...

We don’t talk enough about how the AI bubble is going to seamlessly transition to tech-based state surveillance and oppression of the working and dwindling middle classes as the wealth class steals more and more resources and power and as the climate worsens.

i can’t believe it has been 2016 for ten years

I really like this joke from @joshgondelman.bsky.social

Happy New Year 2026. Rain is considered to be a good omen across many cultures, and there is plenty of it in New Zealand today. May it portend better times - more peace ☮️, justice ⚖️, equity, and sustainability 🌳 for our challenged world.

The correlation between companies named after the Tolkien legendarium and their CEO/Founder being a chittering skinwalker fingering his own taint at the idea of draining the planet of all its resources and then fucking off to a sealed dome in New Zealand while everyone else suffers is extremely high

This. The main point of the essay isn’t about Heated Rivalry, but rather what it means when we as a community recognize each other, the windows and mirrors that such moments afford. Breathtaking.

Who would have thought you can intellectually cripple an entire society just by writing a program that cheerfully agrees with their dumbest thoughts.

In the past week, I've seen stories of AI: - being used by middle schoolers to make porn of other students - calling innocent people sex offenders - shutting down highways with busted-ass self-driving cars - emitting more CO2 than New York City What the fuck are we even doing?

Don't become a bookless statistic this year 😥 #pukapuka

Yeeeah, this is the cyberpunk dystopia I signed up for.

Our five eyes partner.

A hung jury

My kids (11 & 14), going thru a family breakup & move, relied on discord and other chat platforms. Cutting them off from their old friendships at the same time would have been devastating. Blanket bans are blunt instruments. They also don't prepare teens to be discerning, savvy SM users as adults.

If you aren't familiar with Heavyweight, I can't think of a better accompaniment to lazy holiday days. Smart, gentle, unhurried, and unexpected storytelling about human connection that is often as funny as it is heart-wrenching and poignant.

Our highly scientific diagram of the situation:

The government is not doing well in the courts this week and I couldn't be happier #nzpol

interesting info here. #NZPol

It honestly doesn't seem that hard to get - investment in public infrastructure and resources empowers private productivity. People who are more stable can do more and spend more. It's endlessly frustrating that modern governments are, regardless of party, captured by neocon anti-spending ideas

People used up all the clicks on that gift link! 🤣 archive.is/I1lyh

Gift link, probably the funniest thing the Wall Street Journal has done this year.

This is a lovely, hopeful article. I saw Swarbrick's interview with Gary Stevenson, but I didn't know just how many high powered people she'd met in Europe. #nzpol

RNZ is so back

ME: Internet, I am sad. Make me happy. INTERNET: Here are five terrible things. If you come back in an hour, I will have more. ME: Jesus Christ.

while i am not an academic i did see this coming and post about it on bluesky, which is why i am quoted in this article

Behold: the first-ever list of news outlets that have banned generative AI in their reporting. As of today, this is literally information that you cannot find on Google. My goal is to fill the starter pack, so please send over suggestions with supporting evidence! go.bsky.app/8cn1XfT

The proliferation of fake citations in real scholarship reveals a critical flaw in how we “produce knowledge.” No matter how valid a claim is or not, once introduced into the literature, it can persists and spread like an invasive rhizome. This isn’t new, but the audacity of AI makes it apparent.

Important essay on teaching critical thinking, the demise of questioning, the impact of AI on independent thinking ... enviromicro-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

there's something about "AI" where I think to a lot of executives it feels (wildly incorrectly, but bear with me) like it's the first technology they've really been able to understand, maybe even better than other people

techbros: we have created AGI cognitive scientists: you fucked up a perfectly good spreadsheet is what you did. look at it. it's got anxiety

🎉 New Zealand puberty blocker ban LIFTED! ✅ (for now) 🏆 The High Court has temporarily lifted the ban on an interim relief basis, in a giant win for transgender children. 🍾 Woo!!

The problem with productivity

It’s #SecretSantaAoNZ opening day today! If you don’t know, here in Aotearoa New Zealand some lovey peeps organise a country-wide secret Santa over Bluesky/Mastadon with people buying/making gifts for people they don’t know. Follow the feed today if you need reminding how awesome social media can be

#nzpol Just catching up with the HYEFU data today - but the data looks grim pretty much across the board. One data point stood out to me - the economy will be cumulatively $28.3bn smaller at the next election than predicted by Treasury at the last election.

The number of people acting shocked by this amazes me, frankly, since we've been predicting exactly this— and seeing AI slop taking over google searches — for years now. Also we MUST stop using "hallucination," which frames this is an unfortunate quirky fluke. It is the program's intended behavior.

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

Just so I'm clear on this, computer memory has tripled in price because a bunch of it that hasn't been produced yet has been ordered to populate GPUs that aren't installed in data centers that aren't built yet in order to service a demand that doesn't exist to make profits that don't happen.

this field biologist does a great job highlighting the insidiousness of AI editing these one-click AI edit buttons are incredibly appealing to many photographers, amateurs and professionals alike, and are framed as innocuous this is worth sharing and educating people about

“Solar is no longer just cheap daytime electricity, now it’s anytime dispatchable electricity,” said Rangelova. “This is a game-changer for countries with fast-growing demand and strong solar resources.”

There’s a specific mechanism in authoritarian movements that we’re seeing play out in real-time across American media and tech. It’s a simple rule: "If we cannot co-opt it, we must destroy it." It is the logic of "scorched earth." It's the logic of the Nero Decree and it's happening right now. 🧵

Learned today that “Galápagos” comes from a Spanish word for tortoise, meaning that “Galápagos Tortoise” is, in fact, a tortology

Privacy-violating practices to “protect minors” like age verification: (1) Explicitly connect vulnerable adults’ identities to their online activity, putting them at risk of leaks and harassment (2) Move “undesirable” behavior to under-moderated environments that are less safe for people to access

The greatest achievement of the Right is to convince the Left that they can't be aspirational. Anyway I'll be voting Green, two ticks no compromises. 💚💚

When the AI boom began, copywriters were singled out as one of the jobs most vulnerable to AI. Now, three years later, I wanted to hear from workers on the frontlines of the industry, to hear what had actually taken place on the ground. For many, it was even worse than they'd feared.

Absolute scenes at Dunedin Airport this afternoon - WOW. The storm was more or less stalled over the Taieri & we were dry in Dunedin photographing the lightning. Yip, that's HAIL - in Summer @metservice.com @weatherwatchnz.bsky.social