I met with AI data labelers in Kenya who are organizing their colleagues to fight the brutal working conditions and horrible pay given to the workers at the "bottom of the AI supply chain." They believe the NDAs they've signed are unenforceable so are speaking out: www.404media.co/ai-is-africa...

Nature published another pile of trash i am trying to catch up on some of my reading but this one is getting under my skin so here’s a thread highlighting why this piece is either ill-informed or intentionally ignorant of a wealth of knowledge from embodied cog sci and related fields 1/

Oudtshoorn, South Africa

Klein Karoo, South Africa

Not sure what to make of Atwood publishing a log of a chat they had with a chatbot (Anthropic’s Claude.) Some technically naive questions and assumptions by Atwood. Is it made up or heavily edited to make a point I missed? margaretatwood.substack.com/p/claude-you...

Free Palestine 🇵🇸 Dublin, Ireland.

I wrote about some nuance involved with annotating focus order, following a conversation with @annaecook.com where we realized we'd both been running across the same well-intentioned behaviors. #a11y ericwbailey.website/published/yo...

"Palantir CEO Alex Karp says his AI technology will lessen the power of “highly educated, often female voters, who vote mostly Democrat” while increasing the power of working-class men." Just saying it right out loud now. newrepublic.com/post/207693/...

Oudtshoorn, South Africa

Oudtshoorn, South Africa

Afriforum and the right are hell bent on false narratives such as land expropriation without compensation. Akkerland was sold for R80m. www.news24.com/investigatio...

“Lighting Up The Night” 03 acrylic on wood panel 18 x 18 cm My name is Yuki Maehara. Landscape Artist based in Tokyo. I hope my paintings will soothe your soul. #Sky #Moon #Painting #Art #Artwork #OriginalArt #FineArt #Landscape

NYC really has a lot of great diners that are perfect for solo meals

I've dug pretty deep and i agree. I keep telling people that just about everything they love about LLMs is just normal software in a hat and a trenchcoat. the models are putting natural language in front of / between stuff. That's a new interface and it's neat, but that's all it is

the big “AI” players are all in a race to cash out before everybody realizes llms are just a commodity, like databases and ORM layers i think that’s a large reason anthropic etc. are putting out so much religious-themed bullshit

Alright fam, here it is Moby-Dick Rocks!!!; or, put down the AI and read a fucking book. by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein earrings by Ear Art by Ebony London

We have got to get away from success looking like lots of money. Success should be providing value to many. Money is not value.

even if AI really is "intelligence" — which it isn't, categorically and definitionally — this is a joke nobody can corner the market on llms, which are a basic and not-patentable *process* to produce corpuses (databases) and interfaces

This is objectively dumb; electricity is commoditised. The CEO of the preeminent AI/LLM provider is aligning their business service as a commodity?! Microsoft literally owns everything up till GAI in OpenAI. Sam I Am Altman is saying he owns the commodity after?!

Everyone I know: What did they do to Photos! How do I find my photos? It was there, now… where is it? Apple, your Liquid Ass needs an intervention. Data is not UI however pure you want it.

A random Thursday in South Africa.

Leaflet Pro is open to all! Thank you to our early testers :) Next 24 hrs only — $10/m or $100/y with code 'LEAFPROLAUNCH' 🍃🎉💯 Sign up from user menu or pub 'analytics' tab. Big step toward making Leaflet sustainable & lots planned, incl email & memberships. Excited to hear what you think!

Because LLMs cannot be fully scripted [can't distinguish instructions from data], their interactions are inherently unpredictable. blog.cloudflare.com/block-unsafe...

ICYMI (easy to right now), while all these AI companies are trying to keep the whole bubble propped up, Anthropic just put out their own internal study which concluded that their own GPT does nothing to improve productivity while costing the user critical thinking and skill retention capabilities.

Interesting study on AI's capacity to deskill coders. "We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery" & "the participants who showed stronger mastery used AI assistance not just to produce code but to build comprehension". www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

Apologies everyone, we know there was an issue with posts and reactions for 60-90 minutes. Everything was being saved on the PDS so no data was lost. It seems we lost connection to the Bluesky downstream app, we’re investigating the reason.

The UK really has gone tits up since leaving the EU.

When your web app DDoSes your own API...

@eurosky.social all ok? I can’t seem to post…

Another opt-out heist. If it was valuable, if it was useful, if it didn’t have some perverse economics, we’d be beating down the doors to get it.

“respectful of the experts whose work it surfaces” “surfaces”?!? As Dr Davies says every euphemism is a confession. The tech industry must do better than this. Trust in it has already been eroded as it “moves fast and breaks things”.

This month in my 🧪🔭⚛️ column for @newscientist.com subscribers and library users, I wrote about how telling the difference between a galaxies and a star cluster actually isn't always easy I loved prepping this column, the universe is so great 🥹

update I highly recommend building a little grow shelf in your office or cubicle or wherever you spend most of your day. I am going to be sad when these bois need to go outside but I bet I can find some plant that would appreciate a grow light year round >_> <_< >_>

AI/LLM agents in 2026 are winning so hard that we’re back to only two examples being marketed; summarising emails and calendars. Which was a 2010 thing and a 1990 thing and a…

(I know I'm on a list; especially on this append-only protocol lol)

@baratunde.com in conversation with Esther Perel, on how Big Tech platforms are not neutral “town squares”... they’re malls 😬

“Thomson Reuters is a $50 billion Toronto-based company that owns the Reuters news service. It also operates a widely used legal research tool, Westlaw, whose operations are based in the suburbs of Minneapolis. Thousands of the company’s employees live there.”

“epstein class is iranian propaganda” is definitely something i’d expect the epstein class to say

Those working in the sex industry face poor conditions, trafficking and no job security. Criminalising these enterprises drives it underground like it has done in Sweden. Time has come for full decriminalisation, health screening, psychological support and unionisation of sex workers […]

Hearing on the radio I should have joined an investment club not a book club in my 20s. Thus Spoke Zarathustra! In my 40s now and I’m starting the NOON GUN investment club: NOON Of Our Nietzsche GUN Undervalued Net-worth.

I'm actually a bit worried about this. I already see developers retreating from social spaces like Stack Overflow and other forums into endless conversations with Claude. Not only are they getting dumber (see studies) but they are no longer contributing to the commons.

Zuckerberg’s vision: your “friends” won’t be people anymore. They’ll be AI/LLM chatbots. Meta acquiring Moltbook is his blueprint for solipsistic social control and endless capitalistic engagement.

The CIA doesn't need to bug your house, they just need you to not know your robot vacuum is open to the world. www.popsci.com/technology/r...

Claude Code is now charging 25$ per code review, 50$ for deep reviews. But what’s the real cost, once VC subsidies run out? The 200$ Pro subscription reportedly costs them 5000$. So sustainably we’re looking at x35 markups with margins, down the road. Don’t fire your engineers just yet.

You can tell when people are using AI/LLM to code as their dependencies are all years old. e.g. got a brand new codebase with a PostgreSQL 16 dependency when PostgreSQL 17 or 18 is available and stable.

I guess everyone should just email [email protected] just to be safe. People in the EU should probably tack an Article 15 request (access) and an Article 18 request (restriction on processing) to their Article 22 (opt-out) request.

It turned out the AI/LLM “focus group service” was just five overworked Kenyans and an Indonesian invited to the wrong chat group. “The terrible ideas we were forced to review,” one said. “I had to pretend these were genius ideas, and that I was a 68-year-old boomer.”

The trailer for EVERYONE IS LYING TO YOU FOR MONEY. In select theaters starting April 17th 🍿🤑🤣

If you missed the Post Malone performance honoring Ozzy... youtu.be/8Zw2_7TvnT0?...

Another “if we made it opt-in nobody would and our theft model wouldn’t work out for us”