Remember: we were never given credit for being right about crypto, we were never given credit for being right about NFTs, we were never given credit for being right about the metaverse and we will never be given credit for being right about AI. Fuck 'em up anyway.

Congrats, Google. We now have unreliable AI narrators of impoverished information sources, representing their hallucinations as truth. I'm glad I learned to use a card catalog when I was a kid, because fuck this. I'm going to the library. (3/3)

When nobody visits the web anymore, what incentive is there for people to populate it with information? That means AI search will be retrieving information from deteriorating, out-of-date sources and feeding it endlessly back to us. And that means even fewer people will populate the web. (2/3)

With its new AI-based "search," Google is literally killing the infrastructure that its entire business is built on. Instead of linking people to the web, it will lock users into an "interactive" mode that slorps up data what is rapidly becoming the now-neglected and unvisited web. (1/3)

Actual lol

Curious about recent experiences in international travel, particularly for Minnesotans who are U.S. citizens. Upon re-entering the U.S., did they want to unlock your phone or computer? And what did they look at?

I had to go check and -- phew! -- I wasn't both following and blocking him.

There were a couple plagiarism scandals on Goodreads back in the day -- one especially I spent a good amount of time getting his stolen reviews taken down -- and I will never understand the psychology. They weren't even being graded or paid, they just stole from other writers! For what, exactly?

Gen AI is not private. You're literally feeding information into servers run by fascists and creeps who will happily turn your info over to other fascists and creeps. I have no idea why people think it is.

This whole thing of the entire global economy now being based solely on gullible fascists selling each other magic beans would be much funnier if the global economy wasn't how I feed, clothe, and house myself.

Important thread. Listen.

This is the bazillionth reason why no one should flippantly talk about getting rid of the southern states. We should never turn our backs on the powerful organizing happening there. We should not cast away the activists working to make change — and who in doing so risk way more than we do up north.

Uhhh just let me say as someone who used to work in branch banking: DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, GIVE CHATGPT ACCESS TO YOUR FUCKING BANK RECORDS This is a TERRIBLE IDEA

Raising the Flag Follow my work and writing on Substack: nickanderson.substack.com

still not quite over the fact that i watched 15 year olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that IP laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them

Anyway we had to spend over 75% of our cash reserves to deal with this so if you wanna buy a Thing now's a good time I guess? shop.crowsnest.quest

Delightful

Pagosa Springs, CO Janesville, WI Coon Rapids, MN

Twice in a row. Immediately.

My pet theory about this: Roberts et al don't think of white supremacy as "political", it's just how things should be.

If you wrote a story about a rising American dictator, and you included a detail like "dude made a gold statue of himself commemorating an assassination attempt that lots of folk think was staged, and then installed it at his gaudy pleasure palace", people would be like, please be serious.

This means that hundreds, if not thousands of labs all over the country will close. Tens of thousands of jobs will be lost. This is in defiance of Congress's will and in defiance of good stewardship of the US economy. This is entirely because Russ Vought hates science

Incontrovertible evidence, now, of *police* investigating families supporting their kids with gender affirming healthcare in the UK. For trying to do the best for your child, following best practice in most of the world, here you get a visit from the police. Thank you, Wes Streeting.

I say it again and again: Because we don’t learn the real history of this country, we do not understand what this country is capable of. After 1870, 22 Black men served in Congress. By 1901, because of racist SCOTUS rulings, electoral coups and election cheating and violence, there were none.

There are people still living who fought — and watched their compatriots be murdered — for the passage of this act and to attempt to democratize America. To see it completed felled in the span of their OWN lifetime is just absolutely devastating.

What happened at the Supreme Court is about anti-Blackness and curtailing Black political power. Trump as a corrective to Obama. Anti CRT/ DEI as a corrective to Black Lives Matter and Black progress in education and the workforce. Anti-Blackness is America’s favorite manner of self-harm.

In the language of my people: uff da

Friendly reminder that they are still abduction people off the streets of the Twin Cities, and rent is coming due again.

$4.15 working at a French fry place in Riverplace c 1989. I worked there 8 months and survived 3 managers. At one point they asked me to be a crew lead which would have increased my pay by 15c. I turned that down because I would basically be on call all the time and I was 15 and in high school.

All of this.

When radioactivity was discovered, there was a rush to market for all sorts of radioactive consumer goods. There were water jugs made out of uranium glass, for example. I think about that a lot these days whenever I see AI products being marketed to consumers.

I have no doubt that this technology is very useful in important ways. I also have no doubt that many of the proposed applications right now are entirely, hilariously, horrifyingly inappropriate. This happened with asbestos, too. My grandpa brought some home for his kids to play with, like clay.

And this industry is seriously trying to push Congress into making it entirely illegal to regulate them so they can push this stuff out as fast as possible and make it as hard as possible to remove from our lives. It's like they KNOW it's radioactive asbestos, and want to get ahead of the cleanup.

#Booksky Happy Indie Bookstore Day! Get free shipping on Bookshopdotorg, support us and your local indie! It’s the proverbial win-win! If you’re in the Twin Cities, check out DreamHaven Books and say hi to our publisher, who’ll be selling you books! bookshop.org/lists/queen-...

Still feel like "Musk and his crew of incels destroyed a bunch of stuff they didn't understand and thereby hastened the deaths of millions of children" did not get the public attention it warranted.

so, to be clear: ICE has been doing neoStarlight Tours, if instead of taking natives a three hour walk out of town in -40° and ditching them there without their personal effects, to kill them, they drove folks hundreds of kilometers away and ditched them without their personal effects, to kill them.

Hwæt!

Rockland County, NY, gave a $77 million data center tax break to JP Morgan Chase to create exactly one job. On a dollars-per-job basis it appears to be the costliest subsidy in U.S. history, possibly even a world record nysfocus.com/2026/04/20/d...

The average person doesn’t give a fuck if AI has some niche use where it actually excels if used properly. In fact, that is what a tool is *supposed* to do and none of us will have a problem if it is used like that. What we see is AI fucking up real life in a massive way.

I'm not joking when I say mRNA technology is more important than "AI" and it's a tragedy we're throwing billions into one while our government is aggressively defunding the other.

I don't know if we're doing Discourse about recommending Malazan Book of the Fallen to infants again, but here's a good thread about how maybe don't.

Barack Obama and Zohran Mamdani sing ‘Wheels on the Bus’ to kids in NYC

That's it. After disabling Copilot a dozen times because it kept turning itself back on, I'm finally dumping Microsoft. It's going to be a huge pain in the ass but utterly fucking worth it. Look, I know I should have done this sooner, but complacence is easier until something really pisses me off.

It's a mathematical probability engine. Not a thinking machine. The fact that everyone just keeps saying it's an thinking machine when it's just a spicy predictive text machine is the biggest marketing win of the century. youtu.be/0vvVo0Um1HY?...

Some time in the early 90s I went to a 24 hour joint in Uptown right after Rocky Horror let out. (It was was usually Listeria Buffet, but I think it was Dodgy Breakfast at this time.) One of the Rocky Horror people put Safety Dance on the jukebox at least 12 times, which was the count when we fled.

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to get through this thing called life. Electric word, life, it means forever and that's a mighty long time. But there's something else ...

Our piece of shit congressman, whose district includes the BWCA, introduced this legislation which will completely fuck the people of the Arrowhead. Ecotourism is a major part of the economy on the north shore, and they're already hurting because Canadians are staying home.

This is so unbelievably awful. Start a stupid, illegal war of choice, and then don't set up the supply lines?

Welsh hippos just dropped! www.bbc.com/news/article...