“Public Offering, Public Sacrifice” https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/public-offering-public-sacrifice/ > Really healthy environment we've created for young people, eh? Everyone is shamed, everyone suspicious of one another. Good work everyone.

College should be hard www.slowboring.com/p/hard-work-...

"I never see you at the club" Ok? Well I never see you at the procession by the ancient dolmen

happy pride 💕

again, the 'most Americans can't even afford an unexpected expense' stuff comes from *online surveys by payday loan companies*. it is a publicity stunt *by one of the most exploitative parts of the financial industry* that is nevertheless spread enthusiastically by online communists.

Vermeer’s Girl With The Pearl Earring will be shown in Osaka, later this year, and the press conference was as Japanese as you’d expect #Vermeer

People don't long for "inconvenience." They long for permanence. And though streaming services may be convenient, people are waking up to the fact that we are paying rent-seeking middle men month after month for things we will never actually own.

I've been commenting recently about just how seldom I see user needs or business problems being mentioned in the torrent of AI coding posts I see every day. Even from people with "user experience" in their job title. "Claude did 40 hours of UXD in 15 minutes!" Those users must talk *really* fast.

Well, with this official Vatican + Anthropic mandate, I guess it was only a matter of time when the religion of effective altruism, worshipping so-called artificial general intelligence, merged with entrenched religious institutions.

Pope Leo XIV presenting his encyclical on #AI together with Anthropic's Christopher Olah is comparable to Pope Leo XIII presenting his encyclical Rerum Novarum on capitalism together with Henry Ford

Good morning! The Milky Way captured in Tors Cove, Newfoundland. Photographed by Gord Follett..

No industry of value needs to mislead you or make you feel bad for not adopting their tech. Nobody trustworthy will ever see the need to humiliate or attack somebody for not being excited about a product. These are the actions of a loser. www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-of-the-business-idiot/

Today @dairinstitute.bsky.social is releasing the Luddite Lab Resource Hub. The hub hosts case studies, resources, and political education for unions, labor organizations, and workers who want to fight “AI” and automation at work. labor.dair-institute.org

Users: We don't want AI Google: What if it were an Ask Gemini button Users: no Google: What if we drafted reply emails for you Users: NO Google: What if we redid search to be an "experience" Users: WHAT PART OF NO ARE YOU NOT GETTING

"the R slur is coming back" not within slapping distance of me it's not

Some phrases I'm starting to use: "Hm, it's personally really hard for me to support using LLMs for anything because these companies used my work to built their data sets, without my consent and without compensating me. There are multiple lawsuits"

"The Government cannot escape liability for DOGE’s work by scapegoating ChatGPT." A US judge slammed DOGE's use of AI in a decision today blocking the termination of $100M in humanities grants, finding DOGE lacked authority and unlawfully based decisions on race and viewpoint buff.ly/Qw0qcDH

If farmers are so poor, why do they have millions of dollars to spend on environmental lawyers to block passenger rail, wind power, and bike lanes

And it controls trillions of dollars of real estate, your daily bread, a meaningful majority of US senators, our immigration system, & apparently most news outlets- judging by how the news just spits out farm lobby talking points with 0 fact-checks ever. You know, just to name a few things.

When I was in high school, the farmers' kids had the best and newest cars. 🤷‍♂️

Axios has reported that there is a WOLF OUTSIDE THE VILLAGE! We need to do something! There's a wolf! WOLF!!!

Actual “AI” literacy would involve explaining why it's not and never will be a reliable source of information nor will it ever be a replacement for research or creativity.

That’s the wild thing about AI. There’s never really a sales pitch. It’s just, “It’s here, don’t get left behind.” Every other innovation sells itself — we want them, thus they happen. Here? Not so much. The dangers are high, the value unclear, but rich people want more, so away we go?

The connective tissue here is that both offer people way of ennobling individualistic preferences. "I just don't like you" becomes "I think you're an evil threat to The Cause." "I disagree" becomes "I am nobly defending my mental health from your abuse." It has moral weight, it attracts allies.

Banning gAI will (very slowly, unfortunately) become the norm, that is and always was the one true "adapt or die". Given enough time, an "infinite content machine" is not desirable anywhere and is bad for everyone, it's just Spam 2.0.

my formative yimby experience was being priced out of the neighborhood i wished to live in, and realizing that this meant i in turn would price someone else out of the neighborhood i settled for my conclusion was not that any renter involved was evil, but that we should stop playing musical chairs

I'm so tired. #a11y #Accessibility

Generational tweet that might even spawn a school of architecture.

when we mourn le guin, we mourn one of our greatest writers & thinkers. but we also mourn one of our all-time greatest haters

i’ve worked in tech more than 20 years. it has never been more ridiculous.

This Is Just To Say I have turned off the AI features that were in the update and which you were probably hoping to monetize Fuck you they were stupid so unnecessary and so annoying

As a happy addendum to this week's scintillating anecdotes, my dear friend and GeoBee buddy @possumrabbi.bsky.social has created a cake named for me, featuring my famous nocino liqueur. Many thanks, Jonathan!!!! Check out his fun, thought-provoking blog, y'all! flavorsofdiaspora.com/2026/04/16/t...

My painting COASTAL POPPIES

a magical realism novel about academia where it’s imbued with intellectualism and meritocracy

In a first last month, renewables supplied more power to the U.S. than natural gas, a milestone in the shift to clean energy.

It’s almost like WE ALL SAID THIS WOULD HAPPEN fortune.com/2026/04/10/a...

This is the culmination of SIXTEEN YEARS of dogged work by everyday Hungarians. You think that felt hopeless sometimes? I'm sure it did. 👏 Don't 👏 give 👏 up 👏

Am I going to have to repost this thread every day now? Please be a little bit more sceptical about claims long the lines of “the secret thingy I’m trying to turn into a billion dollar payday is super powerful and almost magical, be afraid, but also give me money”

The one iron rule of late-stage financial bubbles is that with massive amounts of money at stake, a lot of people will be lying a lot of the time and many of lying liars will be people you’d trust in normal times, because the first person they fooled is themselves Be extra sceptical.

If you see this I implore you to quote skeet with an unusual image from your posting device without explanation. Still definitely use alt text, though.

Join @emilymbender.bsky.social and I in New York for Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000’s first LIVE show! We’re doing a live taping at the Starr Bar in Brooklyn on Thursday, April 30. Space is limited, so get your tickets. All profit goes to @dairinstitute.bsky.social. www.eventbrite.com/e/mystery-ai...

if this montgomery county news release is indeed a time machine to 2006, by all means take me back: big pants, third wave emo, the sense of wonder and optimism i had at 18. i'm ready

Btw, all this while, Isfahan, beautiful and incomparable Isfahan, keeps on getting pounded every day and night. That city is like an open air museum. Like Venice. Every inch of it is historical. I cannot even imagine what has already been destroyed and pummeled.

Thank you for making my heart lift as I open the blinds.

random close-of-weekend thoughts

Not even “ignore local zoning rules”, it is even more interesting! Squamish as a nation is the approval authority for Nch'ḵay̓ Development Corporation There’s nothing to ignore as the lands never were, and never will be, subject to City of Vancouver policy

The backstory here is that the Squamish people of what is now Vancouver were illegally dispossessed of this land a century ago. They sued, got their land back, and are using their sovereignty to ignore local zoning rules and build 6,000 new homes over the objections of nearby wealthy NIMBYs.

I care less than Taylor is using Claude Code and more that she thinks that she can avoid having her brain cooked by being online 17 hours a day

Post something random or y'all will have a crappy April