One of the things I’m really struggling with about what’s going on in Minnesota is that if you describe what’s going on in plain, factual ways to someone who’s not paying close attention you sound completely, bugfuck crazy

This is what being in your 40s is like

Statistics. State… istics? Like… the state’s way of seeing? Wonder if anyone ever wrote about that.

I always feel roguish to make such a basic point, but bias is an intrinsic feature of _data_, and transitively of any system of analysis or decision-making based on data. The fact that this point has to keep being demonstrated over and over for more complex systems is crazy-making to me.

"vast majority of enforcement authorities are under-resourced, overstretched, & politically-constrained" so legislation too often "remains an empty vessel"

Good summary of “don’t give him what he wants” from relatively comfortable white liberals.

When I was at the White House my team wrote policy that specifically addressed this - the use of often discriminatory facial recognition tools in law enforcement contexts or other areas where civil rights were in play. The image below was the worst case scenario - what we were trying to avoid. 1/3

Know your speech acts. Is this: Performative (done for show)? ☑️ Performative (words that bring about the situation they describe)? ❌

If you were part of the Robodebt class action settlement, you may be eligible for compensation. Registration for compensation ends in early March 2026. Make sure you’re registered. Contact Gordon Legal if you haven’t received a information document package from Services Australia

I teach "Mapping, Space, and Power" starting tomorrow. This 1942 LAT map came into my head from my grad school days and I spent hours reviving an old hard drive to find it. I can't believe it isn't *everywhere* in lit about understanding the power of maps but it is surprisingly hard to find online.

"I’m going to pause here just to review: an institution that purports to be a university has told a philosophy professor he is forbidden from teaching Plato." surreal times dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...

Since I started teaching I’ve always had a hidden curriculum — model how to use information to generate questions and possible approaches to answering them. I thought nothing of answering a student question with a search on the screen. Now I can’t even play an informative YouTube clip.

Australia's eSafety Commissioner is assessing several image-based abuse complaints involving Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok, after weeks a "mass undressing spree" where it generated 10,000s images including women & children depicted in revealing outfits or suggestive positions. thesizzle.com.au/p/e...

And in the end, the GOP got its wish. The Satanic panic around daycare led to a rapid and lasting reduction in Americans' trust in childcare providers, which helped prevent the US from ever building a national childcare system, and helped flatten the growth in maternal employment. 7/

www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa... RIP the DFIR peeps x.x

I’ve done some catalogue searching and am fairly confident in saying that 5/10 titles in this list do not exist (1, 2, 4, 5 and 7). Sloppy, unacceptable, and a real kick in the guts to real authors with real books they’d love people to buy and read!

Color me shocked.

As the former Google Associate General Counsel for web search -- a product built on scraping third party content without permission -- I'm having a lot of trouble processing Google's new lawsuit against someone else for scraping search results. storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog...

That said, this "pivot to (rebrand) as AI" has consequences. Because the public (and non-specialists) cannot tell the difference between a decade old machine learning application and contemporary "AI," and "AI" is sexy right now, more and more applications are willing to make this rebrand.

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

So many interesting stories on these interviews. @robin.berjon.com about web standards, governance, and the possibility of building better fundamentals for the future. > if you got into tech because you didn't like politics, now you have two problems. protocol.ecologies.info/interviews/b...

SCOOP I spoke to the leader of a doxing-for-hire group who showed me how it took just minutes for them to get sensitive personal data from Big Tech companies—with virtually no pushback www.wired.com/story/doxers...

The U.S. proposes asking foreign tourists for five years of social media history before allowing them into the country. EFF’s Lisa Femia breaks down this breaks down this speech-chilling and privacy-invasive scheme for ABC Australia. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-1...

Discord, who recently leaked a heap of personal data in a security breach, wants my personal data to let me access a channel I created in a server I created. Thank you, Australian government.

Now imagine sharing your private fantasies with what you believe is a bot that cannot judge or remember. Just that, on the other side, is a man in a one-room home in Nairobi, pretending to be an AI companion. That man is Michael, and this is his story: data-workers.org/michael/

The Prime Minister credited 36 Months for convincing him to ban teens from social media. This group accused experts who opposed the ban of being 'bought' by big tech. Meanwhile, it was lining up brand deals, eyeing global expansion & developing an AI tool to track students www.crikey.com.au/20...

Bluesky has also asked the @australia.theguardian.com account to put in its age, and is even more restrictive. Guardian Australia can't use @bsky.app, though 3rd party posts are still going through. I won't put GdnAus's 2013 launch as birth date in case it nukes the account. Maybe I'll try 1821

If you see this, repost with your model of positive masculinity.

Streeting to next launch inquiry into “over-diagnosis” of left-handedness. “Never used to be like this,” he insists.

Discworld QOTD, from Hogfather "IT IS ... UNFAIR. ‘That’s life, master.’ BUT I’M NOT. ‘I meant this is how it’s supposed to go, master,’ said Albert. NO. YOU MEAN THIS IS HOW IT GOES."

Eleven years ago, I wrote to Tom Stoppard to ask about this coup de théâtre from 1949. It took me down an unexpected rabbit hole - in memory of Stoppard, here's what I found.

“How did you get into ttrpgs?” I woke the same as any other day except a voice was in my head.

Scoop: The most popular apps in Australia right now are social media platforms not included in the teen ban (so far). This comes as teens make videos recommending that they all migrate to these alternative platforms to get around the ban — something experts warned about. www.crikey.com.au/20...

At New Zealand's Kawaiican cybersecurity convention, organizers hacked together a way for attendees to track CO2 levels throughout the venue—even before they arrived. www.wired.com/story/this-h...

Give the wonderful folks on your systems and security teams lots of pats on the back. This is the hellscape they inhabit daily.

My full analysis of the proposal to revamp EU data protection standards (#GDPR/#ePrivacy). So, changing the definition of personal data? blog.lukaszolejnik.com/the-gdpr-pro..., techletters.substack.com/p/techletter...

wasn’t my most out-there take, but still… called it

Why do some parts of the internet seem more robustly democratic than others? "A big piece of it is that they have a higher purpose. Wikipedia editors, at their best, they really do believe that there’s something more than partisan politics—and that’s the accurate reflection of reliable sources."

reminded of eric williams's observation about britain's relationship to its history with slavery. "British historians wrote almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it."

Important to understand the Epstein stuff and the fascism and the corruption are, in a lot of ways, really all the same story from different angles: powerful men who can and do abuse vulnerable people around them because they can, and because systems of elite accountability catastrophically failed

Good apples (provisional) www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

In an Australia first, I used FOI to get the AI chat logs of Australia's top national security bureaucrat. They show how he used Microsoft Copilot to ghostwrite speeches and messages to colleagues. This comes as the government looks to push AI use in the public service. www.crikey.com.au/20...

uhhh this actually reminds me a lot of how LLMs function at a basic level too - predicting tokens based on proximity & context, etc 😬 ...so we're teaching kids to read like AI & saying AI level is good enough

I'm sure there's been Discourse on this today that I've missed, but my $0.02: I think it conflates three distinct concepts - privacy laws, privileges in court proceedings, and professional ethics rules governing confidentiality. They don't all protect the same thing! www.nytimes.com/2025/11/10/o...

This is huge news in @cameronwilson.bsky.social's @thesizzle.com.au- Microsoft is being forced by the Aus regulator refund all the ultra-dodgy AI plan pushing it was doing for Office 365 Wild that other regions aren't also using regulatory power to punish Microsoft thesizzle.com.au/p/google-sur...

my take on this growing "roblox should be in the teen social media ban" discourse is that this is what happens when a government tells the electorate/the world that the way to deal with online harms is to ban something for kids, and let everyone else suffer.