Halt and Catch Fire Syllabus by @ashleyblewer.com Incredible!

After getting through high school on zero effort, showing up to 7am AP classes on a pot of diner coffee after being out all night, my first semester of college was like the Road Runner hitting the canyon wall painted as a tunnel. Took a year to pick myself up and learn to actually work

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There’s so much I have to say about this, much of which is in my book. But the lack of critical questioning and the last two sentences of this article encapsulate everything wrong with tech journalism: “Like it or not, however, we’re strapped in for the ride. At least Anthropic has a plan”

Would be interesting to compare the results on more recent models - but this problem won’t go away. LLMs are always going to be extrapolating from what has already, and often, been thought, which is why they aren’t windows to the future but anchors to the past.

Neat demonstration of how artificial so-called intelligence is taking us backwards. "ChatGPT produced content most consistent with the 1960s and DALL-E 3 in the late 1980s and early '90s." #AI - see @shannonvallor.bsky.social's work for important thinking on this phys.org/news/2026-02...

"That is a truly fascist idea, the idea of outsourcing thinking....power is in our ability to think with each other" Klein on the "AI for climate" crap and how to weave a better story: www.themaybe.org/reframing-im... @naomiaklein.bsky.social @themaybe.org @alixdunn.com

"Twitter is cooking their brains" theory looking pretty strong

There's something very important in this from @alondra.bsky.social about how a government of bosses understands its relationship to AI: as a means to avoid preexisting, even nominal, deference to popular deliberation or expert consultation. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I struggle to find a more logical explanation

Good news - we have a new ERC-funded 4-year PhD Studentship at the University of Edinburgh, based in Philosophy and our Centre @technomoralfutures.bsky.social, supervised by Dr Emily Sullivan; the project applies philosophy of science to assessing ML's epistemic & social value. Apply by 16 March!

Spain’s PM: “The time of hiding behind servers is at an end.”

Using tech to manufacture BS anti-vax claims

Such a terrible day for journalism. And for democracy, for it does in fact die in darkness. Where are the wealthy defenders of a free and open society, charging in to fund real reporting in America? [sound of crickets]

As of 2025, the US has taken a U-turn on climate progress, and it is only going to get worse.

The "I'm rich so I bought myself a pet cheetah" to "Oh, the cheetah? Yeah, the cheetah was a lot of trouble, I had it put down" pipeline

the $75 million Jeff Bezos set on fire for that Melania propaganda piece could have funded most independent newsrooms for literally decades

Given the WaPo disaster, I’m re-posting my starter pack of indie journalists—it probably needs an update so give me a shout to add folks. #wapo #journalism go.bsky.app/A2UpMn5

Bezos isn't destroying the Washington Post because it isn't profitable. He's destroying the Washington Post because he's calculated that a robust free press threatens the ability of his class to warp society around their interests

ohhh ‘democracy dies in darkness’ was aspirational

Really looking forward to this:

This was not the main point in this article about using AI in college admissions, but it stood out to me for so many reasons including the impulse to have the chatbot mediate all experiences including telling you what you do for fun. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/s...

Toilet training Puffin to nose a dog doorbell to ask to go. She rings it, she gets taken outside. Carol has started pressing the button. Then staring at us. Unsure of her intent: does she think button entails “Now I get to go out” (she’s indoor only)? Or “Remove the white devil from my house?”

✨Speaker Highlight✨ Hear from @amoorelouise.bsky.social on the political narratives of AI at our upcoming Technomoral Conversations event! 🗓️ 11 Feb 18.00-19.30 📍 Edinburgh Futures Institute & online 🎟️ edin.ac/3MZEm0a @braiduk.bsky.social @edfuturesinstitute.bsky.social @shannonvallor.bsky.social

You’ve invented a clock on subscription.

I cannot endorse this enough. AI itself is not "taking us" anywhere. But its developers would certainly like to.

one thing that's great about Bluesky is when there's new Chotiner piece we all meet up like fans of a band for a surprise listening party

They Live was a documentary.

the Epstein files make it very clear why the MeToo backlash was so extreme and why so much of elite society preferred Donald Trump ruling us like a king to the barest hint of accountability

Looking forward to speaking at this year’s Robophilosophy conference in Dublin in August - always such a great interdisciplinary community (HRI, robotics, law, psychology, sociology etc). Submissions are due 6 Feb (but I think you can request an extension if needed).

Thinking about whoever said that by accepting a meal from people and then arresting them ICE agents broke a cultural taboo that was invented by, like, the first humans to set up a tent

We have tried everything, and the only way we’ve found to stop her is replacing her cheap water dish with a heavy crystal Japanese cocktail mixing glass. FML

It’s great when Elon Musk fans try to help

Oh. My. God. Chomsky talking about the 'hysteria' that has developed about the abuse of women and giving Epstein advice on how to handle the media. In 2019. The Media studies discipline and much of the left should reflect on the power given to this one flawed man to shape generations of thought.

"average New Labour minister causes 3 scandals" factoid actualy just statistical error. average minister causes 0 scandals. Scandals Peter, who lives in cave & causes over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

PALANTIR is "Like Uber for authoritarians." Any time the Trump regime says "AI", what you should hear is "repression as a service": 1. AI as an excuse to consolidate data 2. AI to execute orders that humans would refuse "Europe, do me a favour and don't contribute to a worldwide tyranny machine."

This tracks with the number of things i’ve been asked to review/examine this year that had fake citations of me. Just incredibly, staggeringly boneheaded.

Many only know her from Schitts Creek, Home Alone or Beetlejuice. Or maybe Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries if you’re lucky. But SCTV is where it all started, for her and so many other greats.

I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win

Our puppy is so sweet and smart, but also has a bizarre habit of flipping a *full* water dish two feet into the air and making it rain across her puppy pen, then running around proudly with the empty dish in her mouth like a trophy. What even is this behavior

A great thread on AI-driven epistemic contamination

Tesla safety sliding right under my low expectations like

/8 Top comment by Nx: The 3X worse than humans number for Tesla Robotaxi is actually incredibly over-optimistic as a projection for operation without safety operators. Because it excludes all the accidents that were prevented by safety operators.

Every time I hear some genius bragging about how fast they are learning to code/write/make art by using AI instead of their own brain, I think of Jenko in 21 Jump Street on the drug that makes him think he’s figured out all of chemistry but the whiteboard is just a whole bunch of 4s

Texas A&M following the Soviet university model: the university exists to develop the state morality in students and staff. Success to be determined by loyalty to the party, foreign students to be accepted based on ideological compatibility. The pretense of free thought didn’t last long.

❤️

I get tired of saying it, but I’ll say it again: the nature of oppression in America is that they workshop it first on Black, Latino, Asian & Native people. But it is always, in the end, coming for everyone.

Let's all take a moment to stop and drink a toast to the wonderfulness and luminosity of Catherine O'Hara. Here's to her.