Super thrilled to have completed my final seminar today and to be told that I’m almost ready to lodge my thesis for examination :”) huge thanks to my supervisors @timothyjgraham.bsky.social @petamitchell.bsky.social and Benjamin Nicoll for their help over the past three years

A lot of people say AI isn't very good for the world and its outputs are routinely unreliable, but these haters fail to see how it's revolutionizing how we incinerate schoolchildren.

Our call for entries for “Noisy Systems: Aesthetics, Epistemologies and Computation” is open through 16 March. Here’s a 🧵⬇️ #cfp #ml www.biblhertz.it/3773193/2602...

This is the grim thing I keep getting stuck on... major AI platforms are telling kids to self-harm, *and* they're also the tools that lots of people are using because they don't have access to the better healthcare they deserve. So we have to find ways to mitigate the harms for people using them.

a thing historians will marvel about when they study this era is the extent to which the "war is a thing that happens to poorer, browner people" class went about systematically dismantling every aspect of the global political order that confined the costs of war to poorer and browner people

A world war can be won, you want me to believe? youtu.be/-4wgB-04wHw?...

I just learned that Ayatollah Khamenei and Ayatollah Khomenei are not the same person. Here's my plan for regime change in Iran....(1/23)

“humanity hanging from a cross of iron”

Saving the people of Iran from being massacred by their government in the streets by massacring elementary schoolgirls from the air.

It’s amazing how Anthropic already had partnerships with the US Military and Palantir, and its AI was even used during the kidnapping of Maduro. But now they’re a radical left woke company because they won’t agree to the US DoW using it for autonomous weapons that kill without human oversight.

Really enjoyed this paper by @nataliastanusch.bsky.social and Richard Rogers. Their term 'techno-hagiography' (performative writing of a mythology of AI and its spokespeople) and its relationship to temporarily is apt to describe future-making in the present. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Add this to research that suggests that as Musk took over Twitter (but before Twitter became X), the algorithm there was serving up content that leaned markedly to the right, even for users whose networks leaned left. www.arxiv.org/abs/2512.06129

“Why does the left hate technology” is not the right question. Instead we should be asking “why do most people hate the capitalist technologies sold as ‘innovations’ and forced onto society by a handful of mega billionaires and their toady sycophants?”

Completely agree with Ed, and would also add that the ethics of these machines are blurry at the best of times, but the development of AI-powered/assisted weaponry is completely incompatible with ethics. Having a human in the loop for systems that track, target, and kill is complete folly.

Sources: the Pentagon is pushing OpenAI, Anthropic, and others to make their AI tools available on classified networks without the standard user restrictions (Reuters) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Submitted the first full draft of my PhD thesis today for my final progress review. And with a little break, it’s time for my annual reread of lotr :D

Absolute shame on all the class traitor labour parties of this country, federal and state, that have chosen to side with violent cops and a genocidal state over their own people. Extreme moral cowardice and an absolute waste of the best majority they’ll have in a long long time.

some thoughts on Moltbook for @nytopinion.nytimes.com

Floored by this story. A man wrote a pollite email to a federal prosecutor objecting to the deportation of an Afghan seeking asylum. DHS responded with an administrative warrant to get the man's info from Google, then visited his home to intimidate him.

"An analysis of seven rent platforms ... revealed millions of leasing documents could be accessed by threat actors." Thanks to negligent privacy practices, it is easy to access troves of highly sensitive information stored on rental management platforms www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Nothing says “I’m in the final month of writing my phd thesis” quite like developing an obscure coping mechanism

The “Board of Peace” looks more like another form of psychological humiliation for the people of Gaza than a serious group dedicated to peace and redevelopment.

more like the board of war criminals

What the Trump administration “has advanced is not the absence of AI regulation but its rearrangement,” @alondra.bsky.social writes. What we’re seeing is not deregulation but “hyper-regulation by other means.” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

OpenAI has absolutely zero ideas. They have no business. This is not a real business line and it’s so utterly vague and specious, I’m shocked at the credulousness to just print it without saying “there is no logical way this works of course” or talking about how the CFO of OpenAI is saying nonsense

This is the AI bubble’s end game: “when AI has infiltrated work processes to the point that exit costs are prohibitive, the customer base will be unable to escape and coerced into paying up. The world will be hooked on AI, and the tech firms will collect handsome profits.”

And sure enough, OpenAI just announced it would be introducing ads to ChatGPT. Good thing @mbogen.bsky.social & I wrote about the incentives this would create for AI companies, and how those incentives were likely to shape the user experience. TL;DR: it's not great! #itsthebusinessmodel

Protest graffiti from Iran

The death of Renee and many thousands more are made possible by a culture in which it is acceptable to hate women.

You and your wife drop your 6-year-old off at school. You just moved here. You see ICE terrorizing your new neighbors. You film them, as is your legal right. Your wife complies with orders. She is then shot in the head. You still have to pick up your child later today. This could be you.

Grok's issue is far, far worse than "put a bikini on her." There are huge groups of people on Telegram making it do far worse, then sharing how they did it. It truly is a nonconsensual sexual abuse material machine: www.404media.co/inside-the-t...

How has Grok not been shut down yet and those responsible at X been arrested over actively generating CSAM?

Wetlands filter water naturally—removing pollutants through plants & microbes, no chemicals needed. We bulldoze them for development, then build expensive treatment plants. Humility means restoring what works. #Ecology #Wetlands

The horrors persist

🚨 four hour, high-quality video about the making of fascism just dropped 🚨 youtu.be/yamV8VAPi0o?...

2025 has been an incredible year for using computers to make things worse

More killing tech they developed in Gaza to bring the war home

Here we see BioDynaMo, the Biology Dynamics Modeller, an open-source, agent-based simulation software originally designed to model the behaviour of billions of cells. These visuals demonstrate how BioDynaMo can be used to study biological processes at scale.

someone should invent a thing that's like a university but it's goal is to facilitate learning

The Journal of Games Criticism has published a new issue!! Come and read 6 great new open-access game studies articles! gamescriticism.org/issue-6-1/ #gamestudies

New from 404 Media: ChatGPT told a violent stalker to continue running his misogynistic and threat-filled podcast despite the “haters,” and to visit more gyms to find women. The man stalked women in multiple states, including touching and following from work www.404media.co/chatgpt-spot...

Super happy that my friends @katemfitzgerald.bsky.social, @timothyjgraham.bsky.social and I have just published a chapter about conspiracy theories, their formation and persistence on digital platforms. Edited by @ihsanylmz.bsky.social & Shahram Akbarzadeh www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-...

There is a movement to "prove that the datacenter water issues is fake". If you venture into Muskrat's hell site, you can see the community note these people put on this great piece of investigative journalism, accusing them of unfairly implicating datacenters. www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

On this day, Indigenous people and allies confront the settler-colonial narratives of “Thanksgiving,” observing it instead as a National Day of Mourning.

📣 Call for Papers: Weizenbaum Conference 2026 🤖 “Generative AI and Society: What is at stake?” 📅 Berlin, June 10–11, 2026 📌 Submit papers by Jan 31, 2026 🔗 More: t1p.de/wa2nc

A great keynote by @karinwahlj.bsky.social on the rise of boutique news media to start off the #AANZCA25 conference on the Sunshine Coast. Liveblog is up:

This is one of the worst, most horrifying exposures we have ever seen. It is hard to overstate how bad the things that people are using tools like for are, and it's insane to pretend like these tools are anything other than nonconsensual porn machines www.404media.co/ai-porn-secr...