Happy Local News Day! Join the Internet Archive, Investigative Reporters and Editors and the Poynter Institute for the National Summit on Local News Preservation on June 17 at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, MD. Register now: https://bit.ly/4mjsMKR

Oh boy. If an outfit like NBC News is going this direction, that's not good. Understandable, maybe, but not good.

Watching Bill Nye talk about Artemis II is a good reminder that science has been trying to replace Carl Sagan for three decades and utterly failed to do so.

It is the year 2026 AD. Super hackers have gained illicit backdoor access to the AI Claude through the Chipotle support chat.

5 books to get to know me by: The Abyss by Orson Scott Card Hogfather by Terry Pratchett Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card Little Myth Marker by Robert Asprin Hon mention to Good Omens, Forward the Foundation, A Fire Upon the Deep, and all of Discworld.

Every time I am asked to create alt-text for publications that include images or here on Bluesky, I think about the use of alt-text specifically for creating the image/text pairings for datasets used to train text-to-image models (see arxiv.org/abs/2111.02114 for example)

Government professor @jaylyall.bsky.social’s recent research on U.S. Air Force air strikes in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2011 finds that they are strongly associated with increases in subsequent Taliban insurgent attacks, demonstrating that the strikes had counterproductive effects.

Here is the spreadsheet DOGE had ChatGPT produce, to determine which grants were too DEI www.historians.org/wp-content/u...

@are.na invites pitches for its forthcoming annual anthology on the theme of "score" (of course, being sports-indifferent, I think of event scores, experimental composition, @yblent.bsky.social's wonderful project: www.getty.edu/publications... :)

That's a welcome change, Claude: > Honestly, I have limited specific knowledge of [topic], so I want to be careful here rather than give you confidently wrong information.

I'm off this week and I wrote this before we got our war on this weekend. The Paramount-Warner merger is actually a private equity takeover. The amount of leverage used in the purchase rivals the PE deals for Toys "R" Us and Nabisco. Those ended with mass layoffs, and this will too—by design.

Uh. Exactly what kind of "engagement" are you signing us up for, DH2026? Suddenly much more interested in attending remotely than in person.

NEW: A hobbyist has created Nearby Glasses, an app that warns you if someone close by is wearing smart glasses. 404 Media spoke to the creator who said he was inspired by our coverage that uncovers how men are wearing Meta's Ray-Bans to covertly film massage parlor workers.

Uh, what's going on with this image, NBC? Y'all OK over there?

What do LLMs see? I wrote a lil' tool that extracts the attention matrices out of open models and creates this typing visual, with each token's opacity changing according to its average attention score as the prompt progresses. Dimmer words are considered less important to the model.

Yeah, this idea probably would have worked better if I'd done it before the shelves started to bend.

Includes this great roundtable on author influence in spec fic by @fantasycafe.bsky.social, Yvette Ndluvu, @cypayseur.bsky.social, and Daniel Rabuzzi strangehorizons.com/wordpress/no...

I’m excited to share the @aip.bsky.social 2026 Research Agenda. Developed with leaders across AIP’s Federation, it outlines five initiatives on policy & funding, workforce, digital preservation, international collaboration, and identities in the physical sciences. www.aip.org/aip/2026-aip...

Agenda from an upcoming faculty meeting, which I'm choosing to interpret as a Fluxus score:

You know the day will be either amazing or horrible when the random song stuck in your head is from Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

🎬 Filmmakers! The Internet Archive’s 2026 Public Domain Day Remix Contest is open! 🎥 Create a 2–3 minute short film using at least 1 piece of public domain material from 1930. 🎶🎭📚 📆 Deadline: January 7, 2026 💰 First prize: $1,500 ℹ️ Details 👉 blog.archive.org/2025/12/01/2... #publicdomain #contest

Wow, love the visuals in this.

Come research with us at the Max Planck Research Group for Machine Visual Culture — “Artificial Intelligence and the History of Seeing” positions open under Dr Leonardo Impett. We’ll get to hang out sometimes. www.biblhertz.it/3757971/0412...

#JobAlert! Assistant/Associate Professor in the Arts and Unconventional Computing, in the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University: northeastern.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/careers/job/...

📣🎬 Calling all filmmakers & artists! Celebrate Public Domain Day in January 2026 by making a 2–3 min short film using public domain works from 1930 & earlier. 📆 Deadline: January 7, 2026 💰 First prize: $1,500 ℹ️ Details 👉 blog.archive.org/2025/12/01/2... #contest #filmmaking #publicdomain

Minor good news for libraries: "A Victory for IMLS as Court Blocks Trump’s Attempt to Dismantle Agency" IMLS funds leadership training and R&D in libraries in the US. but everyone is gone and grants cancelled so who now gets employed? www.libraryjournal.com/story/a-vict...

Apparently I am “Driving for five hours straight physically hurts” years old now.

Narrator: it was exactly as worthy as the name Encyclopedia Galactica as Will Smith's I, Robot movie was worthy of that name.

We re-watched Wall-E tonight for the first time in forever. I was struck with an overwhelming feeling of "wow, remember when Pixar tried? They were good at their jobs, huh?"

eyebeam.org/executive-di... big transition time for an org that changed my life and the lives of so many artists, hope they find someone with the vision, fortitude, and courage its legacy deserves

Oh FFS, this was MEANT TO BE A JOKE bsky.app/profile/hald...

🚀 NEW MAGAZINE ⌨️ Back in the ’80s there were printed mags of BASIC programs to type in, we’ve brought that back but for web pages! 10 amazing games, toys, puzzles and utilities, no coding knowledge needed vole.wtf/doctype/

You can't spell "calipers" without AI...

"Crucially, [Bruce Sterling] articulated the genre’s defining cultural synthesis: the “overlapping of worlds that were formerly separate: the realm of high tech and the modern pop underground” Good read but always weird to see a genre I followed from early on be looked at from a historic lens.

I kind of hate how tearing down part of the White House without being ready to replace it with anything is so on the nose for the accelerationists running things. I knew parody and irony were dead, but now we're just stabbing metaphor right in the face as if artists didn't have enough problems.

Since I'm using two different dev environments, I'm now in the middle of an argument between Claude Sonnet and ChatGPT about the finer points of error checking. The good news is, neither is right.

Huge congratulations to everyone at The Hop on the reopening of their big stage with tonight’s concert featuring Renée Elise Goldsberry! Can’t wait for tomorrow’s Yo-Yo Ma / We Are Water performance. We missed you Hop!

I am thrilled to announce the opening of the Call for Submissions for Electronic Literature Volume 5. eliterature.github.io/elc5-info/ I am serving along with @zachwhalen.bsky.social, @elikaortega.bsky.social, and Dani Spinosa. This call launches with translations in 12+ languages!

Following a student mispronunciation yesterday, I'll be referring to all LLM output as the Ship of Thesis going forward. Thank you for your time.

2026 internships available in my team at The LEGO Group! Internships in Story, Ideation, Concept Model Design (ie, building with bricks), Prototyping (3D printing etc), Hardware (soldering and weird sensors!) Physical (springs and spinny things) Digital (code for doing stuff with bricks)

I'm too old to be looking for missing semicolons.

I for one am shocked, shocked to learn that the training for Elon Musk's trash chatbot is not being conducted with the absolute highest ethical standards

I'm not at all sure Nexstar and Sinclair want to test exactly how required they are in the current media ecosystem by trying to bully a massive content creator with multiple OTT platforms.

The editors gave us a lot to unpack in this header, but you have to applaud the effort.

There are very, VERY few people who are equipped to talk about this shooter correctly given the brainrot written on the shell casing. You have to understand so much of online culture to get it and also understand how that culture is both connected to and separate from real world ideological spaces

10 four-year PhDs @dfg.de Research Training Group 3064 “Technologies of Witnessing: Media and Cultural Practices“ at the University Mainz – Deadline Oct 17 The RTG examines technologies of witnessing in contemporary media cultures in transformation. stellenboerse.uni-mainz.de#/jgu/job/50416

Well, clearly. Thus the problem.