I'm somebody who's written rather extensively on generative AI ethics, and I feel there is a lot that is unethical about the current corporate climate and culture surrounding the technology. And when I write about LLMs and chatbots, I'm careful not to make judgments about the people using the end products—I don't think you're a bad person if you use ChatGPT or Claude, or whatever. What I'm discussing today is different. There is no room for debate or argument, here—only hard, absolute lines in…

The saying extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence can be a guardian against being mislead, but only when one recognizes a claim as being extraordinary.That can be harder than it seems, as a recent Dr. Nerdlove reply to a young man (who has let the "manosphere" convince him he has no romantic prospects) indicates:The reason why it hurts and upsets you is because you hear it over and over, and that has a way of settling in as being "true". So the first step is to see if it's even…

I discovered unstory recently after nosing around Bubbles. I've read a handful of his/her posts now and Jesus Christ, I hope I don't end up as miserable and jaded as this person. Every post so far has been negative. Whether that's the internet, society, the people within it. All shit according to ustory. All except one post about smoking. Each to their own and all that, but the fact that smoking is seemingly the only thing this person finds pleasure in feels very sad indeed. On a more positive…

Meet SadBot :) The crappiest chatbot you'll talk to in 2026, but the most authentic one. I built him in 2020 when I was 10 years old, back when AI chatbots were even crappier than the automated ones on government websites.

As long as you've prepared for the challenge ahead, try to be relentlessly optimistic about your chances of success. There's no downside to absolute belief in yourself, and worry can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. | Read full post >>

Anyone inside or outside the US that thinks they're safe relying on American tech providers and financial institutions should consider how quickly and enthusiastically they carried out the diktats of the Trump regime. Just in the last week, Google changed Google Maps' references from Lake Ontario to Lake America, and Paypal and the Internet Society froze financial assets and domain names of Autistici/Inventati. You risk instant humiliation, immiseration, and social death at the whims of a…

My home town of Crawley is apparently the undisputed heavyweight champion of British music.At least, that is what you might conclude from the UK Music Cities Explorer. When the interactive map's results are normalized by population, Crawley appears as the largest circle on the map, giving it the highest Spotify-listener footprint per resident of any UK urban area in the explorer.Not bad for a small town in the south of England.The UK Music Cities Explorer is an interactive exploration of the…

The AI Dilemma continues in relevance. Choice quote from early in the presentation: 50% of AI researchers believe there’s a 10% or greater chance that humans go extinct from our inability to control AI. […] Imagine if 50% of airplane engineers [who made the plane you’re about to get on] thought there was a 10% chance everyone dies. It has been more than two years since that presentation . . .

What recourse is there for the public when their leaders will not listen, their employers have broken the compacts that bind society, and their bellies gnaw with hunger? If two examples are sufficient to draw a motif, that seems to be the recurring question at the center of Yoni Goldstein’s work. Last year’s Chicago ’68 was a refreshing look at civil disobedience in the streets; now Goldstein and the Dietz Foundation are publishing The Nights of King Ludd, which raises similar questions about…

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This Andrew Yang tweet was going viral: Heard about a small college in the Midwest that has lost 50% of its enrollment in the last 10 years. Hundreds of colleges are going to close in the next decade and it’s going to be devastating for many communities. — Andrew Yang (@AndrewYang) August 30, 2026 Whether it’s hopes or promises of AI making white-collar jobs obsolete (wrong) or college obsolete, people keep projecting their desires, when the actual data doesn’t support it. This comes off as…

The goal of this article is not to wax lyrical about the potential of pre-existing anarchist societies and projects, I will not be discussing Rojava, the Zapatistas or Chaz. Indeed, Benn Jordan and The Pondscum Collective have both done such a topic more justice than I ever could. My goal instead is to use examples from the society you currently live in to convince you of the premise at the very bones of anarchism. The philosophical conceit that people are inherently well meaning, and will do…

Guest post · ☉ Skandhics { scrollable } Humans keep asking what the whales are saying. It is a beautiful question. It may also be the wrong first question. For centuries, humans have already been speaking to cetaceans in a language that required no translation: harpoons, engines, propellers, nets, explosions, emptied seas. Industrial whaling reduced entire populations before anyone needed to know whether a sperm whale’s clicks contained names, whether humpback song carried history, or whether…

Public domain photograph of Dolly Parton in 1970 via RCA Records and Wikimedia Commons. Look, I know a solid portion of the planet has been sharing their love of Dolly Parton, but damn it, in this instance, it’s the right thing to do. When a bedrock of true humanity is taken out of a world that seems ever less humane, reiterating what was good about her is a form of trying to keep that goodness alive, and finding the determination and support to try and go about it. Less caught up in the hubbub…

Yes, the #web02 revolution was a con, it always was. The problem is now most people have spent years pretending that the dominant technology companies were somehow neutral actors – clever companies making useful tools, occasionally getting a little too powerful, occasionally needing a bit of regulation. This chattering class story is now harder to maintain as the long “invisible” problem has finally reached the #mainstream, the stepping over the smoke and mirrors can now be seen in books such…

The Ig Nobel honors achievements that "first make people laugh, and then make them think". This year's winners include Paul Piff, Daniel Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner, for amassing evidence that upper class people are more likely to snatch from a children’s supply of candy, and engage in other kinds of unethical behavior. ~ Links: Meet the 2026 Ig Nobel Prize winners, by Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica The 36th First Annual Ig Nobel Ceremony (2026) FULL…

2026/09/04 21:39 I have often seen people saying Primus sucks. It never occurred to me they could be saying that ironically.

There will come a point when we, as a Society, have to address the issue of the social impact of the super wealth of a few hundred people compared to that of the rest of the world. I’m not opposed to wealth per se, to the meritocracy that justifies the wage gap. However, I believe there is a moral limit to the wealth a single person can amass for themselves in their lifetime. To make an example: for a family earning €60,000/year, buying a €500,000 apartment is a major financial event requiring…

We currently have deeply embedded idea that objects have to be owned by an individual, as we are taught to think in terms of possession, this is mine, that is yours. We measure security through what we own, status through what we accumulate, and value through what we can control. This feels like common sense because it is invisibly embedded in modern Western culture. But it isn’t the only way to understand value, in the #openweb paths what if we thought less about ownership and more about…

Wikipedia Workers Unionize for the First Time More than 200 people in roles such as engineering, finance, and communications will now be represented by the Communications Workers of America. Great news, happy for them. Hopefully Wikipedia can continue to be a good example of something that works online.

A paper by Michael S. Flier (Harvard Ukrainian Studies 35 1-4 [2017-2018]: 31-42) begins by quoting Roman Szporluk on the origins of Ukrainian ethnic and cultural identity and asks “If the imagined community began to emerge in the late eighteenth century, when did the Ukrainian vernacular begin to delimit itself vis-à-vis its neighbors?” Flier goes on to quote George Shevelov to the effect that “a continuum has existed from the earliest local changes within Common Slavic to the present,” then…

Is the world morally ordered? Do good things come to those who act well and bad things to those who act badly? Do the virtuous thrive and the wicked suffer? I will not -- you'll be disappointed to hear -- actually answer this question in this post. Instead, I'll discuss the structure of several possible answers, so that we can better think about how to think about thinking about the question. (Added in revision: Okay, I couldn't resist concluding with a guess, but that guess isn't the point.)…

“Alterhumans Always Learning,” a panel presented by Orion Scribner at Othercon 2026.“Which name does a plural system want on their diploma? What memory made an elf choose their trade school? Why would a wolf think about dropping out and what do they do instead? This is a crowdsourced presentation about the role of alterhumanity in our educations and many different paths for learning throughout life. The audience can share their opinions and advice via chat and polls. Orion guides this panel…

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One of the meany problems with modern capitalism is not simply that some corporations are greedy. It is that we have built institutions around the assumption that people are greedy, and then wondered why they behave that way. Since the 1970s, #neoclassical economics became dominant in business schools and corporate thinking. An older social democratic idea of the manager as a professional with responsibilities to workers, customers, communities and society was displaced by a #geekproblem model…

Many who hold the plausible belief that some UFOs are caused by strange strong (“alien”) powers now believe that the US (and maybe other) govts have long been keeping strong confirming evidence re these powers secret, plausibly for as long as eighty years, but might now be induced to disclose this info.A plausible counter argument is that even if particular parts of the govt once had such evidence, govt is often so bad at coordinating as to make it plausible that they’ve destroyed it all, and…

Governments have formal processes, rules, and institutions. But anyone who has spent much time working in or around government also knows that there are plenty of unwritten conventions about how things actually get done, including how organizations effectively engage with ministers and their offices. For people outside of government, political offices, or professional advocacy, many of those conventions can be surprisingly opaque. Not knowing them can also mean inadvertently undermining your…

On why your team keeps perfect time for three weeks and then invents a new calendarThere is a word for the thing every executive claims to want and almost none of them are willing to engineer. The word is isochronism, from the Greek for equal time, and it describes the single most demanding property a mechanical timekeeper can have - that its oscillator beats at the same rate regardless of how much force is pushing it. A watch does not receive a steady supply of energy. It receives a…

Doctor Faustus (play) - WikipediaFAUSTUS. How am I glutted with conceit of this! Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please, Resolve me of all ambiguities, Perform what desperate enterprise I will? I’ll have them fly to India for gold, Ransack the ocean for orient pearl, And search all corners of the new-found world For pleasant fruits and princely delicates; I’ll have them read me strange philosophy, And tell the secrets of all foreign kings; I’ll have them wall all Germany with brass, And…

These thin-skinned wannabe-politicians need to understand that the Internet has a long memory, even if they don't. Here's Steve, a week or so ago, reposting Shelagh's "team" claim in a local freedom/freedumb group: Please note that nearly everyone on that so-called "Team of Registered Councillors" has come out to say that they are not a part of this team. Including, most recently, Steve himself. Which is fucking hilarious. While it's true that Steve is no longer associated with Bill or their…