It’s unreasonable to assume that the institutions which capital gave rise to will ever save society from capitalism. Hierarchical, extractive, and undemocratic organization perpetuates the same domination of human over human that it does in placing society over nature. An ecological society requires new, cooperative and democratic institutions.
Imagine a country calling itself a democracy but it’s Election Day isn’t a federal holiday
Pope Leo spoke out against AI one too many times and they hit him with the cancer ray gun
Who Cares Whether Academics Use AI to Write? https://www.chronicle.com/article/who-cares-whether-academics-use-ai-to-write
Sure, says the person who turned in a draft to a journal that was written with #AISlop assistance. These days academics are just tripping themselves to justify their AI slop use. By the way, they also wrote this essay with "collaboration" from the #sloperator
I'll never understand how "let's just fuck with our clocks a few times a year" became a "solution" to anything.
Do people not know what clocks are for? What time is? "ohhhh it's dark outside it can't be dark when my clock says this I must change time itself" shut up
One time, someone said Pavlov probably thought about feeding his dogs every time he heard someone ring a bell, and I haven't been the same since.
39-year-old unvaccinated woman becomes 6th measles death in Pennsylvania
As of Friday, state health officials reported 1,136 cases across 41 counties.
https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/10/39-year-old-unvaccinated-woman-becomes-6th-measles-death-in-pennsylvania/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
"AI" is a failed technology, in the sense that it's neither fit for purpose, nor a likely path to its stated end goal of "AGI", but a lot of people's profits currently depend on pretending it's not. I am curious to see how long the hype will last once the Nvidia ouroboros ends and money stops being pumped into marketing.
"Israeli soldiers say ordered to drop heavy bombs on inhabited Gaza buildings without evacuation: Report"
Data:
- LLMs are killing the planet
- LLMs are raising utility prices
- LLMs are raising computer prices
- LLMs give you teh dums
- LLMs show negligible increases in net productivity
- LLM costs are going up
- LLMs run on stolen content
- LLM companies keep breaking laws and saying, "Oopsie!"
Open Source maintainers for some reason:
- We are debating our AI policy, but it's a tough decision. *whines*
Dudes. WTF is wrong with you?
A truly ecological society would be able to reconcile its ethical obligations to the environment with its own needs to sustain itself.
I see you posted something online that didn’t also include the entire canon of collective human knowledge, so now I’m going to angrily reply
In ancient Athens they had a process for banishing potential tyrants from the city. Athenians had learned the hard way that threats to democracy cannot be tolerated and, to maintain the people's power, they removed those who would challenge it in favor of oligarchy. There are lessons to be learned from that.
The linear algebra machine is not your friend
When I speak to students, I always tell them to feel free to email me with questions. Sometimes they worry that I won’t actually respond, but what they should really be worried about is me sending a new link relevant to what they asked about every three days forever.
A new study has examined 20,736 scientific publications about climate tipping points. Several of those are estimated to be crossed around 1.5 degrees warming, i.e. any time soon: permafrost thaw, Greenland Ice Sheet, North Atlantic Subpolar Gyre.
https://theconversation.com/some-climate-tipping-points-are-being-studied-far-more-than-others-new-research-293614
so, interesting story--this week I was let go from the job I've been with for the last 5 years!
might you be able to buy a #zine or two to keep my spirits up through what I expect to be a soul-crushing new job search?
https://www.etsy.com/shop/StitchandDestroy?section_id=29207932
I’m sure someone has already made this point but What We Do in the Shadows walked so that Widow’s Bay could run