Wild read. It’s as if the right is an alliance between the most dangerous coddling of Big Tech and the dumbest criticisms of it.

Ugh, this article makes it sound even worse.

What a depressing story.

TFW a webcomic punchline is more or less your actual theology.

For reasons I don’t have to get into here, summer is one of the hardest times of year in mental health terms, and over the course of the past few months, I’ve had my fair share of existential dread and feeling adrift. As I wrote last week, that meant that I was hesitant to start reading the comics series Ice Cream Man, because I was afraid that it would further fuel that dread.

There are many worse things happening in our country right now, but also: this is petty and embarrassing.

This is good! It’s another book that I took too long to read, so it’s hard to review when I took breaks for other books between sections.

It’s a very Doctorow book. I mean this in three ways: First, it makes an impassioned plea for a niche-but-important tech cause. Second, it overlaps with his fiction writing in really obvious ways. Third, it reads like an extended blog post (which I mostly mean as a compliment).

Did not realize that dashcam surveillance was a thing. I hate that it is, and I hate that Flock is going here.

This is horrifying. Reading the headline is one thing, but reading some of the details is stomach-churning. I’m not a lawyer, and as disgusted as I am with this, I don’t know what legal liability should look like here. I feel more comfortable describing this as ethically bankrupt, though. I think I would have many fewer concerns about generative AI if it weren’t a platformized consumer product. Whatever the right legal response to this is, OpenAI has some moral responsibility for this sort of thing.

Good article (here’s a gift link), and one worth adding to the right kind of syllabus.

Don’t need the NYTimes to say this to recognize that it’s happening, but it’s helpful to have all of these examples gathered in a single place. Gift link.

If this is so great for the community, why won’t the company even identify itself publicly?

Helpful reminder that data center problems are not just hypothetical—they’re potentially local.

Very interesting piece.

Some Ellulian vibes in here.

I genuinely think it’s useful to remember that non-AI datacenters are also contributing to the climate crisis, but that doesn’t let AI off the hook. It’s like saying “sure, we’re spending far beyond our means, but have you considered that we’re already in debt?

This sucks. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Reddit here, which has shown over the past few years a dedicated interest in monetizing its userbase.

Interesting read. Bookmarking for reference.

I hadn’t thought about these two trends (cracking down on adult content, and Grok being Grok) being in tension with each other, and I appreciate what this article does to make that clear.

Unsurprising but disappointing.

I’m very much on team “alternate voting systems in the U.S., please,” but it’s also wild how much of what’s happening in Gaza right now can arguably be traced back to proportional representation with low thresholds.

A year ago today, I wrote a post describing the difficult time I’d had that year attending a local “Reunion” (family camp) put on by Community of Christ. That reminded me of a post I’ve been meaning to write for months about this year’s much more positive experience at Reunion, so it’s time to get those thoughts out of my head and into a post.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve read a fair amount of anarchist fiction, and I’ve found that I like it. A lot. I don’t know that I’m ready to become a committed anarchist in the real world, but I love the way that anarchist fiction does two things: first, it dares to imagine a better world than the one we live in; second, it believes that human beings are capable of collectively creating this better world—and without being forced to do. One of my favorite imaginings in this genre of fiction comes from Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, where Shevek (the main character, from the anarchist moon Anarres) explains to some colleagues that in his home, everyone pitches in to take care of undesirable tasks like cleaning up waste (I can’t remember if this is human waste or industrial waste or something else… I really need to get a copy of this book so I can reference it for posts like this).

Don’t even know what to comment here. How is this the world we’re living in?

Again, I’m not sure copyright is the way to go in fighting immoral generative AI companies (that the ALA and EFF are on Anthropic’s side seems important to me), but “we have to be able to do this to be successful” still strikes me as such a hollow, self-serving argument.

There are, of course, social benefits to open sourcing powerful tools like these ones. However, I’m reminded of “open source” Android, which is a deliberate business decision that benefits Google—and of how many NCII-generating tools are based on open weight/open source models. gift link