Some good observations worth bookmarking.

Not impressed with Substack, and Masnick does a good job of explaining why.

When I was in grad school, a faculty member in my program told me a story about his then-quite-young son, who was having a grand old time climbing on top of the kitchen table and then leaping off of it to the floor below. (Truth be told, my memories of this conversation are fuzzy, and the son might have been engaged in some otherwise dangerous behavior.) The father tried to tell the son to stop doing this, warning: “You could have hurt yourself!” The son’s response? “But I didn’t!” Sure, the action had been potentially dangerous, but the landing had been a success, and the son didn’t see what the big deal was.

I appreciate Masnick’s roundup of all the stupid things going on re: tariffs.

Thanks to this article from The Atlantic that I saw on Bluesky, I’ve been able to confirm something that I’ve long assumed to be the case: that my creative and scholarly work is being used to train generative AI tools. More specifically, I used the searchable database embedded in the article to search for myself and find that at least eight of my articles (plus two corrections) are available in the LibGen pirate library—which means that they were almost certainly used by Meta to train their Llama LLM.

This is a mess of a post blending thoughts on tech policy with religious ideas and lacking the kind of obvious throughline or structure that I’d like it to have. It’s also been in my head for a couple of weeks, and it’s time to release it into the world rather than wait for it to be something better. So, here it is:

I am frustrated with generative AI technology for many reasons, but one of the things at the top of that list is the knowledge that today’s kids are growing up in a world where it is possible—even likely—that their middle and high school experiences are going to involve someone using generative AI tools to produce deepfake nudes (or other non-consensual intimate imagery—NCII) of them. See, for example, this horrifying story from the New York Times last April.

I soured on Section 230 for a bit, but I came back and largely because of arguments like this one.

As usual, lots to like in this post from Mike Masnick.

Masnick pulls no punches.

Saw someone link to this and remembered I should probably read the whole thing instead of just the first few paragraphs. I fall somewhere between Doctorow and Masnick on Bluesky optimism, but I really appreciate their dialogue on it.

Some more good writing on a bad situation.

Yet more to demonstrate that “free speech” often means “right-wing speech.”

Bookmarking as yet another example of Elon Musk’s free speech reputation being undeserved.

I don’t like Big Tech, but I’ve become more wary of regulation in recent years because folks like Masnick have compellingly made this argument over and over: It’s the smaller, better companies and sites that suffer the most from it.

I wasn’t sure about a retheming of Mille Bornes for this game, but this post on design decisions was actually really reassuring.

Love these digs at Twitter in the Kickstarter video for Mike Masnick’s new card game.

Masnick is excellent at balancing “Musk has a right to do this” with “the hypocrisy is shameful.”

Deeply appreciate Masnick’s writeup. I don’t know the ins and outs of the law, and that’s given me some pause in being upset about the ruling. To see a lawyer find fault with so much gives me greater confidence in my own frustration.

The most dangerous part, though, doesn’t require a law degree to understand. The logic of the findings poses a threat to all libraries, not just this one.

I am way more pessimistic about AI than Masnick is, but we agree on this sort of thing. Algorithmic surveillance is no more appropriate in response to AI concerns than it is to cheating concerns.

Some good thoughts here by Masnick.

I got skeptical of Section 230 for a while, but folks like Doctorow and Mike Masnick have brought me back around.

I’ve only skimmed this so far, but while I firmly believe that the fetishizing of freedom of expression is causing real issues in our world, I appreciate Masnick’s critique. I expect I’ll always be more keen on regulation than he is, but that doesn’t make him wrong in the points he’s making here.

Oh, so the moral panic is hypocritical, too.

Masnick puts this better than I could. This legislation is dumb, but this advocacy feels dumber.

Look, it’s hard to oppose legislation that purports to be “for the kids,” but with the EFF, Mike Masnick, and other voices I respect still firmly against this, I’ll be calling my reps—and encouraging others to do the same.