"As Ursula Le Guin says, speculative fiction is not wistful thinking but a way of reflecting on reality. However, personally, as a reader from South Asia, sometimes the genre can be alienating because it rarely reflects my reality or the thousands of other realities that are outside the anglosphere"
I think it was @mattwall.bsky.social who said, “if you can’t be bothered to write it, I can’t be bothered to read it”👏🏽
FWIW I am a non native speaker and I think those arguments are a bit sad. There is tremendous value in finding your own voice and humanity has for most of its history been multilingual bsky.app/profile/ding...
Belief might be illustrative (and similarly challenging). It has:
1) a dictionary definition (assent to some proposition)
2) a folk psychological notion - related to (1) but also connoting "faith", beyond the available evidence
3) a mathematical definition - derived from Bayes theorem...
The Technological Republic is bipartisan
Karp’s book came out after @bentarnoff.com and I had already started writing ours. Reading it we were like “oh this is Muskism.” The interesting thing, as @lioneltrolling.bsky.social pointed out, is that it was written with the assumption of an incoming Harris administration.
Browsing this company's website and the only way I can describe what I'm seeing is imagine a school shooter was a management consultant
Quit using Meta products. It’s a pretty simple solution. But God knows people won’t give up their Facebook - Instagram - Threads.
If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
I'm pretty sure chatbots are widely used in government at this point. I would love to know to what extent or better yet how has this has deskilled them or changed their communication. Actually, I wonder if anyone has studied pre/post ai summer political speech patterns.
I love this one! Was going to reread it soon actually, cause I do intend to cite it in an essay I'm working on.
Transcript of end of the question from Ed Davey to the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, and him dodging accountability with the use of a complete non-answer: Will the Prime Minister finally accept that the only way that he can help to deliver that is by resigning? The Prime Minister: I set out in my statement the full facts. In September, when the Bloomberg emails came to light, I asked the then Cabinet Secretary to review the process. He told me that the process was as it should have been, and as soon as the information about the security vetting came to light last Tuesday, I asked for the facts to be established, so that I could update Parliament. The right hon. Gentleman asks me about the announcement before developed vetting. He has heard the evidence that I have given to the House from the former Cabinet Secretary and from the former permanent secretary. In relation to the advice from Simon Case, when I asked the former Cabinet Secretary to review the process after September 2025, he specifically addressed whether the process had been followed by referencing the Simon Case letter, and assured me that the process was the right process to have followed. In answer to his question, that was specifically looked at by Sir Chris Wormald in the review that was conducted in September last year.
Hearing it is one thing, reading his response, another entirely. It's like Ed Davey was talking to a chatbot.
Oh thank you for this one!
Anyone arguing that some flavor of AI literacy will protect women from AI deep fake porn is at best unserious and at worst desperate to protect their automated goon generator. This is prima facie not a literacy problem.
Like, AI literacy in any form will not protect black and disabled folks from the algorithmic bias, and the violence that emerges from it, of spicy autocomplete. Full stop. No amount of AI literacy can protect us in the deployment of the system because it is tracking the wrong problem.
This has been restored! Thanks to folks in Mexico who'd made a copy and re-shared it with me... not sure how it got deleted but it's back!
Open biblio that anyone can copy/paste and add to (please add anything that fits!)
CRITICAL DATA CENTER STUDIES
docs.google.com/document/d/1...
Privacy stalwarts in Congress just bought us a few more days to put together a bill that actually reforms Section 702. Keep pushing. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...
I'm convinced world-building scifi in particular greatly improved my ability to understand complex systems, but also different ideological perspectives (because many authors write a world where their beliefs work perfectly, and seeing how that world relates to the real one helps understand them).
If I ever see a laptop with a PalanGenderQueer sticker on it in the wild it's on sight
I think he is! The Green's strong response (and their wins) have been such a ray of hope in comparison to the emails I've gotten back from my Labour MP about Palantir. These contracts pretty blatantly undermine our digital sovereignty and it's a mystery why we'd even want these contracts at all.
Can't wait to dig into this.
I wish my feed was mostly stories of refusal. Actually, a bluesky feed for stories of AI resistance and refusal would be so great because those stories are probably among the most important and buried.
it's funny how our technology is being oversimplified by the replacement of desktop applications with browser-based applications at the same time that it's also happening by replacing websites with smartphone apps.
Conversely, boosters who abuse LLMs to the point of losing all critical thinking skills (if they ever had any) will answer: data center harms are minimal, data workers are better off now that they have a job, and folks suffering psychological damages were already subject to mental health issues.
My favorite thing about all three of these examples is how they are each demonstrably untrue.
Why does Palantir have a £240 million contract with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and a £330 million seven-year contract with the NHS? Seems like something write to one's MP about.
I really wish more people had paid attention when several observers tried to warn about the technofascist and eugenicist tendencies of thiel and karp and that group, for rolling up on two decades, now.
And i *Really* wish the media & political actors would take the threat of them seriously, today 😕
Everything else aside, this level of discourse from a world public figure is without equal nowadays.
Knife crime! Pronouns! Meat bans! Some political issues lead to "hotter", more emotional and polarizing debates than others. We show how these "trigger points" reveal a contested structure of moral expectations and how they get weaponized by polarization entrepreneurs. OA @bjsociology.bsky.social 🧵