Ngaroma Riley: Carving out a place for wāhine | E-Tangata “All I want to do is keep carving without trampling on anyone's mana. I kept hearing ‘mahi tapu’ being bandied about, and I thought: ‘All right, what is this mahi tapu that people say wāhine aren't su...

Ending the night with an antidote to all the doomscrolling. This is a lovely interview to feel inspired by! e-tangata.co.nz/korero/ngaro...

Pope Tweet: “When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.”

Is Pope Leo reading Baudrillard

The text on a whiteboard reads ‘avoid AI’ in all caps with three exclamation marks.

I’ve been doing a bit of actual teaching of students this semester (year 2, tertiary ed). One student-generated class rule is to ‘avoid AI’ all caps. They know its harms & dubious outputs. But they also know the tech is being foisted upon them & with ad hoc guidance at best, at least in education.

We can at least tell our school principals that AI at schools is not inevitable & teach our kids AI literacy beyond how to use it “responsibly” that includes its environmental harms, labour exploitation, intellectual property & data theft. #NZpol

Time to #TalkAboutHumanities -- Linguistics is the study of how language works and how we work with language, and linguists end up very sensitized to language use and how it shapes our social world.

Asians for Tino Rangatiratanga. Solidarity forever #nzpol

Fuck yeah!

And that it was quite a radical move, deemed selfish when I thought I was being selfless by getting stronger! But I’m glad that I’m modelling this (patriarchal deprogramming) to my kid, who’ll grow up with even fewer fucks to give!

That every week I was away was one year of pregnancy & delivering a child; one year of maternity leave (when I nearly went bananas) & one year of work postpartum + parenting a one-year old. My partner was all good with it from the get-go. But soon I realised that what I did wasn’t entirely a given.

My own mother seemed disappointed that I could leave my partner & 2-yr-old at the time. My usually chatty & supportive MIL had no words to say to me 😆 I didn’t give a shit. But I did do my own mental calculation to justify to my own self & patriarchal programming.

It’s fascinating how even hobbies can be fraught with gendered expectations. In Jan 2020 I went to Thailand by myself for a 3-week Muay Thai camp. The weirdest reactions that I got were from my own women. Ranging from ‘who do you think you are?!’ to ‘how did you manage that?!’

Good share.

So wholesome 😻

Amazing and inspiring to read this story! Go Westies!

Amazing 🤩

Yes to all that 👇🏽

The sheer contempt I see among my kiddo & her friends: "They use AI" is an insult the same way "your mom dresses you funny" used to be.

Yes, second that. Can we also get a walkable city like New York? lol

"AI is garbage, bro, it gives you wrong answers like half the time and the other half the time makes you stupid."

Overheard a middle schooler chastising a fellow student for suggesting they use AI. Whole middle school herd started mocking the AI kid.

...We need to let these kids at the tech bros.

The environmental impact of AI: energy, water and emissions The AI boom is being sold as inevitable progress, but the real question is not whether artificial intelligence can do useful things in theory. It is who owns it, who profits from it, what it is mostly being used for, and who pays the environmental and political bill when the hype turns into microchip manufacturing plants, data centres, rising power demand, water stress, surveillance and attacks on democratic life. A Greenpeace Germany report released in 2025 warned that AI’s electricity demand, emissions, water use and raw material needs are all rising fast, and that AI data centre electricity demand could be 11 times higher in 2030 than in 2023 unless governments intervene. A February 2026 report backed by Beyond Fossil Fuels made the greenwashing problem even clearer, finding that 74% of industry claims about AI’s climate benefits were unproven and that it could not identify a single case where consumer generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot were delivering material, verifiable and substantial emissions cuts.

"That is why the debate cannot be reduced to whether AI might do good one day, because the system being built right now is already redistributing power upwards while pushing environmental costs and information risks outwards"

www.greenpeace.org/internationa...

I just finished drawing and colouring with the kid. Now we’re watching Lilo & Stitch. The husby is pottering around. Thanks to an extra day off.

Catching #ZenMoments

Billie caught in mid-yawn, sitting on the heat pump, under my TV showing NASA’s Artemis live feed.

Billie and I spending Good Tuesday (thanks to tertiary ed).

I love The Americans so much. I still think about the ending - what the couple get up to in Russia, how their two kids are faring in America, & the FBI guy/family friend.

But The Koreans sounds amazing!!! Can’t wait!

But also a collision between The Americans and Homeland would also be amazing!

"No serious scholar or scientist in their right mind would want LLMs to produce their texts”

irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2022/12/29/a...

Soaring gas prices from Iran war push Southeast Asian countries to the brink The Philippines' energy crisis is threatening to escalate into an economy-wide crisis, with fears rising inflation will hit the country's poorest families hard.

The momentum to go solar after this will be unstoppable.

A nationwide energy and economic crisis is unfolding in the Philippines, which was the first country to declare a national energy emergency since the Iran war broke out.

Ōtara school brings back bilingual learning after 21 years Bilingual learning returns to Ōtara school after more than two decades without it.

Ōtara school brings back bilingual learning after 21 years #kikorangi www.rnz.co.nz/news/ldr/591...

Our pale blue dot 🌏

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. — Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

our ocean planet, in the insurmountable desert of space.
www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-...

The Philippines Never Surrendered | The Cavalcade Of America | Drama | Old Time Radio Downloads + Red net.

Fascinating find! An Arthur Miller radio play ‘The Philippines Never Surrendered’, first aired in 1945. The voice acting is so interesting!

I’m old enough to remember shows like these on AM radio growing up in the 80s #nostalgia

www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com/drama/the-ca...

That’s it