One of the reasons we have people swear an oath to uphold the duties of their position is because the Constitution is a rule book not an airbag, fire sprinkler, or autocorrect. It cannot automatically mitigate, stop, or fix anything. People have to actually take steps to enforce it.
Photo of a black cat in front of a computer monitor touching the screen with a Stack Overflow page open.
Clawed assistant > Claude assistant
I don't need a summary of what's available online, in biographies, or even in my own notes. I need to comb through and find the great details, decide what interests ME. No, it's not efficient. It's slow and painstaking. But I don't believe in efficiency as an ultimate good, especially in writing. /
We're on track for a chaotic summer and fall weather season, intense heat waves that will result in massive fires, and a rough hurricane season. This year is ripe for an unpredictable mix of chaotic events that will make voting more difficult and stressful. Planning needs to include that too.
If a thing is so incredible and valuable because it eliminates the burden of people needing to skill up or get up to speed in order to do something, then it cannot also be a thing in which not using it right away would cause someone to be "left behind". Those are mutually exclusive characteristics.
I met with AI data labelers in Kenya who are organizing their colleagues to fight the brutal working conditions and horrible pay given to the workers at the "bottom of the AI supply chain." They believe the NDAs they've signed are unenforceable so are speaking out:
www.404media.co/ai-is-africa...
We're not just in a subscription economy, we're in a subscription democracy. Some are getting a higher tier of benefits while the rest are locked into the basic plan we were signed up for at birth where the cost only ever rises and they keep removing benefits or turning them into premium add-ons.
"Use AI or get left behind" is rugged individualism applied to technology. It's a fantasy that a person could be "good enough" with AI to not be affected by global shifts in labor and information. It's propaganda for individual survival over collective action on behalf of the collective welfare.
Historical context for these jobs...one of the last people convicted for their role in the Holocaust was a secretary at a camp. She claimed as a secretary she wasn't responsible. She was found guilty because she could not deny that she knew what was actually happening.
www.mlive.com/news/detroit...
Maybe you need this
I'm not worried about a future in which I'm left behind because I don't use certain technologies. I'm worried about a future in which everyone is expected to do even more than we already are and those things aren't actually useful, necessary, or good for us — individually or collectively.
It's wild to have 2 pro-AI people in the same article, one saying that authors need to use AI or get left behind AND the other saying if readers know a book is AI they won't read it.
"Do the thing that your target customer will boycott you for if they know you are doing it." Wow. Great advice.
The arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort are a test for every MSM member with a platform. If you are not voicing your outrage at this blatant violation of the First Amendment, you are utterly discredited as a journalist.
Georgia Fort, an independent journalist and vice president of the Minnesota NABJ chapter, was also arrested by federal agents this morning
I was sent this video of agents at her door:
Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern said: > “The government’s arrests of journalists Don Lemon and Georgia Fort are naked attacks on freedom of the press. Two federal courts flatly rejected prosecuting Lemon because the evidence for these vindictive and unconstitutional charges was insufficient, and Lemon has every right to document news and inform the public. Instead of accepting that humiliating defeat, the government has now doubled down. > > “These arrests, under bogus legal theories for obviously constitutionally protected reporting, are clear warning shots aimed at other journalists. The unmistakable message is that journalists must tread cautiously because the government is looking for any way to target them. Fort’s arrest is meant to instill the same fear in local independent journalists as big names like Lemon. > > “The answer to this outrageous attack is not fear or self-censorship. It’s an even stronger commitment to journalism, the truth, and the First Amendment. If the Trump administration thinks it can bully journalists into submission, it is wrong. We’ve recently seen that even in the Trump era, public pressure still can work. It’s time to do it again. News outlets across the political spectrum need to loudly defend Lemon’s and Fort’s rights. Journalists are not making themselves the story, Trump is.”
INBOX: @freedom.press on the arrests of Don Lemon and Georgia Fort
We've built a system in which the penalties and settlements for lying and cheating cost far less than what companies can make when they lie and cheat and then we act shocked that they lie and cheat.
Cough
media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/12/...
...you don't get to deny responsibility for your actions or words because you were manipulated. The judgement of your character isn't because you were manipulated, it's because of why you were vulnerable to that kind of manipulation in the first place.
If you can be manipulated by someone playing on your resentments of others, your desire to see others punished, your wish to see others denied things you don't think they deserve, your dislike of those not like you, your feelings of superiority, or your refusal to listen, learn, or understand...
"We have to help people understand what is (the current, shared reality), we must collectively imagine what can be (a future possibility), & we have to diligently labor for what must be (organizing to sustain life/livingness & for liberation)."
@prisonculture.bsky.social on how to move forward.
Hee !Quote tweeting to plug @unbreaking.org is an information aid project tracking the ways the Trump administration is breaking reality . We provide sourced and cited thematic timelines to help people understand and take action without having to doomscroll or read 3837387 substacks
It's been far easier to diversify my fiction books than my nonfiction books and I think about the implications of that a lot because we need both diverse stories and diverse expertise and analysis.
I really hate that when my internet goes down these days my first instinct is to be suspicious, immediately check to see if I still have phone signal, and doing a quick double-check of headlines rather than just "that happens sometimes."
Her doing this and me scrolling social media are the same activity.
They want slavery . They want it. They want the the world slavery made and are trying to break it down to its coding parts
and the people “fighting” them want the equivalent of benevolent overseer roles because they accept the premise
I got the best gift from @nws.noaa.gov
A blaring very early Christmas morning flash flood alert that ensured we woke up and checked conditions around us. Functioning public services that keep us all safer every day is exactly what I wanted.
it's taken me a while to put this together. but I hope, if you've never heard of her, or even if you have, this tribute to Alice Wong buoys your heart and gives you a good sense of who this incredible person was. www.coyotemedia.org/remembering-...
and then once it's done and can't easily be undone, they don't remember the why or the decision agreement and are upset to the point of acting hateful and cruel. It's hard to absorb and not respond because logic and facts simply have no role to play in the matter and they don't have the capacity.
One of the extremely hard parts of dementia caregiving is that sometimes you can do absolutely everything you can to try to make sure they understand and remember an important decision and discuss and repeat it a a million times...
This is an illustration. I could not handle looking at an inbox that looked like this.
