Yeah, it has completely lost its charm for me for exactly those reasons 😒

Most fun you can have with your clothes on.

I'm quoting my longtime friend, Susan Shwartz. She's 112% right.

Oh this wasn't the big 865 person open science effort in Nature, this is just me and Manikya chillin on a beach by ourselves 😀

Proud to have been a part of this effort!

Lots of tech dudes think the "idea" is the important part of creating, not the creative journey you take through work to give that idea actual meaning. Ideas are the easiest, cheapest and least fulfilling part of it. Giving ideas life through work, and sharing that work with others, is the stuff.

Every time I log onto Zoom, it asks if I want AI help. I click no, don't ask again. It asks again

Every document in Acrobat asks if I want an AI summary What exactly would a summary of a knitting pattern be, an image of the final project?

I really just want AI to get up off my ass at this point.

hey, if AI proponents hadn’t been making up nonsense about AI tools while forcing them on us, then maybe people wouldn’t reflexively block AI tools, even when they actually work. that’s not on normies for being rational consumers. that’s on AI proponents for being systematically full of shit

You would get so many more amazing books if you had Universal Basic Income. Not even the most dream-scenario AI could compete with the creativity of a world of authors no longer afraid of affording rent.

Social movement scholar here to comment on No King again. a 🧵:

These protests are important b/c:

1.) as sustained image events, protests offer evidence of continued disapproval of the direction the country is going and disavowal of the country's leadership.

thoughts on today:

1) the protests are good, actually

2) you should go to one of you can

3) it will do you good to see how many other people also hate this guy

4) you might meet people who you can organize with

5) there are more of us than there are of them

6) we are going to win

The AI Boom Wasn’t Built for the Polycrisis “There are too many ways for it to fail for it not to fail.”

The AI economy looks...really precarious. So @matteowong.bsky.social & I did a bunch of reporting to try to figure out what happens when a potential bubble collides with a war in Iran and a potential resource shortage. The answer is...arguably the most dire stuff i've heard from smart ppl in a while

Four portraits of Minnesota residents inside and outside their homes. From left to right: A woman in a hijab, an older woman wearing a red whistle, an elderly couple in winter coats standing in the snow, and a woman wearing a buttoned-up cardigan and dark blue jeans.

The news has moved on, but ICE is still in Minneapolis.

My neighbors are still patrolling streets, driving strangers to work, and providing aid. As a photojournalist at @propublica.org, I wanted to know: What do they look like in their daily lives?

So I picked up my camera 👇

We don't have to submit. I've said a long time that inevitability is the first lie of fascism. Think about that when AI boosters say there's no choice. There is. There always is.

We Live In A Society (Really) > Today's BFT newsletter was written by Nick, a fella I met on Bluesky who had what I thought was a good take that could make an even better BFT blog post. You can follow Nick on Bluesky. I was going to begin this blog by revisiting the toxic discourse around a 2023 tweet about smoking on the train by Mindy Isser, a left-leaning Philadelphia organizer who posts mostly about the labor movement. Isser's innocuous post set off a cascade of increasingly wild-eyed replies and devolved into a days-long social media war in which no prisoners were taken. It turns out almost three years to the day after this legendarily controversial post, Isser was embroiled in an almost identical debate about antisocial behavior in public spaces. The response to both posts elicited the same arguments: Isser is too soft, she hates the unhoused, she should move out of the city if she wants to avoid people masturbating on public transit. Isser then gets accused of being the “headphone police,” which produced this perfect “how did we end up here?” moment: What. This kind of discourse catches fire on Bluesky every so often (as it did on Twitter, and apparently still does on the X platform) and I think it’s worth addressing. The controversy du jour was spun up around a post discussing an unhoused man throwing a rock into a post office window. I don’t want to re-litigate that post, which, to be clear, ended with pleas for more government-funded shelters and better mental health services (the original post has since been deleted but here’s the screen grab that was my introduction to the issue). I’m more interested in this response: _Did you talk to him? Did he say he had no reason? No. More likely this is just an assumption. or worse, complete bullshit made up to generate public distrust of the houseless.”_ In The Absence Of Earnestness, Fascism ThrivesWoke 2 is going to be fueled by virtue signaling. And that’s OK.Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter I’m fascinated by the desire to ask the guy why he threw a rock through the post office window, the question implying the existence of one or even a handful of good reasons to do so. While they might not accept the particulars of the permission structure, people making this argument – knowingly or not – are in agreement with the American right on the praxis (do whatever the fuck you want and have zero consideration for anyone else). The right says this is OK and even laudable because you’re in charge, this is your life, your country, and you have a god-given right to behave in any way you want to behave. The “public urination is fine” left is saying it’s OK because you aren’t in charge, life is unfair, and human beings have no agency. * * * The right is built on the idea that everything is atomized and individualized; success or failure, it’s all about you and your hard work (or cranial dimensions). The left rejects this framing by suggesting social problems are systemic—that there are intertwining systems built into society to benefit the few at the expense of the many. The idea that these systems affect entire populations and supersede or suppress individual traits and actions is what produces the demands for a robust social safety net and a path for comfort and stability for all. This is a good thing. But thanks to the nuance-flattening properties of social media, a small quorum of terminally online leftists have internalized systemic thinking to the degree of no longer believing in individual agency. Their working assumption appears to be that everything is a logical reaction to an oppressive force. It’s not dissimilar to the overextension of therapy-thought that has convinced online self-care dead-enders that you’re never the asshole and never need to take responsibility. This is how you end up with a multiple-day pile-on dissecting whether it's "ableist" to give homemade chili to your neighbor. It would be difficult to exaggerate how much this sort of discourse alienates what we might call political normies: Folks who vote but who don't spent six or eight or ten hours a day engaging in the minutia of inside-baseball political culture. Making excuses for someone throwing rocks through a window or pissing all over a bus or a subway car or blasting their music for everyone to hear is a huge turnoff for people like this, who will hear these justifications and turn to someone – anyone – who will solve the problem of rock throwing and bus pissing. Often that means empowering Republicans whose solution is to simply imprison the people in question. Ezra Klein Is Mourning The End Of The CivilacrumKlein wants a simulation of politics without conflict. Ascendant fascism won’t allow that.Bad Faith TimesAndy Elrick It all comes from the same place of outsourcing responsibility to others. Using the concept of systemic oppression to excuse shitty, anti-social behavior, I'd argue, is infantilizing and insulting to people on the ground trying to build the liberal-left project that might get a chance to thrive post-Trump. I’m reminded of my friend Tim’s _post_ : > _“a lot of young leftists correctly realize the carceral state is bad but lack the creativity or stamina to engage with real solutions so sort of accidentally end up with ‘uh, the crime is good’ and then wonder why that makes people upset.”_ Tim is arguing in the context of anti-carceral leftism but the same attitude plays out in the discussions of American class and power dynamics more generally. The argument goes that anti-social behavior is merely a symptom of a bigger problem and worrying about it is but a distraction from solving the bigger problem of mass poverty and mental health, or worse, a way to further oppress marginalized people. But if focusing on the behavior at the expense of trying to solve the bigger issues is missing the forest for the trees, then ignoring anti-social behavior in favor of large-scale societal changes is effectively denial that individual trees exist at all. I'm not arguing that this represents a large faction of the American left, nor is it anything elected officials or organizers are claiming. It's little more than discourse about social media posts on a dying breed of text-based social media apps. But I think it's important for anyone interested in growing the coalition to be precise about these things, especially in an era when journalists and political tastemakers are as online as anyone, and any random poster can be platformed by right-wing media outlets as spokespeople for the Democratic Party. “We live in a society” – and its cousin phrase, “A better world is possible” – is often lobbed at the right as a criticism of its selfish worldview and inability to empathize with those in need. But it also suggests there is some sort of baseline social respect worth protecting; that the better, more equal world people are building together should make room for everyone. That, yes, people living on the street or in extreme poverty deserve mental health care and economic stability, but also that kids and women and the elderly should feel safe in public. These ideas are not inherently at odds; claiming so is effectively ceding the public masturbation/urination issue to the right wing, and we all know how they would prefer to solve it. _Follow Nick on Bluesky at_ @nickhasthoughts.com_._

If the left doesn't take anti-social behavior seriously, voters will turn to the right for solutions

Oops, missed that!

Lord knows my prior biases are deeply aligned with the conclusion of this paper but there are only N=18 people per group, they don't have the power to conclude any of this robustly

This is not the point, but it's also darkly hilarious to me that he managed to write eight paragraphs without once using a pronoun to refer to you.

Miscellanea: The War in Iran This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any spec…

Well, I am not sure what my analysis here is worth, but here is my 7,500 word primal scream of a military historian's take on the War in Iran.

My best summary: this war is dumb as hell.

acoup.blog/2026/03/25/m...

Funny thing about American mass media is how woke content is broadly popular, routinely pays for itself, and sometimes goes blockbuster, whereas right-wing content is a narrow niche that rarely reaches breakeven, never goes blockbuster, and usually requires immense subsidies for it to exist at all.

Sorry folks you’re going to have to be sincere and earnest and uncool and otherwise lame if you want to defeat fascism

Canvas Unrolls AI Teaching Agent The new AI agent aims to save faculty time on “low-value tasks,” but stops short of fully automating grading. But some experts worry that the rise of agentic AI could lead to a dead classroom, where c...

Strong recommendation to teaching faculty to just say no to this stuff, even if you are AI curious/enthusiastic. This is meant to reduce faculty autonomy and capture human labor with automation. You're selling out your future self and the profession as a whole. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

Thread. I'm begging people to realize how much we've already given in just the past 25 years. I'm old enough to remember when surveillance wasn't ubiquitous and before ICE or the TSA existed. There was even a time when the average cop wasn't kitted out for full on urban warfare.

spent a lot of the weekend reading stuff and i’m no expert but it sure feels like this week is poised to give off march 2020 vibes

TIL what the chicken joke is about

UX works through social relationships. AI tools are erasing them. Stakeholders want to vibe code and have designers clean up after them afterwards. But rather than helping with velocity, there is just more noise and more work for everyone.

Work is a social relationship. We create things together. This is especially true of UX design.

AI's value proposition is freedom from relationships.

So when designers champion AI tools, we are not making ourselves layoff-proof. We are reinforcing a system that frames us as unnecessary friction.

An incredible resource
#statssky

It really drives home to me how it's so good for mental health to do challenging things (with appropriate support). Success is often secondary!

Kid said to me in the middle "why is this so terrifying and so fun at the same time?" 😍

I hope he remembers this next time he doubts himself.

I just took the 10yo on a really challenging ropes course up in the trees. The combo of physical exertion and adrenaline reminds me of much of what I miss about rugby, but the best part was seeing my neurodivergent, anxious kid face his fears and learn that he could do something terrifying and hard.

When Jon Haidt Called Me a Cheater Science, Snark, and the Moral Mind

Entertaining and interesting post by @kurtjgray.bsky.social on how science works using his own research on moral psychology in contrast to @jonathanhaidt.bsky.social's work.

people being horrible assholes online is not in fact justification for succumbing to rank bigotry of any kind, and it's nuts how many people seem to think it is.

if you're willing to become a bigot because people were Mean Online, i think you already were one.