Firefox 148 Now Available With The New AI Controls, AI Kill Switches Firefox 148 introduces granular AI controls and a global "AI kill switch" that allows users to disable or selectively manage the browser's AI features. Phoronix reports: Among the AI features that can be toggled individually are around translations, image alt text in the Firefox PDF viewer, tab gro...

Firefox 148 Now Available With The New AI Controls, AI Kill Switches

news.slashdot.org/story/26/02/24/0054207/f...

DuckDuckGo poll says 90% responders don't want AI In a recent DuckDuckGo poll, nine out of tenresponders said they don't want "AI" features.

www.pcworld.com/article/3044...

Heads up: new X/Twitter Terms of Service update on Jan 15th asserts rights to your work. Delete old posts.

"You grant us a worldwide, royalty-free license, with the right to sublicense, to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display, upload, download, and distribute..."

News of me: I’m retiring. I’m 67 years old and I’ve worked full-time at Tor Books for 37 of those years. Today, January 5, is my official last day. This has been in train for several months, and while it hasn’t been a secret for some time, I haven’t mentioned it on social media until now. (1/3)

Literally a publication for eight-year olds 40 years ago

Five behaviours that can count as sexual harassment under Thailand’s new law Thailand’s amended Criminal Code, effective December 30, 2025, broadens sexual harassment to cover words, gestures, stalking and online acts, with tougher penalties.

We can all start writing this into our original works and FanFictions. 🙏

Five behaviours that can count as sexual harassment under Thailand’s new law
www.nationthailand.com/news/general...

If you were at the No Kings events, please wear a mask for the next few days.

Covid is not over.

You can infect others before you feel symptomatic.

People are losing their healthcare. They’re losing their food assistance. They’re losing housing.

We need to protect each other.

There's nothing wrong with you.
There's something wrong with the world.
Keep being weird.
Keep howling against the storm.
Keep writing erotic stories about moon ghosts.
Keep being a spark in the darkness, and hope for a better tomorrow.

Science Under Siege

Many thanks @msnbc.com for highlighting our new book #ScienceUnderSiege @michaelemann.bsky.social @peterhotezmdphd.bsky.social @publicaffairs1796.bsky.social

Anthropic to pay authors $1.5 billion to settle lawsuit over pirated chatbot training material Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit by book authors who say the company took pirated copies of their works to train its chatbot.

apnews.com/article/anth...

Why should I write better when a machine can do it for me? Because actually no one can do it for you, because your voice is unique among all the people on earth. Siri never petted a horse's neck. Alexa has never been ghosted by the captain of the football team. But you have lived, your heart is beating, you have suffered, and you have something important to say. It's a human's job, to use words, and whatever job you give to a machine, that part of your brain goes dark. Maybe it's worth it when it comes to remembering phone numbers and directions, but when that part of your brain that uses words goes dark, that's a vast area that's very close to your soul. Don't let some internet platform convince you that what you have to say and create isn't worthwhile. Words are the echo of your soul. Honing that echo matters.

this iconic advertising copywriter named Kathy Hepinstall Parks died over the weekend and I wanted to share something from her website I thought Bluesky would like

You ‘run the gamut’ and ‘run the gauntlet.’

You don’t ‘run the gambit.’

gamut = entire range or series

gauntlet = severe trial

Gambit = Alpha-level mutant who can convert potential energy to kinetic energy

What has it been like shifting from reporter to media executive, managing a staff instead of filing stories yourself? And do you write any of the jokes at The Onion? Or are you strictly managing the business? The Onion’s process is deeply, beautifully inefficient. Every day, our writers take 150 headlines into a physical writers room in Chicago and whittle them down to maybe one or two. These people throw away the funniest sentence I will ever write in my life six times by noon every weekday. The point of taking over this place was to preserve this process, which I learned this week is almost assuredly more rigorous than The New York Times. That’s why I don’t touch any of it. I just try to get more people to pay attention to the output, and get our work into different mediums and new places. We brought back the paper, reinvested in the Onion News Network, bought a full page ad in The Times for something they were going to write anyway. The role is to make the world-class work they’re already doing seep into everyday American life more frequently, and that’s working. You actually can do this, you know. You can just try to highlight the beauty of things you like and not try to vampirically extract value at every step. If people get one thing out of this whole Q&A, I hope it’s that. You do not have to make an A.I. version of your own employees that operate at 1.5x speed but produce purely iterative garbage, especially in media and journalism. People don’t actually want that shit. Make a good, human thing and people will bend over backwards to support you. This is a valid way to run a company.

Also talked about The Onion being inefficient on purpose.

www.status.news/p/the-onion-...

Putting on my Publisher hat, I have an announcement:

Augur Press will be open to submissions of Novellas & Novelettes from both agented and unagented writers starting THIS WEEK!

It’s not open yet. But while we wait…

AMA about publishing with this fledgling small press.

Sorta like how the invention of vaults hurt the bank robbery business.

Why the FUCK would I pay actual human currency for what is essentially a text-to-speech kindle book? Why the FUCK would I ever want that?? THATS NOT THE POINT OF AN AUDIOBOOK.

I SURVIVED READING BANNED BOOKS ALL I GOT WAS SMARTER AND MORE EMPATHETIC

📚 ¿y tù? 📖

Writing With A Plan But Not A Map If you’ve ever met me in real life, you know I’m your girl in a crisis. In my bag I keep everything from Band-Aids to Benadryl, while my car has a first aid kit, ice packs, socks, sneakers, and din…

Discovery requires a willingness to get lost. Author Liz Michalski takes us along as she pushes her manuscript in the wrong direction, ultimately leading her to a better course, today at WU.

When reporting a larger feature, I use Google’s NotebookLM to organize my files. And my favorite is using custom GPT to give me synonyms for words I overuse.

THIS IS A THESAURUS. IT ALREADY EXISTED

Folks call your Senators now!! A ban on any state laws on GenAi for 10 YEARS is gonna do unthinkable harm!

For those of you wondering what to say here are two posts you can use to build your own script (use alt script to cut and paste)

Need to find your representatives? Here you go:
5calls.org

How Google forced publishers to accept AI scraping as price of appearing in search Court documents reveal Google considered giving publishers AI opt-out and rejected the idea.

Super, important report on how a monopolist has a different set of choices in how it uses your content. (I think it's from this exhibit which also caught my eyes in a big way - www.justice.gov/atr/media/13...) pressgazette.co.uk/platforms/ho...

Called it.

In case you're worried that you don't know where your story is leading you...

give me your typos. your messy drawings. your silly memes. your cringey joys. your little doodles. your rewrites. your second attempts. your better attempts. your years-in-the-making stunning beauties that make you sigh with contentment at having perfected them at last.

just give me works by humans

Free and fair access to information is one of the most important foundations of any functioning democracy.

This National Library Week, I stand with the IMLS and my friends at @authorsabb.bsky.social in support of the roles public libraries play in our communities.

#NationalLibraryWeek #RightToRead

Hey! If you like what Cory Booker is doing right now, call your senators and ask them to do the same (now and in the future). Find their info at ☎️ reps.fyi!

Thank you for this.

Where to buy sapphic books directly from authors and publishers. Shown is a shopping card full of books in all colors of the Pride flag

I put together a list of sapphic publishers and authors who sell books directly to readers.

Note: This list is meant to give readers more option; it's not a call for a blanket boycott of Amazon since that would mean boycotting many indie authors.

jae-fiction.com/where-to-buy...

Ursula K. Le Guin — Nominate a Book for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction

Nominations are now open for the 2025 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction—and anyone can nominate work for this $25,000 prize! We hope you'll nominate books you love that meet this year's criteria:

Court filings show Meta staffers discussed using copyrighted content for AI training | TechCrunch Court filings suggest that Meta staffers discussed using copyrighted materials to train Meta's AI models, including models in its Llama family.

So when do they have to pay the folks they stole from?

I mean, I'm not holding my breath...but accountability in times like these would be REALLY GOOD TO SEE IN ACTION.
techcrunch.com/2025/02/21/c...