Led directly to the famous little green chairs in Bryant Park. 🥰

I've always loved the research William Whyte did on how social spaces are affected by the control we have over seating arrangements. He put folding chairs in public squares and filmed people using them, discovering that practically everyone scoots a chair just a bit before sitting in it.

AI as a Fascist Artifact (This is a bit of a merger of two talks I recently gave about fascism and AI. One was in German at the Cables Of Resistance conference, one in English at the Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy. I added some shots of the slides I used as a structure for the text which […]

In which I argue that "AI" as we understand it today is a structurally fascist artifact.

https://tante.cc/2026/04/21/ai-as-a-fascist-artifact/

ok I need naming suggestions for the bluesky effect where a platform's hostility to a part of its userbase only makes that part stronger.

For example the "AI Hater" label has created a cultural touchstone of *good people*

🤝

Uh-oh. Do we need a new version of @magnets.eurosky.social’s brilliant observation about how climate change will manifest?

In a surreal twist, people are now doubting footage that is both very real and very close to home—a result of AI imagery poisoning the waters:
www.tickaroo.com/e/GCRysAwNeu...

The difference is that one uses an infinitesimal amount of energy and runs your own computer and the other requires an connection to a server farm drawing the power requirement of a small county. A host of negative externalities aside, it just does not scale in a healthy way.

I haven't had a long enough breath to talk about how AI is ruining the open web. API after API I used to use is closing - literally because paying the $$$ required to feed these impersonation machines is prohibitive.

The whole web is built on a primary grace: that the people visiting you are trustworthy. It costs a little something for me to serve my webpage to everyone who goes there. When the number of scrapers outnumbers the number of humans by an order of magnitude, this grace is fragile.

The cyberpunk future is gigabit fibre on one side of the road in my little coastal Otago village, penguins and sea lions on the other.

This is wild. (For those unfamiliar with NZ geography, this storm seems to have deluged the precise boundary of the CBD of the nation's second largest city and NOWHERE ELSE.)

77mm in one hour in Berhampore. That’s just an incomprehensible rain intensity anywhere at any time, let alone in Wellington in Autumn. We used to use 7mm an hour as a threshold for “heavy rain”, and this was more than 10 times that.

In Jersey it doesn’t matter. You can wander into any diner on any Route across the entire state and you’ll get the exact same mirrored walls and etched glass dividers. Cake and pie counter. Bottomless coffee. Open 24 hours. You don’t even need to open a menu b/c you already know what’s on it.

Thanks for bringing that article to my attention. I've been having a lot of convos with folks lately about bringing our 1997-era web skills (minimal code, maximal performance, works everywhere for everyone) back into fashion to combat careless bloatware. (Hoo boy do I have stories.)

tumblr: poppy-pipopapo: "no smart appliances in this house. absolute fucking moron appliances only. my toaster is there to make bread hot not to tweet what time I ate breakfast or whatever the fuck" poppy-pipopapo:"don't need my goddamn microwave to snitch to the nsa" memoryshards: "if i am somehow forced to own a smart appliance (likely due to lack of availability) i will figure out how to take the computer out and make it dumb" poppy-pipopapo: "lobotomize your coffeemaker"

Yup. Have repeated, many (many) times, the sleep-walk into power strategy of (many in) the left was (very) high risk.

A lower risk strategy required a cohesive, progressive, unified policy platform put to Aotearoa. Sadly, none is to be seen. Sigh😢.

ganeshnana.substack.com/p/government...

I visited Library Field with my son today.

It was marvelous to wander the grounds and to hear about the ways people are thinking around very cool question:

What does a library looks like when it is also a forest?

libraryfield.org

Meanwhile, in the Deep South…

It isn't obscure in library circles, and it should be obvious, but it does seem to confuse a lot of people when I note that a bad economy always sees a spike in virtually every library use statistic.

My early Twitter feed was mostly people in my field (libraries and museums) talking about innovations, experiments, & live-tweeting conferences. I had a good handle on the vibe of the sector from that alone. (Aware that most of the reasons it went away is a *society* issue, not a SM one, tho.)

Yeah, people talk about how Mackenzie Scott is not a "good" billionaire because if she was, she wouldn't be a billionaire anymore. And like 99.9% of the time that is true.

But we also built a system where you can't actually give your money away fast enough to avoid how fast it is growing right now!

not even joking i am so sick of the cringing apologetic way democrats have come to behave about anything remotely left of center. give me what i want and fucking smile about it dammit

AI is profoundly unpopular. A recent NBC News poll found that among 18-34 year-olds, AI's net favorability rating is -44. *Negative 44*. Those are basically serial killer numbers. It's not much better among women 18-49. (Men over 50 and upper class are the only ones who like AI, and just barely.)

Not here.

For #30DayChartChallenge day 15, the topic is correlation. So with discussion "what even is US consumer confidence", and local stuff, here's a graph I made in 2019- for the supposed leading economic indicator of Business Confidence, NZ business confidence is least correlated to the NZ economy.

you shouldn’t learn about bands from shady TikTok manipulation, you should learn about bands by hanging out with a girl you like but are also extremely afraid of

While I love all things NZ Libraries, this reads like the opening scene-setter of a future true-crime podcast…

I gave my kids tiny transistor radios (a tech they had never encountered before!) just before a 4 hour road trip and we did not hear from them ONCE.

Dunedin: If your voting papers haven't arrived, don't panic. If your enrolment details are up to date, you should have them by the middle of next week.

If not - or if you still need to enrol / update your info - you can still turn up and vote in person at the DCC office in the Octagon.