"The new waterwheel they built to power the loom made the river undrinkable, and when the boss cut my hours in half, I couldn’t buy food anymore, which really made the whole rickets situation get out of hand. But that’s exactly the sort of time you need a laugh, right?"
We @thenarwhal.ca spent a month investigating what Doug Ford's conservation authority consolidation means for drinking water protections. 12 sources & a leaked doc reveal the system built to prvent another Walkerton crisis is in flux—and experts are worried.
thenarwhal.ca/ontario-sour... #onpoli
melt-water puddles
a toddler searching for frogs
or a dragon
#DailyHaikuPrompt (frog) #senryu #3lines #micropoetry
Established at our 48th Congress in 1986, World Writers’ Day honours the courage to write and the solidarity that protects it.
As writers face imprisonment, exile, censorship, and violence for speaking the truth, we stand with them and defend freedom of expression.
This looks so super fun - high drama and high camp you say?? Can’t wait to read this one!
“The narrative that we need big AI models—and quasi-infinite amounts of energy—tries to sell us the idea that this is the only kind of AI we need, and the only future that's possible,” says AI and sustainability researcher Sasha Luccioni. “But there are so many different, smaller and more efficient models that can be deployed for a fraction of the cost, both to people and the planet.” In a separate piece of research also published Monday, Luccioni and Yacine Jernite, head of sustainability at AI company Hugging Face, looked at the costs of training a wide variety of AI models, finding that massive proprietary models trained on access to vast amounts of data and energy aren’t the only option for powerful AI solutions. Often, smaller models perform just as well as the more expensive ones in AI application.
In the sections above, we showed that training and deployment costs across all of the categories we have surveyed — task and domain models, small and medium language models, and large open-weight and proprietary systems — vary by orders of magnitude. This report provides quantitative estimates of those cost to show that the majority of commercially and scientifically significant AI development does not require 9-figure training runs or exclusive access to data-center-scale infrastructure. Open science and open-source developers have demonstrated that models that are competitive on a wide range of benchmarks can be trained for costs that range from the low thousands to the low tens of millions of dollars, and that deployment can be as simple as running on a single GPU instance or on-device, or as scaled as paid API access. The gap between that reality and the narrative centered on frontier-scale systems is not merely technical; it has implications for who can build, audit, and govern AI.
Some coverage of our new report in @wired.com by @mollytaft.com!!!
Really want to highlight this new work from @sashamtl.bsky.social et al though: on the 'none of this has to be this bad' point -->>
www.wired.com/story/big-te...
“AI giant Anthropic ran a massive program called Project Panama where they spent tens of millions of dollars to hoover up used books, which they then sliced, scanned, and pulped.”
Congratulations!! 🎉🎉🎉
We Can't Believe We Have to Do This Live Coverage: Is Grok Still Being Used to Create Nonconsensual Sexual Images of Women and Girls? We're following whether Elon Musk and his companies, X and xAI, make any meaningful change to stem the tide of likely-illegal AI deepfakes on X — content that's being generated via Musk's own chatbot, Grok. Image: Elon Musk in front of the silhouette of an anonymous woman.
NEW: X/Twitters continue to freely use xAI's Grok to generate and disseminate nonconsensual explicit deepfakes of real women and underage girls.
Neither X nor xAI have taken meaningful action to fix the issue. So we're following that inaction live:
futurism.com/artificial-i...
You are painting a vision of a future in which teachers create lessons with "A.i.," students complete them with "A.i.," and teachers grade them with "A.i."
No learning takes place under this system.
The only benefactors of this system are the corporations being paid for the "A.i." products.
while i am not an academic i did see this coming and post about it on bluesky, which is why i am quoted in this article
“Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day.”
thank you for the outpouring of support!
those of us laid off from Teen Vogue yesterday are now sharing our GoFundMe to help us cover our emergency expenses now that we've lost our incomes, as we get back on our feet.
Very good @abigailboydmlc.bsky.social summary of the really, really significant data centre growth in New South Wales, Australia - something we can see directly contributing to sustaining the burning of coal in the state
www.instagram.com/reel/DQbKiv9...
Nearly 6 billion people live in the 101 countries that a recent study has identified as confronting a net decline in water supply — signaling enormous challenges for food production and a heightening risk of conflict and instability.
(Published July)
This only happens to you once
1. The intense and all-encompassing institutional and societal pushback seen in some countries against any intervention to mitigate the impacts of Covid-19, whether that be vaccines, or air filtration / purification, or masks, is not simply as a result of mandates or lockdowns.
A purple graphic for The Fiddle’s special Summer 2026 disability issue. At the top of the graphic is The Fiddlehead’s logo. Below is a purple image with two transparent light purple circles overlapping like a Venn diagram. On top of this, in white, is the work Revolution. Below is the text: call for submissions from disabled writers. Deadline November 30, 2025. Thefiddlehead.ca/revolution
Disability: The Revolution!
Special Issue Call for Submissions, Deadline November 30, 2025
If you identify as disabled and would like to answer this call, please submit! We would love to hear from you.
See the full call and instructions on how to submit here: thefiddlehead.ca/revolution
Congrats!! 🎉🎉🎉
‘The anti-vax movement isn’t simply a grassroots network of concerned parents. It’s an industry. … It operates on a simple premise: if you’re not vaccinating your kids, you need to protect them somehow, and here’s a bunch of things you can buy to do that.’
Excellent writing in @macleans.bsky.social
Congrats!! 🎉
For context that's a third the price the RIAA expected a single human to pay for just downloading 24 songs a decade ago (after cutting the ruling down from $1.5m, or $62,000 per song), and that's not adjusting for inflation:
NEW: “Remigration” and “mass deportations” is the new rallying cry of white nationalists. Experts say it’s a call for ethnic cleansing. A new Canadian group is trying to "normalize" the concept and get the Conservative Party of Canada to talk more about immigration.
www.antihate.ca/remigration_...
Similar survey underway now in Canada, for anyone who wants to weigh in:
openmedia.org/AI-survey-2025
“It would take you 723 years to delete enough emails to save the same amount of water in data centers as you could if you fixed your toilet”
“If someone deleted all their photos, the water they would save could support 2 blades of grass on their lawn”
Air Canada offered the pilots a 26% wage increase in the 1st year of their newest contract.
The flight attendants got an offer of an 8% increase in the 1st year.
In the entire 4-year deal Air Canada offered them, their wages won't go up by as much as the pilots' did in just 1 year.
