media literacy studies today should be akin to rhetoric classes in the past: an education in the tropes and structures that shape communication and so society

How to Do Soul-Craft with State Tools We’ve never before done what they call, in the scribal industry, a “crosspost” of someone else’s work.

a clear and useful observation about AI: it is externalizing attention in the way that writing previously externalized memory. "The risk of this second externalization [is the enclosure] of perception, memory, and desire themselves." www.the-hinternet.com/p/how-to-do-...

a screenshot of a google search for "nearest star" with a pop-up asking if you'd like to "see results closer to you?"

i don't think that'll make the result any more precise, but sure

I am literally crying laughing

insanely cool - the artemis II mission patch is reversible, and when the crew rounded the moon they flipped the patch to indicate they're coming back home

i'll never get on board with string theory on the principles of poor naming alone. where's the romance or the soul? what's that — you've discovered the Last Theory of Physics; the fundamental truth of all reality, and you're calling it... sticky tape hypothesis? get out of here

this is a tangent, but i think future evaluation of LLM "intelligence" needs to reckon with cyber exploits. yes, this is home turf for AI in many ways, but it requires a form of open-ended reasoning that is clearly beyond the more restrictive conceptions of AI capabilities
bsky.app/profile/simo...

claude mythos is particularly fond of mark fisher for unknown reasons - from the system card www-cdn.anthropic.com/53566bf5440a...

Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted? New interviews and closely guarded documents shed light on the persistent doubts about the head of OpenAI.

“He has two traits that are almost never seen in the same person. The first is a strong desire to please people, to be liked in any given interaction. The second is almost a sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.” www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

a brilliant combination of biography, art criticism, and essay; investigating the relationship between word and song, and awareness and performance. recitals of schubert's lieder draw on a strand of amateurism that transcends the techniques of professionals — some grace can only come from ignorance

"The gift was immense, the creative profusion unprecedented, the promise magnificent, the curtailment brutal." - an absolutely gorgeous piece on the life and lieder of Schubert. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

i like to imagine him idly swinging around a baseball bat in my peripheral vision when i feel distracted (like posting on bluesky oops)

me shouting at myself in my flat about my word count

Why So Many Control Rooms Were Seafoam Green The Color Theory Behind Industrial Seafoam Green

bethmathews.substack.com/p/why-so-man... a) amazing investigation of something you won't have consciously noticed but immediately realise is true and b) brilliant example of how game design is interaction design is safety design

i was in the eagle the other night and it was packed as usual, with groups waiting round the fringes for a central table to free up. when one did it started a chain reaction, like hermit crabs come together to trade shells, each group swapping up for slightly more space

have started listening to studio ghibli soundtracks when walking around these days and it's amazing how "Going to School In A Sunny Hillside Town" puts you in a better mood than placebo

I wrote about Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s Muskism for @theguardian.com —it’s a brilliant take on why we ought to focus on the hellish 21st century update on Fordism rather than the man himself.

I agree!

hah, absolutely right yeah. i made this comparison wayyy back in 2021 that AI will be used to extrude low-effort text that i think sort of still stands up www.theverge.com/22734662/ai-...

Had a great time speaking to @johnmerrick.bsky.social about THE ASSET CLASS for @the-breakdown.bsky.social - a publication i really love

yeah, absolutely same. and i worry that when i state my opinion that AI is not some intrinsic desecration of the writing process i am paving the way for those bad effects to take place...

"The Claude debate [...] also occluded something deeper: the human decisions that led to the killing of between 175 and 180 people, most of them girls between the ages of seven and 12. Someone decided to compress the kill chain. Someone decided that deliberation was latency."

AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying LLMs-gone-rogue dominated coverage, but had nothing to do with the targeting. Instead, it was choices made by human beings, over many years, that gave us this atrocity

a very good, troubling report on the Minab school bombing. the culprit was not AI, but an out-of-date database, whose provenance was obscured by a "simplifying" tech layer — a problem that AI will exacerbate www.theguardian.com/news/2026/ma...

a federal judge has halted the DoD's designation of anthropic as a supply chain risk, describing it as "likely both
contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious." full ruling here: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...; story here: www.nytimes.com/2026/03/26/t...

(it produces soulwork, but that is a matter of content not form)

i do understand that people are taking this stance as part of a wider argument. (they object to the labour implications of accepting AI text in all contexts (as do I), and appeals to "sacred" human practices is a useful weapon in this fight.) but i just think writing is craft, not soulwork

there's something about people treating writing as this sacred practice that's despoiled by any contact with machines that doesn't sit right with me. whether or not AI can make useful edits/etc is another question altogether (it has limited applications in my experience)

i love giving dogs silent, imploring looks in public

look at this gorgeous cover - the kerning, the colour, the oval! such simplicity and so well balanced

I reviewed Matt Goodwin’s new book for the New Statesman.

Spoiler: it’s worse than you could ever imagine