I see we've reached the point in this particular summer of extremes where we are now having to BLOW UP rocks in drought-striken rivers to help send water towards gasping nuclear power plants www.theguardian.com/world/live/2...

South-eastern Europe faces heatwave energy crunch as Romania detonates Danube rock to increase water flow – Europe live

Explosives used to move a large rock and let more water flow to cool nuclear power plant

theguardian.com

What if instead of starting substacks in twenty-fucking-twenty-six people learned to give one iota of a fuck about whether they want to associate themselves with nazis.

"Microsoft warns that consumers aren't buying enough of the thing they don't want."

The Irish Times@irishtimes.com · 7mo ago

AI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warns

So, ok, a thing about telling yr audience "i use AI for my info gathering/research but then I look over it and fix any errors" is that you unfortunately told me youve outsourced your knowledge base on this subject to the machine, and therefore I have no reason to believe you CAN catch those errors

It’s really starting to grind me down

DeDOGEd

Quinn Slobodian@quinnslobodian.com · last wk.

And it arrived

UX Designers: You just told Product Managers to do that? I did not know we could do that.

Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani@mayor.nyc.gov · last wk.

Uber Eats and DoorDash hid tip buttons and set default tips below 10%. As a result, tips for delivery workers fell 79%.  In January, we made these corporations change their apps — and in the past six months, we've put $104 million back in delivery workers' pockets.  This is only the beginning.

Billionaires being unafraid to say things like this publicly is a major indicator of how bad things have gotten

Rachel Gilmore@rachelgilmore.bsky.social · last wk.

Very cool that Shopify’s CEO thinks the poor should have far less of a vote than the rich. Still worth that ad read money, folks?

Financialisation of UK Higher Ed. & functional stupidity The higher education sector across the anglophone parts of the world, amongst others, is in continuing crisis. At present that crisis is most visible in the UK through the proposed, and implemented, redundancy programmes, real-terms cuts to…

Financialisation of UK Higher Ed. & functional stupidity

The higher education sector across the anglophone parts of the world, amongst others, is in continuing crisis. At present that crisis is most visible in the UK through the proposed, and implemented, redundancy programmes, real-terms cuts to overall investment in research and ongoing (at present - annual) national level pay disputes between the largest academic trade union and the employers group…

samkinsley.com

The social media manager desperate here to avoid Betteridge's Law of Headlines by going with 'the catch is...'

MIT Technology Review@technologyreview.com · 2w ago

After three years of record-­breaking heat and another scorcher underway, air-conditioning isn’t going anywhere. Feeling the heat, scientists and startups are hoping to amp up solid-­state cooling. The catch is whether it can match the efficiency of traditional AC.

the only thing more depressing than American legacy media is the Australian press gallery

Greg Jericho@grogsgamut.bsky.social · 2w ago

No politician other than Hanson has had a longer, cruiser run than Joyce by the media forgiving his incompetence and actual behaviour as "he's unvarnished, he's a maverick..."

what you need to understand about the tech industry today is that if you buy an asset when it is worth $1 and sell it when it's worth $100, you make $99 for doing nothing and the entire tech industry is built around manufacturing the conditions for this to happen that is the product they build now

Futurism@futurism.com · 2w ago

It's a bloodbath.

It's always funny to me how people equate LLMs to other, less understood things. We don't know how neurons make consciousness, but we absolutely know how LLMs work. They are not a black box. They are intricately designed, often public white boxes. There's no consciousness because we can look at it.

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ@olivia.science · 2w ago

Many, and especially he, love to do that. So glad others see it too. More here from me on this including many more collected examples in the appendix: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

breachmedia.ca/a-notorious-...

A notorious consulting firm is selling austerity. Canada’s universities are buying ⋆ The Breach

The Nous Group, an Australian consulting firm, has raked in millions for “fixing” universities in financial freefall. Their solution? Corporatization

breachmedia.ca

Marco Rubio: "You fellas don’t want ta listen to these goddamn reds. Troublemakers—they’ll get you in trouble... Might be a good idear to go... we got to clean out this camp. An’ if it gets around that you got reds out here—why, somebody might git hurt." [Grapes of Wrath, Penguin, p264]

Defuturing

Dr. Jeroen W.P. Wijnendaele@drdragases.bsky.social · 3w ago

"[N]early 4,000 academic posts in social sciences, humanities and the arts have been axed in one year alone. In the 12 months to December 2024, just under 3,000 social sciences, 820 humanities and 240 arts jobs went. All but 110 were in non-Russell Group universities, reducing student choice..."

Unhelpfully Literate. Maladaptively literate.

julie muncy@julie.radiantarray.io · 3w ago

i continue to maintain that, while education has clearly objectively suffered, people are regularly reading more than they ever have in all of human history. just not, y'know. *books.* we're not illiterate-- we're literate but weird. a new thing.

“There’s nothing you can do about it. That’s progress, it’s the future.” No, that's *power*. This stuff is being rammed down our throats by people with a financial interest in us swallowing the slurry. Don't pretend this is providence or the hand of god.

Is Slavoj Zizek still around?

Catherine Rampell@crampell.bsky.social · 3w ago

We’ve opened the strait that was never closed, ceasing a ceasefire for a war that was never a war, stopping Iran from charging tolls because tolls are illegal, all so Trump can charge his *own* tolls because *his* tolls are legal. This will hurt affordability which is a hoax anyway

$21bn investment is a bullshit figure that won’t generate actual jobs of economic activity that actually improves lives. Tell them to fuck off www.afr.com/politics/fed...

Anthropic tells Chalmers: $21b investment hinges on copyright

Chief executive Dario Amodei met with Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese when AI giant Anthropic launched in Australia in April.

afr.com

Listening to story about LLM-assisted math problem-solving and thinking about how LLMs work best with restricted (smaller vocab, specified meanings) languages – e.g., coding, but also powerpointing, uni admissions essaying, etc), suggesting mathematics are just types of restricted languages.

But the U.S. is nowhere close to setting the global research agenda anymore, and it’s starting to show. People in other countries don’t take it for granted that American scholarship matters anymore. English as a lingua franca at global conferences is on seriously shaky ground.

Every UX designer knows how much users LOVE when all their shit moves around for no reason

The Verge@theverge.com · 3mo ago

Taco Bell is experimenting with an AI-driven menu board, which will use the technology to “dynamically change the layout, content, and visuals on a car-by-car basis.” Read more from @emroth08.bsky.social:

Critics of hylomorphism seem never to have actually made a physical object; form can be imposed on material - that's what the violence of tools allow. A craftsperson is someone with the skill to work non-violently and so allow a material's forms to manifest.

"A redundancy programme among senior managers must be part of any solution to the UK’s higher education crisis." johnheathershaw.substack.com/p/the-crisis...

The Crisis in Britain’s Universities

The cuts that have been proposed at the University of Exeter demonstrate the crisis of purpose in Britain’s universities. Should not universities also be places to prepare for "eternal dwellings"?

johnheathershaw.substack.com

Falling house prices = improving housing affordability

Ned Resnikoff@resnikoff.bsky.social · last mo.

New for PUBLIC COMMENT: If the realtors are unhappy, that's a sign that your city may be doing something right on housing policy publiccomment.blog/p/falling-ho...

University of Wollongong hearings at ICAC today: consultant Tanya Diesel got a lucrative contract with the University despite a close prior business relationship with Chancellor Michael Still. She even invited him to her poetry reading ...

The (non)sense of entitlement of the self anointed Big 4! Headline says it all Thanks @thesaturdaypaper.com.au & @barbarapocock.bsky.social

Once again confirming my general assumption that the dumbest people you know (ABC senior management) are the ones most into A.I.

Crikey@crikey.com.au · last mo.

The ABC will roll out Claude AI by Anthropic across the organisation, according to an internal announcement sent to staff this week. www.crikey.com.au/2026/06/26/a...

Gambling-maxxing and Scam-maxxing: Zuckerberg's defuturing contributions to the world. What an awful human being.

rat king 🐀 👑 @mikeisaac.bsky.social · last mo.

more news: Mark Zuckerberg is telling lieutenants to pursue partnerships with Polymarket and Kalshi with Meta's new prediction market app called Arena, per sources Meta is targeting 18-34 year old users with a goal of 100 million regular "predictors" www.nytimes.com/2026/06/26/t...