Let's refer to this El Niño locally as Minns in honour of @chrisminnsmp.bsky.social - as in 'This Christmas, watch out for devastating bushfires as a result of this unprecedented Minns.' www.theguardian.com/environment/...

‘Jaw-dropping’ El Niño bursts through temperature record months before peak

‘Godzilla-level’ phenomenon is supercharging the climate crisis and will have a huge impact on communities across the world

theguardian.com

“Unity's New AI Thing Is A Soulless Joke” https://aftermath.site/unity-spark-ai-google/ > I find it both astounding yet also entirely expected that we are now years into the AI bubble and everything coming out of it still looks like complete shit.

Unity's New AI Thing Is A Soulless Joke

'We made Unity Spark for the gamers who have spent a thousand hours inside a genre and know exactly what’s missing' OK man

aftermath.site

Amongst its various other impacts, the Coalition’s migration policy announced today will lead to thousands of job losses in higher education if implemented. Maybe that’s even something they’re pleased about

The Kouk makes a great point here. Productivity in human services is extremely hard to measure; the class sizes for teachers example is a great one. Universities have been cramming more students into their classes for years — learning has declined — is that better ‘productivity’?

Independent Australia@independentaus.bsky.social · 5d ago

Australia’s productivity debate overlooks a fundamental flaw: across much of the economy, productivity simply cannot be reliably measured. Australia’s productivity problem may be impossible to measure ~ @thekouk.bsky.social buff.ly/xZ509Fb

The planning contradiction is impressively neat: it accepts that 809Mt of GHG emissions will worsen global warming. It says leaving the coal in the ground would make a difference …then approves the mine anyway. Climate science only matters up until the decision. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The green light for the largest coalmine in NSW history is shocking proof that our governance systems are betraying Australians | Georgina Woods

There is no greater treachery than this failure to face up to the climate crisis. How can we now fend off despair?

theguardian.com

The "Head On" example is incredible given that it was a homeopathic product that was mostly made of wax and didn't do anything

Jason Koebler@jasonkoebler.bsky.social · last wk.

i see arguments like this sometimes and ... what's the thing. what is this "everyday annoying task" that an AI could actually do and that you could trust it to not totally fuck up? i cannot imagine the things. and tech/robots have made a lot of tasks more efficient but there's always more shit

August was the hottest month in global history and yet, NSW has just approved the biggest coal mine expansion ever proposed in the state. It is scandalous that Australia is leading negotiations at global climate talks, including in the Pacific next week.

Approval of biggest coal project in NSW planning commission’s history described as ‘infamous betrayal’

Independent Planning Commission says climate change impacts from Hunter Valley project will be ‘outweighed’ by economic benefits

theguardian.com

“We’re losing billions and we’re making a product that’s an existential threat to humanity” is a hell of sales pitch www.ft.com/content/c768...

Anthropic warns of ‘existential risks to humanity’ in IPO prospectus

Long-awaited S1 filing reports Claude maker lost $8bn last year on $4.6bn in revenue

ft.com

Google earth has updated its satellite images of Gaza. The destruction is almost incomprehensible.

The idea of a "tech industry" has always relied on "computer" being a special kind of medium, akin to alchemy. And if tech demands to be king, AI hype has now elevated LLMs to a king of kings. But the solipsism has hit a dead end. The only way forward is to recognize that computers are not special.

LLMs are just normal technology. But tech is just a normal medium.

The more we focus on a particular technology, the more we lose sight of what normal people actually care about.

productpicnic.beehiiv.com

Breaking News! Code: FUBAR!!! The preliminary Nino 3.4 sea-surface temperature for September 25th was 29.822°C. This breaks the previous highest temperature ever recorded in the region of 29.815°C, set on November 17th, 2015. The Climate 8-ball is exiting, stage right.

We all had this 'I didn't do the reading' twerp in some sophomore class that was only enjoyable after he stopped turning up.

Christopher Webb@cwebbonline.com · 2w ago

This is actually hell, right?

The algo era really should be understood as a permanently manipulated form of “discourse” where your responses are genuine but arise from manufactured conditions, we are usually reacting to something somebody paid for us to react to and your attention matters far more than what you say.

gotta say there’s something almost poetic about Trump incentivizing less fuel efficient vehicles as the Iran war keeps pushing up the price of gas

Amee Vanderpool@girlsreallyrule.bsky.social · 2w ago

Trump announces he will sharply scale back fuel-efficiency rules for new cars and light trucks, gutting one of the government’s most significant efforts to reduce gasoline consumption and speed the country’s shift to electric vehicles.

"we can't uninvent this" we can't uninvent my car either but it still doesn't go anywhere without gas in the tank

Anthony Moser@anthonymoser.com · 9mo ago

"ai" is not a genie that can't be put back in a bottle, it's a pillar of smoke that dissipates unless you keep burning money

Buried at the end of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's NYT interview: the single most terrible yet somehow confusingly appropriate metaphor for fossil-fuelled AI I have ever seen ketanjoshi.co/2026/09/16/n...

I had a few thoughts on why techbros always say these embarrassing, weird things https://tante.cc/2026/09/24/the-test/

The Test

Jensen Huang, the NVIDIA CEO and wearer of the most midlife crisis looking leather jackets in the world, was on Ezra Klein’s podcast. Now I don’t really want you do go through all of what was being said in that recording/writeup. It’s painful. You feel your mental capabilities decaying with every minute of listening … […]

tante.cc

Imagine if all the evidence for climate change was "a bunch of guys on a website thought very hard about it and agreed it was very bad and might happen" instead of empiricism.

"I belong to a cult. Someone did some research that undermines the core tenets of my cult and came up with a catchy phrase that makes it harder to recruit more people to my cult. This makes me sad."

Good to see this finally get coverage in my old paper. This is the same mob who campaigned against me, but it wasn’t sufficiently newsworthy then.

The Cathy Wilcox@cathywilcox.bsky.social · 3w ago

www.smh.com.au/business/com...

Was invited to a conference session on AI and Design that appeared to have been designed by a so-called-AI as it was difficult to parse, but was themed 'dramaturgy,' so I sent this low production value 5min video in place of the one they extruded for/of me vimeo.com/1228457444

If and only if Brechtian genAI

Short invited presentation to 'Always Question AI'

vimeo.com

people are always saying anti-AI arguments don’t understand the full nuances of the technology. which is correct. but only because it stole everyone’s work, exists solely to get you fired, has made the entire internet unusable and has been forced on everyone without consent

www.effort.news/irregular

A Single Firm is Behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta Hacking Scandals — Effort

The Israeli Effective Altruist firm Irregular caused unsecured AI models to hack real targets.

effort.news

"We have created a super-intelligence. What can we do to save humanity from certain destruction." "I know. We'll hire Accenture."

Are CEOs lying more now than previous decades or has the job always been to lie (to customers, employees, suppliers, investors)? If they are, is that a consequence of recent Finacialisation, or a decimation of (investigative) journalism, or just following hyper-politics' lead?

In thisa piece for @thenewworldmag.bsky.social I express the wish for a better level of public discourse around AI that doesn't leave us hanging on every word of the alleged tech gurus. www.thenewworld.co.uk/philip-ball-...

Apocalyptic AI fantasies are a stupid, annoying distraction from its real problems

The people who work in AI are not gurus and most of their predictions have been wrong. Working in the industry makes them less reliable commentators, not more

thenewworld.co.uk

I have only seen cis-men opining that AI is going to kill us all. Has anyone seen anyone with a different lifeworld professing that apocalyptic belief?

Any research on pharmaceutical usage by AI bros? Are we sure their AI-is-going-to-kill-us-all is not being induced by junior programmers overdoing gummies, elder founders microdosing psychedelics, and investors incoherently amphetamined?

Slow is still within Inevitable and Powerful. Do not have truck with Slow. The reframe should be: Your so-called-AI technology does not work and there are more significant things we should be investing in developing. anthonymoser.github.io/writing/rhet...