Soft Rains Day. "Today is August 4, 2026, in the city of Allendale, California. Today is Mr. Featherstone's birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita's marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills." RIP Ray Bradbury, 1920-2012

I work at a public library. People who want to use AI seem to have no trouble doing so. People who don't want to use AI have a harder time. I crowdsourced and then finalized this document "How to disable or avoid intrusive AI" and then gave it a short URL: notoai.org Please pass along if it's useful

Our relationship to visual evidence is being profoundly disrupted by GenAI tools, which will impact how we know, what we can know, and what we think can be known about the world. A massive epistemological shift is upon us.

Faine Greenwood@faineg.bsky.social · 5d ago

I used to do some work on the ethical use of satellite and drone imagery for aid and disaster response, and it is genuinely hard to express in words what a dangerous, stupid thing Google is doing by making it easy to use GenAI to create faked satellite imagery:

The overwhelming right wing sentiment is that COVID was an engineered bioweapon that was also harmless. Trump overreacted to it by shutting down the country, then engineered a drive to create a vaccine that was the real bioweapon that killed millions, and it's Joe Biden's fault.

The epistemic crisis will be experienced as a series of short form videos of natiral disasters viewing on your phone until you are/aren't in one and a procedurally generated lie makes it impossible for people observing from afar to trust if the peril is real or hallucinated.

Albuquerque Journal@abqjournal.bsky.social · last wk.

Gallup officials say AI news outlet Prism McKinley County is publishing false and misleading stories during historic flooding.

Odysseus and his men landing on an island where they have to play basketball against the Harlem Globetrotters

*People need to understand the Gray Zone. The Gray Zone is the apotheosis of ethnonational modernity. If you love exclusive national borders, this is THE border *If you're not interested in it, it's very interested in you *It can go anywhere that smoke goes www.reuters.com/graphics/UKR...

Inside Ukraine’s Kill Zone

Drones now dominate the war in Ukraine. Fly through the front line’s deadly “kill zone” and discover how surveillance, kamikaze drones and new tactics are reshaping modern warfare. An immersive Reuter...

reuters.com

By adopting and perverting methods of agitation honed by labor unions, police exert a veto power over democracy.

How Cops Consolidated So Much Power Over Local Governments | Defector

Even before his historic election as New York City’s mayor in November 2025, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani had reportedly begun searching for “common ground” with the city’s rank-and-file…

defector.com

*Wildberries R Us

*There's no boots-on-the-ground, no color revolution, no seizing of city hall and radio stations *it's the methodical, unmanned destruction of circuitry and power sources, of electronics, components, surveillance, communications, space antennas, fuel and electrical power

*I don't wanna pick fights with Bluesky zealots pro-slop or antislop; I just already know what an AI-war looks like *It looks like Crimea today. No Internet, no electrical power, iffy water and food, blown-up bridges, maybe some ration-card QR-codes *Already here. Awaiting distribution

*What's going on right now is that the insupportable AI-Bubble is getting methodically replaced by an Armaments Bubble, and there's gonna be every kind of "AI-Productivity" there, too *The Long Hot Summer of AI is getting stale, there's a whole new set of arguments on the way

Like, Power Law gonna Power Law, but I still have trouble wrapping my head around that paying Shams $20m or whatever does better than the in-depth coverage of all 30 teams that you could pay for instead, especially when you can't get that coverage from the local paper anymore either.

Rodger Sherman@rodger.bsky.social · 2w ago

It sucks that ESPN is choosing to pay a small handful of personalities $50 million a year and cutting costs elsewhere. I’m sure they have data saying those guys move the needle but it feels like a long-term disaster to invest everything in 3-5 guys when you could fund a robust media ecosystem

It sucks that ESPN is choosing to pay a small handful of personalities $50 million a year and cutting costs elsewhere. I’m sure they have data saying those guys move the needle but it feels like a long-term disaster to invest everything in 3-5 guys when you could fund a robust media ecosystem

Awful Announcing@awfulannouncing.bsky.social · 2w ago

Trans girl baseball makes me a better woman:

Trans Girl Baseball Makes Me A Better Woman | Defector

Taking care to avoid the team-picking system of our schoolyard memories, Lilah Maravi divided us into two sides of about 20. It was a pleasant Sunday in June—Father’s Day—and we had gathered at our…

defector.com

the best day for the presidents of every R1 to hold a press conference screaming that higher ed is our second largest export and destroying it is economic sabotage and soft power detonation was Jan 21st 2025. the next best day is tomorrow.

Anna Kornbluh@annakornbluh.bsky.social · 2w ago

a bad thing is running a phd program with brilliant international students who must reckon with a volatile xenophobic saboteur government in fresh ways every day, no thank you, 0/10

davidlabaree.com/2025/09/29/e... I'm going to go with undivided (or at least much more loosely divided) time. Living mostly according to the natural rhythms and inclinations of our bodies & minds. Outside of monasteries & elites, the modern time system really only dates to the advent of railroads.

E.P. Thompson: Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism

This post is a tribute to a wonderful essay by the great British historian of working-class history, E. P. Thompson.  His classic work is The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1966.…

davidlabaree.com

Scott “bell beaker” Cave@hellabarnes.bsky.social · 3w ago

what is the reverse historical dorito? the thing from the past that would blow our minds in a positive way

Cuz what you got is what we need and all we do is dirty deeds…

NBC News@nbcnews.com · 4w ago

Several metallic objects were discovered on Forrest Beach, a small quiet coastal town in Queensland, the Australian Space Agency announces.

I have been thinking about writing about the end of Vannevar Bush’s postwar vision in “As We May Think” where science and technology serve the common good of humanity. The NSF & the Open Web are under deep risk, it’s not coincidental that it’s happening at the same time, & it’s not too late

Losing Google Search is not the loss of a public good - it’s the loss of a rent seeking extractor that enclosed our information & sold the story that it was providing a public good. But rebooting real public goods Google ate will not be easy.

Part of what makes me feel insane marinating in the AI discourse is that there really is a technological singularity in progress, and it's called unlimited cheap energy with greatly reduced externalities. It's just happening slower in the US because we're flirting with becoming a fascist petrostate.

Nicolas Fulghum@nicolasfulghum.bsky.social · 4w ago

Solar's sharp rise continues. As of April 2026, global solar capacity now exceeds 3 terawatt. 1 gigawatt → 1 terawatt: 20+ years 1 terawatt → 2 terawatt: 33 months 2 terawatt → 3 terawatt: 19 months

The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. We didn’t deserve to leave this WC with good national vibes, and we will not.

Some real old-school USMNT vibes tonight, you got to hand it to them

Just here to post this again like I do every year, not only because Douglass was one of the founding philosophers of American liberty but because I am so moved by the kids Frederick Douglass’ descendants deliver “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July”

‘What To The Slave Is The Fourth Of July?’: Descendants Read Frederick Douglass' Speech | NPR

YouTube video by NPR

youtu.be

Andrés Cantor: “Stand up, ladies and gentlemen, and applaud them both, victors and vanquished…”

Cape Verde defeats Argentina via a 2-3 loss in extra time

Absolutely insane that Cape Verde — a country of 500,000 — played Spain, Uruguay and Argentina…and lost to none of them in regulation. Easily one of the greatest performances in World Cup history.

I don’t want this point to be lost in the discourse. Going digital-only means inequity for people who cannot afford internet or constantly purchasing new games. Libraries provide opportunities for people to experience games they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford, and that will be lost.

ErikT@erik45824291.bsky.social · last mo.

My child loves going to the library and checking out a new video game every week. Going digital only eliminates libraries as a way people can access games.

I say it often but once again: By granting them borrowing privileges and protecting their privacy, public libraries afford children a form of civic standing and respect that has few parallels in our “free” society, which mostly treats children as chattel. Vociferously defend public libraries. 📚