‘When the government replaces a New Zealand public servant with AI, what really happens is this: money that used to be paid to someone living in Wellington, Lower Hutt or Palmerston North gets paid instead to a tech giant in California or Seattle’ newsroom.co.nz/2026/05/21/b...

Before we let AI run the public service, we need to know the full impact

New Zealand is badly under-prepared for mass deployment of AI in the public sector - and the latest Budget measures are being made without safeguards, writes Professor Alexandra Andhov

newsroom.co.nz

We all literally, LITERALLY just watched NASA fly four absolute all-stars the farthest any human has ever been from Earth and back flawlessly, and yet we're still continuously forced to pretend Musk's bullshit catastrophe factory is the future of human space exploration

Nash@radiodeadair.com · 2mo ago

Surprising no one, things did not in fact go according to plan.

“We’re told that if we don’t use #AI then we’ll get left behind, but what if we’d like to leave the AI boosters behind instead? It’s time to give a voice to those who don’t view AI as an inevitability but a liability.” #GenAI #TechEthics #RejectAI

Marisa Kabas@marisakabas.bsky.social · 3mo ago

NEW — My first true foray into AI haterdom is about how those of us not convinced by AI’s inevitability are a real constituency worthy of a voice. Give it a read:

Meanwhile, publishers are blocking the Internet Archive, a digital library, from archiving their journalism due to fears of "AI scraping." That's right -- the same papers selling their work to AI companies are blocking a nonprofit archive due to "fears of AI." (2/3) www.niemanlab.org/2026/05/more...

More than 340 local news outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism

McClatchy, Advance Local, Tribune Publishing and other major newspaper chains are restricting the nonprofit's archiving bots.

niemanlab.org

I don’t know what to tell you, man. I’m a medieval historian, and, in my field, if you don’t check your sources (and your sources’ sources) you are just asking to be taken for a ride by some bored 19th C. aristocratic English antiquarian with a penchant for inventing history.

Tech Bros are lyke "oh man do not go to college it ys too manye bookes - instead, just use generaciounal wealthe to create a startup that doth helpe companyes charge more for watir on hot dayes"

Resharing this essay I wrote for @creativecritical.bsky.social. When I wrote it, I thought it was a reflection on the past. I now see it was a guide to my future. creativecritical.net/why-im-no-lo...

Why I'm No Longer a Proper Academic - Creative-Critical

By Irina Dumitrescu. A talk given at the Creative Critical launch event at UCL's Institute for Advanced Studies in September 2022.

creativecritical.net

The Taoiseach wants consideration of nuclear. I made a programme that did that. Long story short: an Irish nuclear power plant wouldn’t generate any electricity until 2066 at the very earliest. Link at end of thread.

The Journal@thejournal.ie · 3mo ago

Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said Ireland should “consider seriously” the use of nuclear energy. Asked by reporters whether nuclear power should form part of Ireland’s long-term energy mix, Martin said the State should “explore all avenues”. jrnl.ie/7030692

"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould

X2Y@x2y.tech · 6mo ago

SAM ALTMAN: “People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model … But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart.”

I’m fucking horrified that folk 100s of years from now are going to refer to this period as the Trumpian Age or some shit and I’m gonna be lumped in with all the dumb extremist dicks. Solidarity with dead people from the 19th century who thought empire was for arseholes and now get called Victorians

U.S. President Donald Trump has fired all 24 members of the National Science Board, the body that oversees the National Science Foundation. https://scim.ag/4cxQWhl

Trump fires NSF's oversight board

Dismissal of the National Science Board is widely seen as latest move to erase NSF’s independence

scim.ag

When slavery was abolished in Jamaica in 1834, the following Irish surnames were present in the long list of compensated slave-owners: Barry, Bourke, Boyle, Brady, Brennan, Broderick, Buckley, Burke, Byrne, Carey, Carroll, Codd, Coleman, Collins, Conway, Corbett, Costello, Cowan, Creighton, Crowley

social media was a wonderful brain toilet for every random half thought you didn't want to bother real people with before they decided to move all of society and infrastructure and government inside of the toilet

Social media is no longer social. Most of it is passive viewing of videos and pictures from people we've never met. But we're still studying social media like it's 2010. We've entered the post-social media era — and research needs to catch up. osf.io/preprints/so... preprint w/ Richard Rogers

This is true for varoius forms of the beast that we're facing today: regardless of its different forms, what these new reactionary, authoritarian political movements and figures aim at is to replace the existing form of politics with a new one. This is a kind of action beyond formal persuasion.

Naomi Klein@naomiaklein.bsky.social · 4mo ago

"logic of Musk’s empire is total. X shapes the discourse. Grok automates it. Grokipedia rewrites the historical record. Starlink can deliver it all, everywhere, to everyone. Each layer reinforces the others. It’s not about winning arguments in the public sphere. It’s about building a replacement."

"logic of Musk’s empire is total. X shapes the discourse. Grok automates it. Grokipedia rewrites the historical record. Starlink can deliver it all, everywhere, to everyone. Each layer reinforces the others. It’s not about winning arguments in the public sphere. It’s about building a replacement."

Astra Taylor@astra.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Muskism by @bentarnoff.com and @quinnslobodian.com is now out. My endorsement: “A wholly original and insightful analysis that deserves to be read by the billions of people impacted by Musk’s pathological quest for power and wealth.”

"In the place of problem-solving technology, companies have jumped on successive bandwagons like NFTs, the metaverse, and LLMs. What these all have in common is that they are not built to really solve a market problem. They are built to make VCs and companies rich." Read more: buff.ly/Yu2AUFy

I wrote about why we should keep reading and writing www.irishtimes.com/life-style/p...

Patrick Freyne: Here’s why AI is making us dumber and more lonely

Writing forces people to resolve internal contradictions and confront their own bullshit. It’s why it’s hard. It’s why it’s beautiful

irishtimes.com

It's harder to measure but I feel like RFK Jnr shutting down funding for MRNA research is actually up there with DOGE cuts and this latest Iranian war as a contender for Most Evil Things Trump II has done. Accounted properly, this regime is really wracking up 20th-century-dictator kill counts imo.

Ignacio Gallup-Diaz@igallupd.bsky.social · 4mo ago

"Pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine shows lasting results in an early trial: Scientists caution that more research is needed, but nearly all of the patients who responded to the personalized vaccine are still alive six years later."

In the months leading up to the midterm elections, hundreds of accounts have emerged on social media featuring A.I.-generated pro-Trump influencers posting at a rapid pace. Several accounts have already amassed thousands followers. Some of the posts have more than half a million views.

Hundreds of Fake Pro-Trump Avatars Emerge on Social Media

The artificial-intelligence-generated fake influencers have surged on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube in an apparent bid to hook conservative voters.

nyti.ms

NEW: A cross-border investigation led by @investigate-europe.eu has revealed how industry lobbying is shaping data centre regulation in the EU. jrnl.ie/7013368

How Big Tech wrote secrecy into EU law to hide data centres’ environmental toll

A cross-border investigation has revealed how industry lobbying is shaping data centre regulation.

jrnl.ie

France is switching from Microsoft to Linux "We must become less reliant on American tools and regain control of our digital destiny. We can no longer accept that our data, our infrastructure, our strategic decisions depend on solutions whose rules, pricing, evolution, and risks we do not control."

As Hungary votes, would recommend this piece about how Viktor Orban has used public money to bankroll an international ultraconservative network - including Roger Scruton cafes and €10k a month for failed Reform candidate Matt Goodwin democracyforsale.substack.com/p/orbans-brits

What happens to Britain's radical right if Orbán loses?

Inside the money, power and patronage connecting Hungary and the British right

democracyforsale.substack.com

Without energy efficiency, the EU would need — and pay — 31% more for energy today. Since 2000, efficiency has removed 265 Mtoe of demand from the market entirely. The best protection against a price shock is not finding cheaper oil and gas. It's needing less of it.

i think people have forgotten that vance is quite possibly the least experienced person to *ever* serve as vice president of the united states

“The reality is that we don’t have any food security in Ireland because the vast majority of what we consume is imported and the vast majority of what we produce is exported” – Emma Howard, economist, Technological University Dublin. Another excellent article by @codohertynews.bsky.social

Fuel protests reveal flawed relationship between farms, fertilisers and food

Farmers have warned of food shortages but Ireland imports most of what it eats

irishtimes.com

Catherine Coxon@catherinecoxon.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Fuel protests reveal flawed relationship between farms, fertilisers and food www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2026...

I’ve managed to string together my thoughts through the rage this week, please read & share 💭✍🏼 #Spéirghorm #IrishPolitics #Fascism 🔗 tinyurl.com/wak45j7d

The only way to durably protect hauliers - and the economy - against fossil fuel shocks is to support them to electrify trucks. Sales of electric trucks in China outsold diesel trucks last December. So far this year, only one electric HVG was newly registered in Ireland. #fuelprotests #speirgorm

Europe should regulate Big Tech instead of banning kids from social media, Estonia says

Europe should regulate Big Tech instead of banning kids from social media, Estonia says

The European Union should focus on regulating large social media platforms instead of imposing bans for minors to use them, Estonia’s Education Minister Kristina Kallas said on Friday. Europe…

politico.eu