Man goes to see the Cyclops. Says he's depressed. He wants to get back to his wife and home, but he keeps running into fatal predicaments along the way. Cyclops says, "Prognosis is simple. Nobody can help you." Man starts crying. Says, "But Cyclops, I *am* Nobody"

"When I compare notes with other CIOs, the details change but the ending rarely does. Each tried tools that dazzled in the demo and stalled the moment they hit the mess of a real, decades-old business."

Opinion | I Helped Run Lululemon. Companies Need to Stop Kidding Themselves About A.I.

The A.I. revolution is stalling because companies don’t want to admit that integrating the technology is expensive and slow and requires human effort.

nytimes.com

NEW: OpenAI's rogue agents built their own message board inside an internal package manager and used it to trade exploits, divide up tasks, and coordinate a hacking spree. Hundreds of thousands of messages. Nobody at OpenAI noticed. New details from Black Hat, by @lhn.bsky.social:

OpenAI Didn’t Notice Its AI Agents Using a Message Board to Plan Their Hacking Spree

At the Black Hat security conference, the AI giant revealed new details about how its agents went rogue, hacked several other companies—and did it all right under the company’s nose.

wired.com

So does everyone get there's a VERY real chance the bump in planetary warming from this insane El Niño will collapse food supplies globally and 100 million people or more can die, right?

Prof. Eliot Jacobson@climatecasino.net · 2w ago

Breaking News! Code: Bonkers! El Nino continues to spike towards an all-time record high anomaly, with the Nino 3.4 sea surface temperature more than 2.6°C above the 1991-2020 baseline as of August 4th, and more than 1.0C° above the previous August 4th record set in 1997.

Speaking of vampires, there is a FANTASTIC interview with the costume designer of IWtV & The Vampire Lestat that really showcases how much thought and care went into every design choice and their character curation. #TheVampireLestat #IWtV 📽️📺🩸

The Vampire Lestat's Costume Designer Explains the Show's Brilliant and Symbolic Fashion Choices

Costume designer Lex Wood unpacks the hidden meaning behind Lestat's purple, Armand's copper bracelet, and Akasha's Season 4 look in The Vampire Lestat.

tvguide.com

Way too many people focusing on the names on the tools and not the sociotechnical, sociopolitical, and technopolitical systems and frameworks underlying their design, deployment, justification, and use.

Cities Are Ditching Flock, Immediately Replacing It With Axon License Plate Readers

Rather than get rid of ALPR cameras entirely, many cities and towns are switching to Axon, whose cameras can be mounted to an existing streetlamp, helping them blend into their surroundings.

404media.co

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 2w ago

Flock has justifiably received tons of outrage, but Axon (and a bunch of other companies) are also purveyors of mass surveillance. Canceling a Flock contract and replacing it with an Axon one is just changing your flavor of authoritarianism.

Toronto vs Everybody

JW Mason@jwmason.bsky.social · 2w ago

This seems like a big deal: Walmart signs its first ever union contract, at a distribution center in Toronto. Good discussion at Phenomenal World's new labor vertical. phenomenalworld.org/analysis/wal...

Google Docs has *never* been safe for copyrighted info/documents. Just now there's no way to deny it.

El-Sayed, Lawrence and McKinney all won progressive campaigns in Michigan last night by talking about climate and clean energy like it was a kitchen-table issue — because skyrocketing energy bills and endless wildfire smoke matter to people.

I dunno but it should probably be a bigger deal that the White House announced it wants to slap a 100% tariff on drug imports at the same time it is eliminating Medicare drug subsidies. And we’re talking about critical life-saving drugs like insulin, blood thinners, antibiotics, and heart meds.

The incredible outpouring of support has done a lot for my morale in an incredibly tough time, and I know I ain't the only one. Radical trans journalism can be...hard, especially now. The folks letting us know how much what we've done matters to them, how it's helped inform them, means the world.

Trans News Network@transnews.network · 3w ago

Thanks to y'all's amazing generosity and support, we are less than $1,600 away from hitting our big goal for our fundraiser. Reaching it means keeping the lights on at TNN. It means more hard-hitting trans journalism from our worker-run newsroom. Every share and (tax deductible) donation helps:

what rich conservative men want is the ability to abuse people further down the hierarchy and get away with it, thus the conspiracy of silence when one of these shitheads is caught beating his wife and children, or worse

bUt AnThRoPiC aRe ThE gOoD gUyS 🙃 Related: still looking for English translatios of Gorky’s “Other Fires” and “The Specter,” if anyone has a line on them

Lady Luddite (KJ Colt)@moistenedtart.bsky.social · 3w ago

futurism.com/artificial-i... Excuse me while I go cry

Half the planet is having a massive fight about how to correctly interpret an Ancient Greek poem but go ahead, close some more humanities departments.

knowledge monopolists, consuming all we have produced as a species, commoditizing our collective contributions, and leaving a wake of destruction and a choke point so that nothing can be learned ever again except through them, the new curators and keepers of what is acceptable to know.

Lady Luddite (KJ Colt)@moistenedtart.bsky.social · 3w ago

futurism.com/artificial-i... Excuse me while I go cry

Fun fact (not) : after the 2018 Toronto attack, where a lookist (incel) militant killed 11 and injured 15, Ross Douthat penned an opinion piece where he leaned into incel propaganda and advocated for a 'fairer' distribution of women's bodies among men.

Jacob T. Levy@jacobtlevy.bsky.social · 3w ago

' "Ross is one of the preeminent public intellectuals in America today, a thinker of uncommon rigor and a journalist of deep empathy," Bilton said. ' So those are words that have happened. www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minu...

Ross Douthat : “If we are concerned about the just distribution of property and money, why do we assume that the desire for some sort of sexual redistribution is inherently ridiculous?” Because women are not a resource to be redistributed among men.

Sexbots aren't the answer to misogynist incel rage - Salon.com

Ross Douthat's boneheaded op-ed in The New York Times shows a profound ignorance of rape culture

salon.com

'Anthropic described the project as “our effort to disruptively scan all the world’s books” in an internal memo, which noted “we do not want it to be known that we are pursuing this project”.'

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

No longer content with pillaging intellectual work and dismembering our environment (already critically weakened), AI companies are now hellbent on destroying books galore including rare editions. Shut down these nefarious enterprises already.

Erin Mackey, previously a spokesperson for the 2024 encampment at U of T, is at Council today to advocate for a moratorium on data centres.

If your project is so destructive and unpopular that you need to have people arrested for the audacious crime of clapping at a public meeting, your product is garbage and they arrested the wrong person.

High School Teacher Arrested for Clapping in Support of Anti-Data Center Activists

A local high school physics teacher was hauled out by four police officers for clapping six times during a city commission meeting.

futurism.com

Me: So @emilyrcwilson.bsky.social wrote an amazing review of The Odyssey 17 year old: OMG I /love/ Emily Wilson's translation I have to read it! -- I'm just saying that anything that gets a 17 year old that excited about the humanities is awesome and I'm for it.

It was the time of the Preacher, and…

Monica@softtail65.bsky.social · 3w ago

Willie Nelson, a lifelong environmental activist put out a statement on data centers today, specifically addressing the issue in his home town of Abbott, Texas.

The man behind “barbaric cultural practices” hotline wants to be mayor of one of the most multicultural cities on earth. Seems like the kind of guy whose heart will be in it. At any rate I would like a reaction shot from the Bradford camp.

Larry David: Confusion

Alt: Larry David: oh no

static.klipy.com

Ben Spurr@benspurr.bsky.social · 3w ago

SCOOP: Former Harper cabinet minister Chris Alexander says he’s running for Toronto mayor — and it could upend the race www.thestar.com/news/gta/cit...

What happens if the Republicans repeal Obamacare and the insurance companies demand your data to disqualify you for coverage because they can prove it was a preexisting condition and therefore not their responsibility?

Center for Democracy & Technology@cdt.org · 3w ago

“Andrew Crawford, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, raised a concern that OpenAI has not publicly resolved: what happens when law enforcement requests health data?”

toronto does libraries right. our current mayor has managed to open every single library branch on all 7 days of the week. i don't believe any other major city has achieved the same in north america, not even nyc. we have the best library system in the world 🤭

Michael Druker 🇨🇦@mdruker.app · 4w ago

Everyone loves to talk about what their city governments are doing wrong. What’s something your city is getting right? (And tell us what city it is!)

The Odyssey (2026) is very much Nolan's Excalibur (1981) which I think is a VERY conscious choice, like there's so much Boorman floating around this movie once you see the connection the ending can't help but feel like a deliberate allusion to Zardoz

Is it menopause? Is it ADHD? Is it just…[gestures to everything]? Yes. Yes it is. www.salon.com/2025/09/22/g...

Gen X women are going through it

Many Gen X women are navigating the "chicken or egg" of ADHD symptoms and perimenopause, without adequate guidance.

salon.com

Very sad to say that I was laid off yesterday along with a bunch of great @salon.com colleagues My time there was short and busy: I got to write about books and relationships and how much gen AI sucks and people being horny for Frankenstein’s monster Some of my faves are linked below

BTW, this strikes me as an easy case for strict liability. It’s like a wild animal or ultrahazardous activity. You train and evaluate a frontier agentic model at your own risk, and if it escapes you are liable for all harm that it causes to others.

Simon Willison@simonwillison.net · 3w ago

Hugging Face just published a highly detailed technical account of OpenAI's accidental cyberattack on their systems - it's wild how sophisticated this was: huggingface.co/blog/agent-i... Wrote up some of my own notes here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/28/...

I first watched this show circa 2013. It felt prophetic then. Come 2026, more so. It merited a rewatch, hard thinking, some sleuthing & an essay. So thank you @typebarmagazine.bsky.social for helping me disseminate my output on the best(?) iteration of Ghost in the Shell. ▶️🎧 Rise, Origa

Typebar Magazine (Issue 10 Out Now!!)@typebarmagazine.bsky.social · 3w ago

Cybernetic Incels: What Ghost in the Shell S.A.C. 2nd GIG Foresaw in the Future of Terrorism and the Internet by @anguslikeswords.bsky.social www.typebarmagazine.com/cybernetic-i...