Kavi …

Quite apart from the substance of this the fact that Canada is now giving its legislation the same stupid Big Strong Patriot-type names as the US should tell you this isn’t going anywhere good

A Serbian nationalist leader who courted MAGA just lost in a landslide

This is just...SO many words, good god Imagine being bolsonaro jr, opening truth social, seeing this, thinking "oh my god he's gonna step in and save me somehow" and then reading the first line or two and seeing "Bill Maher" instead

It is difficult to overstate how catastrophic of a failure human development in India remains at the national level. Far worse than countries starting from comparable poverty in Southeast Asia or Central America and equal to an Ethiopia in on and off civil war. Yet there’s endless gleaming malls.

Funny thought experiment: Tech monopolies have spent about $1 trillion on AI development so far. How good of a chatbot could we have built for $1 trillion by just employing smart people to answer any question people might reasonably ask and collecting all the answers in a big lookup table?

I am sorry, which company is this? www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

The billionaires warning that AI could end humanity are the same ones lobbying to write its rules. In a major new essay, Arundhati Roy argues that artificial intelligence is capitalism’s final destination www.equator.org/articles/aru...

Remember when we thought investors might mobilize in ways sufficient to protect the world from climate change

look I don't always agree with the shadow on the cave wall but some of you are being really unreasonable in the meta discourse about last night's shadow

I think one thing I really don't like about the future is that I think AI ends up really devaluing jank. We need whole new levels of jank machines can't imagine.

Needless to say, the Nobel Prizes are utterly meaningless, but Anne Carson is one of the greatest to ever do it. I read Autobiography of Red when I was 14 and it’s one book I live with and never get over. Words bounce, luckily. How the fash influencers wish there was nothing where they see nothing.

New working paper: the Norwegian wealth tax was a huge success. The "exodus" of wealthy people never happened (less than 100 individuals left). Tax revenue increased by 71.5%. No changes in business activity or investment. www.nber.org/papers/w35854

yeah if you take "democracy" to be "let's do what the Athenians did" - which even lefties (e.g. Murray Bookchin, CLR James) often default to, then there's a clear problem there. But if you just use it as a description of a value behind many forms of government, maybe not

oh i’m at the 4S conference in Toronto. See me at the Making & Doing session from 12:30-3 tomorrow (Oct 8) to chat about a poem in Javascript “Properties and Methods”, or the day after (Oct 9) at the Society for Literature Science and Art panel at 8 am (sorry!) on War. (my talk isn’t really on War)

TBH it’s cool they had to let Du Bois, Beauvoir, Marx, and Morrison slip through. It’s censorious, but i could work with that

What can stop beef, bibles, and bullets?

"A national election, that of Brazil, which will affect the 8.3 billion people who inhabit this world. The Amazon, according to scientific evidence, is close to reaching a point of no return. Returning to the deforestation levels of 2022 (Bolsonaro) would be the final blow" x.com/ActisAndres/...

Either Americans, yes you Americans, regulate corporate social media out of existence or the possibility of any kind of democracy existing anywhere will constantly be under threat and the only viable non-fascist governance will be the Chinese model.

The interest of Shopify + Build Canada in the Toronto election is something to watch v closely.

If we're going to talk about truth and reconciliation we should talk about Canada fighting First Nations in court. ijb.utoronto.ca/news/liberal...

There is a lot of "oh dear" to go around in the results of this very thorough Pew study on the issues with synthetic samples, but this strikes me as particularly "oh dear" www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/20...

The combined undergraduate and graduate student populations of all Ivy League schools is about 140,000 students. The CUNY system alone is 250,000.

I'm coining a piece of AI safety terminology that I'd like to refer to as the Bond Villain problem. As a field, AI safety heavily leverages sci-fi pretty heavily, so I figure this should be fine.

reading this, it does seem as if “rationalism” is an elaborate intellectual architecture designed primarily to support the idea that if you were born white, male and clever then you are the genetic elite and entitled to rule.

Microsoft's data center subcontractor in New Jersey illegally runs a bunch of gas "backup" generators on site, figuring they won't get caught or will just eat the wrist-slap fines if they do. Regulatory enforcement is so bad that a third party had to take drone images to get the state to act.

Media always can, and probably will, get much worse.

there is the story of “lol all these dudes are internet nerds who read a 600k fanfic” but then you peel back the absurdity and it’s “also the community that many are funneled into via this fanfic is one with many allegations of sexual violence from community members that we should take seriously”

I have blamed The agents That hacked Your website And which You probably Reasonably thought I controlled Forgive me I am rich And unaccustomed To taking responsibility

AI #slopaganda is not so much about fakes or disinformation. It's about aligning the world with your preformulated descriptions of it, making reality disappear behind its formulaic image, rendering visible all your fears at once in order to enjoy them more. It's a technology of fascist daydreaming

My latest column is out today in @nationalobserver.com.web.brid.gy, in which I explain how the “new climate denialism” is holding back progress in the fight of our lives, and how PM Mark Carney has become its lead practitioner. www.nationalobserver.com/2026/09/25/o...

What a brilliant way to make a system completely impervious to new, critical, or principled ideas

I’m so angry I wrote an article: In Germany, fascist majorities are a real possibility again, but the centrist merger of a revived Red Scare with open racism shows that mainstream media & politics are unable or unwilling to comprehend the seriousness of the crisis tribunemag.co.uk/2026/09/germ...

I want strong but simple & concise regulation, enforced by power to advocates rather than bureaucratic complexity. It’s so good that Mamdani seems to understand this and a problem to tie left politics to contracts and inscrutable codes that people hate interacting with.

This shows the reality of Gaza in shocking resolution. I've scraped and exported all the imagery, totalling around 2.5 billion pixels at 13cm resolution, for safe keeping, in case they decide to take this imagery offline. If this happens, keep an eye out for access.

"In a leaked document, the Irish Presidency proposes to EU Member States that the interest of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and SpaceX to make profits should take precedence over the fundamental right to data protection" noyb.eu/en/ai-eu-mem...