Jim Ray

My hottest AI take is that the executive class is petrified of labor and saw that whatever else LLMs are/aren't, they're fine labor-smashers + that a ton of ordinary people find the artificial hyper-complexity and scamminess of modern life and work so unbearable that they'll throw a god-box at it.

“Vacant Lot Condition” :(

this might rank as one of the most important outcomes of the night if it happens. would give dems the ability to begin to make north carolina a democracy

Pro-Lula Brazilians doing en masse digital organizing against the platforms is interesting. Basically took website/influencer growth hacking techniques—eg everyone go like/comment/share this, get the algorithm to pick it up—and applied them to electoral politics at a grand scale. Thread:

I’m not a political journalist, so was gladly surprised at the community I found here last night. To Americans anxious about the upcoming elections, a key thing we learned in Brazil that might help you: DO NOT engage with the far-right online. Don’t share rage bait. Amplify your people. Ignore them.

Hypothesis (which I need to verify with data): most saliant political misses for Kalshi & PolyMarket in 2025-6 tend to be the markets favoring right-wing candidates. Could the tight connection into right-wing information ecosystem bias biasing prices?

In his acceptance speech, Lula says he will work to regulate digital platforms in Brazil. “Digital crimes must be dealt with like real-life crimes.” This comes after Meta directly interfered with the Brazilian elections, favouring Flávio Bolsonaro.

Bluesky elders know that @lulaoficialbluesky.bsky.social was the first head of state on the platform!

Lula Goes HARD

Brazil’s results tonight are a big endorsement for the idea that every country should have a second “are you you sure about that” election a couple weeks after the first one for the important stuff

your yearly PSA: want to do something positive wrt the ecosystem while saving yourself a bunch of time and effort? skip the bagging and just rake leaves into a pile wherever convenient (bonus points if you do it under a tree). www.nps.gov/articles/000...

a 25 year old could not comprehend how bad the dining options were in the median American town in 1996

Just remembered I recorded a delightful chat with the even more delightful @danhon.com then promptly went on vacation and forgot to promote it so here you go www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sid...

A small grove of historic American chestnut trees has become the site of resistance against an AI data center in West Virginia. @samleecole.bsky.social has more. Read now: www.404media.co/west-virgini...

In between dodging CVEs and coming up random numbers other than “4” I missed the news that Facebook owes the state of New Mexico an entire year’s profit for doing the thing we’ve always known their entire business relies on. Forty-nine states to go! www.nytimes.com/2026/10/21/t...

A million North Carolinians have voted in this year’s election. One of them—just one!—cast a ballot from Antarctica. I found him. And I found out how he did it. www.ncrabbithole.com/p/one-person...

Oh well if the *Hoover Institution* thinks it's wrong to tax billionaires, well, I guess we should check in with the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers and the California Chamber of Commerce for independent confir www.sfchronicle.com/california/a...

Gonna sleep on it but I think I’ll end up canceling my order. Which is a real shame because the pencil already arrived!

CNBC reporter referencing Paris Marx during a Tesla Q3 earnings call let’s gooooo

80% 14-day churn on Muse? Sounds like a mobile game to me @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social www.garbageday.email/p/is-meta-s-...

Somewhere away from "We'll just win elections and make the big platforms behave!" and "All that matters is winning so we should just use whatever platform gets us the most eyes!" there has to be a recognition that Meta/TikTok/YouTube/X are permanent thumbs on the scale until we crush them.

For a decade now, otherwise smart reporters, columnists, analysts have tied themselves into knots trying to will their way into a reasonable understanding of what, to the rest of us, has been an obvious fact: Donald Trump is a fucking moron who ruins everything he touches

does the media ever—ever—ask republicans to disavow this open white supremacist?

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This year’s FFConf is shaping up to be genuinely unmissable. So …um, you know …don’t miss it: https://2026.ffconf.org/ I’ll see you there! 🔗 https://adactio.com/notes/22807

stowaway.live This is very cool. A live rendering of the view from any aircraft. Via the Dense Discovery newsletter (also worth subscribing to www.densediscovery.com/issues/411)

Late to this Bloomberg piece on Marc Andreessen. This is one of the key things. Andreessen is *angry* about how he has been treated, when any objective observer might note he has benefited enormously from the institutions he now purports to detest. www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

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Devoting your social time to platforms where you control your own account and your own data, is the only real long term solution to hating billionaires controlling their own platforms.

A WIP frontend is available at preview.gifdex.net now too 🩷 * Please note that moderation will still be applied to the WIP platform, and any restrictions will carry over to the final deployment. * Content posted must be SFW and not contain flickering imagery. NSFW is not permitted at this time

I have an essay in the November issue of The Nation about the Dem establishment class war on the youths, and by extension DSA and young progressives in general: www.thenation.com/article/poli...

New project for you all: I produced “Musk,” Alex Gibney’s extraordinary documentary, rolling out now.

You can't build a better internet if no one participates. And, so the people loudly announcing they're going back to X, strike me the same way that scabs crossing the picket line do: the rest of us our out here holding the line to create a better world. And you're just deciding "fuck it, too hard."

Any normal, non-sociopath sees how obviously broken housing in SF but it’s exactly what the hippie gentry have always wanted. Their constant complaining about tech yuppies is just part of their cynical anti-politics to hold on to a little bit of power and ruin where they live.

I would kill for these sweaters (the rest of the thread is also excellent)

I know a lot of people don't care, and only associate the feature with late stage Twitter, but I am PUMPED for "spaces" on here

The question of computer sentience has always been moot for me because for my entire computer using life these fuckers know when I have 120% more things to do than time to do them and pick that moment to utterly shit the bed. With. Out. Fail. They know, they've always known, and they hate us.

the October stream schedule for the Elon Take The Wheel livestream, including a killer group of guests and some special surprise news, drops in two hours get excited!

After 2024, the GOP (in no small part because they'd spent years huffing fumes on X) thought they had a generational mandate instead of accurately reading yet another razor thin election in a year that disfavored incumbents.

“Once everyone has…an ‘exceptionally capable personal agent,’ does anyone?” I’ve been saying this since the days of Waze routing everyone to the same shortcut, rendering it no longer a shortcut. Modern tech is obsessed with productizing these kinds of myopic “cheats.”

"The Birthday Party Piñata and the Freudian Death Drive: A Study in Collective Delusion"

Begging anyone else in any of our media or political institutions to achieve this baseline level of understanding of what’s actually warping our world.