Sameer Vasta

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.

Contemporary Arabic scholars, artists, writers, thinkers, technologists, teachers, leaders, etc., all exist and do remarkable work. For RFK Jr to assert otherwise is a mark of his own ignorance, prejudice, and political calculations. Don’t participate in any of them

my election night hot take is that a bunch of the progressives who won big had such a history of community organizing and knew how to mobilize a deep bench of volunteers, organizing matters so much and you can get started organizing literally anything. talk to people face to face, get organized

If you're in line to be mad at Doug Ford for outlawing municipal ranked ballots STAY IN LINE

Voted!

Hundred Rabbits is an artist collective that documents low-tech solutions with the hope of building a more resilient future. We live and work aboard a sailboat in remote parts of the world to learn more about how technology degrades beyond the shores of the western world: 100r.co/site/about.h...

My six-year-old daughter is trying to get me to explain the plot of You Can See Everything to her, and frankly, I can’t even describe it to myself after watching it.

10:1 student-teacher ratio, free food, later start times (and free childcare), triple the chances to play and move, no grades till high school, well-paid teachers and aides. Offer tutoring and quiet library time as needed. Now you have twice as many kids who can focus, so you can try some things.

Give Amanda Seyfried an Oscar.

I wrote about the influence credit cards have on the restaurant industry, and how it increasingly feels like if you don't have the right card, you can't get into the cool restaurants (and how swipe fees contribute to the fact that you can't afford it anyway) www.weareravenous.com/restaurant-c...

What if the standard career ladder is a driver of authoritarianism? https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/forcing-and-detouring

If you live in Canada and want to help with public health data collection, sign up to be a flu watcher: public.cnphi-rcrsp.ca/fluWatcher/r... It takes about 30 seconds every week and you’re contributing to better public health data in the country.

Wish someone would release patches for my vulnerabilities

a good soup makes you feel like everything's right in the world. to be clear though, it's not. the soup lies.

This is fantastic: a mash-up of Ray Parker Jr.’s “Ghostbusters” with a dozen other '80s songs: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Iyu...

Soon, our apple bags will be empty. www.inthemargins.ca/apple-pickin...

I haven’t checked the stats for #ldnont, but I the sentiment is the same for this city too. We need more leaders advocating for safer streets.

This is why I say I'm "a big fan of being a big fan" of things — it's good for the people that make things, and it's good for your soul, too!

Here’s what’s going on. Baby boomers bought houses for cheap and then spent decades showing up to meetings demanding nothing else could be built in their neighborhoods so that their houses would see exponential increases in value, and now they don’t want that value taxed.

I watched the first ten seconds and closed it bc the guy was annoying and then it crossed my timeline again from a different source so I was like OKAY FINE and y’all it is WORTH it

Whole family got our flu shots today so I’m feeling pretty good about that.

New blog post! 👨‍💻 “I hoped the system would have had more capacity for institutional reform than it has.” (on the launch of Digital Transformation Canada) sboots.ca/2026/10/14/h...

The internet has revealed to us that a.) people all around us passionately believe the goofiest, most nonsensical and sometimes obviously harmful things, and that b.) we are collectively unable to deal with this knowledge except by making each nonsensical thing absolutely everyone's problem.

first draft of the less computer handbook is done :) lesscomputer.ca

Sam Altman said people are just gonna have to die in order to implement AI. In the very same week, Anthropic claimed it’s a human rights violation to be mean to the computer. These people need to be held accountable. They think lines of code are a person with rights but living people are debris.

Anyone who sells you a tool that promises to outsource the work of your relationships, or the loving tasks of connecting to our friends and family, is someone who is trying to rob you of your own humanity. For god's sake. Say no to this. Say no to all of it.

It's telling that men would rather try to invent tech to replace humans' role in caregiving than step up as equal partners in parenting. Telling, that is, in that it shows how financial capitalism and patriarchy work together to dissuade men from doing "unprofitable" labor, like the work of care.

It’s extremely demoralizing to have known how much all these guys sucked for literally decades now and still watch them get richer and richer and more and more powerful. I don’t know how to describe what that’s done to my view of whether there’s anything about this country worth saving.

I feel like we don’t talk about millennials in particular, hitting our 40s - in earlier generations many of us would be reaching the peak of our careers, but because of disaster after disaster, locust after locust eating our industries, many of us are on our 3rd or 4th fresh start.

If you change your UI to place the AI button exactly where the most used button in your entire app was, I wish you not just unending gastrointestinal distress, but to stub your little toe at least once a day, and to get a splinter under your fingernail at least once a week

Got this month’s issue of the Byron Villager, and for the umpteenth time (basically since we moved to this neighborhood) there isn’t a single person of color in the magazine: not in the features, in the profiles, in the masthead or writers, or even in the ads. #ldnont

These mini essays about challenging our knee-jerk use of computation (in the context of government, democracy, culture) from @biancawylie.com are concise, thought-provoking reads. Waiting in line? Skip your doom-scroll and read one of these instead. Then think and discuss (in-person maybe?)

This is your occasional reminder that generative "AI" in particular could have been developed on public domain materials and/or licensed and compensated works but the major players intentionally, methodically and systemically chose to steal labor from working creative folks instead

Disembodied voice in the Shoppers Drug Mart— owned by the Westons— tells me to consult their A.I. doctor for advice b4 seeing pharmacist. Valuing tech over humans and pushing a dangerous robotic nihilism. I’d suggest shopping elsewhere.

Sad news everyone. Our beloved friend the computer has now become a hated enemy

Make friends with "unproductive" conversations. You can start a meeting with a statement about needing unproductive time to build community together, or for the need to model what it means to unwind the expectations of productivity. lesscomputer.ca/direct-the-c...

The operational backbone of Canadian government & academia exists on Microsoft Google AWS infrastructure but instead of a serious conversation about building foundations for public interest digital infra we are much more fixated on the hot shiny AI toys

The "AI is coming for jobs" narrative contributes to a scarcity mindset that destroys worker solidarity. I think we can look at anti-trust, tax policy, regulation, consumer protection, labor rights, and rights to housing, healthcare, childcare, and transportation without mentioning "AI" at all.

we fucked up bigtime when the internet slipped from the utopian promise of being able to connect with ANYone into the hellscape of being connected to EVERYone

Hey! This Friday, come join me and Hillary Hartley, co-founder of 18F, the US government's first digital service, former Deputy Minister and Chief Digital Officer for the province of Ontario when we chat about, uh, how people work. It'll be great. Register here: calendly.com/verylittlegr...

I gave a talk last week about tech billionaires (we really don't like them) and how to fight them (labour organizing, it's always labour organizing). Come take a 9-minute break from producing shareholder value and watch! Thanks to @thewalrus.ca for inviting me for #WalrusTalks 🍁