Google, Microsoft pay creators $500,000 and more to promote AI:

Other artificial intelligence players, including Anthropic and Meta, are also hiring social media creators to post sponsored content on apps like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and even LinkedIn.

Obviously this doesn’t confirm that Hank Green specifically was paid by Anthropic. But considering the pro-Anthroopic, AI culty videos he made recently, it’d be nice for him to confirm he wasn’t paid.

Anthropic AI safety researcher quits with ‘world in peril’ warning:

“The world is in peril. And not just from AI, or bioweapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment,” Sharma wrote.

The last person to pull this “the world is in peril, I’m leaving” resignation stunt was Geoffrey Hinton from Google. He now works for an AI academic non-profit funded by Google. Sort of like a weird golden parachute?

At this point I can’t tell if this is a public relations stunt, AI psychosis, or some mixture of both.

My only fear is the lengths they’ll go to in order to convince us that they created a god.

Lots of cool websites in this curated list: Weeknote #1987 • Robb Knight

ICE knows you blocked them on Bluesky

Homeland Security Demands Social Media Sites Reveal Names Behind Anti-ICE Posts:

Enforcement by sending tech companies legal requests for the names, email addresses, telephone numbers and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize the agency.

The timing of all this doesn’t look great for Bluesky and Mike Masnic. Bluesky, the Public Good Corporation, launches “Find Your Friends” in December 2025.

Then, ICE joins Bluesky, the decentralized social media platform, a month later. Bluesky verifies ICE, which triggers a mass-blocking by Bluesky members. ICE is now the third most blocked account on Bluesky.

DHS now has a public list of everyone who blocked ICE. Not to mention the firehose of everyone’s activity data. But don’t worry, DHS super duper promises it won’t collect the personal information of Bluesky’s users in a special Bluesky-specific privacy policy.

Why is DHS going out of its way to reassure Bluesky’s user-base by carving out a special privacy policy? What does ICE give a shit about Bluesky’s public relations?

And Bluesky’s response? Nothing. Because you can’t be accountable for people’s private data if you kill the concept of privacy.

Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I’m switching back to Android:

I randomly tried Android again for a few months last spring. Using a functioning keyboard was revelatory.

Having just written a thousand-word essay exclusively on my iPhone, I’m with this person. Typing on iOS is excruciating. It’s not just the autocorrect either. It’s layers of muscle memory over two decades, tapping a millimeter off target because Apple keeps changing the keyboard. It’s all a mess.

My niece and I made an album cover for our new band Nova Band. We make pop music and we love cotton candy.

We’re back, baby. 🇵🇷

Melt the ICE MN – Bring the Heat, Melt the ICE:

1. ICE out of Minnesota now
2. Release all detainees
3. Statewide eviction moratorium by March 1
4. Drop all charges against ICE resisters Amnesty for all immigrants
5. Abolish ICE, DHS, and the police

The Centralized Social Media Debacle:

Opting out is not virtue. It’s alignment.

And alignment, at this stage, feels like the most humane choice available.

I’m dying. What I think happened here is dude is using AI to make automated posts, and the AI grabbed an AI generated photo of an all-Asian cast of Friends to make a barely coherent business strategy analogy.

I refuse to believe that LinkedIn is a real place.

Found on a cross street. I don’t know how to feel about the message. I hope Jess is okay.

This is my favorite sweatshirt. I bought it back in 2016. That last three years I wasn’t able to fit into it. It turns out, that gained weight was bad for my health. Today, I fit into my fav sweatshirt. It’s a small win but I feel good.

A jar of jam, a pile of crackers, two heaps of goat cheese, and a zero sugar root beer, rest on a wooden cutting board.

This is the lunch of a man who just spent an hour crafting an email. He is frazzled. He is painfully aware of how insignificant that sixty minutes was in the greater cosmos. He wonders if Corporate America is just some sick joke by a greater entity pulling the strings of the universe for a laugh. It must be.

Goat cheese and crackers, though. What a treat.

Wore these for eight years. I’d like to mend this hole, but (lol hole but). There are others forming, too. 😭

I fear it’s As The Heel Goes, So Goes The Sock.

Someone should write a book about how technocrats use decorum, gossip, blackballing, and other social strings on the Social Web to silence the people calling them out for corrupt behavior.

I’d read that book.

Today I wore a red hoodie shirt with a green undershirt, blue shorts, and mismatched socks. It was so bad it became cool again (that’s what I told myself.)

Can We Have New Bad Things?:

Second, as Tooze asks, “Why can’t we have new bad things?” Why is it so difficult for progressives to consider that we might be in a genuinely new moment?

We’re all guilty of this, of finding historical context. It helps. But perhaps it’s an overused trope. I think it’s comes from, of all places, Rachel Maddow lol. She’s the queen of historical context.

The Hater’s Guide to Oracle:

We are setting up for a very funny and chaotic situation where Oracle simply runs out of money, and in the process blows up Larry Ellison’s fortune.

Oh, my sweet summer child. American billionaires don’t lose their fortunes. Our wealthy citizens enjoy a socialist system where their losses are subsidized by the rest of us.

Substack released a new feature that allows writers to customize their Substack page using an HTML/CSS editor, so that their custom design shows up in the Substack app.

It’s feature chum. It’s just another way to keep us tethered to the Substack platform; to “the cloud.”

The Internet-of-things (IoT) marked the first crack in my rose-colored glasses in which I viewed big California tech companies. It was the first time I was like, wait a minute. This isn’t about giving us something useful. It’s about something else (I have that same feeling about AI).

The internet-of-things and Substack’s new feature (and AI and blockchain, and crypto, and–) are related in that they are catalysts for big tech’s cloud strategy. It’s spaghetti thrown at the wall. Some of the pasta stuck, some slid down to a heaping pile of dead hype.

The sync-and-share business model was pioneered by Dropbox and went mainstream with iCloud. I pay them to keep my MacBook, iPhone and iPad synced and up-to-date. They ensure I don’t lose my files.

It’s a good service. I use it to swap writing on my phone to my laptop to my phone again. What a time to be alive.

But, of course, it wasn’t enough for big tech. My little ten or so bucks per month isn’t buying anyone a second yacht.

A decade ago, sync-and-share revealed what is now the end game for technocrats— 1. Build and enforce that tether from device to data center by any means possible. 2. Get us addicted to remote computational power 3. Dial up the egress fees to 11. Then, voilà. We got the Comcast(s) of compute.

We’re still hovering around step 2. Flirting with 3.

Reduce the things you do that strengthens that tether.

The rambling below is a placeholder potentially for a more thoughtful review.

I bought the Tangzu Wan’er earbuds because I was curious how they sound. I needed a cheap pair of wired buds, and these were recommended by Snazzy Labs.

The audio sounds terrible. It’s like listening through a tin can. I messed with the EQ and still, really poor quality. But there’s a caveat.

I think the adapter I had to use because I have an iPhone (RIP headphone jack), isn’t working properly and that could be causing the audio to sound like shit.

Anyway, twenty-five bucks or so for these “chi-fi” earbuds is, I guess, not a bad deal. I’m hoping they sound better plugged into a device directly.

📖 Reading: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

Just about a chapter in, and whew.

I want to rewatch All Light, Everywhere, a documentary about the surveillance state, but I can’t bring myself to do it. It’s so relevant to the times, but it’s a difficult watch because it illuminates (heh) our situation so well.

Anyway, watch it if you’re looking for something to watch tonight. I think it’s on Tubi.

Only the latest stage of capitalism can we get such innovations as the Gummy Fried Chicken Candy Combo Meal

ICE Expands Power of Agents to Arrest People Without Warrants:

The change expands the ability of lower-level ICE agents to carry out sweeps rounding up people they encounter and suspect are undocumented immigrants, rather than targeted enforcement operations in which they set out, warrant in hand, to arrest a specific person.

🎉 It’s time to play:

They’re pretty comfortable with eating in front of me now. I’m about 4 feet from them.