He turns around in the front seat and stabs a thick finger at the notebook that I had set aside. “Write this down,” he says. “No matter which way it goes—taking the Senate or the fall of democracy—whatever the eventuality, the work remains the same.” “You have to build things for people to access. You have to build the apparatus for change, even if no one else shows up. If you don’t build the movement, it won’t be there when the day for action comes. It’s thankless. People live their entire lives building something they may never see succeed. And […]

So is QAnon a religion? Awkward question, but it’s non-psychotic by definition. Still, it’s interesting, isn’t it? If social media makes a thousand people believe the same crazy thing, it’s not psychotic. If LLMs make a thousand people each believe a different crazy thing, that is psychotic. Is this a meaningful difference, or an accounting convention?

As an editor, I clearly can’t condone using AI to generate made-up pitches, especially if you plan on sending them to me. The last thing we need is more people adding to the growing fatberg of hallucinated slop that, day-by-day, makes up a larger and larger proportion of the internet (some reports suggest up to 90 per cent of new online content could be AI-generated by 2026, although this statistic could itself be AI-generated for all I know). But I do enjoy the irony that people put out of work by AI are turning to those same tools to re-enter […]

"It's so funny," several people said to me, "you were in a progressive city amongst conservatives, and then in a conservative state amongst progressives!" This kind of thinking is common in America in a way that still feels strange to me.

As Rob Saldin and I have argued, the closest analogue to Abundance is the Progressive movement of the early 20th century. Like Abundance, Progressivism covered a very wide range of ideological terrain.

“Setting aside the controversy regarding Dungeons & Dragons, people now claim that dark music and/or violent video games increase teen suicide, but it seems we haven’t learned our lesson because instead of saying, ‘All right, well, let’s look at these factors and take into account these probabilistic determinations,’ people jump right to a causal conclusion,” he said. “This is one example of a human tendency to ignore the whole fraction.”

The shorthand implication was that the United States was becoming a petrostate, or at least much more of one, while the Chinese were well on their way to becoming what futurists in Silicon Valley like to call “the world’s first electrostate.”

When you start to add up all the pieces of this equation—the tribalism, the humor, the hedonism, the rancor, and the jeopardy—it makes total sense that the Britain of 2025 has become so disturbingly proficient at gaming the online system. Because in an attention economy, what more compelling draw could there be than people with nothing to lose?

video games are so successful in this by creating an artificial world with idealized ontologies and user interfaces that allow you to “feel the feedback.” For cybernetics to be applicable beyond these artificial worlds to the world most people care about, the most effective media technology remains the baroque cyclical diagram.

But just because I doubt that these choices were motivated by politics doesn’t mean the detractors don’t have a point: something basic is being lost here. In both cases the companies have discarded character and context in an effort to streamline their identity. I have written previously about the often misguided penchant art directors have towards simplifying their brands. I suspect that the lion’s share of this tendency is simply following trends, and the current fashion in corporate design is simple, flat typography and short (often single-word) brand names. To the extent that someone actually gave this a thought, the […]

But for the 4,000+ who participated in the hunt, it was a reassurance that Mamdani’s candidacy isn’t the unprecedented threat that his opponents are trying to position him as.

“The whole media production effort and the campaign, more broadly, was like an antidote to doomscrolling,” DiMieri said. Despite being produced by a cohort familiar with the hellish trenches of Twitter, they understood that direct, hopeful messages played a lot better on modern video platforms like Instagram Reels,

If London has more fiscal autonomy and pays its own way, then government spending is no longer a north vs south fight – the central government can use its cash to invest in infrastructure in the north.

How real is your world? How do you know? Maybe it’s the gentle sway of leaves in the wind. Or the sound of crickets chirping at dusk. Or the softness of the light in the summer. Take a step back, blink. Turn your head to the side. Are you sure?

Outside of the lab, breeding garlic using true seeds is even younger. Dillon Haggerty, a Washington farmer who is growing his first season of seeds, said, “It’s not like it’s a common practice.” Ted Meredith echoed this, telling me that the biggest change he’d observed since he started writing about garlic was more awareness of TGS among small-scale growers.

“He doubted if this could be found unless the operator can transpose himself into the centre of gravity of the marionette,” writes Kleist. “In other words, the operator dances.” Doubling down, the dancer insists that the “last trace of human volition could be removed from the marionettes and their dance transferred entirely to the realm of mechanical forces,” gesturing towards an entirely automated form of dance that, if crafted to his precise specifications, would be something that “neither he nor any other skilled dancer of his time…could equal.” Here we are confronted with the reality that Freeka Tet’s AV puppetry […]

And so, the trap is also the safest bet. Keep the IP as similar as possible and just keep re-selling it. This worked for the opioids industry, so why not for entertainment?

Software engineering is unlike traditional engineering disciplines in that for most of its lifetime it's had the luxury of purely deterministic expectations. This is not true in nearly every other type of engineering.

Autocrats and authoritarians routinely distort or even disappear economic data. In a statistical twist on Hanlon’s razor, Britain is achieving a similar result not out of malice but incompetence.

“Stick a needle into the shiny bubble of the technical world’s received wisdom,” Ullman urged would-be coders. “Burst it.”