John

[Kyle 🚄 @KyleTrainEmoji]

PICARD: Data, shields up

DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy.

[camera shakes]

WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE DECKS

DATA: Here's what happened: you told me to raise shields, and I didn't

[Daniel Boguslaw @DRBoguslaw]

BREAKING: The federal government is targeting Anti-AI and data center activists. They are formulating a new threat category: anti-tech violent extremism. Full article in replies.

[Ed Zitron @edzitron]

Today’s free newsletter is about how LLMs are the perfect grift to exploit an economy dominated by do-nothing managers and executives disconnected from any real work, and how the facade is crumbling as companies pay the true cost of AI.
https://t.co/X7qmNMFjYm

[Alvaro Bedoya @BedoyaUSA]

AI worker protections passed by Congress:

AI rules won by unions:
❌No forced AI use to take someone's job (IATSE)
❌No body scans w/o consent/pay (SAAG-AFTRA)
❌No AI slop rewrites (WGA)
❌No AI firings (CWA)
✅6mo health/pension if displaced (CU)
✅Mandatory bargaining pre-rollout (HTC)

[Joyce Carol Oates @JoyceCarolOates]

absolutely, I believe this. I have never been able to "write"--at least a first draft-- any other way than by hand.

our handwriting is unique to us as our fingerprints. it makes sense that the brain & the hand are closely coordinated. handwriting can vary & be loose & formative--not fixed like print; it embodies plasticity, change. even an unintelligent scrawl has meaning.

print is uniform, impersonal. as Samuel Beckett said: "It all came together between the hand and the page."

[brian @brianonhere]

Damn — that’s what i purchase my stuff with!

[Alexis ☭ @gothgfdotrip]

look at how they massacred my boy T_T

[Matthew Cole @mattbencole]

I barely survived “telling writers they have to read is gatekeeping,” I don’t think I can live through “telling writers they have to write is gatekeeping”

[Kitten 🐈 @kitten_beloved]

This is like one of those audio journals you find on a corpse in a sci-fi horror game

[Keifer @DannyVegito]

[guy who can’t fully remember that Gramsci quote] it’s Monster Time

[Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) @organizeworkers]

How to protect your job from AI overreach in the workplace

This guide explains the AI issues facing workers and how they can organize for a voice in how it's implemented at work.

Link in 🧵

[Katherine Argent @effthealgorithm]

Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???

[Ed Zitron @edzitron]

This post rocks because it’s both a scathing indictment of AI and also 100% this guy’s fault

[Isi Breen @isaiah_bb]

As I keep saying, Democrats are gonna have to choose between Israel and winning elections.

[Wyatt Reed @wyattreed13]

Wild statistic buried in here — a majority of Americans, across all ages and political affiliations, think AI will “do more harm than good” to their everyday lives.

There’s only ONE group that thinks AI will make their lives better, not worse: those who make $200k/yr and up.

[Eric Geller @ericgeller]

Really bleak stuff here. https://t.co/5yUXVQ4KXy

[rayne fisher-quann @raynefq]

yes!!!

[Ilhan Niaz @IlhanNiaz]

“Cognitive Surrender” - a new study argues that use of AI leads to suspension of human reasoning, not its augmentation. The implication being that over time people will lose their reasoning ability & use AI as its substitute. Download the paper for free here, excerpts & reference below:

https://t.co/ZlWbD0b6CJ

——-

“As people increasingly integrate AI into their decision-making processes, they interact and engage with a cognitive system that can reshape the functions of both intuition and deliberation. For example, System 3 can replace System 1 by offering confident, ready-made answers that preempt the need for intuitive reasoning.” (page 15 of pdf)

“As AI systems increasingly participate in human cognition, a new phenomenon emerges that cannot be explained by traditional concepts such as cognitive offloading or automation bias alone. We define cognitive surrender as the behavioral and motivational tendency to defer judgment, effort, and responsibility to System 3’s output, particularly when that output is delivered fluently, confidently, or with minimal friction. Unlike cognitive offloading, which is typically strategic and task-specific (e.g., using GPS to navigate), cognitive surrender entails a deeper transfer of agency.” (Page 17)

“Access to System 3 outputs significantly influenced accuracy, increasing correct answers when AI was correct, and decreasing accuracy when incorrect. Access to System 3 made decision-makers more confident, despite approximately half of System 3 outputs being incorrect. Finally, users who trust AI more and have lower NFC and fluid IQ were more likely to display cognitive surrender. Whether System 3 was accurate or faulty, its presence displaced internal reasoning.” (Page 27)

“Cognitive surrender was robust across studies.” (Page 42)

“Across our studies, we observe that when System 3 was available, people readily engaged it and frequently adopted its answers. This shift reflects a reallocation of cognitive control rather than mere effort saving. System 3’s fluent, confident outputs are treated as epistemically authoritative, lowering the threshold for scrutiny and attenuating the metacognitive signals that would ordinarily route a response to deliberation. In the case of cognitive surrender, there is a shift in the locus of control, with an external system (System 3) occupying the default position.” (Page 45)

“Time constraints clarify why surrender arises so readily, while incentives and feedback show that surrender is malleable. When decision time is scarce, the internal monitor detecting conflict and recruiting deliberation is less likely to trigger. Hence, the low-friction path to defer to external cognition becomes attractive.” (Page 46)

“Tri-System Theory is not a warning about AI’s dangers but a recognition of System 3’s psychological presence. We do not merely use AI; we think with it. In doing so, we must ask new questions: What happens when our judgments are shaped by minds not our own? What becomes of intuition and effort when a generative, artificial partner stands ready to answer? How do we preserve agency, reflection, and autonomy in a world where users engage in cognitive surrender?”