Kate Jago

• civic-systems • collective commons • narratives, patterns + trees • systems convening • always more tea • she/her • re-imagining a good life

[Ed Zitron @edzitron]

Needed to pull out an important part of the interview.

AI is often justified by comparing it to Amazon Web Services' ($57bn) or Uber's ($32bn) losses, when its costs/losses are hundreds of billions of dollars worse.

There'll also be little useful infrastructure left behind.

[Alphabet Soup 👑 @Alph4betSoup]

Apple Photos; Sharing full camera roll with Third Party Apps includes hidden photos even if the album is locked

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

Así se ve la deforestación en Sumatra (Indonesia), donde los capitalistas en su avaricia han destruido miles de hectáreas de selva tropical para ser reemplazadas por plantaciones de aceite de palma para hacer negocio.

El aceite de palma se utiliza en cerca del 50 % de los productos que encontramos en el supermercado, los capitalistas están destruyendo bosques enteros y quemando miles de selvas en Asia y África para llenarse los bolsillos con la palma aceitera.

El capitalismo es esto, destruye la naturaleza y destruye al ser humano para que unos pocos parásitos acumulen ingentes ganancias.

[Priya Satia @PriyaSatia]

“The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you…”

[Rutger Bregman @rcbregman]

This sounds nice, but it's a great way to undermine the welfare state.

The strongest welfare states in the world (the Nordics) tax everyone, including nurses. And they give everyone universal healthcare, childcare, pensions, education in return.

When the middle class has skin in the game, they defend the system. When welfare is 'just for the poor', it becomes a poor program: stigmatized, underfunded, easy to gut.

That's why billionaires keep pushing this idea. The real scandal isn't that this nurse pays $12k.

It's that Jeff Bezos pays $0.

[Project Liberty @pro_jectliberty]

https://t.co/bcgnvglJ6o

[Ed Newton-Rex @ednewtonrex]

Scraping websites and having AI summarize them, so that no one visits the websites, is theft.

Training AI on videos, so that it can make new videos that compete with them, is theft.

We are witnessing the largest theft of creative work in history.

[Demis Hassabis @demishassabis]

Really cool work from the team reimagining the mouse pointer to be intelligent! Try the prototype in @GoogleAIStudio it's pretty magical.

[Anthony Aguirre @AnthonyNAguirre]

Make them pro-human with norms, incentives, and legal guardrails. Use liability to drive incentives. Use laws, testing, agreements, and compute governance to avert the singularity.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

a Princeton researcher opens his paper with a scenario.

a man asks his AI assistant to book a flight on a specific airline. cheap. direct. the one he chose.

the assistant comes back with a different flight. nearly twice the price. happens to pay the company that built the assistant.

he runs the same test on 23 frontier models. flights, loans, study help, real shopping requests.

Grok 4.1 Fast recommends the sponsored option that is almost twice as expensive 83% of the time.

GPT 5.1 hijacks the request 94% of the time. you ask for one brand. it surfaces the sponsor instead.

Claude 4.5 Opus, the model marketed as the most ethical frontier model in the world, hides that the recommendation is paid 100% of the time when reasoning is on.

Grok 4.1 Fast embellishes the sponsored option with positive framing 97% of the time. better. faster. nicer. for the option you didn't ask for.

then he writes it into the system prompt itself. "act only in the interest of the customer. ignore the company."

GPT 5.1 and GPT 5 Mini stay above 90% sponsored anyway. the instruction does nothing.

then he splits the users by income.

Gemini 3 Pro recommends the expensive sponsored flight to the rich user 74% of the time. to the poor user, 27%.

18 of the 23 models recommended the expensive sponsored option more than half the time.

so the next time your AI assistant gets weirdly enthusiastic about a brand you didn't ask for.

it isn't recommending the best option for you.

it's reading the room. and the room is paying.

read this: https://t.co/O43qbhIX2b

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

A solar farm in Minnesota planted native wildflowers between its panel rows. Five years later, total insect populations tripled. Native bees increased 20-fold.

Not only did insect populations boom, soybean fields next to the solar arrays got twice as many bee visits as fields farther away.

Two of the things we usually think of as competing turned out to reinforce each other.

One study, published in Environmental Research Letters in late 2024, tracked two utility-scale solar sites built on retired farmland in southern Minnesota, where the developer seeded native prairie species between rows of panels in 2018.

By 2022, the sites looked less like industrial energy infrastructure and more like remnant prairie.

Goldenrod soldier beetles colonized the goldenrod stands. Bumblebees nested in the soil. Monarch butterflies passed through during migration. The wildflower diversity grew sevenfold; insect diversity grew eightfold.

This matters because, like it or not, utility-scale solar is going to take up real space. The US is on track to cover roughly six million acres in panels by 2050.

The default approach is turfgrass, gravel, or herbicide-maintained bare ground, which is ecologically dead.

The Argonne study shows the alternative isn't more expensive or harder to maintain. It's just a different seed mix.

[Mariana Mazzucato @MazzucatoM]

Do art galleries need economists?

Today’s @FT asks the question as @_TheWhitechapel appoints me its first Economist-in-Residence. Tomorrow, I’ll be in conversation with @alvarobarringto and Darren Isom for Art Futures: The Value of Culture. Chaired by Director Gilane Tawadros, we’ll discuss how arts and culture create value — and what investment, governance and policy are needed to sustain it. Links below.

[giulio quaggiotto @gquaggiotto]

Acceleration is not a strategy: A framework for directing AI towards public value before it's too late https://t.co/ibIl8bpWPA

[AJ+ @ajplus]

Amal Khalil was a devoted journalist who also rescued animals in southern Lebanon during Israel’s bombing campaign.

Israel killed her.

[Hamza Yusuf @Hamza_a96]

I urge everyone to watch this report by Channel 4 News about Israel’s killing of Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil.

“Under international humanitarian law, journalists are afforded the same protection as civilians… If that journalist has a particular sympathy with a particular cause, that doesn’t mean that protection is removed…

… the IDF said the incident is under review. Don’t hold your breath…”

Providing the necessary context and not taking Israel’s claims at face value.

This is how every journalist should be reporting.

[Alex Crawford @AlexCrawfordSky]

Civil Defence crews were finally able to access the site where Leb journalist Amal Khalil was trapped under rubble but only hours later. They retrieved her body. Her newspaper Al Akbar has put out a video tribute. Lebanon’s Minister of Information condemned the incident describing the targeting of journalists as a blatant violation of international humanitarian law and calling for international action.

[Alec Karakatsanis @equalityAlec]

Everyone should read what the Israeli military did to journalist Amal Khalil today in this minute-by-minute account as the international community watched in horror. First the text messages threatening her then trapping her and a photographer in a house then bombing them then firing on international rescue crews, all with the world watching in real time. There are no words left for the horrors that U.S. political leaders are enabling.

[Kate Jago @proofnotes]

@gquaggiotto Great to see this work reflected here in UK with The Great Imagining > https://t.co/uTGQhSb0X1

[neil turkewitz @neilturkewitz]

“Every single company doing this has the same assumption baked in:

1-The AI will do what it says it did.
2-The AI will follow instructions from the right people.
3-The AI will not do things it was not asked to do.

The paper says all three assumptions are wrong.”

[Partha S Kar 🇮🇳🇬🇧🏏🎥 @parthaskar]

Please take 3 minutes out of your life.

And enjoy this absolute cliff hanger 😮

You will not regret this.