Yellow bird with black face and red eye, all puffed out and slightly damp.
Let me start a belated thread of Aotearoa New Zealand silvan birds.
To lead things off, a New Zealand Bellbird photographed on Kapiti Island.
Follow up: The world's most visited porn website PornHub is set to block Australian users before the Monday deadline for implementing age checking
The data from your Meta Ray Bans is used to train Meta's AI, which most people don't understand means that humans are looking at the most intimate details of their lives. www.svd.se/a/K8nrV4/met...
Thank you to the Enforcement Division for bringing this important matter to the Board. Kids shouldn't have their privacy rights compromised to play sports or take part in school events.
Annotation of text says "Timnit Gebru: Anchor legal jargon in lived stakes."
Had I had the opportunity to share this piece with @timnitgebru.bsky.social, I am sure she would have given me insightful and interesting comments. This weird gimmick from Grammarly is neither. /4
I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.
The use of social media to target dissenters, long a risk, has soared in the 2nd Trump admin. In light of the overreach, there may soon be more receptivity to tackling this issue. @rlevinsonwaldman.bsky.social details legal and policy solutions, via @knightcolumbia.org:
NZ’s national cybersecurity strategy was released last week.
There’s a discussion doc with proposals to designate critical infrastructure with specific requirements, including the .nz ccTLD run by InternetNZ.
War is not a morality play.
The relevant question isn’t: Are the targets bad people who have done bad things?
The relevant question is: Will going to war make things better, achieving something that’s worth the death and suffering it causes?
I'm amazed that I've seen or heard no mention of this all day, but 75 years of chaos -- and often killing -- in and around Iran and, arguably, around the Middle East all started when the United States caused regime change in Iran! www.history.com/this-day-in-...
In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.
This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.
The Mausritter gambit is where you just take “cats are indestructible death machines” as the starting point and roll with it.
"Every time we treat transparency as the problem, we are choosing institutions over victims." -Maybell Romero
Yours truly in @newscientist.com talking about the exact same things I was talking to journalists about five years ago #Sisyphus
www.newscientist.com/article/2516...
That’s mainly *continental* philosophy.
In the analytic tradition, the emphasis is on logic, clear reasoning, and ^^^^^AWAKENING THE CHITTERING THINGS THAT DWELL IN THE GAPS BETWEEN ARTICULABLE PROPOSITIONS AND MADNESS
Salt
Fat
Acid
Heat
There's a great maze of tunnels, a Labyrinth. It's like a great dark city, under the hill. Full of gold, and the swords of old heroes, and old crowns, and bones, and years, and silence.
Breaking with the established church is kind of a tradition there even!
On social isolation, one of the longest time series we have, from Sweden, shows the opposite trend: reported loneliness roughly halved from the 1980s to the 2010s. 7/
a nice thing about when the internet was a bunch of little sites and servers was that it was a lot harder for governments to pressure "the chat provider everyone uses" to implement age verification.
you wanna pressure 300 separate IRC servers? good luck with that. but one company? easy
This is such an important and under-appreciated point. More stories from MN because we just have more journalists who live here and know their communities
Sir Ian McKellen performing a monologue from Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas More on the Stephen Colbert show. Never have I heard this monologue performed with such a keen sense of prescience. Nor have I ever been in this exact historical moment.TY Sir Ian, for reaching us once again.
#Pinks #ProudBlue
NEW: The unfathomable Minnesota transcript that must be read, as it tells the reality of America today.
"I am not white, as you can see," Julie Le — a government lawyer — told a federal judge on Tuesday. "And my family's at risk as any other people that might get picked up too ..."
Law Dork:
Up until 1985, women made up half the PC market, as you'd expect. Girls played as many video games as boys, went on to make computer things at about the same rate.
"AI is rapidly populating medical records with synthetic content, creating a feedback loop [that] drives a rapid erosion of pathological variability and diagnostic reliability...this renders AI generated documentation clinically useless after just two generations" www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...
if you're a renter and have had to use an online application platform or a property management app - now's a great time to reach out to your property manager, link them this article, and ask them what they're doing to make sure that the tech they're using is keeping your data secure
OpenClaw is designed to perform actions in the system and services (files, browser, terminal, calendars, instant messengers), so a configuration error or prompt injection vulnerability can translate into real actions on user accounts and data.
First published in Craccum explains some things
This article is a very useful reframing of the tired “Europe falling behind in tech” whinge.
Europe has actually build the foundations for socially useful tech, for decades.
What it has not done is attempt to create Empires by extracting cash from that work.
ploum.net/2026-01-22-w...
