Propellant. — ethanmarcotte.com We cannot separate the everyday use of “AI” platforms from their use in death and war.

“These tools, and the companies that manufacture them, have tremendous costs — to our labor, to our environment, to our futures. And as we’ve been seeing, those costs also include actual human lives.”

Good and important read by @ethanmarcotte.com.

ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/propel...

An 'Al bubble' is the biggest concern of credit investors for the first time ever, according to a survey among Bank of America Corp.'s clients. "Few worry about geopolitics or a central bank policy error," BofA strategists including Barnaby Martin wrote in a note on Tuesday. Some 23% of survey's investment-grade respondents saw the threat of an Al bubble as their top concern, up from 9% in BofA's previous survey in December. Worries over a potentially unsustainable surge in investment and valuations of AI companies overtook 'Bubbles in Credit' as the top concern, according to the survey. Anxiety over trade tensions and a global recession had also been seen as the biggest perceived risk during 2025.

Bank of America’s big credit investors are now most worried about the threat of an AI bubble, specifically unsustainable investments and over-valuations.
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Acting ethically in an imperfect world Life is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somew...

I was disappointed to read Cory Doctorow's post where he got weirdly defensive about his LLM use and started arguing with an imaginary foe.

@tante.cc has a very thoughtful reply here:

tante.cc/2026/02/20/a...

A few further comments, 🧵>>

"We need new models of professionalism that do not center novelty, but consequence." blog.ronbronson.com/design-as-re...

The legitimately innovative thing about AI is that it is a completely bottomless pit. It's swallowed up:

- all energy sources
- all our data
- all investment dollars
- all new jobs
- all capex
- all attention
- and now, all hardware components

with absolutely no end in sight. Nothing will satisfy.

Vercel to Netlify migration checklist A comprehensive guide for migrating your projects from Vercel to Netlify, including Next.js setup, configuration migration, and production readiness steps.

Vercel ➝ Netlify migration made simple.

✅ Checklist
✅ Next.js tips
✅ Best practices

Start here → docs.netlify.com/resources/ch...

the post office is a public service. it doesn’t need to make money. public transit doesn’t need to make money. the library doesn’t need to make money. some things exist for the public good and we desperately need lawmakers to stop thinking about them in terms of capitalism. these are not businesses.

I fully believe companies should be punished with "death sentences," not just fines.

Every executive fired with no severance, all stock set to $0 and its listing pulled from markets.

Let's see these CEOs be unable to get a new job

I'm so angry and so tired of being angry. Please, world, stop doing such bad things, I need a rest

forced-color-adjust: none is an unavoidable foot gun | Sarah Higley A very long treatise on why text backplates were a bad idea. Most of the time.

For anyone who pays attention to high contrast / forced colors mode styles:

I wrote up an explanation of why forced-color-adjust: none is nearly unavoidable and how it sets up your codebase for downstream bugs:
sarahmhigley.com/writing/forc...

“You don’t need your wheelchair. We have wheelchairs.”

Note to airline carriers, terminals, transportation providers, hospitals, medical providers and all others who need to hear this:

Wheelchairs are not interchangeable.

Wheelchairs are not one size fits all.

This is so frustrating, especially because it's a result of convenience and politics. It's easier and quicker for the CSSWG to create a spec than for the WHATWG. At least, this is my understanding for why this keeps happening (toggles, carousel).

Published a new interactive blog post on tab roving, a nice little technique for making grids and other element groups more accessible for keyboard navigation!

Check it out: https://nik.digital/posts/tab-roving

🤞

but all of this is about finding messages that reach people who don't have a lot of context *to help them understand why they shouldn't use it*

harm reduction, in this context, is *use reduction*

Years ago, I read that the reason we ask questions isn't to find an answer but to prepare our minds to receive an answer. Answers, data, and info are everywhere but meaningless without a question to sift through and organize it.

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars.

OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

While I'm complaining about prime: I will never want to watch my videos in portrait mode. Quit defaulting to that. And respect the fact that I've locked my OS to not auto-rotate. I just rolled in my side in bed, I didn't flip the phone around bc I wanted to see a smaller, worse version of my show

This whole tirade is brought to you by a morning meltdown while trying to find my 6yo's favorite show. I thought the service had dropped it since it wasn't showing in search results. My wife told me to go search from the home screen. No, not that home screen. The home home screen. Gah!

Were you watching a series? It doesn't remember. There's not always a "Continue watching" section. And if it's there, it might not contain everything you've been watching. But that movie you quit halfway through 2 years ago? It's there. New episode dropped? Oh well. Good luck searching for it.

Searching on the Firestick (made by the same damn company) returns completely different results for the same service. Is it on prime? Depends which search you use.

Prime video service has the worst UX I've ever fought. Searching for a title might return what you're looking for or it might not, regardless of whether that exact title is available on the service.

Stanhill, Lancashire, 1764. Wear and carpenter James Hargreaves invents the Spinning Jenny, the first practical spinning-frame, to make the tedious task of producing cloth a little bit faster. He doesn't know it yet, but this will destroy the world. Spurred by inventions like his, the industrial revolution will transform everything -- work power, the wealth of nations. Society as we know it began here, and it wasn't great for everyone. But a group of weavers and textile workers saw this future coming. And did their best to prevent it.

"Curse you spinning jenny, you ruined everything!" The standard narrative does that LUDDITES were foolish lunatics who, in fear of technology, decided progress was bad, and started hitting it with sticks. But the truth is entire ways of life were being destroyed. Previously, skilled craftsmen were respected for the time and effort it took to do their work. The entire family usit would form a cottage industry - creating something valuable, and command a decent living. But when a machine can work 10 times faster its owner can charge less for the prodcts- craftsmen couldn't compete and were left out of work almost overnight. And as factories became a fixture of the british landscape, these now unemployed labourers often ended up working the factories that had just destroyed their way of life. Britain was the most prosperous nation in history, factory owners became extremely wealthy and influential. But the people doing the actual work saw almost none of it.

Factory work paid little, since "the machines" did "the real work" human labourers were deemed unimportant and replaceable. FUN FACT!: Factory owners preferred to hire ORPHANS since less people would notice if they were maimed or killed on the job! Now the owners quickly realized the workers might notice they did all the work for almost no pay. If they went on STRIKE or ARGUED FOR HGHER WAGES, this would threaten their tremendous wealth. In 1799, Parliament passed the Combination Act, which made FORMING TRADE UNIONS, COLLECTIVE BARGAINING, AND GOING ON STRIKE ILLEGAL. Organizing against the rich became a crime.

If you were living through it, opposing the industrial revolution wasn't techno-phobia. It was SELF-DEFENSE. The combination act forced unions underground into secret societies. And the greatest secret of all was their leader - Ned Ludd. Ned had been a folk character for years. In one version after being whipped by his master, he smashed two knitting frames in a rage. In more fanciful versions, he then escaped to the Sherwood forest, here he lived among the animals as their king. Some versions specifically call him 'Much Better Than Robin Hood'.

Happy Labor Day!

Today we're bringing you The First Union, as told by HBomberguy (@hbomberguy.bsky.social) and illustrated by Skutch (@skutchdraws.bsky.social) It's the dawn of the industrial revolution, and of the way many of us work...

Have you ever heard of the term "Luddite" from an elder?

Lightning bolts, too

remember folks, we cant have gun restrictions because if we do the federal government will occupy our streets, imprison people without due process, ship dissidents to foreign gulags and things of that nature

Chef's kiss. Absolutely perfect article. Thank you

I wish AI could suffer.

*unrolls canvas bag of torture implements*

Sometimes it's more comfortable to believe the people in charge are competent but evil than the reality that the American economy is in the hands of clowns that couldn't manage a convenience store.

Just how much has DOGE exaggerated its numbers? Now we have receipts. A POLITICO analysis of DOGE data reveals the organization saved less than 5 percent of its claimed savings from nearly 10,100 contract terminations.

"'That’s the equivalent of basically taking out a credit card with a $20,000 credit limit, canceling it and then saying, 'I’ve just saved $20,000.' Anything that’s been said publicly about [DOGE’s] savings is meaningless.'”

I hope this helps someone:

Regardless of your intention when using AI, it doesn't change the processes involved in using it, which include excessive consumption of water & other finite energy sources and data centers that are placed in vulnerable communities, polluting both people and land.