Brian Doherty

YouTube video by LastWeekTonight AI Slop: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Hire real artists 🎨

I have pretty simple requirements for a phone. I need to be able to call and text my wife, make a grocery list, take pictures of my kids and open an app to scroll through posts documenting the worst things happening in the entire world at every second of the day. I'm kind of traditional I guess

a drawing of Milhouse from the Simpsons but in the style of the Bauhaus movement captioned everything's coming up Milhaus

I will never apologize for a post

Weekly vigil spotlights horrific events in Gaza In a Norfolk marketplace, a quiet weekly vigil bears witness to Gaza’s devastation, defying political indifference

Every Saturday in a small market town, writes Jacob Ecclestone, ordinary people gather quietly to acknowledge Gaza’s devastation.

Their quiet presence speaks louder than words.

AI impoverishes us at every step of the process: - data centers pollute our environment - energy use drives up costs - content theft robs creators of income - the actual output is used to displace workers and depress wages - using it harms our mental health and impairs our competence - the flood of AI slop is damaging our sociopolitical landscape All in service of making a worse product - and world - to enrich a handful of already spectacularly wealthy people

While defending the luddite argument in Discord, I stumbled into this IMO succinct explanation for opposing generative AI:

At every step in the process, it impoverishes us.

Screenshot of the first two questions in the survey - there's only six to answer. #SpéirGorm #SpéirGhorm #Ireland #Art

There's a REALLY quick and easy survey for the public consultation on the Basic Income for the Arts scheme - it only takes a few seconds, anyone can fill it in, and it could make a huge difference to arts workers in Ireland. Take a few ticks to places a few ticks here: ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/run...

tef e. birbs @tef_ebooks [30 years into the future] me: you know netflix used to send films by post my amazon smart watch: 0.3% Productivity loss detected. Hourly rate reduced to $1.12 for 7m21s. Please refrain from talking on the packing line. Please say "Productivity" to acknowledge me: productivity

‘I live for a chance to leave Iraq’: how I survived torture and slavery at the hands of Islamic State A decade on from being freed, a Yazidi woman tells how she endured being abducted by militants when she was aged nine

‘I live for a chance to leave Iraq’: how I survived torture and slavery at the hands of Islamic State

Rat Bastard Dogs Help Seize €50k Drugs RAT BASTARD dogs working for revenue have seized drugs worth over €50k at a Dublin parcel hub today, despite not being paid any money for their touting. Snitches Bailey and Sam sat proudly as they uncovered …

Rat Bastard Dogs Help Seize €50k Drugs
https://waterfordwhispersnews.com/2020/08/21/rat-bastard-dogs-help-seize-e50k-drugs/

He won an Oscar for this, nipped out for a smoke with his statue, had a security guard refuse to let him back in (he didn't speak English) and in the resulting scuffle was arrested, with his Oscar. In every way a hero

The British media outlet ITV also went on a Jordanian airdrop and simply ignored the Israeli government’s illiberal demands:

www.itv.com/news/2025-08...

OLIVER: "Gaza is starving is a sentence that's objectively true, but it's also slightly misleading because it's too passive — Gaza is being starved by Israel."

logging onto Bluesky

“This is about defiance. It’s about doing the right thing... And even if we fail, at the very least, we didn’t contribute to the problem.”

These words aren't defeatist, but a realist expression of our choices: give up, or go down fighting with a chance. ✊️

*Must-read* article.

Motherfucking wind farms…

The first 100% effective HIV prevention drug is approved and going global An epidemic that's been sustained for 44 years might finally be quelled, with the milestone approval of the first HIV drug that offers 100% protection with its twice-yearly injections. It's a landmark...

Well, I'll be damned.

It's royalty free and there's already six, generic manufacturers lined up.

newatlas.com/infectious-d...

*at the Shakespeare family bbq*
OMG stop talking

School sports day reveals my son’s new attitude to compet... Inexplicably, my son has become a good loser

At a balmy sports day, my son discards the urge toward competition, and teaches me a lesson about losing with dignity.

observer.co.uk/news/columni...

100K defy Hungary’s ban, march in Budapest Pride event - National | Globalnews.ca Around 100,000 people defied a government ban and police orders on Saturday to march in what organizers called the largest LGBTQ+ Pride event in Hungary's history.

Around 100,000 people defied a government ban and police orders on Saturday to march in what organizers called the largest LGBTQ+ Pride event in Hungary's history in an open rebuke of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's government.

globalnews.ca/news/1126602...

Séamas O’Reilly: Ballymena violence is the result of politics based on scapegoating any ‘other’ "The central perversity of treating these people as anything other than racist thugs is only more transparent in Ballymena because they have so few migrants that any other excuse is patently absurd."

Referring to events in Ballymena as "disturbances" is a euphemism too far. We are witnesses to a pogrom. And it behoves us to say so, loud and clear.

www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle-co...

jackson @placed_onto oven has a Window, microwave too, you can see All the way through a blender, but the Dish washer, oh No you could Never see in there, they Refuse to let us See what's going on in there

There’s a genre of autobiography which reads: “It was 1962. I was 24 & had jst purchased my first house in St John’s Wood. Thinking I’d better earn a bit of cash, I wrote to the BBC &was invited to meet the head of drama. The following week I was offered a 13 part series- v reluctantly I might add!”

me: pendants annoy me

him: why?

me: they think they know everything

him: I think you mean “pedants”

me: *under breath* fucking pendant

‘Nothing left’: Irish whale-watching company closes amid ‘overfishing’ Sprat fishing has disrupted the food chain and diverted humpback, minke and fin whales as well as dolphins

Just to remind people listening to RTÉ's report on the destruction of Irish sprat stocks (the basic food for many other fish) that most sprat go into fishmeal to feed farmed fish. Salmon farming is a major part of the problem. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/m...

one thing I believe is it’s important to celebrate good things 10x as hard and to look for them 10x as often because our animal brains are hard-wired to pay 10x as much attention to bad things; it keeps us alive, but it doesn’t keep us happy

happiness has to be fought for, survival will tend itself

This is brilliant.

RIP Paul Durcan.

This was the first poem I read by him, and it absolutely broke me.

Why I’m Resigning from the NSF and Library of Congress I cannot participate in systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging.

“NSF’s closed-to-the-public deliberations were observed by Zachary Terrell from the DOGE team. Through his Zoom screen, he showed more interest in his water bottle & cuticles than the discussion. Terrell accessed the awards system to block the dispersal of approved grants.“

time.com/7285045/resi...

Silicon Valley billionaires literally want the impossible Ars chats with physicist and science journalist Adam Becker about his new book, More Everything Forever.

No, we are not going to live on other planets. Bullshit artists like Musk might as well be the leaders of death cults. arstechnica.com/culture/2025...