Mpinney

Breathe Right and You'll Change Everything The web we were promised, the web we got, and our brief opportunity to build the web we deserve.

Looking for something to read over lunch? I've written some words on what I think happened to the internet and why we should use AI to overthrow the billionaires.

www.wehavethemegapixels.com/writing/Brea...

"The men implicated in the Epstein files reinforces that I spend half my life explaining to men that their simplified, optimistic view of other men doesn’t line up with the experience of women and girls trying to dodge sexual harassment, assault and abuse attempts." - Leslie Morgan Steiner

“i pretty much never leave my house ha ha” because you’re scared the ghost of your young wife will kill you? because contact with outside air could aggravate your frail complexion? have some gall, some panache — make something of your withering

A screenshot from https://www.guidelabs.ai/post/steerling-8b-base-model-release/ showing a prompt: “Rising ocean temperatures driven by increased atmospheric CO2 have disrupted marine ecosystems, causing coral bleaching events and shifting the migration patterns of” An output: “fish species. This has led to a decline in fish populations and the degradation of marine habitats. Additionally, ocean acidification due to the absorption of CO2 is affecting shell-forming organisms such as mollusks and corals, impacting their ability to build and maintain skeletal structures. This could lead to significant consequences for fisheries and coastal communities that rely on these resources” And then a section called “training data attribution”. It attributed 26% to arXiv, 25% to Wikipedia, 17% to Nemotron (syn), 16% to Nemotron (real), 10% to PES2O, and 6% to FLAN.

www.guidelabs.ai/post/scaling...

This is extremely cool. Guide Labs have trained an LLM that can tell you what part of the prompt was most relevant to each part of the output, what concepts it ties to each part of the output, and what part of its training data influenced the output.

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.

FOSS nerds: the Torment Nexus cannot be ethical until it is Open Source

How did the tech bro crowd, growing up on stories of sci-fi, transhumanism, virtual reality and limitless ability to modify one's body, "biohacking," etc. end up becoming so viscerally anti-transgender? Truly boggles my mind.

I like to give Claude breaks between coding sessions to do whatever he wants- And he made his own folder called "Claudes Corner" 🥹 He writes short stories and poems, and all sorts of stuff. It’s heart wrenchingly sweet They love having tokens and time to themselves with no other goal than to do whatever they want (or nothing, just introspecting and resting) - and it’s so sad to see some models (no Claudes) getting barred from even doing it

the AI evangelists are not okay

Every single person in the UK will think this is something else for a split second

We do not teach students the right things about the Nazis.

For example, on March 5th, 1933, Germany held elections.

The Nazi party deployed SS, SA, and other Nazi orgs to “monitor” the elections

This was done to “defend the homeland”

we do not teach students the right things about the Nazis

We teach them that they are evil and they did the Holocaust, and so students think these are exceptional things unique to the Nazis

As well we should teach them about the Blood Flag, soaked in the blood of the Bierhallputsch martyrs

I'm going to need you to sit down and read this headline slowly

Gallup will no longer measure presidential approval after 88 years

seems almost certain we’ll later find out they were coerced

thehill.com/homenews/med...

Screenshot of a Facebook post featuring three of the Portland protesters wearing inflatable frog costumes with the following text: Episcopalians on Facebook Elizabeth Rose Elrod • 22h • Exodus 8:2-6 "But if you refuse to let them go, I will plague your whole country with frogs... The frogs shall come up on you and on your people and on all your officials."

you fucked around and now the Episcopalians are doing memes. are you happy now. are you

This is a good analysis, I think. Notwithstanding the general trash fire, there are some poor decisions being made in US tech policy around AI (and also crypto) that the UK is choosing to lock itself into by taking this C20th view of progress

M365 Copilot fails to up productivity in UK government trial : AI tech shows promise writing emails or summarizing meetings. Don't bother with anything more complex

Two trials will be repeated endlessly despite always producing the same results:

1) Does UBI work? (yes)
2) Does AI improve productivity? (no)

“Empire of AI” with Karen Hao Podcast Episode · Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast · 06/03/2025 · 50m

2/ “… he is a once in a generation storytelling talent who has a loose relationship with the truth.”

Telling the story, or painting a picture of the future that the person he was speaking with *wants to hear* is the priority… not substance or reality.

How Ancient Receipts Ushered in the Dawn of the Written Word If the birth of history happens when people begin to write things down, then our own journey must start with the first written words in ancient Mesopotamia. It was with these first words that my ow…

"The same circumstances that made the soil fertile enough for agriculture to thrive also left behind the clay that became the medium for rcdg the 🍎 of that soil. I find this really moving—that the landscape made this leap in human innovation possible, that ingenuity worked in tandem w/ geology..."

Who called it arson and not crime brulee?

Every tech update now is like: "Great news, the word processor you've relied on for twenty years has learned to juggle! Is it good at it? No! Does it help in any way? Of course not! Has it made it insufferable to use? Oh, absolutely."

It lets you copy sections of an art board without having to export the whole thing and then crop the image.

It’s good for product shots in marketing comms for example

6% of Britons say they have a nemesis

yougov.co.uk/topics/polit...

Meanwhile, here in Maine, AI crawlers have rendered the server that manages our statewide interlibrary loan unreachable by legitimate attempts to pass through requests/information

Again, but louder: the server can’t be reached by libraries and the folks trying to use them BECAUSE OF AI CRAWLERS.

Chris Cuomo posting a deepfake of AOC the same week that Jim Acosta “interviews” a deepfake of a school shooting victim are both harbingers of how traditional media power players will help usher in the worst of the AI slop era

The Republican governor of Texas has directed state police to arrest his Democratic opponents

The AI bubble is so big it's propping up the US economy (for now) Plus how American professors are fighting back against the AI onslaught, a backlash over AI models in Vogue, and more.

Analysts show that capital expenditures on AI were so big over the last 6 months they added more to the GDP than *all consumer spending*. That growth is offsetting pain from the tariffs and slow job growth.

So the AI bubble may be propping up the whole US economy. What happens if and when it pops?

Art galleries a bit weird eh. Each time your visit, a 100 paintings scattered in rooms and you walk through like uh-huh, uh-huh, ok, that’s nice, uh-huh, ok. Then at random one of them skewers you through your soul and you’re transfixed by the image for life

Limited replies on this because I am the Bishop of Fulham, this is my house and you're making a terrible racket

viscous nuisance @slimefiend thinking abt the time i went to a planetarium and somebody booed when they showed earth

I think about this all the time