WASHINGTON—Saying his advocacy for consuming animal products had painted a target on his back, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed Monday that anti-protein extremists had left a head of lettuce on his doorstep. “Yesterday morning when my wife went out to get the paper, she discovered a gruesome threat left by radical herbivores attempting to intimidate me,” a visibly shaken Kennedy said at a press conference, adding that the FBI was processing the head of iceberg lettuce for fingerprints and would investigate the incident as an act of suspected anti-protein terrorism. “I never had any illusions that ending the War on Protein would go unanswered by these enemies of muscle mass. Nonetheless, I’m shocked by this brazen and disgusting attack on my family. I felt so sick after seeing those leafy greens that I couldn’t even finish my plate of raw liver. But I will not be cowed by this heinous provocation. I will continue fighting for Americans’ right to consume protein no matter how many cabbages, zucchinis, or stalks of celery these monsters wield against me.” Eyewitnesses reported that Kennedy ended the press conference by defiantly chugging a glass of raw hamburger.

The post RFK Jr. Claims Anti-Protein Extremists Left Head Of Lettuce On His Doorstep appeared first on The Onion.

NEW YORK—In an unprecedented effort to “pour gas on the fire” and grow the popularity of the league, NHL officials announced Monday that it was launching a new $800 marketing campaign in a major push to attract new fans. “Move over, NFL and NBA, because we are pulling out all the stops to make the NHL the biggest thing in sports, starting with a bold new banner ad we’ll be running on Yahoo.com,” said NHL chief marketing officer Heidi Browning in a press release, noting that the three-figure initiative aims to highlight the most exciting elements of the sport, from “the toots of the refs’ whistles” to “the game’s many rules” to “the players’ high-tech safety gear.” “We’re going to be passing out hundreds of promotional stickers and snazzy brochures encouraging folks to check out their local NHL team. And once the computer whiz we hired for $30 an hour finishes getting our Google business profile set up and blasted out to the web, it’s just a matter of time before everyone in America ‘catches the cold’ of professional hockey!” At press time, NHL officials confirmed the campaign was already paying in dividends after the Yahoo banner ad racked up 14 unique impressions in the first day.

The post NHL Launches $800 Marketing Campaign In Major Push To Attract New Fans appeared first on The Onion.

THE HEAVENS—Admitting He felt torn between His true feelings and His fear of the unknown, the Lord God Almighty announced Monday that He no longer loved humanity but was too afraid to leave. “Any affection I ever had for the human race is long gone, but I’m just terrified at the thought of walking away and being alone,” said Our Heavenly Father, adding while He has felt “stuck” for millennia in the company of the species He adored long ago, He still worries He would have no real identity without them and starting over at His age was terrifying. “Sometimes I imagine myself ending it, striking out on my own, and discovering who I really am as God. But then reality comes crashing down. I’ve been with humanity since the sixth day of creation. What am I supposed to do, start over with bonobos?” At press time, The Almighty acknowledged that He would face little resistance if He left, as humanity has also been growing increasingly distant for some time now.

The post God Admits He No Longer Loves Humanity But Is Too Afraid To Leave appeared first on The Onion.

#Kento #RoninWarriors

In brief: In today’s post, although it is quite chilly this morning, we report that Houston is probably done with freezing weather for this season. We also look ahead to a warm day on Thursday, followed by mild conditions this weekend.

Last freeze?

Temperatures are rather cold across the Houston region this morning, dropping into the low- to mid-30s are inland areas such as Conroe and Cleveland, with the low 40s in the urban parts of the region. However, with it not freezing this morning, Matt and I are fairly confident the Houston region will not see a freeze again this season.

Could it freeze in parts of Houston? On average, the city experiences its last freeze in mid-February (last week), but there have been plenty of years in which temperatures have reached freezing in March. So this is not a firm guarantee from your friendly meteorologists at Space City Weather. But looking ahead at our weather the next two weeks, there is nothing to suggest freezing temperatures are on the horizon. Overall, things look pretty spring-like for us, and that pattern is likely to carry on through March.

Speaking of winter, a powerful winter storm has hit the northeastern United States during the overnight hours. This was well predicted by forecasters, but still quite a striking event for the region from Washington D.C. to Maine. Winds are gusting up to 60 mph, in addition to 1 to 3 feet of snow, in some locations. Matt has been writing about the impacts of this massive blizzard over on The Eyewall.

Monday

By contrast, our weather here is likely to be fair in the days ahead, with sunny skies prevailing for the most part. High temperatures today will push up into the low- to mid-60s, with light northeasterly winds. Low temperatures tonight will again drop into the low 40s in Houston, with the potential for upper 30s for some areas further inland.

Tuesday

This will be another sunny day, with highs pushing into the lower 70s as high pressure eases away from the region. Winds will turn gusty from the south, perhaps up to 25 mph during the afternoon and early evening hours. Lows on Tuesday night will drop to around 60 degrees.

Wednesday

This will be another day in which southerly winds really whip up across the region, gusting to perhaps 25 or even 30 mph, bringing more humid air into the region. Highs on Wednesday will likely reach up to around 80 degrees, with mostly sunny skies. Lows on Wednesday night will fall only into the 60s.

Thursday

This will be the warmest day of the week, and perhaps the year to date, as highs push into the low- to mid-80s across the region. Temperatures may feel upward pressure due to compressional heating as a cool front pushes southward, likely reaching the area during the afternoon or early evening hours. I don’t expect much in the way of rain with the front, but it should knock lows into the upper 50s by Friday morning.

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday

The weekend looks to be mild, with high temperatures in the vicinity of 80 degrees, and mostly sunny skies. Overnight lows will range from the mid-50s to 60 degrees, probably, with moderate humidity levels. It won’t be cold, but it won’t be steamy hot, either.

Next week

Our mild weather continues into next week, with highs likely in the vicinity of 80 degrees. Some rain chances may return by around the middle of next week, we’ll see!

Today's links

• Deplatform yourself: Copyright infringement is your least entertainment dollar.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: "Lawer" threatens suit; Landmark metaphotos; 3DP v (c); Forced arbitration; Imperial Scott Walker; Keysigning ritual; Polyfingered robot dictaphone; DNS bug; Register of copyright damns term extension; How Anonymous decides; Christchurch quake people-finder; Minor HP disenshittification; US v developing world at WIPO; TfL v anagram tube-map; Disneyland waiting; Internet of Garbage.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Deplatform yourself (permalink)

The first time I met William Gibson – to interview him for the Globe and Mail on the release of 1999's All Tomorrow's Parties – there was one question I knew I wanted to ask him: "What happens to the counterculture in the era of instantaneous commodification?"

https://craphound.com/nonfic/transcript.html

Gibson's answer stuck with me for decades:

What we're doing pop culturally is like burning the rain forest. The biodiversity of pop culture is really, really in danger. I didn't see it coming until a few years ago, but looking back it's very apparent.

I watched a sort of primitive form of the recommodification machine around my friends and myself in the sixties, and it took about two years for this clumsy mechanism to get and try to sell us The Monkees.

In 1977, it took about eight months for a slightly faster more refined mechanism to put punk in the window of Holt Renfrew. It's gotten faster ever since. The scene in Seattle that Nirvana came from: as soon as it had a label, it was on the runways of Paris.

There's no grace period, so that's a way in which I see us losing the interstitial.

This may seem like an odd thing to think about, but nearly all the art and culture that means something to me started as something that was transgressive and weird, and even if it was eventually metabolized by the mainstream, that was only after it had a chance to ferment and mutate in a tide-pool of Bohemian weirdness.

All this century, I've asked friends and weirdos about what can resist this commodification and co-option. Scott Westerfeld – author of Uglies – had a very on-brand answer: he told me that he thought that teenagers might deliberately start cultivating acne as a badge of rebellion. That hasn't happened yet, but if it does, it will be born co-opted, because there's already a luxury brand called "Acne":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acne_Studios

One anti-commodification measure that's worked reasonably well over the years is to be ugly. Punk zines and early Myspace pages embraced an aesthetic that the existing cohort of trained designers available to work for would-be co-opters would rather break their fingers than imitate. Eventually, some punk zinesters and Myspacers became freelance designers and offered the aesthetic for sale, but after the "grace period" that Gibson was worried about in 1999. By contrast, after a brief period in which early AI image-gen snuck psychedelic fish-dogs into every output, AI became so mid and inoffensive that even when it was used to make transgressive images (Trump spraying protesters with liquid shit from an airplane), it looked incredibly, terminally normal:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/20/ransom-note-force-field/#antilibraries

There's more than one way to be ugly, of course. The "edgelords" that defined forums like SomethingAwful and /b/ made heavy use of slurs, rape "jokes" and other beyond-the-pale rhetoric. Whether this reflected sincerely felt beliefs or a mere desire to shock (or both), it had the effect of making these subcultures very difficult to commodify. If you and your friends barely utter a single sentence that can be quoted in a mainstream news forum or office email, it's going to be very hard to co-opt you. For a long time, edgelords festered in the "dark corners" of the internet. But that's changed. The Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes – who thinks that "every woman and girl" should be "sent to a gulag" – has had dinner at the White House:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/nick-fuentes-women-gulag/

Last week, Ryan Broderick wrote a short, striking article for his must-read Garbage Day newsletter about the way that the far right have become "cool" within Gen Z by being so outre that they were evicted from the major platforms (before Trump II, that is):

https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-only-taboo-left-is-copyright-infringement

As Broderick writes, "cool" isn't just "trends" ("hyperpop, brainrot, crowdwork comedy, Instagram collages, their weird post-COVID pop punk exploration"). For Broderick, cool things used to become trends after they were "begrudgingly canonized" by the likes of Time Magazine. But with Hollywood replaced by Youtube, magazines replaced by Tiktok, and radio replaced by Spotify, that looks very different today. Today's version of artist management teams is "hype houses." All forms of cultural activity have collapsed into a single, overriding imperative: "getting attention."

Which brings Broderick to his main question:

If everything is just attention now, and attention is completely commodified by algorithmic tech platforms, how can you push back against that?

His answer: "You have to essentially pre-deplatform yourself."

For young people, "the only things that have the level of scarcity and danger required to be seen as cool" are "whatever is unacceptable on those platforms." In other words, anything (and maybe only things) that're blocked or banned are a candidate to be cool. Cool people walk away from the places where you'd expect to find them and hang out in places that are culturally viewed as less important.

Broderick argues that this is the source of far-right influencers' influence: the fact that manosphere weirdos and trolls are hanging out in "shadowy corners" like Kick makes them feel authentic and outside of the norm and thus intrinsically interesting. And (Broderick continues) the fact that these manosphere types are now totally reliant on Discord clip-farmers has made them feel more mainstream and thus potentially less interesting.

This is where it gets cool. Broderick argues that there's nothing intrinsically reactionary about this kind of self-deplatforming as a parallel evolution taking place in progressive media. When Stephen Colbert's Trump-colonized network bans him from airing an interview with a Democratic politician, he puts it on Youtube instead, where it gets far more attention than it would have if the network had just left him alone.

But by and large it's not Democratic politicians who are too dangerous for the platforms – it's copyright infringement. The law makes it very easy to get things removed via unproven accusations of copyright infringement, and the platforms make it even easier:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/27/nuke-first/#ask-questions-never

Copyright is a doctrine that, by design, has very fuzzy edges where things may or may not be prohibited. But in the digital world, those edges are often erased, even as the zone of lawful activity they enclose contracts. This means that media that can be accused of infringing copyright is the most unwelcome content on platforms.

Broderick's theory predicts that the "coolest" media – the stuff that makes taste – is the stuff that fits in this zone of copyright infringement. He cites some compelling case studies, like Vera Drew's "The People's Joker," an amazing, unauthorized Batman mashup/trans allegory. Warner shut down multiple screenings of The People's Joker (including at TIFF), and this increased the coolness and prominence of the movie, driving people to underground screenings:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Joker

A more contemporary version is Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, which Broderick describes as "a copyright rats nest" based on a web series that is "completely illegal to watch on streaming platforms":

https://pagesix.com/2026/02/14/hollywood/how-nirvanna-the-band-the-show-the-movie-skirted-copyright-law/

Despite this/because of this, NTBTSTM just had "the biggest opening ever for a live-action Canadian film":

https://x.com/hertzbarry/status/2023521583923663342

Broderick's conclusion is that "as platforms police speech less and less, edgelords lose their sheen," but that this material, at or beyond the edge of copyright, unwelcome on platforms, is the future face of cool.

And here's where Broderick really got me: "the most dangerous thing for platforms is not racist garbage. It’s unmonetizeable content."

I make a lot of "unmonetizable content," starting with this blog, which has no metrics, no analytics, and (of course) no ads. I refuse to add social media cards, and hide obscure jokes in incredibly long URLs that get truncated on social media. I labor for hours over the weird illustrations that go at the top of the posts, which I release (along with the text they accompany) under Creative Commons licenses that let pretty much anyone do pretty much anything with them, without asking me, telling me, or paying me (it's always very funny when someone accuses me of publishing this work as clickbait – clickbait for what? To increase bandwidth consumption at my server?).

I do this to "woo the muse of the odd," a phrase I lifted from Bruce Sterling's 1991 keynote for the Game Developers' Conference, a talk that struck me so hard that I dropped out of university to make weird multimedia shortly after reading it:

https://lib.ru/STERLINGB/story.txt

It's a great talk, but the best parts are where Sterling grapples with this question of coolness, counterculture, and commodification:

In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, "woo the muse of the odd." A good science fiction story is not a "good story" with a polite whiff of rocket fuel in it. A good science fiction story is something that knows it is science fiction and plunges through that and comes roaring out of the other side. Computer entertainment should not be more like movies, it shouldn't be more like books, it should be more like computer entertainment, SO MUCH MORE LIKE COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT THAT IT RIPS THROUGH THE LIMITS AND IS SIMPLY IMPOSSIBLE TO IGNORE!

I don't think you can last by meeting the contemporary public taste, the taste from the last quarterly report. I don't think you can last by following demographics and carefully meeting expectations. I don't know many works of art that last that are condescending. I don't know many works of art that last that are deliberately stupid… Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird and don't do it halfway, put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it.

It's been more than 30 years since I read that essay, more than a quarter century since I asked William Gibson whether Madison Avenue "finds its own use for things." Over the ensuing decades, media has become ever-better at "following demographics and carefully meeting expectations," thanks to vast troves of behavioral data correlated with media analytics. That process has only accelerated the "recommodification machine" that Gibson worried about in 1999, but as Broderick points out, there's one thing that is even harder to co-op than acne – "unmonetizable content," the Kryptonite of the platforms.

Hey look at this (permalink)

• finally we have created the silver bullet https://backofmind.substack.com/p/finally-we-have-created-the-silver

• Tac B https://chrisbathgate.blogspot.com/2026/02/tac-b.html

• Chainmail Finder https://www.chainmailfinder.com/

• More Women Drone Pilots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDJa1_fLVeA

• It’s Time for Teachers to Break Up with Amazon https://ilsr.org/article/independent-business/its-time-for-teachers-to-break-up-with-amazon/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago Mysterious “lawer” threatens to sue me over Bad Samaritan story https://memex.craphound.com/2006/02/20/mysterious-lawer-threatens-to-sue-over-bad-samaritan-story/

#20yrsago Flickr set documents locations in Neal Stephenson trilogy https://www.flickr.com/photos/notlikecalvin/sets/72057594068198516/

#20yrsago How the US is boning the developing world at WIPO https://web.archive.org/web/20060501000000*/https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004434.php

#20yrsago Why kids are on MySpace https://www.danah.org/papers/AAAS2006.html

#20yrsago Transport for London censors anagram Tube map https://web.archive.org/web/20060222021226/https://www.unfortu.net/anagrammap/

#20yrsago More clues to identity of author of EFF-sliming article in The Reg https://memex.craphound.com/2006/02/22/more-clues-to-identity-of-author-of-eff-sliming-article-in-the-reg/

#20yrsago US copyright head: world “totally rejects” webcasting restrictions https://memex.craphound.com/2006/02/21/us-copyright-head-world-totally-rejects-webcasting-restrictions/

#20yrsago Copyright office head denounces “big mistake” of extending copyright https://web.archive.org/web/20060329162217/https://www.ibiblio.org/yugen/video/too_long.mp4

#20yrsago Artists paint Detroit’s derelict buildings Tiggeriffic Orange https://web.archive.org/web/20060411143941/http://www.thedetroiter.com/nov05/disneydemolition.php

#20yrsago Canadian Uni bans WiFi because its safety can’t be proved https://web.archive.org/web/20060307004018/http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/home/News.asp?id=38093&PageMem=1

#15yrsago Overcome information overload by trusting redundancy https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/feb/22/information-overload-probabilistic

#15yrsago Embattled PS3 hacker raises big bank to fight Sony https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/02/george-hotz-secures-enough-donations-to-fight-sony-rap-battle-begins/

#15yrsago How Anonymous decides: inside the lulz-sausage factory https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/02/empty-suit-the-chaotic-way-that-anonymous-makes-decisions/

#15yrsago America’s Chief Apocalypse Officer, a Fed job ad from 1956 https://web.archive.org/web/20110210020542/http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2011/02/nuclear-weapons-post-attack-job-description-1956.html

#15yrsago What happens when you stick your head in a particle accelerator https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/03/what-happens-when-you-stick-your-head-into-a-particle-accelerator/

#15yrsago Saif Gadaffhi, plagiarist https://web.archive.org/web/20110225114903/https://saifalislamgaddafithesis.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

#15yrsago Google App to help locate people in Christchurch quake https://web.archive.org/web/20110222091007/http://christchurch-2011.person-finder.appspot.com/

#15yrsago Photos of kids waiting at Disneyland https://web.archive.org/web/20110301045827/https://arinfishkin.com/fishkin_delayed_gratification.html

#15yrsago Westboro Baptist Church attempts to lure Anonymous into attacking it? https://www.siliconrepublic.com/life/were-not-attacking-westboro-baptist-church-anonymous

#15yrsago Egyptian orders a pizza for the Wisconsin demonstrators https://www.politico.com/story/2011/02/from-cairo-to-madison-some-pizza-049888#ixzz1EXkqdxcu

#15yrsago Metaphotos of landmarks made from hundreds of superimposed tourist snaps https://web.archive.org/web/20110219193205/http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/hundreds-of-tourist-photos

#15yrsago Armed Services Edition books: abridgements and pocket-editions for doughboys https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/military/literature-on-the-frontlines-the-history-of-armed-services-edition-books/?doing_wp_cron=1771432700.1463210582733154296875

#15yrsago 3D printing’s first copyright complaint goes away, but things are just getting started https://memex.craphound.com/2011/02/20/3d-printings-first-copyright-complaint-goes-away-but-things-are-just-getting-started/

#15yrsago Imperial Scott Walker, the worker-hating AT-AT Destroyer https://web.archive.org/web/20110224024111/https://simulacrumb.tumblr.com/#3388763986

#10yrsago Forced arbitration clauses are a form of wealth transfer to the rich https://web.archive.org/web/20160322142114/https://www.acslaw.org/sites/default/files/Arbitration_as_Wealth_Transfer_1.pdf

#10yrsago Eleven years and counting: EFF scores a major victory in its NSA mass surveillance suit https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/big-victory-judge-pushes-jewel-v-nsa-forward

#10yrsago What a serious keysigning ceremony looks like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9j-sfP9GUU

#10yrsago Pseudoscientific terror ended fluoridation in Calgary, now kids’ teeth are rotting https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdoe.12215

#10yrsago Manual typewriter + servos = polyfingered robot dictaphone https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNSCL4YOd5E

#10yrsago Sarah Jeong’s Harvard lecture: “The Internet of Garbage” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUSctMLLNUE

#10yrsago Citing copyright, Army blocks Chelsea Manning from receiving printouts from EFF’s website https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/military-prison-blocks-chelsea-manning-reading-eff-blog-posts

#10yrsago Improve your laptop stickering technique https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juRDql6wBIQ

#10yrsago Photo of Bernie Sanders being arrested in 1963 Chicago protest https://web.archive.org/web/20160220024814/https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-bernie-sanders-1963-chicago-arrest-20160219-story.html

#10yrsago Uber uses customer service reps to push anti-union message to drivers https://qz.com/619601/uber-is-using-its-us-customer-service-reps-to-deliver-its-anti-union-message

#10yrsago The latest DNS bug is terrifying, widespread, and reveals deep flaws in Internet security https://web.archive.org/web/20160222231840/http://dankaminsky.com/2016/02/20/skeleton/

#10yrsago 19th century spam came by post, prefigured modern spam in so many ways https://web.archive.org/web/20160915000000*/http://www.ephemerasociety.org/blog/

#10yrsago Republican Congressmen backed by airline money kill research on legroom and passenger safety https://web.archive.org/web/20160221163010/https://theintercept.com/2016/02/21/backed-by-airline-dollars-congress-rejects-effort-to-address-shrinking-legroom/

#5yrsago The Paltrow-Industrial Complex https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/21/paltrow-industrial-complex/#goopy

#5yrsago Facebook vs Australia https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/21/paltrow-industrial-complex/#facecrook

#5yrsago K-shaped recovery vs wealth taxes https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/21/paltrow-industrial-complex/#wealth-tax

#5yrsago What Democrats need to do https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/22/sorcerers-apprentice/#do-something

#5yrsago Tech trustbusting's moment has arrived https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/20/escape-velocity/#trustbusting-time

#1yrago Ad-tech targeting is an existential threat https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/20/privacy-first-second-third/#malvertising

#1yrago We bullied HP into a minor act of disenshittification https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/22/ink-spattered-pitchforks/#racehorse-semen

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Montreal (remote): Fedimtl, Feb 24
  https://fedimtl.ca/

• Oslo (remote): Seminar og lansering av rapport om «enshittification»
  https://www.forbrukerradet.no/siste-nytt/digital/seminar-og-lansering-av-rapport-om-enshittification/

• Victoria: 28th Annual Victoria International Privacy & Security Summit, Mar 3-5
  https://www.rebootcommunications.com/event/vipss2026/

• Victoria: Enshittification at Russell Books, Mar 4
  https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cory-doctorow-is-coming-to-victoria-tickets-1982091125914

• Barcelona: Enshittification with Simona Levi/Xnet (Llibreria Finestres), Mar 20
  https://www.llibreriafinestres.com/evento/cory-doctorow/

• Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
  https://conference.bioneers.org/

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Panopticon :3 (Trashfuture)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/panopticon-3-150395435

• America's Enshittification is Canada's Opportunity (Do Not Pass Go)
  https://www.donotpassgo.ca/p/americas-enshittification-is-canadas

• Everything Wrong With the Internet and How to Fix It, with Tim Wu (Ezra Klein)
  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-doctorow-wu.html

• How the Internet Got Worse (Masters in Business)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auXlkuVhxMo

• Enshittification (Jon Favreau/Offline):
  https://crooked.com/podcast/the-enshittification-of-the-internet-with-cory-doctorow/

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1035 words today, 351334 total)

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

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Bobby no! Charlotte, you let him slip through your fingers.

The post Brazen fantasist appeared first on Bad Machinery.

New comic!

Let's not pretend we're not in mythological Greece here.

OTTAWA – Following a heartbreaking 2-1 loss to Team USA at the Winter Olympics, viewers nationwide started a rewatch of the hockey romance series, Heated Rivalry, in search of a more uplifting version of Canadian male hockey players getting screwed. “It was so frustrating watching all these guys trying to score on Hellebuyck, but he […]

The post Nation returns to Heated Rivalry to watch Canadians get fucked in a good way appeared first on The Beaverton.

A year ago, I wrote a piece about the asymptotic nature of intelligence and the limits of AI. It’s long been my contention that intelligence is not boundless; it doesn’t shoot up an infinite curve to the stratosphere. Rather, there is an upper limit on what can be known and the inferences that can be made based on what’s known. That is: a complete understanding of the universe may theoretically be possible. It’s also possible that to simulate this amount of knowledge, you basically need to build a second universe in which to house it. (The old cartography joke is that the best map is a one-to-one representation).

What would it look like to approach the asymptote of intelligence? A whole lot like the last year. Before you read any further, I highly recommend watching the following video:

The video is about OpenAI and ChatGPT, but it would be about whatever company had seized the low-hanging fruit of LLM scaling, projected infinite scaling onwards, and believed their own hype. The AI bubble is about to pop, and it’s mostly going to pop because too many people in Silicon Valley believed Ray Kurzweil’s inane hypothesis that intelligence is infinite and we are going to blast right through human intelligence toward something alien and godlike. This became an unspoken religion, a race toward “singularity” and AGI. It has always been based on a supposition for which there is no evidence — but plenty of desire.

One of the comments on the YouTube video above summed it up nicely: TonyGrayCanada wrote: “Scaling LLMs to get to AGI is like using a ladder to get to heaven. The length of the ladder isn’t the problem.”

The length of the ladder isn’t the problem.

And the problem might not be that we simply need a different way to get there. The problem most likely is that there’s no such thing as heaven. No infinite intelligence. No alien mind that will usher us into the fabled singularity.

However … what’s coming and what’s here is amazing enough, and I think this point gets lost in the crazy hype curves. The human brain is ASTOUNDING. We evolved from single-celled organisms on a wet ball in the middle of the cosmos, and then one day we peered deep into the cell to discover the helix of DNA, the atoms that make up those helixes, the quarks that make up those atoms. We also gazed out into the infinite expanse and figured out black holes and neutron stars and came up with some decent guesses about what holds it all together.

THIS IS BONKERS and we don’t talk about it enough. A jiggling of atoms became self-replicating and later figured out a whole lot about quarks and the cosmos. If you look at our origin and where we are, and you assume a theoretical limit to what can be known, we are most likely closer to the limit than we are to complete ignorance. We’re most of the way there. We built cities out of mud, and all the miracles within them. Some hairless apes. It’s crazy.

And AI is getting crazy, because it speeds up all the amazing things that humans can do. Writing computer code is slow and laborious. AI is automating that. In the next few years, we will reach a point where you might not purchase an application to solve a problem, you’ll just create your own application. (Or, most likely, your AI agent will be aware of the dozens of free apps others have already made to solve this problem and suggest or tweak an existing one).

Some define AGI as human-level intelligence, in which case we are already there. It might be funny to point out a hallucination here, or a logical error there, but for every example of AI getting something wrong, another model gets it right or the wrong model has already improved. Humans get things wrong all the time. Optical illusions persist even after being told what’s happening. Superstition exists even with all our scientific progress. And we hallucinate constantly.

The LLMs of today are more than capable of replicating what the human brain does, which is miraculous enough. New breakthroughs in physics are now coming from AI systems. Brand new math proofs. New medicines from complex protein folding. These are all things humans can do and would eventually get to ourselves, but AI is speeding up cognition and helping us get there a bit faster. Silicon Valley is betting the farm on this. But most of humanity is asking, “So what?”

The “So what?” is critical and should not be ignored. An LLM can already devise a better system of governance which will bring the most good to the most number of people. It can do that today. Right now. In mere minutes. But so can we! The fact that we don’t and can’t has nothing to do with what’s possible in our technology and everything to do with what’s wrong in our biology. We are petty, insecure, jealous, superstitious animals. We are already at the point where we would be better off automating our decision-making with an LLM. If an LLM had control over me, it would eat healthier, exercise more regularly, make fewer mistakes, know a whole lot more about the universe, how to fix things, how to be witty, it would write this blog post better and do it in an eyeblink.

So what?

Computers are already better than me at chess, and yet I continue to play. They built a robot that can play billiards almost perfectly, and yet I love chalking up a cue and the crack of a ball knocking another into a leather pocket. There’s a human out there who is better than me at anything I can do, and yet it feels good to do many of those things. We are jiggling bundles of atoms with feelings and moods, and we’re going to keep indulging in them and falling prey to them.

Earlier I pointed out that there’s a finite limit to what can be known about the universe. But there is no upper limit to creativity. We can be weird and avant-garde in a way that physics can’t. Physics is a set of rules and a pattern of ordering matter. Understanding the universe is a quest to simplify those rules and to grasp all the possible states of matter. Creativity is a wild exploration of all the things that aren’t possible. It’s infinite because it comes from randomness. Knowledge is finite because it comes from order.

A perfect future, where humans and their technology reach a kind of symbiotic homeostasis, would be one in which machines handle all the order that humans aren’t interested in, freeing up more time to engage in randomness. That doesn’t mean an end to work, because what many of us do for play qualifies for work by some other person. At times, doing the dishes feels like play for me. My hands want to be there, getting wet, removing grime, deriving aesthetic pleasure from watching a thing become clean and dry, ready to use again. There is no end to play or creativity.

This perfect future would be full of enough robot doctors that any injury or illness is seen to immediately. It will also include lots of human doctors who are doing the same thing becasue for them it is play. It will be full of AI-written novels that readers enjoy, but also human authors who can’t stop writing for the pleasure of it. The income side of things will be solved, because everyone will have food, shelter, security, healthcare, and all the necessities. But some will have more than others, because we are still moody little bundles of atoms. And some will try to harm others for the same reasons. But things will get better and better for the vast majority of people.

That’s a future we could design and work towards right now, with existing technology and wealth. But … of course we won’t do that. We aren’t that far evolved, and we may never be far enough evolved. What’s more likely is that our societies will crumble because we couldn’t be human to one another. Men will continue to backslide into the barbarism from which we came, built on aggression and fear, and women will keep making the decision to have less to do with us and more to do with themselves and one-another. Population collapse will accelerate; we will reach a point where economies contract, leading to wars of aggression and aggrievance. Pockets of rationality will make progress again, much like the Greeks among the Romans, and that progress will be seized and used to build toward what we have today, where it will collapse again. The oscillations will speed up because lost knowledge will be rediscovered more quickly from the artifacts left behind. Eventually, one of these oscillations will stumble upon a technology that can put an end to us all, and one among us will deploy it immediately. Leaving the Earth for some future hairless ape to have a go at it.

The limit holding us back will never be the limits of AI, but rather the limits of our biology. Can we stop hurting ourselves and others? Can we expand our circles of empathy until they include every living thing and even most non-living things. Can we be satisfied with less than our neighbors if it means we all have the basic necessities of life? I’m an atheist, and the 10 commandments start off with some very weak sauce about fearing no other god and what not to believe, but even I can see that most of our problems would be solved if we lived by the rest of what’s there. No lying. No jealousy. No killing. We’ve had all the answers for thousands of years. We still can’t abide by them.

This is why OpenAI is in trouble, why the AI bubble will burst, and why AGI will not fix everything. We know what to do. How to live. How to solve all our problems. There’s no deficiency in our brains. The problem is and always has been our hearts.

The post The Limits of AI appeared first on Hugh Howey.

In brief: The massive winter storm that will bear down on much of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic is about to kick off, so this post just runs through the expectations at the final hour.

Hopefully you all were able to watch Team USA take the gold this morning, and if you love cold and winter, the day should only get better for you in the Northeast and parts of the Mid-Atlantic. Here, we’ll walk you through the various expectations now that we’re in the final moments before the storm really begins.

Snow totals

This should not be a major storm in the DC Metro, though a few inches are possible.

Snow totals begin to ramp as you approach the northwest and east side of the Chesapeake Bay. Around a half-foot is expected in Baltimore with higher totals to the east, rapidly escalating to 12 to 18 inches from Salisbury, MD north across all of Delaware. A period of mixing near the coast may hold totals down there a bit, particularly around Ocean City, MD.

Snow totals really crank once into New Jersey with 12 to 24 inches likely in all of South Jersey. The riskiest spots for lower totals may be in Cape May County up to about Atlantic City and for the Delaware Beaches where a period of sleet or rain may mix in with the snow for a time, cutting totals down a little. There will still be a *lot* of snow.

The gold medal winners for this snowstorm will probably be somewhere in Ocean or Monmouth Counties in New Jersey or just southwest of there, where we could, theoretically, see someone pick up nearly 25 inches of snow. We’ve seen some models put out 30-inch totals here, but I do think snow ratios may hinder that effort a bit. Likely someone between Salem County and Monmouth County will pick up 25 inches or more when all is said and done and be crowned champion. Elsewhere, 12 to 20 inches of snow is likely across most of the rest of New Jersey.

Around 20 inches of snow is expected for most of the New York City Metro with closer to 12 to 18 inches up into Connecticut and perhaps higher totals on Long Island. To make the top 10 list all-time for snowstorms in New York City, we’ll need to see at least 18.2 inches at Central Park. We need 14.1 inches for the top 20 list.

Snow totals will remain around 20 inches in southeast New England, with both Providence and Boston likely to come close to there. Lesser amounts will fall on Cape Cod and especially Nantucket. A secondary snowfall maximum for the event overall could occur between Providence and Boston.

That’s a lot of snow. This storm will be in a future edition of “Northeast Snowstorms” I am sure.

Powerful winds

The forecast wind gusts remain very impressive across the region, with coastal communities likely to see 50 to 70 mph wind gusts from New Jersey through Long Island and southeast New England.

Hence, blizzard warnings are spread over a wide area for most areas south and east of I-84.

Coastal flooding

Tonight’s high tide is expected to cause locally major coastal flooding on the Delaware coast and Jersey Shore up through Long Island. Atlantic City is now forecast to see major tidal flooding levels reached. An 8-foot high tide would be the highest there since Hurricane Sandy.

Widespread moderate tidal flooding will occur outside of those pockets of major flooding. Thankfully, the storm is moving away by tomorrow, so that should limit the number of elevated high tides we see, with mainly just tonight’s being the most troubling for the region.

And so now we wait and see the totals pile in. Here’s hoping everyone stays safe through this event in the East. Feel free to share your reports with us too!

Take that, counter culture.

In brief: Forecasts through the day today have tended to trend toward an even more impactful storm from Delmarva through southern New England tomorrow and Monday. Major snow, powerful winds, and major coastal flooding have all escalated a bit since this morning.

There have continued to be a few changes today to the forecast with respect to the East Coast blizzard that will begin bearing down in about 12 to 18 hours. As a radio DJ said in college ahead of the Presidents’ Day storm of 2003, “we’ve upped our totals, now up yours.”

The expanse of snow seems to have grown a bit. It’s certainly expanded a bit more north and west. You can see this by looking at snow totals across New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

It now appears that the one-foot line will extend to the north of Boston out through Poughkeepsie and south into Allentown and possibly into much of Delaware now. Blizzard Warnings have also been expanded through the day today, now covering a huge area from Boston through the length of Delmarva.

Additionally, it seems that the wind forecasts have ratcheted up some since earlier today too. Here is one ensemble model, the HREF and its probability of wind gusts hitting 65 mph or higher through the event.

Those probabilities are quite high. These winds may locally cause some damage, particularly on the immediate coastline, with numerous power outages possible near the coast as well.

Another notch upward came via tidal flooding outlooks today. There is now likely to be some pockets of major coastal flooding from Delaware through Long Island. For example, the gauge at Lewes, DE is now expected to hit 8 feet with Sunday night’s high tide cycle. This would be the highest since the January 2016 blizzard.

The NWS in New York City is highlighting the potential for significant coastal flooding for portions of southwest Long Island in particular.

By the way, a pro-user tip: Go to your local NWS forecast office and read the briefing packages they put up during events like this. These are primarily geared toward media and emergency manager partners, but they contain a metric ton of information for the local area, including some very useful details on forecast uncertainties. Some offices make this easy to find. Others do not. But with enough digging, you can find them.

One other note: This is likely to be fairly wet snow, which makes shoveling a little more stressful. Please exercise caution when clearing the sidewalks. Your risk of a heart attack increases substantially when dealing with this sort of snow. As we tell people here in Houston when it gets a little extra hotter than usual in summer: Don’t underestimate the impact these more extreme events can have on personal health risks.

I had seen some comparisons to the Blizzard of 1978 (the New England one, not the Midwest one) thrown around, which seems, kind of reasonable? No two storms are identical, and indeed this storm’s track will not be identical to that one, nor will the snow totals be identical. But just including that as an analog puts this storm in rarefied air.

We are probably looking at a memorable, if not historic storm for the coast from Delmarva through southern New England. This one appears to be one for the books.

The weather started getting rough…

Sometimes I worry that my lamps aren’t feminine enough.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
The Man from Madras, whose balls were of brass, is in fact a meditation on the need to find synthesis between humanity and technology in modern life.

MILAN – After causing the nation 3 straight days of what can only be described as “holy shit, holy shit, I’m going to lose my god damn mind” levels of stress at the Olympics, the government has ordered Hockey Canada to pay for all Canadians’ therapy appointments for the next 3 weeks. “You can’t just […]

The post Hockey Canada ordered to pay nation’s therapy bills appeared first on The Beaverton.

MILANO-CORTINA – With Canada’s mens team defeating Great Britain to clinch gold in the Winter Olympics, Canadian skip Brad Jacobs is crediting the victory to his team’s delicate, sometimes-controversial fingering technique. “We caught a lot of heat for our fingering earlier in the games,” explained a flushed, satisfied Jacobs after the climax of the event. […]

The post Canada credits gold medal curling win to expert fingering appeared first on The Beaverton.

This comment section is open for any non-work-related discussion you’d like to have with other readers, by popular demand. Here are the rules for the weekend posts.

We fostered and then quickly adopted Laurie in 2020, during the first week of the pandemic. He hid behind some books on a bookcase for three days, but he relaxed once he discovered there were other cats in the house. It turned out he loved other cats.

We had named him after the neighbor boy from Little Women before realizing that, just like his namesake, he yearned to be part of a big family. Fortunately, he was! He was an aggressive cuddler; he loved being in my lap, but his favorite thing in the world was cuddling with other cats. If he saw a cat looking cozy, he immediately snuggled up with them. He slept in a ball with Wallace every night.

We lost him to lymphoma this week. He was full of love and joy.

The post weekend open thread – February 21-22, 2026 appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Yeah. Got it. Let’s go.

A U.S. district judge ruled Buffalo Wild Wings can continue to call its popular menu item “boneless wings” even though they are “essentially chicken nuggets.” What do you think?

“I always just get bone-ins and ask for the bones on the side.”

Zoe Barlow, Horticultural Essayist

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“Makes you wonder how loco the pollo we’re eating actually is.”

Joel Avrin, Bread Bagger

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“The casual dining chicken restaurant told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Gary McArdle, Macaron Displayer

The post Buffalo Wild Wings Allowed To Continue Using ‘Boneless’ Chicken On Menu appeared first on The Onion.

LONG BEACH, CA—Encouraging his child to put her language skills to good use, local father Paul Feldman urged his daughter Alice to show off her high school Spanish with a guy on the street speaking Spanish, sources confirmed Friday. “This is a great opportunity to show off that B+ you got in Señor Shapiro’s class,” said Feldman, assuring his daughter that even if her pronunciation was not completely flawless, the man muttering to himself in rapid Spanish while glaring at passersby would be sure to appreciate the effort. “He’s going to be so impressed by your vocabulary, not to mention the fact that you’ve mastered the dreaded pluscuamperfecto tense. Don’t forget to roll your R’s, and maybe throw in a little of that Castilian lisp.” At press time, Feldman was comforting his crestfallen daughter with a reminder that she had at least just learned a lot of new Spanish words. 

The post Dad Urges Daughter To Show Off High School Spanish With Guy On Street Speaking Spanish  appeared first on The Onion.

WASHINGTON—Exhausted from repeated efforts to explain the most basic aspect of political power, an aide to President Trump nevertheless began wearily explaining for the fifth time Friday why he couldn’t pardon the former Prince Andrew. “I know Andrew is a good man who’s been treated terribly, but you remember when we learned a few minutes ago that England and the United States are two different countries?” said Senior Advisor Gerald Donovan, gesturing yet again at a world map with the nations in question labeled “America” and “Not America.” “So because England is not the United States—remember, not the same thing—you are not president of it. Does that make sense? And since you are not boss of England, you can’t do things like pardon Prince Andrew, even if it makes you really mad that you can’t. A long time ago we were part of England, but we aren’t anymore. That’s why we’re now one thing, and they’re another separate thing far, far away.” At press time, Trump seemed to finally grasp why he couldn’t pardon Andrew but said he would not rule out running for president of England in 2028.

The post Aide Wearily Begins 5th Explanation Of Why Trump Can’t Pardon Prince Andrew appeared first on The Onion.

The post Trump Suffers Setback Unrelated To Child Rape appeared first on The Onion.