nerd

Some Interesting Things I Read Today (12 May)

I want to stop linking to archive.today because of its troubling behaviour, so I won't be providing that link for some sources. I also won't link directly to 404media because they annoy me with their “it's free, but give us your email” tactic. You'd think an outlet writing on privacy would realise how gross that is, but...

I also don't link to Substack because they have knowingly and directly supported Nazis; I wish people would move off and to something like Ghost, but I can't also pretend to know their reasons for staying on the Nazi Blog Platform. I don't think this people are bad, btw; I just think they have another priority, and I don't know what it is. Anyway, I tried archiving via IA, but Wayback Machine throws out error pages that make you look for the relevant post and then click a link in the suggestions... which makes zero sense.

• Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain by Jason Koebler [11 May 2026, 404media]

I will be going about my day reading, watching, or listening to something and, suddenly, I notice that something is wildly off. Quite simply, I feel like I’m going nuts.

I feel this very strongly. I don't normally assume everything is AI, but when it starts hitting me in ways that feel strongly of AI... It makes me feel like I've lost the plot. I also feel very strongly that, even when people tell me they've used the generative AI in certain parts of the development of something... That I find it hard not to question whether they've been using it elsewhere, and it makes me want to not engage with anything else they do.

(Disclosure: Pangram Labs previously advertised on 404 Media).

This is a fun thing to point out because AI detection is shit at detecting AI... and often flags non-AI things as AI because (in a fun ouroboros of shit, AI is trained on non-AI things in order to create the “more human”-sounding AI bullshit). So while I'm glad 404 did disclose this in the article, they also need to not promote people who promote the use of AI in ways where it doesn't quite work.

Other fun things to note:

When I sat down to write this article, in which, to be clear, I did not use AI, I found myself writing the following sentence: “It’s not just in places we’re conditioned to see AI—Google AI overviews, LinkedIn influencer posts, and Facebook feeds—I’ve started seeing AI…” I stopped typing, freaked out, and deleted the sentence. Have I always written this way? I honestly don’t know.

This AI construction is a common way of speaking. Of course you've likely written like this, but it's the frequency. How often do you say “It's not x, it's y?” That's the bigger tell for AI rather than whether a person uses that phrasing or not. Same thing goes for other so-called “tells”: the em dash, semi-colons, and parentheticals. I use a lot of all these things and have for years, but what is the comparison between how much I use them and how much AI uses them? (And in some cases, my use of some things mirrors AI despite the fact that I know I've used them “excessively” and can go back to examples from the 2010s to prove it.)

Last month, the New York Times quoted a teacher who said “They are using generative A.I. to write before they learn how to write.” Teachers I spoke to last year lamented that they are spending their very real human hours and considerable brain power trying to determine whether they are grading essays that are written by humans or robots, and know that they are often giving writing notes on papers that were likely written by AI.

Speaks more to the school system. When kids don't feel they're doing something within their capabilities (like kids who struggle to write in the language of instruction because they're not getting necessary language support) or something that is authentically engaging, you're going to end up with AI work (much like you end up with copied work prior to AI). Also, it's easy to tell whether the work your students give you is AI if you work with them throughout the whole process and also engage them in other things (e.g., note-taking for the process). I know a teacher's job requires a lot (I've done it for 15 years), but I'm seeing a lot of focus on the wrong things and teachers handing out excessive amounts of work.

• I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me. by Marcus Olang' [8 July 2025]

This was linked in the above article, but when I opened it and saw:

The replies pointed out something crucial, something that makes this whole debate even more infuriating: Some of us actually had to learn English.

I knew I had to actually read it. Even though I grew up speaking English as my first language (and therefore didn't have to learn English in the same way because it came to me “naturally” as part of the environment I grew up in), I have worked with a number of people who speak a different first language and therefore learned English in a formal classroom setting.

To these detectives of digital inauthenticity, I say: Friend, welcome to a typical Tuesday in a Kenyan classroom, boardroom, or intra-office Teams chat. The very things you identify as the fingerprints of the machine are, in fact, the fossil records of our education.

And even though the people I have worked with are Korean, Slovak, Czech, Polish, Chinese, Ghanaian, etc... They also frequently use the same “AI tells” that Marcus lists because they all learned English in a classroom with varying degrees of strict colonial attitudes built into the curriculum.

Recent academic studies have confirmed this, finding that these tools are not only unreliable but are significantly more likely to flag text written by non-native English speakers as AI-generated. (And, again, we’re going to get back to this.) The irony is maddening: You spend a lifetime mastering a language, adhering to its formal rules with greater diligence than most native speakers, and for this, a machine built an ocean away calls you a fake.

I just love this paragraph, so go read Marcus's piece. I'm not saying more than that.

Some Interesting Things I Read Today (16 April)

• Anti-imperialism of the Idiots: How Western Campists and Tankies Align with the Axis of Resistance [25 January 2025]

Personally, I don't see a need for the term “campists” when the two camps are effectively the same thing. “Tankies” doesn't allow them to escape the historical complicity that they continue supporting, particularly since these people are continuations of the same political project that would've supported the Soviets sending tanks into Hungary in 1956.

Otherwise, I like this incredibly concise piece because it highlights a continuing issue of Western leftists supporting other authoritarian and imperial regimes in favour of what is largely anti-US politics (because even when they are anti-Israel, that opposition still sits largely with their opposition to the United States and the connection of Israel to the US rather than actually critiquing the problems of Zionism and the inherent colonialism of Israel). I also think that a tankie's opposition to Europe is a mixed bag and highly dependent upon the situation being discussed, whether that nation shares an affinity for similar authoritarian regimes (e.g., Russia), and often seek to obfuscate the imperialism or colonialism of the nation they choose to tentatively support.

• Fergie Chambers Is Heir to One of America’s Richest Families — and Determined to See the U.S. Fall by David Peisner (24 March 2024)

I'm not a fan of the framing of this article, but it highlights a lot of red flags that people will gladly overlook in their supposed anti-colonial or anti-imperial politics, including domestic abuse (a constant thing that is neglected by many people). Probably one of the most honest parts of the article is this:

Chambers’ outsize wealth ensures his outsize opinions have outsize influence. He consistently shrugs off the notion that he’s the leader of any movement, but as Kamau Franklin, who runs Community Movement Builders, a Black-led nonprofit that works on issues of police violence and sustainability and to which Chambers has given multiple grants, puts it, “Because of the resources he has, whether people like it or not — whether I like it or not — he’s deferred to by certain people who are looking to bring him in closer in order to get those resources.”

And also this:

Pushak, one of a few veterans of the Madison compound who moved to Alford, eventually fell out with Chambers. He looks back fondly on their friendship, but says Chambers just didn’t like being challenged. “People are somewhat disposable to him,” he says. “He can buy new friends. I feel like an asshole saying it, but it didn’t feel that way until I was treated that way.”

• Transmisandry Is Not Real by Devon Price (22 January 2024) [archive link]

Devon writes about how the bigotries that trans men face are more often not as a result of being men but because other people do not see them as men. I like this piece for how it highlights where the bigotries are coming from, making it clear that they are part of battles that people are fighting in other arenas.

Some Interesting Things I Read Today (3 April)

• The State vs. the Emma Goldman Book Club by Sara Van Horn (2 April 2026)

This whole case has been infuriating, but I also don't like giving the first amendment nonprofits any excuse. The ACLU has literally come out in support of Nazis in the past, and they can't handle the fact that there was a gun present in a protest in a state where guns are very legal? That seems like they'd rather pick and choose who gets first amendment rights, despite their claims otherwise.

The above article is a pretty good rundown of the Pairieland trial.

• How the Prairieland ‘Antifa’ Verdict Threatens the Anti-Trump Resistance by Steven Monacelli (19 March 2026)

Same topic as above, immediately after the verdict, and discusses the repercussions of this decision. While I don't usually like engaging with former intelligence dorks (which this article does), they do make good points about what'll happen (that, btw, most people who didn't do any of this to other people... already had made).

• School book banning escalates in the UK as Greater Manchester secondary school censors scores of books by Katie Dancey-Downs (20 March 2026)

Ridiculous use of AI to ban books, but also just a bunch of absurd censorship choices. Children are being weaponised again for “their own safety.”

Some Interesting Things I Read Today (2 April)

I don't want to take notes on these, but I do want to keep track of and share some of the interesting things that I've read. (I'm not going to bother keeping track of things that felt annoying or awful to me.)

• On The Enshittification of Audre Lorde: “The Master's Tools” in Tech Discourse by Tara Tarakiyee (28 March 2026)

Using Cory Doctorow's usage of Audre Lorde as a jumping off point, Tarakiyee delves into the context and history of Audre Lordes comments on “the master's tools” and how it is utilised in tech. This particular quote is something that I like, and I think it'll stick with me (probably because it feeds into my frustration for people using the work of others as a means to shut people up):

From my perspective, in free software and adjacent communities, the phrase has taken on a life entirely detached from its origins. I myself have probably engaged with it that way, to be completely honest. Micah White described it as “the atomic bomb of discussion enders,” a phrase so potent it can be applied to absolutely any argument about strategy and method, often by people who have never encountered the full speech. White's concern is not with Lorde's argument but with what has been done to it: a revolutionary provocation flattened into a reflexive shutdown. It shows up most often as a thought-terminating cliché: using corporate infrastructure, proprietary platforms, or mainstream legal mechanisms to advance liberation goals is self-defeating by definition. The master's tools. End of conversation.

• The Technofascist Technology Quiz by Catherine D'Ignazio (28 February 2026)

Somewhat useful, though I feel that it is lacking because it doesn't do enough to recognise that even centralising around the government (not just military or law enforcement*) enables technofascism. Seems like it could be a good starting point, but it really needs to engage specifically with governments and not just some of the institutions they offer.

This also includes that she needs to have people think about connections between corporations and other institutions (e.g., Palantir's use in health services).

I feel similarly about the post she wrote previously, trying to figure out how to define technofascism.

• The AI climate hoax by Ketan Joshi (17 February 2026)

Greenwashing is always something I'm reading about when it comes up, especially because it's such a major problem. There's also one on a “green” and “privacy-focused” search engine that added AI, despite the fact that their claims were nonsense.

I don't think regulations are going to save us, so I don't agree with those proposals because it's so easy to undo policy (as we see everywhere). I really do think more direct action and dismantling of these industries and companies is the best way to deal with this.