Mr.Mark

🤪

“The irony of being forced to dumb down an essay about a story warning against the forced suppression of excellence was not lost on me. Or on my kid, who spent a frustrating afternoon removing words and testing sentences one at a time, trying to figure out what invisible tripwire the algorithm had set. The lesson the kid absorbed was clear: write less creatively, use simpler vocabulary, and don’t sound too good, because sounding good is now suspicious.
At the time, I worried this was going to become a much bigger problem. That the fear of AI “cheating” would create a culture that actively punished good writing and pushed students toward mediocrity. I was hoping I’d be wrong about that.
Turns out… I was not wrong.”
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/06/were-training-students-to-write-worse-to-prove-theyre-not-robots-and-its-pushing-them-to-use-more-ai/

“The bill would make clear that the powers of corporations do not include spending money or contributing “anything of value” to influence elections or ballot measures, as the bill’s language explains.

That could directly challenge the ability of super PACs to raise unlimited money and keep their sources of funding secret.

“It makes Citizens United irrelevant in Hawaiʻi,” said Tom Moore, a senior fellow for democracy policy at the Center for American Progress who previously served for seven years at the Federal Election Commission. “Hawaiʻi has the opportunity to lead.”
https://www.civilbeat.org/2026/04/can-hawaii-deliver-all-of-america-from-citizens-united/

This is bonkers!
#degoogle
“Both of these episodes, the Anthropic Claude Desktop manifest install I wrote about two weeks ago and the Google Chrome Gemini Nano push I am writing about today, share the same underlying decision. An engineering team at a large AI vendor decided that the user's machine is a deployment surface to be optimised for the vendor's product roadmap, not a personal device whose owner is the legal authority on what runs there.”
https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-silent-nano-install

“I wanted, in this horrible moment, to remind people that what the far right is doing globally, I think, is largely backlash. A new world is being born, and they’re basically trying to abort it. Which is a little ironic, given their views on abortion.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/mar/25/rebecca-solnit-slow-revolution-far-right-cannot-tolerate

Please, #europe, #france, don’t fall for the con…

😎

I wonder how the US would look?

RE: @karlauerbach@sfba.social

THIS!