Ten years after AlphaGo’s match against Go champion Lee Sedol, today’s AI still isn’t tapping into the machinery that made that win possible.

The voice in your head is not yours. It’s an advertisement urging you to buy a drink from the nearby vending machine. By now, you’ve learn...

# Today's links * Israeli ad-tech company was a delivery system for "mercenary spyware": And they used Google, Facebook and every other major ad platform to do it. * Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. * Object permanence: Big Mouth Billy Bass x Linux; No-Fly lists v common sense; Lemony Snicket advises the 1%; "Aloha From Hell"; KSR v Elon Musk; "Everything Belongs to the Future"; Trump's mail-servers run Win2003; Copyfraud v covid. * Upcoming appearances: Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Vienna, Kilkenny, Oxford, Sheffield, Virtual, Oxford, Montreal. * 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. * * * # Israeli ad-tech company was a delivery system for "mercenary spyware" (permalink) More than half of all internet users have installed an ad-blocker; Doc Searls calls it the largest consumer boycott in history. As large as that boycott is, everyone – yes, _everyone_ – should block _every_ "programmatic" ad, because the entire system is so insecure that failing to do so could result in the total compromise of any or all of your digital devices. That's the inescapable conclusion of Citizen Lab's latest blockbuster investigative report, "Exposing AdFection," which reveals how the largest ad-tech companies in the world, including Google and Facebook, allowed themselves to be hijacked by a "mercenary spyware" company that used the ad system to locate targeted individuals and serve "zero-click malware" that took over their computers and phones without them having to take _any_ action: https://citizenlab.ca/research/how-discover-tech-turned-targeted-ads-into-a-pipeline-for-spyware/ These tech giants amassed detailed surveillance dossiers on virtually every internet user, and they've assigned each of us unique, persistent identifiers, like a Social Security Number for spying. These companies _also_ allow advertisers – or anyone pretending to be an advertiser – to serve blobs of code (which is all an ad is) to anyone based on those identifiers. This allowed an Israeli spyware company called Discover-Tech (which masquerades as an ad-tech company) to sell totalitarian governments and sleazy corporate mercenaries the ability to pluck individual internet users out of the billions who log in every day and then serve "malicious ads" (that is, blobs of arbitrary code) to those targeted users. These malicious ads contained "no-click, zero-day" attacks, which meant that they exploited previously unknown vulnerabilities to take over devices without _any_ user interaction. The mere act of loading a web-page or opening an app that relied on one of these gigantic ad-tech companies to serve ads was enough to compromise your device. No clicks needed, and no warning. Among the targets of this attack campaign were the computers of workers at Al Jazeera. They were attacked with malware from the mercenary spyware company Candiru (which now calls itself "Integrity Labs" because irony is not dead). Beyond Candiru, Discover-Tech also facilitates attacks by numerous criminal mercenary spyware companies, serving ads on hundreds of thousands of sites and apps. Discover-Tech was "certified" as a safe supplier by Google, Yandex, Microsoft, Beeswax (a division of Comcast) and IAB, the ad-tech industry's leading professional association. Ironically, Discover-Tech even attacked users by serving them malicious GDPR notices that appeared to let users opt out of commercial surveillance. Because Discover-Tech was certified by all these industry bodies and firms, it had access to more than _four billion_ ad-auctions, meaning that on _billions_ of occasions, it was able to collect the identities of users loading apps and visiting websites, check them against the list of targets, and attack any victims it discovered through this dragnet. Discover-Tech is an Israeli company with ties to other Israeli spyware and hacking companies, including through its board, whose members included Eric Banoun ("One of the pioneers of offensive cyber in Israel" – _Haaretz_). They have overlaps, relationships and affiliations with a rogue's gallery of Israeli companies, including the notorious NSO Group, who routinely sell cyber-weapons to the world's worst governments and whose products have been used to attack journalists, embassy workers, and activists. The whole incident highlights the monumental insecurity of the ad-tech industry, whose indiscriminate and voracious surveillance and manifestly insufficient vetting and security auditing now exposes every internet user in the world to terrifying targeted attacks. These companies – including Google, a thrice-convicted monopolist whose surveillance tendrils are wrapped around the whole world – claim that they operate their networks with prudence and oversight. But the proof is in the pudding: for years, they've played host to a murderer's row of cyber-mercenaries who used their infrastructure to attack journalists and others. The only way to avoid this is to block ads. This is easy enough to do in a browser (which is why the majority of internet users have installed an ad-blocker in their browsers), but it's _illegal_ to reverse-engineer and modify an app so you can block the ads in it: https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/21/dickovers/#block-element Many websites run anti-ad-block scripts that push out nagging, guilt-tripping notices that call you a thief and a cheapskate for blocking ads. Ignore those notices: if a website is running "programmatic" ads that allow arbitrary third parties to spy on billions of people and target individuals for malicious device takeovers, they are charging too high a price to see their content. Some sites go further: their notices demand that you either turn off your ad-blocker or pay for a subscription. This "pay or okay" scheme is illegal in Europe, California and other territories with strong privacy laws, and they are morally bankrupt besides. Privacy shouldn't be a luxury item and _everyone_ deserves to be secure from cyber-attacks: https://noyb.eu/en/noybs-pay-or-okay-report-how-companies-make-you-pay-privacy This report also provides the most comprehensive rebuttal to a dangerous idea that refuses to die: that we should improve competition in the ad-tech sector by assigning every internet user a mandatory, government-issued advertising ID to "democratize" ad-targeting and followup (which the sector calls "attribution"): https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/07/revealed-preferences/#extinguish-v-improve Despite all this, none of it is an indictment of ads _per se_. The problem here isn't _advertising_ , it's _surveillance_. The ad-tech sector has convinced advertisers that targeting ads to _users_ rather than _content_ will massively improve ad performance. The evidence for this is _very_ poor: targeted ads improve clickthrough rates by less than 5% (relative to content-based ads that relate to the substance of the page you're looking at), and they're incredibly expensive (and _very_ dangerous!) to serve. On top of all that, surveillance-based ads shift power away from publishers (who know more about the materials they publish than any ad-tech company ever will) to spying ad-tech companies (who can spy on users in ways that no publisher could ever match). Whatever minor additional revenues surveillance advertising can wring out of the market are totally swamped by the cost of the ad-tech sector's own operations, which the ad-tech sector makes up for by grossly underinvesting in security and by colluding to cheat publishers _and_ advertisers, charging more for ads and paying less to the websites that run them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue If we want to improve competition in advertising services, the answer isn't to facilitate spying (which also allows the world's scummiest cyber-mercenaries to stage and serve targeted attacks). We should ban surveillance advertising altogether, restoring context-based ads to their role as the way that publishers make an honest living without selling out their audiences: https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/31/context-ads/#class-formation * * * # Hey look at this (permalink) * Philips updates instructions for ultrasound system linked to 4 deaths https://www.medtechdive.com/news/philips-updates-instructions-for-ultrasound-system-linked-to-4-deaths/832692/ * Don’t be fooled—LLMs don’t reason https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/10/02/1145639/dont-be-fooled-llms-dont-reason/ * Beneath resilient financial markets, risks remain elevated and vulnerabilities persist https://www.imf.org/en/publications/gfsr/issues/2026/10/13/global-financial-stability-report-october-2026 * Ultimate gridfinity drawer configurator https://makerworld.com/en/models/2737065-ultimate-gridfinity-drawer-configurator * Is Blockbuster Video the Answer to Our Digital Privacy Woes? https://www.thenation.com/article/society/digital-privacy-salazar-paramount/ * Trump Is Encouraging Airlines to Scam Passengers in Every Way Possible https://newrepublic.com/article/216435/trump-airline-fees-fines-passenger-rights-scam * * * # Object permanence (permalink) #25yrsago Linux on a Big Mouth Billy Bass https://web.archive.org/web/20010927153043/http://bigmouth.here-n-there.com/ #20yrsago No-Fly lists even stupider than suspected https://web.archive.org/web/20061019002553/http://rawstory.com/showoutarticle.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbsnews.com%2Fstories%2F2006%2F10%2F05%2F60minutes%2Fmain2066624.shtml #20yrsago Canadian MP booted for his blog https://web.archive.org/web/20061026153747/http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2006/10/18/turner-caucus.html #20yrsago Recording industry shuts out Brazilian legal scholars https://web.archive.org/web/20061103225020/http://www.a2kbrasil.org.br/ENG/SIGN-A-PETITION-FOR-AMENDING-THE #20yrsago How pickpockets work https://web.archive.org/web/20070110023812/http://www.kiplinger.com/magazine/archives/2006/11/mystory.html #15yrsago Why are more people opting for legal name-changes than ever before? https://web.archive.org/web/20111020163908/http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15333140 #15yrsago Advice to the 1% from Lemony Snicket https://occupywriters.com/works/by-lemony-snicket/ #15yrsago Proposed Australian law makes it an offense to insult Gaming Minister Michael O’Brien https://web.archive.org/web/20120507161803/http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/more-news/surely-this-is-a-joke/story-fn7x8me2-1226167552466 #15yrsago Aloha From Hell: Sandman Slim goes back to Hell and kicks more ass https://memex.craphound.com/2011/10/18/aloha-from-hell-sandman-slim-goes-back-to-hell-and-kicks-more-ass/ #10yrsago California DMV thinks “INFOS3C” is a dirty word https://www.techdirt.com/2016/10/17/california-dmv-rejects-1nfos3c-vanity-plate-because-sexual-connotation/ #10yrsago Howard Stern won’t release Trump tapes https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/howard-stern-on-replaying-his-donald-trump-interviews-it-would-be-a-betrayal-7542079/ #10yrsago Kim Stanley Robinson says Elon Musk’s Mars plan is a “1920s science-fiction cliché” https://web.archive.org/web/20161018043554/http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-17/why-elon-musk-s-mars-vision-needs-some-real-imagination #10yrsago UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal says GHCQ illegally spied for 17 years https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/17/13305270/uk-illegal-surveillance-gchq-investigatory-powers-tribunal #10yrsago Project Include cuts off Y Combinator because Peter Thiel is a part-time investor there https://web.archive.org/web/20161019043240/https://motherboard.vice.com/read/horrified-by-trump-silicon-valley-leaders-debate-cutting-ties-to-peter-thiel #10yrsago Islamophobic terrorist cell planned a “bloodbath” in Kansas, wanted to kill Muslim babies https://web.archive.org/web/20161018144035/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/10/15/it-will-be-a-bloodbath-inside-the-kansas-militia-plot-to-ignite-a-religious-war/?utm_term=.a9d769256cf6 #10yrsago Everything Belongs to the Future: a tale of pharmadystopian, immortal gerontocrats https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/18/everything-belongs-to-the-future-a-tale-of-pharmadystopian-immortal-gerontocrats/ #10yrsago UK government proposes issuing Britons with unique porn-viewing ID numbers https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/a-database-of-the-uks-porn-habits-what-could-possibly-go-wrong/ #10yrsago Donald Trump’s mail-servers are running Windows 2003 https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/18/labor-shortage-discourse-time/#core #5yrsago Copyfraudster censors investigation of implausible covid gadget https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/18/labor-shortage-discourse-time/#copyfraud #5yrsago Corporatism made John Deere ripe for a strike https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/18/labor-shortage-discourse-time/#deere-dash * * * # Upcoming appearances (permalink) * Vancouver: Read, Resist, Repair, Rejoice (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 19 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/01 * Victoria: Munro's Books, Oct 20 https://www.munrobooks.com/events/6113620261020 * Vancouver: Life After AI (Vancouver Writers Festival), Oct 22 https://writersfest.bc.ca/festival-event-2026/46 * Ottawa: Life After AI (Ottawa Writers Festival), Oct 24 https://writersfestival.org/event/life-after-ai * Vienna: TED AI, Oct 28-30 https://tedai-vienna.ted.com/ * Kilkenny (Kilkenomics), Nov 6-8 https://kilkenomics.com/ * Vancouver: Enshittification (Sid Williams Theatre Society), Nov 10 https://www.sidwilliamstheatre.com/events/cory-doctorow-talks-enshittification/ * Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12 https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/ * Oxford: Ministry of the Future, Nov 23 https://ministryforthefuture.co.uk/events.html * Sheffield: Reverse Centaur at Juno Books, Nov 25 https://www.outsavvy.com/event/40274/cory-doctorow-in-conversation * Virtual: Enshittification, AI, and the Future of Technology (UBC Master of Educational Technology), Nov 28 https://met.ubc.ca/2026/09/met-speaker-series-cory-doctorow-enshittification-ai-and-the-future-of-technology/ * Oxford: Bennett Oxford Symposium on Open Code in Science, Dec 9 https://www.bennett.ox.ac.uk/events/2026-bennett-institute-symposium/ * Montreal: World Science Fiction Convention, Sep 2-6 https://montreal2027.ca/en * * * # Recent appearances (permalink) * Life After AI (Brain Bar) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPPa43-n0vI * Terms of Service with Clare Duffy (CNN) https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/terms-of-service-with-clare-duffy/episodes/458ce968-af5d-11f0-b539-13ed2afe25f8 * AI, Work, and Power (Software Engineering Daily) AI, Work, and Power https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/podcasts/cory-doctorow-on-ai-work-and-power/ * AI, Corporate Power, and the Fight for Worker Control (Plutopia) https://plutopia.io/cory-doctorow-ai-corporate-power-and-the-fight-for-worker-control/ * How to Think About AI—Before It’s Too Late (Daniel Solove) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0xR3uEgGcc * * * # Latest books (permalink) * "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/ * "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 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, April 20, 2027 * "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027 * "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027 * * * # Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: **Currently writing:** * “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 563 (26602 total). * "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. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor. * A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING * * * This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. * * * # How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection): https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "_When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla_ " -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer. ISSN: 3066-764X

Den norske ambivalensen til atomvåpen har vore der heile tida. Det nye er at vi skal tene pengar på han.

Vi vet at ytre motivasjon virker dårligere enn indre. Og her nærmer vi oss det som er den store krisen for dagens barn og unge.

85 year-old Navi Pillay served as a leading national (during apartheid in South Africa) and international jurist. By appointing her, the Nobel Committee is making a stand which has drawn praise and condemnation.

It is dispiriting that we have finally reached the point where the pariah that is TurnItIn, the veritable trojan horse of extractive data farming edtech capitalism, is now blatantly telling universities that all student work will be used for their (proprietary, for profit) AI 'training' data. That they have been using student work for their search bot training for decades is now besides the point. That TurnItIn never had any purpose other than to convince academics it would help prevent plagiarism - when it does nothing of the sort, is now only a side issue. My own former employer circulated detailed notifications to staff about TurnItIn not being suitable for building plagiarism cases, so what was it for? Nothing. It was for nothing. Yet the uptake of TurnItIn in education is vast. https://calmatters.org/education/higher-education/2025/06/ai-detector/ So only now, even after so much time and valuable teaching expertise has been thrown down the toilet of extractive data farming, does HE finally wake up to their responsibility and criticise all the pointless monopolised SaaS that they pay to use yet get nothing out of. No one was willing to break the mould and say hang on - why don't we just stop using this crap? Everyone dressed it up as 'learning' for students. That seeing a similarity score was somehow going to make a student write a better essay. The fact that WONKHE have cottoned on to the fact that student work is owned by Turnitin is rather astonishing. It has always required “perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable and sublicensable” rights to student writing. Thats a long way of putting "we own everything you give us" - just like Facebook. Are people in denial, or just dumb? It's a good question. I have various email threads from a well known learning edtech community that discuss how they use TurnItIn. Should they all have been doing something a lot more worthwhile? probably. How much money was thrown at TurnitIn for the pleasure of then donating all student work for free? https://wonkhe.com/blogs/a-supplier-shouldnt-be-able-to-rewrite-who-owns-students-essays All academic writing is notoriously broken, has been for a very long time. I can never understand why any of this is permitted to carry on. The bottomless pit of public money and resources (staff time, training, research etc etc) donated freely to extractive companies who expect payment as well as all the free writing content and review. 'AI' will not help you. It will destroy it all. **More links** https://gradeforuni.com/turnitin-ai-student-essays-uk/ https://wordpress.aber.ac.uk/e-learning/2026/10/05/turnitin-statement/ https://www.ics.ai/post/ucisa-2026-ai-higher-education-insights https://www.turnitin.com/press/advance-to-acquire-turnitin https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2019/06/28/automating-mistrust/ #academia #academicchatter #ai #turnitin

I can dismiss a lot of pronouncements by Big Tech companies as simply press releases trying to invent the future. But attempting to ascribe consciousness to AI…

KI-forfatterne får meg til å savne den irriterende, men tross alt seriøse unge streberen.

Our research has traced the background of hundreds of people connected with the revolt.

Europe’s top disinformation conference faces government withdrawals and pressure over its debate on foreign interference, free speech and the US.

The capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and in particular Large Language Models like ChatGPT, Claude, or DeepSeek, are developing at extraordinary speed, accompanying by calls from some tech...

Tom Holloway’s play uses the real-life story of 1960s chatbot ‘Eliza’ to explore the tension between humans and AI.

I was trying to think of a more famous screenwriter in modern Hollywood than Aaron Sorkin, and I came up with nothing. The guy has been making movies and TV shows we love since the early 90s, and he gives a great sound bite and an even better interview. That's why I was so pumped to see him do this wide-ranging conversation with _Esquire_ editor-in-chief Michael Sebastian. These sit-downs are intimate, and you get to hear the real thoughts and ideas Sorkin has had throughout his illustrious career. From writing _The West Wing_ to directing his latest project, _The Social Reckoning_ , Sorkin goes into detail about the writing industry and expectations of a writer. Let's dive in. ## 1. Storytelling Truth vs. Literal Truth One of the most essential takeaways for screenwriters is Sorkin’s philosophy on truth. He put it pretty simply: your allegiance as a dramatist must be to storytelling truth, not literal fact. Or, as the old saying goes, "Never let a fact get in the way of a good story." To make his point, he talked about an iconic scene from _The Social Network._ Basically, in real life, Mark Zuckerberg was drinking beer in his dorm room while writing the blog post that launched _FaceMash._ But that felt kind of stale. So Sorkin wrote Zuckerberg making a vodka and orange juice, so it was more in character. When Fincher came in to direct, he pointed out the historical inaccuracy and wanted to change it to beer. So the two of them had a discussion, and Sorkin fought for vodka because a college student pouring vodka conveys an explicit intent to get drunk, whereas opening a beer could just mean he was thirsty. > "The important truth isn't what he was drinking—it was that he was drunk... It’s a painting, not a photograph." ## 2. Dialogue is Music, Not Just Data I love the rhythm of Sorkin dialogue. It's maybe the thing he's so famous for: the musicality of how his words stream from his characters and paint such a beautiful picture. His walk-and-talks are among the most recognizable things on TV and in movies. For Sorkin, dialogue should function like musical composition, in that what is said matters just as much as how it gets said. One of the things that makes Sorkin so unique is all the different directors who have taken a crack at his scripts. It's fun to see how they tackle certain aspects and then how much everyone has in common. In the video, Sorkin cites working with Rob Reiner on _A Few Good Men_ as a foundational learning experience in working with a director. Reiner treated dialogue with reverence, refusing to allow actors to ad-lib so that the rhythm remained intact. Other times in his career, that was not always honored. ## 3. "Trust Me, I'm Aaron" Scenes I think we all wish we had as much power as Sorkin, who can kind of drop the mic when confronted and tell people to trust his vision. He's been around the block now and has earned that trust, especially with all of his successes. This was also something he learned from Reiner, who would ask Aaron to go back to his desk and work scenes out rather than pitching them out loud because it was easier to prove himself that way. Reiner dubbed those the "Trust me, I'm Aaron" scenes. The lesson here is to just write it if you feel like you can't pitch it. ## 4. Outline vs. Free-Writing I am a big fan of writing a script outline, but Sorkin approaches draft writing organically. He's not writing anything formal before jumping in, His process is to wait until he has **three index cards** pinned to his board representing key beats before jumping into page one. Then, he just sits down and writes to those beats. His analogy here is using a flashlight to go through a forest. You can only see as far as the beam reaches ahead of you, but as you move forward, the path further along illuminates itself. Those beats get him walking, and as he walks, he sees more and more. ## 5. Why Generative AI Will Fail in Cinema This is originally why I tuned in. I wanted to hear Sorkin's point of view on AI, since AI has been one of the things shoved down our throats over and over again, And especially because it feels like these AI bros are always trying to get AI to spit out scenes that mimic Sorkin. Sorkin expresses a confident, humanist view that AI-generated stories will ultimately fail, largely because they lack resonance with humanity, since they have never lived. To make his point, Sorkin recalled seeing an abstract painting made by a machine at a party. When he learned a machine created it, his emotional response disappeared because he saw there was nothing behind that art. We want to see art developed by people. > "We are going to find out that it matters that they were people... We are not going to feel a connection to computer-generated characters, dialogue, stories, paintings, or songs." ## Summing It All Up Aaron Sorkin is an interesting person, and I think his life can be seen in his writing. We see this evolving guy trying to figure out not just tech but how people work. It's what has drawn the audience to him for the last 30+ years and why we still engage with his work today. I'm excited to see what he does next.

French cartoonist Piet creates anti-AI stickers

This post offers up a close reading of a section of the Stochastic Parrots paper, to make sense of an increasingly contested analogy. The reading is my interpretation, which draws from the text in the 2021 paper by Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major and (S)Mitchell. This year, Bender and Mitchell

Spiderweb Software creates epic indie fantasy adventures for Windows, Macintosh, and the iPad, including the hit Avernum, Geneforge and Avadon series.

KI inntar dataspillene og livene våre. Mens varsels­lampene blinker.

Selv bruk av KI til enkel språkvask kan endre både form og innhold i en tekst.

If you’re anyone who veers remotely to the left politically, there are two eras: a time before Bernie Sanders ran for president, and a time after. The US political landscape before Sanders’s first presidential campaign looks today like an alien planet. There were virtually no socialists who held elected office, or at least those who admitted to it. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was an obscure organization with a little over six thousand members across twenty-six chapters. Arguably the most prominent leftist figure was a curmudgeonly linguist who almost never appeared in mainstream media, Noam Chomsky. Only 59 percent of Democrats and less than half of independents were willing to vote for a socialist candidate. And the great progressive hope was a politician who flatly opposed single-payer health care and ran on a platform of stronger regulation and more public investment in key industries.Within five years of Sanders’s run, dozens of open socialists served in elected office at every level of government, including the US Congress. DSA’s membership had exploded to more than 55,000 with more than 150 chapters in every corner of the country. Socialists like Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were among the most popular political figures in the country. The share of Democrats willing to vote for a socialist candidate had jumped to 74 percent. And that progressive politician, Elizabeth Warren, launched a presidential campaign on a platform of single-payer health care, universal childcare, free public college, and debt cancellation.Neither Sanders nor his campaign were single-handedly responsible for all this. But it’s not a coincidence that the political landscape transformed this drastically, in this particular way, within less than a decade of his first campaign, nor that 97 percent of DSA’s now 120,000-strong membership joined after 2016 (the majority of its current members joined after 2019, when Sanders launched his second run and a year after Ocasio-Cortez first won election). Before Sanders made his first official announcement — to a small crowd of Capitol Hill reporters, muttering that there wasn’t an “endless amount of time” because he’d have to get back to work — most people, even on the Left, would have told you the world we currently inhabit, with all its horrors but also its sudden possibility, was decades away at best.There were a few socialists in political office before Sanders ran. Kshama Sawant had won a seat on the Seattle city council in 2013, for instance, while Carlos Ramirez-Rosa was sworn into his Chicago alderman’s seat twenty-nine days before Sanders’s announcement, even if he had not run as a socialist. (Ramirez-Rosa joined DSA a few months after Donald Trump won the 2016 election.) But the broad national appeal of Sanders’s platform was something different. It reminded millions of Americans who had learned to instinctively narrow their political ambitions that the things they assumed were impossible — not because they were actually impractical, but because there seemingly wasn’t the political will — they could and should fight for, because it was what most people wanted.Sanders’s campaign showed it was possible for a socialist to win over people who had never even flirted with New Deal liberalism, let alone Marxism. Whatever drove it, whether Sanders’ authenticity, his fist-shaking against the establishment, or the fact that even conservative households don’t want to be buried alive in medical bills, Sanders had a crossover appeal that defied the way we tend to pigeonhole voters. It wasn’t out of the ordinary to hear Trump supporters in those years professing that, after the demagogic billionaire, Bernie was their guy.Ideas and policies were one thing, but Sanders gave today’s socialists a ready-made vocabulary and approach to sell them, too. The Left’s decades in the political wilderness had been an often fruitless, Goldilocks-style search for a political tribune. Before Sanders, the lefty firebrands who championed the causes he became famous for came off, however unfairly, as kooks — like Dennis Kucinich, whose penchant for ventriloquism and claims he had seen a UFO could overshadow his advocacy for single-payer health care, or Mike Gravel, whose antiwar message was undercut by an onstage style that came off as unhinged ranting. Lefty politicians either had vision but not credibility, or, in Warren’s case, credibility but without a sufficiently ambitious vision.Sanders, by contrast, came off as fairly normal but serious — neither an ideological zealot, nor a doctrinaire leftist who spoke in slogans or obscure jargon, but someone who put socialist ideas into everyday language and made you agree they were common sense. What eccentricities he had built up in the course of a lifetime were either helpful — the uncombed hair, rumpled suits, and distaste for chit-chat that so amused political reporters bolstered his image as a no-nonsense fighter — or ones he swiftly repudiated.As Americans watched and heard Sanders speak with their own eyes and ears, they didn’t see the caricature of a socialist they had been fed through popular culture, but a pissed-off fighter for the working Americans being perennially screwed by a host of nefarious forces they recognized in their own lives: big banks, health insurers, corrupt politicians, the billionaires that fund them. This had been the secret sauce of Sanders’s breakthrough election to the US Congress in 1990, when he had used the previous year’s savings and loan bailout as a political foil and saw passing motorists yell at him to “Give ’em hell, Bernie!”They also saw someone who rooted this pitch in a national tradition they understood. Yes, Sanders often pointed to European countries like Denmark and Sweden to show that the policies he was calling for were practical. But crucially, he wrapped himself in the coat of the New Deal, the most well-known historical parallel to what he envisioned for the country, eschewing the tendency of some radicals to dismiss Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s program as a series of mere liberal reforms that had done capitalism a favor.In his first run, just as he would in his second, Sanders delivered a major address explaining to the nation what democratic socialism meant by casting the national memory back to the New Deal. Sanders had good reason to do it beyond its historical legibility for American voters. After all, for all its compromises, the greatest, longest-lasting achievements of Roosevelt’s program were often demanded, drawn up, and put into motion by left-wing radicals.It took a little longer for the class of young socialists inspired by Sanders to absorb all of these lessons. Many clung to the judgmental moralism and jargon-littered vocabulary that became accepted as normal on the Left for far too long. And socialists’ self-defeating fixation on “abolition” of police and prisons still persists, in spite of its many political and practical downsides.But they have been absorbed. We see it in the more plainspoken communication style and more class-focused approach of Ocasio-Cortez, who these days tends to stress the power of billionaires instead of simply racism to explain the Right’s ascent, and who is more likely to talk about how “the American Revolution was against the billionaires of their time” than to talk about “the intersectionality of interconnectedness of all our fights” for a laundry list of types of justice.And we see it in the mayoralty of Zohran Mamdani, one the most popular politicians in the country, who has charted a different path on public safety and policing that more closely parallels that of Sanders, whose very first election victory rested on poaching the local police union’s endorsement.Keeping the Light AliveAll of the elements that built and sustained Sanders’s political path through an era vastly more unfriendly to socialism were there in his first campaign. That campaign in turn became a real-world model for socialists in the twenty-first century to both run for office and engage with a skeptical American public — a model that, looking out from the cliffside of 2026, they have used to reshape US politics.Trump’s two election victories and the weakness of liberal institutions have made it easy to miss this story. It’s been made even easier thanks to a mainstream press perpetually in a hurry to declare the Left dead, confidently telling us over and over again that the socialist movement Sanders’s run helped breathe new life into had finally run out of oxygen.The reality is that a decade after a time when, generously, only a handful of socialists around the country held any elected office, socialists now hold serious positions of power all over. There will be at least seven socialists in the US House of Representatives next year, growing nearly fourfold since Trump declared to a standing ovation from Congress that “America will never be a socialist country.”A socialist will almost certainly be elected mayor of the nation’s capital this November. Socialists are presidents of the city councils of both St Louis, Missouri, and Providence, Rhode Island, with the candidate’s slate of progressive allies achieving a near sweep of their city council races in the latter. Socialists also control a third of Portland, Oregon’s city council, occupy nearly a third of the seats on Minneapolis’s — where DSA-backed members serve as both the majority and minority leaders — and have four seats on Los Angeles’s fifteen-member city council. Wisconsin has a socialist caucus again in its state legislature after a nearly hundred-year absence, one of whose members very nearly took the Democratic nomination for governor this year. For years, socialists held a near-majority on the city council of Somerville, Massachusetts.Numbering in the dozens at the end of last decade, there are now more than 250 socialists holding elected office across the country. You can find them everywhere from the Mountain States (in Santa Fe, Missoula, Aurora, to name a few) and the Midwest (in Toledo, Louisville, Iowa, Chicago, among others) to New England (in places like Portland, Cambridge, the state legislatures of Vermont and Connecticut), and the South (in New Orleans, Atlanta, Knoxville, San Antonio, and more).And of course, in New York, a socialist governs the country’s biggest city, the home of its financial sector and the largest city economy in the world, helped by four fellow socialists on its city council and a total of sixteen who will sit in the state legislature after November. Long before this, with much smaller numbers, socialists in the state, including Mamdani himself, had already played leading roles in major progressive legislative victories, passing sweeping eviction protections and allowing the state’s largest public utility to enter the renewable energy industry, among other things.Many of these officials were directly inspired by Sanders. Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Summer Lee, former fellow Squad member Cori Bush, and Massachusetts state representative Erika Uyterhoeven all volunteered or worked on his 2016 run. Mamdani has pointed squarely at that campaign as the reason he became a socialist. Other socialist mayors-to-be, like Providence’s David Morales and Washington, DC’s Janeese Lewis George, have credited it with their political awakening. So have socialist Squad-member-in-waiting Claire Valdez and St Petersburg city council member Richie Floyd, the first socialist elected in Florida in a hundred years. Go to any moderately large gathering of socialists, whether elected officials, rank-and-file DSAers, or both, and you’re likely to see “Bernie 2016” memorabilia sprinkled throughout.Attached again to concrete policies and living, flesh-and-blood political figures, socialism is not the boogeyman it used to be. Most Democratic voters, a third of whom now identify as democratic socialists, are perfectly happy to have a socialist as their candidate, or even actively prefer a candidate endorsed by one. Multiple polls show voters across the board are more turned off by MAGA candidates and Trump endorsees than self-described democratic socialists. In both pure numbers and political power, the current crop of socialist elected officials may be far away from the movement’s American zenith in the early twentieth century, but none of this suggests they’re anywhere close to hitting their ceiling yet.Onward and Upward?The question is whether they and the movement around them can sustain this upward trajectory. In some ways, Sanders’s path to the presidential race, spread out over thirty-five years in which socialists wandered the desert, was easier than the one his political heirs now have to traverse. Not only is state repression of the Left ramping up to levels far beyond where it was even under Ronald Reagan, but high-profile socialists are today as likely to face attacks and misinformation coming from pockets of the Left as from the Right.Sanders too spent his career being pelted by many of the same left-wing accusations his 2020s successors now face: that he was a traitor to the cause, an imperialist, a liberal, a fraud, too accommodationist to the Democratic Party, and so on. Lobbed at a time when the Left was small and marginal, none of it stuck by the time Sanders ran in 2015, when he was viewed in the fresh eyes of both friend and foe as a uniquely, even naively, principled and pure idealist — instead of the shrewd, ruthlessly pragmatic operator he actually was.It was just as well. An unyielding pragmatic radicalism has always been at the heart of Sanders’s approach. As he followed its glow, millions of others trailed after its familiar incandescence. And when the light grew just bright enough, he turned around and saw something remarkable: that he was no longer alone.This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.

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