The social media discourse seems to constantly come back to the question of whether Large Language Models are “useful (good)” or “useless (bad).” The responses are a bizarre back and forth in which one group says they use it often and another group says they nobody uses it at all.
On Take Your Child to Work Day, DOGE-led GSA is hosting an AI workshop for kids of federal employees threatened with layoffs
Blood in the Machine11 posts last monthTomorrow, April 24th, is Take Your Child to Work Day, an occasion on which many federal workers would typically bring their kids into the office. This year, any celebratory mood will likely be dampened by the sweeping layoffs ordered by Elon Musk’s DOGE, which has fired tens of thousands…
With Elon Musk on the way out, federal workers can unite to stop DOGE
Blood in the Machine11 posts last monthGreetings all,
Hope everyone’s hanging in. The big news this week: Elon Musk is finally stepping back from DOGE. On an earnings call that revealed Tesla’s net income had fallen 71% in the first quarter of 2025, Musk announced that, starting in May, his “time allocation to DOGE will…
Possible Noise
Cybernetic Forests5 posts last monthA guided tour of the NCM Melbourne's "Signal to Noise" exhibition.
In the age of computation, the role of noise — or at least, the close-enough approximation through pseudorandom numbers —…
The fury at 'America's Most Powerful'
Blood in the Machine11 posts last monthLast weekend at Coachella, the singer of the punk band the Circle Jerks called for “an army of Luigis,” in reference, of course, to Luigi Mangione, the alleged murderer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
The statement, which implied the band would like to see more assassins murdering more CEOs, …
The original slop: How capitalism degraded art 400 years before AI
Blood in the Machine11 posts last monthGreetings all —
I’ve got something a little different today: The first original BITM guest post, from the great writer and editor Mike Pearl. Mike is a former VICE columnist, the author of The Day It Finally Happens, a frequent contributor to the New Republic, and a good…
Black Mirror's 5 best broadsides against big tech
Blood in the Machine11 posts last monthI’m old enough to remember when Black Mirror first dropped, and the anthology sci-fi show was widely received as transgressive, even shocking. Here was a smart, often legitimately unsettling suite of dark modern Twilight Zone fables, all built around the ways new technologies might be used (typically by faceless corporations…
Signal to Noise (and Back Again)
Cybernetic Forests5 posts last monthOur understanding of noise could be traced to a young Einstein, staring at a pond full of pollen 120 years ago. Einstein theorized that the seemingly arbitrary motion of pollen on the surface could be modeled — and in so doing, we confirmed the existence of molecules that moved pollen…
Therapists went on a hunger strike to protest 'assembly line' conditions and the automation of mental healthcare
Blood in the Machine11 posts last monthMental health professionals at the giant consortium Kaiser Permanente started a five-day hunger a strike in Los Angeles on Monday this week, an escalation of a broader strike that has ground on since October 2024. The workers are fighting for more time spent with patients and better pay, and against…
Turning the little screws
Blood in the Machine11 posts last monthIn the summer of 2016, just months before Donald Trump was elected president for the first time, I snuck into what was then the world’s largest iPhone factory. Officially called the Longhua Science and Technology Park, it was better known as Foxconn City, named after the massive subcontractor that handles…
Blogs
- Disconnect
Tech critic Paris Marx provides the critical take on Silicon Valley you’ve been missing
0 posts last month - escape the algorithm
A newsletter about taking control of our attention and finding a more human side of the internet. Featured in Wired and Rolling Stone.
0 posts last month