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man sometimes i really want to get back into welding but then i remember that the guys from the first course i took won’t be there and change my mind

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not only is it pride month, but it is also mens mental health awareness month

take the time to check in with the trans men, nonbinary men, intersex men, queer men, disabled men, and men of color that you know

let them know that you support them

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One of my favorite things about Terry Pratchett's books is their unique relationship with used bookstores. Particularly because they are difficult to find, for three reasons. The first reason is that they aren't there. Books in used bookstores were once owned by other people, people who decided to let that book go in the hopes that it will find someone new who will love it. It's very difficult to let go of a Terry Pratchett book. The second reason is that, if they make it into a store, they never stay there very long. They're usually purchased less than a few days after their arrival.

The third reason is my favorite: if they made it to the bookstore, and remained unnoticed, it's because the spine is worn. It's been read and loved so much it's almost unrecognizable from the spine. I've never found a used Terry Pratchett book without a cracked spine, and I love it. Cracked spines, stained pages, worn covers, these are the physical signs of love that we leave on our favorite books, and every Terry Pratchett book I've found in a used bookstore has been loved, dearly.

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Movie/TV Recommendation for People Who Are Fans of Cloudward, Ho!

Some of these are explicit inspirations for the season (from interviews/articles), and others are ones I either like/might appeal if you've been liking the Cloudward, Ho! so far:

Treasure Planet (2002) - animated movie

Disney movie based on the book Treasure Island

Has a solar-punk / space pirate aesthetic

Great characters, great music, fun adventure movie

My favourite Disney animated film (cause I love pirates)

Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)

Disney animated movie

Very adventure/historical with a similar premise as Cloudward, Ho!

Has steampunk aesthetics & a good story/characters

Castle in the Sky (1986) - animated movie

Studio Ghibli movie set in airships/1800s setting

Adventure story with a mythical place they're trying to find

I admittedly haven't watched, but it seems good and is on my watchlist

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)

Terry Gilliam steampunk-adventure movie

Strange in the same vein of many of his stories

Has a sky ship in it

Brennan said it inspired the idea of having new adventurers joining the older crew

Also haven't watched, so can't vouch for it

Stardust (2007) - movie

Mostly historical / fantasy, but has sky-pirates / sky ships

Stars Charlie Cox & many famous people

Robert De Niro plays a gay pirate

Nautilus (2024) - tv show

Based on 20, 000 Leagues Under the Sea

Steam-punk submarine / nautical adventure

Has the actor of John Silver from Black Sails in it

Or watch any of the many film adaptations of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Disenchantment (2018) - tv show

Animated show by the creator of Futurama & The Simpsons

Mostly fantasy, but in later seasons they go to Steamland - a steampunk world and more adventure takes place

Mostly included this cause it's a fun show and I love to recommend it to more people

Around the World in 80 Days (2021) - TV Show

There are many adaptations of this book, admittedly I've only watched the movie, but my Grandma said this one's good and it has David Tennant in it

Less fantastical than the others on this list, more "grounded" I guess in real life, but still has a core group going on an adventure in the Victorian era in a hot-air-balloon

Or watch one of the many other movie adaptations of the same book

Time Bandits (1981)

Terry Gilliam movie about a group of time travelling bandits and British child

I love this movie and if I'd watched it when I was younger it would have become my whole personality

Mostly just a vibes thing that connects this one

feel free to add any in the reblogs/comments

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It’s sad how much of what is taught in school is useless to over 99% of the population.

There are literally math concepts taught in high school and middle school that are only used in extremely specialized fields or that are even so outdated they aren’t used anymore!

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The question is 'are you a person of principle, or merely a person of strong feelings?'. If you're a person of principle, the principles will apply universally.

I do actually care marginally about the guy in that reddit screenshot who voted for Trump and is now worried that he might lose his medicaid funding because I did not fucking stutter when I said healthcare is a human right but the people losing their internships and job offers to the hiring freeze are straight up hilarious.

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Proposal for new fandom etiquette:

If you read a fic because it was linked/recced somewhere, you leave a comment saying "came from XXX" and that comment doesn't need to include anything else.

Because when all of a sudden there's a lot of activity on one particular fic I WANNA KNOW WHY!!!!!

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let me tell you about hopepunk.

grimdark says “we are all going to die. the universe is cold and empty.” hopepunk says “yes, and the greatest act of defiance against the dark is kindness.”

grimdark says “nothing can save us forever.” hopepunk says “something can always save us today.”

grimdark says “in a hundred years, we will all be dead and forgotten.” hopepunk says “yes, but here and now, we are alive.”

grimdark says “there is no hope. there is no mercy. there is no justice.” hopepunk says “but there is us.”

hopepunk says  “the universe has done all it can, and we are still alive.”

hopepunk is not about the daylight. it’s about the flame you light in the dark of the night. hopepunk is not about being unbroken. it is about taking the beating and staying on your feet. hopepunk is not idealism. hopepunk is the willful, unyielding defiance of cynicism.

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Whoever said frogs say "Ribbit" was being incredibly reductive some of these guys do say "Ribbit" but a lot of them be saying "ᴮᵉᵉᵖ" some of them be saying "Waauu" and some of them be saying "Fuck" but I don't know who taught them that one.

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apply juice to what?

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People talk as though the operative word in that phrase is 'productive', when in fact the most important word there is 'society'. Society only functions well if we make sure that we're all looked after, irrespective of whether we meet some arbitrary criterion for validity. All we've got to do to be valid members of society, deserving of participation, protection, existence & the ability to thrive, is exist. You're worth it.

Hey, it’s ok to not be a “productive member of society.”

Some people are housebound. Bed bound. Some people physically can’t eat, shower, or use the toilet without the assistance of a caretaker. Some people don’t have the spoons to get out of bed in the morning, let alone work a 9-5 job in this capitalist hellhole.

You’re not lazy. You’re not less than.

And this is coming from a disabled person with chronic pain who can leave the house and walk (with some pain) without mobility aids.

You deserve to take up space. You deserve to cost money. You deserve to be here without feeling guilty just because you can’t give back in the traditional way.

You’re worth it, hun. 🫶🏼

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Your Meta AI prompts are in a live, public feed

I'm in the home stretch of my 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PDX TOMORROW (June 20) at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG and at the TUALATIN public library on SUNDAY (June 22). After that, it's LONDON (July 1) with TRASHFUTURE'S RILEY QUINN and then a big finish in MANCHESTER on July 2.

Back in 2006, AOL tried something incredibly bold and even more incredibly stupid: they dumped a data-set of 20,000,000 "anonymized" search queries from 650,000 users (yes, AOL had a search engine – there used to be lots of search engines!):

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

The AOL dump was a catastrophe. In an eyeblink, many of the users in the dataset were de-anonymized. The dump revealed personal, intimate and compromising facts about the lives of AOL search users. The AOL dump is notable for many reasons, not least because it jumpstarted the academic and technical discourse about the limits of "de-identifying" datasets by stripping out personally identifying information prior to releasing them for use by business partners, researchers, or the general public.

It turns out that de-identification is fucking hard. Just a couple of datapoints associated with an "anonymous" identifier can be sufficent to de-anonymize the user in question:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1508081113

But firms stubbornly refuse to learn this lesson. They would love it if they could "safely" sell the data they suck up from our everyday activities, so they declare that they can safely do so, and sell giant data-sets, and then bam, the next thing you know, a federal judge's porn-browsing habits are published for all the world to see:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/01/data-browsing-habits-brokers

Indeed, it appears that there may be no way to truly de-identify a data-set:

https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/understanding-the-maths-is-crucial-for-protecting-privacy

Which is a serious bummer, given the potential insights to be gleaned from, say, population-scale health records:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/health/data-privacy-protection.html

It's clear that de-identification is not fit for purpose when it comes to these data-sets:

https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/precautionary.pdf

But that doesn't mean there's no safe way to data-mine large data-sets. "Trusted research environments" (TREs) can allow researchers to run queries against multiple sensitive databases without ever seeing a copy of the data, and good procedural vetting as to the research questions processed by TREs can protect the privacy of the people in the data:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/01/the-palantir-will-see-you-now/#public-private-partnership

But companies are perennially willing to trade your privacy for a glitzy new product launch. Amazingly, the people who run these companies and design their products seem to have no clue as to how their users use those products. Take Strava, a fitness app that dumped maps of where its users went for runs and revealed a bunch of secret military bases:

https://gizmodo.com/fitness-apps-anonymized-data-dump-accidentally-reveals-1822506098

Or Venmo, which, by default, lets anyone see what payments you've sent and received (researchers have a field day just filtering the Venmo firehose for emojis associated with drug buys like "pills" and "little trees"):

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/technology/personaltech/venmo-privacy-oversharing.html

Then there was the time that Etsy decided that it would publish a feed of everything you bought, never once considering that maybe the users buying gigantic handmade dildos shaped like lovecraftian tentacles might not want to advertise their purchase history:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/03/etsy-users-irked-after-buyers-purchases-exposed-to-the-world/

But the most persistent, egregious and consequential sinner here is Facebook (naturally). In 2007, Facebook opted its 20,000,000 users into a new system called "Beacon" that published a public feed of every page you looked at on sites that partnered with Facebook:

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

Facebook didn't just publish this – they also lied about it. Then they admitted it and promised to stop, but that was also a lie. They ended up paying $9.5m to settle a lawsuit brought by some of their users, and created a "Digital Trust Foundation" which they funded with another $6.5m. Mark Zuckerberg published a solemn apology and promised that he'd learned his lesson.

Apparently, Zuck is a slow learner.

Depending on which "submit" button you click, Meta's AI chatbot publishes a feed of all the prompts you feed it:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/12/the-meta-ai-app-is-a-privacy-disaster/

Users are clearly hitting this button without understanding that this means that their intimate, compromising queries are being published in a public feed. Techcrunch's Amanda Silberling trawled the feed and found:

"An audio recording of a man in a Southern accent asking, 'Hey, Meta, why do some farts stink more than other farts?'"

"people ask[ing] for help with tax evasion"

"[whether family members would be arrested for their proximity to white-collar crimes"

"how to write a character reference letter for an employee facing legal troubles, with that person’s first and last name included."

While the security researcher Rachel Tobac found "people’s home addresses and sensitive court details, among other private information":

https://twitter.com/racheltobac/status/1933006223109959820

There's no warning about the privacy settings for your AI prompts, and if you use Meta's AI to log in to Meta services like Instagram, it publishes your Instagram search queries as well, including "big booty women."

As Silberling writes, the only saving grace here is that almost no one is using Meta's AI app. The company has only racked up a paltry 6.5m downloads, across its ~3 billion users, after spending tens of billions of dollars developing the app and its underlying technology.

The AI bubble is overdue for a pop:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/measures/

When it does, it will leave behind some kind of residue – cheaper, spin-out, standalone models that will perform many useful functions:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Those standalone models were released as toys by the companies pumping tens of billions into the unsustainable "foundation models," who bet that – despite the worst unit economics of any technology in living memory – these tools would someday become economically viable, capturing a winner-take-all market with trillions of upside. That bet remains a longshot, but the littler "toy" models are beating everyone's expectations by wide margins, with no end in sight:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00259-0

I can easily believe that one enduring use-case for chatbots is as a kind of enhanced diary-cum-therapist. Journalling is a well-regarded therapeutic tactic:

https://www.charliehealth.com/post/cbt-journaling

And the invention of chatbots was instantly followed by ardent fans who found that the benefits of writing out their thoughts were magnified by even primitive responses:

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

Which shouldn't surprise us. After all, divination tools, from the I Ching to tarot to Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies deck have been with us for thousands of years: even random responses can make us better thinkers:

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

I make daily, extensive use of my own weird form of random divination:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/31/divination/

The use of chatbots as therapists is not without its risks. Chatbots can – and do – lead vulnerable people into extensive, dangerous, delusional, life-destroying ratholes:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/

But that's a (disturbing and tragic) minority. A journal that responds to your thoughts with bland, probing prompts would doubtless help many people with their own private reflections. The keyword here, though, is private. Zuckerberg's insatiable, all-annihilating drive to expose our private activities as an attention-harvesting spectacle is poisoning the well, and he's far from alone. The entire AI chatbot sector is so surveillance-crazed that anyone who uses an AI chatbot as a therapist needs their head examined:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/01/doctor-robo-blabbermouth/#fool-me-once-etc-etc

AI bosses are the latest and worst offenders in a long and bloody lineage of privacy-hating tech bros. No one should ever, ever, ever trust them with any private or sensitive information. Take Sam Altman, a man whose products routinely barf up the most ghastly privacy invasions imaginable, a completely foreseeable consequence of his totally indiscriminate scraping for training data.

Altman has proposed that conversations with chatbots should be protected with a new kind of "privilege" akin to attorney-client privilege and related forms, such as doctor-patient and confessor-penitent privilege:

https://venturebeat.com/ai/sam-altman-calls-for-ai-privilege-as-openai-clarifies-court-order-to-retain-temporary-and-deleted-chatgpt-sessions/

I'm all for adding new privacy protections for the things we key or speak into information-retrieval services of all types. But Altman is (deliberately) omitting a key aspect of all forms of privilege: they immediately vanish the instant a third party is brought into the conversation. The things you tell your lawyer are priviiliged, unless you discuss them with anyone else, in which case, the privilege disappears.

And of course, all of Altman's products harvest all of our information. Altman is the untrusted third party in every conversation everyone has with one of his chatbots. He is the eternal Carol, forever eavesdropping on Alice and Bob:

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

Altman isn't proposing that chatbots acquire a privilege, in other words – he's proposing that he should acquire this privilege. That he (and he alone) should be able to mine your queries for new training data and other surveillance bounties.

This is like when Zuckerberg directed his lawyers to destroy NYU's "Ad Observer" project, which scraped Facebook to track the spread of paid political misinformation. Zuckerberg denied that this was being done to evade accountability, insisting (with a miraculously straight face) that it was in service to protecting Facebook users' (nonexistent) privacy:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/05/comprehensive-sex-ed/#quis-custodiet-ipsos-zuck

We get it, Sam and Zuck – you love privacy.

We just wish you'd share.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/19/privacy-invasion-by-design#bringing-home-the-beacon

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i love the term "joshing." it's slang, meaning to joke or tease playfully. "i'm just joshing you." who is this notorious josh. who joshed so much that the whole concept got named after him

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“My favourite thing was a bunch of people made a giant sign that said “How am I going to be an octopus about this?” and held it up during Pompeii at all the right times and it distracted me enough to sing “octopus” instead by accident.”

— Dan Smith [x] (via bastillewtf)

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earlier my friend said to me “somewhere out there, in an alternate universe, there’s an all female rock band called ‘king’” and I’m STILL recovering from that mental image and how gay it made me feel

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David Hoffman, London, 1973