Plus: Wedding Brain, news hustlers, the importance of talking to strangers and the best restaurant bread in America
#762: One weird trick to make new friends
Plus: Dubai influencers, cultural time and the "most uplifting corner" of the internet
#769: Nothing you see online is true
Clipping as emergent online literacy, the women self-injecting bootleg Botox and the woes of Facebook nanny groups
#773: Regressing to the mean
Plus: slop wildlife, the post-American internet and AI for emotional labor
#764: It's been a year
Plus: phone poems, low-friction friends and the decline of online travel recs
#760: Gambling the future into existence
Plus: Cosmo for conservatives, AI;DR and being "agentic"
Pluralistic: IP can’t save you from AI (18 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
You don't have to believe that AI "art" is any good (I don't), nor do you have to believe that AI "art" can be any good (I don't) to understand that the reason that the capital markets are putting trillions into AI is that they believe they can fire workers of every kind and replace them with AI:
233. "The Illusion of Thinking" — Thoughts on This Important Paper
This is a fantastic paper. I just love it. tl;dr AI is not human. Anthropomorphization has been bad for AI, LLMs, and Chat. Clippy walked so today's AI could run.
Is AI ruining… fashion?
There are compelling reasons to believe that slop is no longer just limited to the internet. From AI design tools to trend scraping and fast fashion… This video makes a compelling argument that AI plays a role in why so few fashion brands have unique identities anymore. [Media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaxXspZQYkc]
#777: Happily surrendering our leisure to lines
Plus: the physicality of data, the second coming of froyo, and the rise of "dopamine sites"
Brands Adopt ‘No AI’ Disclaimers to Stand Out Amid the Slop
Marketers move to get ahead of growing consumer skepticism by labeling content that doesn’t use AI.
"AI" and Productivity
[I keep bringing these up on Bluesky, so I think it’s time to gather them up and make a post out of them.] This is a collection of articles...
#158: Build your AI Brain
How I built a second brain that gets smarter every day
Is there something it is like to be an AI?
Posted on Wednesday 2 Jul 2025. 1,593 words, 6 links. By Matt Webb.
The AI Aesthetic
Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.
For the love of God, stop calling your AI a co-worker | TechCrunch
A growing number of startups are anthropomorphizing AI to build trust fast -- and soften its threat to human jobs.
"I was forced to use AI until the day I was laid off." Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry
Copywriters were one of the first to have their jobs targeted by AI firms. These are their stories, three years into the AI era.
