@johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social

John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · May 04, 2026

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/05/04/the-16-million-question-if-editing-harris-was-election-interference-what-was-editing-trump/

“The editorial pattern is consistent throughout: 60 Minutes’ producers cut the parts where Trump sounded unhinged and kept the parts where he sounded like a slightly more normal politician answering questions.”

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · May 04, 2026

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/04/hope-in-the-dark/

“In 2024, America saw its first all-solar powered solar panel recycling factory, which reclaimed 99% of the materials in a panel that was 20% efficient, and then used those materials to make two panels that were each 40% efficient” @cory@mastodon.social

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · May 04, 2026

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/04/hope-in-the-dark/

“We dig up a lot of fossil fuels. The world consumes seventeen times more fossil fuels in a year than we will require to electrify the planet forever” @pluralistic@mamot.fr

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · May 04, 2026

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/04/hope-in-the-dark/

“Trump keeps making moves without ever thinking about the countermove he might provoke. He can't metabolize the strategic maxim that "the enemy gets a vote."” @pluralistic@mamot.fr

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · May 04, 2026

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/04/hope-in-the-dark/

“Trump's demand destruction accelerates Putin's demand destruction: China and India both increased their energy consumption in 2025 – but reduced their fossil fuel consumption over the same period. “ @pluralistic@mamot.fr

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · May 04, 2026

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/04/hope-in-the-dark/

“Trump doesn't understand the concept of "demand destruction," which is what happens when shortages prompt people to make durable, one-way changes in their behavior that permanently reduce the demand for fossil fuels.” @pluralistic@mamot.fr

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · May 04, 2026

https://calnewport.com/on-bottlenecks-and-productivity/

“Something I’ve long written about is the reality that many digital productivity tools paradoxically make us busier, rather than better at our jobs. Goldratt’s theory helps explain why.” #calnewport

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · May 04, 2026

https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/crimes_against_decency_need_as_much_cover-up_as_crimes_against_the_law

“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
—Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack

Via @gruber@mastodon.social

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · May 04, 2026

https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/crimes_against_decency_need_as_much_cover-up_as_crimes_against_the_law

@gruber@mastodon.social

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · May 04, 2026

https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/crimes_against_decency_need_as_much_cover-up_as_crimes_against_the_law

“Most illegal acts are scandalous, but many scandalous acts are perfectly legal. But all scandalous acts need to be covered up.” @gruber@mastodon.social

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · May 04, 2026

https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/crimes_against_decency_need_as_much_cover-up_as_crimes_against_the_law

“if it were more widely known that this is how these glasses work, there’d be more of a social stigma surrounding those who wear them.” @gruber@mastodon.social

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · May 04, 2026

https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/crimes_against_decency_need_as_much_cover-up_as_crimes_against_the_law

“Meta runs a criminal enterprise. Most of the organized crimes Meta commits aren’t crimes against the legal code (although some are), but rather crimes against public perception and human decency. Remember what they did with Onavo, their VPN product? Was that illegal? Dunno. Was it outrageous? Hell yes.” @gruber@mastodon.social

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · May 02, 2026

https://www.manton.org/2026/05/01/not-leaving-github-yet.html

“It’s like leaving Facebook - when I was thinking about it, I was worried if I’d miss my friends or be out the loop. It’s been over a decade at this point and I don’t miss it one bit - no regrets whatsoever.” @manton

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · May 02, 2026

https://buttondown.com/blog/future-of-email

“you technically can use an emoji in your email address” @buttondown@mastodon.social

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · May 02, 2026

https://buttondown.com/blog/future-of-email

“Your phone’s operating system is likely less than a year old. Odds are it’ll get updated again sometime over the next few months, but also will be considered obsolete in a few years. Email, meanwhile, runs on a stack of standards, some of which haven’t been updated in over two decades.” @buttondown@mastodon.social

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · May 02, 2026

http://scripting.com/2026/05/01.html#a132010

“as you would expect from a tight silo like Substack, the API lets you read but not write. They want you to use their editor, what they don’t want is to be one of 20 distributors of your writing. They want an exclusive and they get it.” @davew@mastodon.social

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · May 01, 2026

https://www.manton.org/2026/05/01/years-pass.html

“I love discovering a blog and realizing I can wander through the archive of older posts. In the era of information overload and slop, that kind of consistency is harder to fake.

Haven’t started a blog yet? Today is a perfect day to begin.” @manton

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · May 01, 2026

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/05/01/meta-solved-their-problem

“Go to Meta’s AI glasses website and try to find the part where they warn you that footage is subject to review by teams of contractors in third-world countries” @gruber@mastodon.social

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 30, 2026

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/04/30/palantir-workers-are-finally-noticing-the-skulls-on-their-caps/

“the “bring your whole self to work” era has pretty much ended, and how workers in a tighter labor market are increasingly going to find themselves at companies whose values they can’t fully stomach.”

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 30, 2026

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/04/30/palantir-workers-are-finally-noticing-the-skulls-on-their-caps/

“The moral bankruptcy part should be obvious (if it’s not, go do some soul-searching)”

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 29, 2026

RE: @glnational_mirror@mastodon.hongkongers.net

This seems to have become almost routine.

It is SO wrong.

Can it really be necessary to say so?

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 28, 2026

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-year-of-magical-thinking/

“we are ruled by a class of people who seem either to believe or presume that war, disease, and apocalyptic destruction are things that will only ever happen to poorer and browner people.”

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 28, 2026

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-year-of-magical-thinking/

“the outpouring of open sympathy for Mangione as well as a follow-up attack on Altman’s house, suggests that the norm against open advocacy for political violence is not only reversible but has perhaps already been reversed—the logical consequence of undermined trust across all social institutions, among them the “legitimate” formal systems one might hope would displace violence”

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 28, 2026

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-year-of-magical-thinking/

“The Trump administration sustains this carelessness by holding onto a raft of genuine insight amid the sea of delusion: it has, up until now, been extraordinarily successful in making other people pay the price for its mistakes and crimes. But that raft is thin. The structure whose supports our elites are steadily kicking down is also the one that props up their own personal safety”

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 28, 2026

https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/a-year-of-magical-thinking/

“there were 121 mass shootings in the first 112 days of the year, making mass shootings of the kind attempted at the Correspondent’s Dinner a statistically daily occurrence. Public officials are appalled, then, to live in the same world the rest of us do.”

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 28, 2026

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-loop-everything-has-happened-before-and-everything-will-happen-again/

“Humans don't go to war despite knowing what war does, they go to war because the knowledge of what it does fades, even though it technically exists. Nobody forgot the pain of WW1. It just became less vivid…” @Daojoan@mastodon.social

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 28, 2026

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-loop-everything-has-happened-before-and-everything-will-happen-again/

“The printing press was going to democratize knowledge. And it did! But first, it launched two centuries of religious war. Johannes Gutenberg pressed his first Bible in 1455. By 1517, Luther's theses were being reproduced across Europe in weeks, and by 1618, the Thirty Years' War had begun.” @Daojoan@mastodon.social

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 28, 2026

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-loop-everything-has-happened-before-and-everything-will-happen-again/

“It works for medieval Catholics, for Jacobin revolutionaries, for Nazi party members, for Twitter mobs. The crowd needs its victim, and the victim needs to be innocent enough that the guilt of destroying him is too heavy to carry, which is why the sacrifice must be followed by denial.” @Daojoan@mastodon.social

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 28, 2026

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-loop-everything-has-happened-before-and-everything-will-happen-again/

“conformity experiments in 1951 showed that ordinary people will deny the evidence of their own eyes rather than disagree with a confident group, and bubbles are Asch experiments with money on the line.” @Daojoan@mastodon.social

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 28, 2026

https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/talkie/

“Demis Hassabis is fond of saying that a test for truly powerful AI would be to train a Talkie-like LLM with a knowledge cutoff of 1911, then challenge it to formulate general relativity, as Einstein did in 1915.”
Retro AI, via #robinsloan

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 27, 2026

https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/sites/default/files/styles/embedded_image/public/2019-06/Jacquard-cards-2.jpg?itok=nCaLOVro

Punch cards for weavers that led to computing technology - via @kottke@mastodon.social

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 27, 2026

https://kottke.org/26/04/crocheted-technology

“I’m a sucker for these types of projects because innovations in textile production led to the development of the first computers and the work of artists like Nikolich bring that relationship full circle.” @kottke@mastodon.social

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 27, 2026

https://daringfireball.net/2006/04/initiative

“If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.”
Stanley Kubrick via @gruber@mastodon.social

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 27, 2026

https://daringfireball.net/2006/04/initiative

“What I’m doing now is like jumping out of a plane with this idea as my parachute.” @gruber@mastodon.social

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 27, 2026

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/27/analogs-and-analogies/

“AI is the money-losingest project the human race has ever attempted.” @pluralistic@mamot.fr

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 27, 2026

https://calnewport.com/who-asked-for-this/

“Generative AI has no shortage of ways that it might, with care, be shaped into genuinely useful products, but this shaping needs to actually happen before the hyper-scalers earn the right to continually harass the psyche of billions of people with breathless pronouncements. Most people don’t care that GPT 5.5, released late last week, underperformed Opus 4.7 on SWE-Bench Pro.”

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 24, 2026

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/we-are-still-living-in-the-long-boring

“sounds like revelation and means, on inspection, that you can look things up very quickly on your phone. We have indeed built ourselves a very fast library. That library has caused a lot of unhappiness, but certainly it’s a remarkable technological achievement.”

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 24, 2026

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/we-are-still-living-in-the-long-boring

“the lesson of the last fifty years of digital technology is that software’s limits are the limits of the screen itself. Code cannot insulate your house; no algorithm has ever laid a water pipe; the internet has not built a single mile of high-speed rail.” #FreddieDeBoer

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 24, 2026

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/we-are-still-living-in-the-long-boring

“The internet in 2022, before the ChatGPT wave broke, already contained more text than any human being could read in ten thousand lifetimes, more images than any eye could see, more music than any ear could hear. “ #FreddieDeBoer

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 24, 2026

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/we-are-still-living-in-the-long-boring

“LLMs write code, generate images, produce music, summarize documents, draft prose… which is to say, they have achieved mastery over the exact domains that were already, by any sane measure, overprovisioned.”
#FreddieDeBoer

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 11, 2026

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/11/obvious-terrible-ideas/ “there were lots of people back then who had the capacity to imagine the kind of gross stuff that Zuckerberg, Musk, and innumerable other scammers, hustlers and creeps got up to on the web. The thing that distinguished these monsters wasn't their genius – it was their callousness” @pluralistic@mamot.fr

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 07, 2026

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/06/empiricism-washing/

“Uber uses historic data on drivers to make inferences about how economically precarious they are, and then extracts a "desperation premium" from their wages. Drivers who are pickier about which rides they accept ("pickers") are offered higher wages than drivers who take any ride ("ants")” @pluralistic@mamot.fr

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 04, 2026

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/04/digital-subjugation/

“Every day, Trump proves to the world that American tech isn't merely untrustworthy – it's a live, dire, urgent danger to your state, your companies, and your people. The best time to get shut of the American internet was 15 years ago. The second best time is right fucking now.” @pluralistic@mamot.fr

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 04, 2026

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/04/digital-subjugation/

“year after year, the world allowed itself to become more dependent on America's easily weaponizable tech, making the tech both more dangerous and harder to escape.” @pluralistic@mamot.fr

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 02, 2026

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/02/limited-monopoly/

“Anthropic has taken an extremely aggressive posture on copyright's "limitations and exceptions," arguing that it can train its models on any information it can find, and knowingly download massive troves of works for that purpose. It's darkly hilarious to see the company firehosing copyright complaints by the thousands to prevent the dissemination, dissection and discussion of the source-code that leaked due to the company's gross incompetence” @pluralistic@mamot.fr

pluralistic.net

Pluralistic: It’s extremely good that Claude’s source-code leaked (02 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 02, 2026

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/02/limited-monopoly/

“Copyright, nominally a system intended to protect creative workers – is weaponized against the people it is meant to serve” @pluralistic@mamot.fr

pluralistic.net

Pluralistic: It’s extremely good that Claude’s source-code leaked (02 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 02, 2026

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/02/limited-monopoly/
Takedowns
“Viacom admitted in court that its marketing departments would "rough up" clips of its programming and upload them to Youtube, making them appear to be pirate copies, in a bid to interest Youtube users in Viacom's shows, and sometimes Viacom's lawyers would get confused and send threatening letters to Youtube demanding that these be removed” @pluralistic@mamot.fr

pluralistic.net

Pluralistic: It’s extremely good that Claude’s source-code leaked (02 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 01, 2026

http://scripting.com/2026/04/01/135829.html

“As revolutionary as AI is, some things aren't going to be done with prompts, pretty sure of that… Think about how you drive a car, you don't slowly tell the car to "turn the wheel left and tap the brake, now right, and hit the gas." Maybe this will turn out to be like the difference between using a mouse or a keyboard. Some people thought keyboards were obsolete when the Mac came out in 1984. I'm using a keyboard right now.” @davew@mastodon.social

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 01, 2026

Replying to @Daojoan@mastodon.social

@Daojoan@mastodon.social this was truly a pleasure to read, very funny actually, while of course also being depressing. Thank you on all counts

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John-Paul Flintoff @johnpaulflintoff@mastodon.social · Apr 01, 2026

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/01/minilateralism/

“US companies' ability to export their digital products after 2028 will depend on whatever Trump does in the next two years, a period during which we know Trump is going to be a raging asshole (assuming he doesn't have a stroke first).” @pluralistic@mamot.fr

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John-Paul Flintoff

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Pluralistic: It’s extremely good that Claude’s source-code leaked (02 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily

Pluralistic: It’s extremely good that Claude’s source-code leaked (02 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily

Pluralistic: It’s extremely good that Claude’s source-code leaked (02 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily

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