Wayde Compton

I dreamed we were lined up to get vaccinated beside a long hedge in bloom. The hedge was full of hummingbirds flying from flower to flower. When it was my turn, the nurse gently caught one of the birds off the hedge, poked its tiny beak into my arm, then set it free.

“The world has already ended.” — Larissa Lai, Utopian Strategies for Life in the Post-Apocalypse, keynote at the @UofCFreeEx conference

I don't idealize the past, but I think people were happier before there were supercomputers in everyone's pockets whose every social media buzz/notification is a cortisol-prompting reminder that the world is ending & that everyone else is more successful & living a better life.

Imagine being so soulless you end up rooting for a future like this

@Whatapityonyou @mommywhitfield Chess is a clear example of a thing that machines do better than people right now, and there’s not that much interest in watching machines play each other compared to watching people play

Support for the US Attacking Cuba: Oppose: 61% Support: 13% Support Among: GOP: 30% IND: 9% DEM: 3% YouGov / Feb 27, 2026

"Power is the ability not to have to learn." - Karl Deutsch

I've used em-dashes my whole life — they add rhythm and grace to writing. But now they're an AI tell. Can we get a grandfather clause for those of us who were fluent in em-dashes before ChatGPT launched in November 2022?

The war exposed the collapse of American protection In less than one hour after being hit by the US and Israel, Iran responded with surgical precision, striking 17 American installations across the Middle East. Successive waves of missiles and drones forced US troops to abandon their bases and scramble for shelter in luxury hotels, which, ironically, quickly became targets themselves. It has now been 12 straight days of continuous bombardment, with multiple waves every single day and no sign of fatigue. The strikes are not limited to the bases: they are hammering roads, airports, ports, hotels, and power plants. Evacuation orders exist on paper, but they are being carried out at a snail’s pace, because security is nonexistent and far too many troops are still trapped under fire. Almost no one remains at the American bases anymore. Even the refueling aircraft that operated out of Saudi Arabia have been pulled out and relocated to Germany. The message to the Gulf countries is crystal clear: the US cannot even protect its own bases. You’re on your own. The sense of invincibility that lasted for decades has been shattered. Critical radars destroyed, interceptors running on fumes, bases bombed, Iranian missiles still launching, the Strait of Hormuz still closed, and Gulf allies left completely exposed. All of this is being watched in real time by Asian countries that, until yesterday, were betting everything on American power to contain China. The red light is flashing bright. If the US couldn’t defend the Gulf against Iran… what real chance do they have of protecting anyone against Beijing? Up until February 28, American protection felt absolute. Today it feels like something else entirely. The collapse of that decades-long myth of absolute security is the deepest and most lasting indirect effect of this war.

One family, the right-wing Trump-aligned Ellisons, will soon control: TikTok CBS CNN HBO Discovery Channel BET Cartoon Network Comedy Central DC Studios Fandango Miramax MTV Nickelodeon Paramount PlutoTV Showtime TBS The CW TNT Warner Bros. And more This is oligarchy.

This cannot be stressed enough: Corrupt governments support genAI because they want you so overwhelmed by false images that you doubt the true images of their atrocities.

when will the AI bubble finally pop im fucking tired dawg

There should be a legal requirement to label all AI generated text. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life parsing out human communication from machine slop. This is a mental tax I never agreed to or signed up for.

“There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as before an ancient friend.” ― James Baldwin, No Name in the Street

@atrupar Warmongering piece of shit. Cuba can't do anything to us. Leave them the fuck alone.

I just gave a closed-book, pen-and-paper midterm exam in my 300-level course at UBC with 100 students. All exams were graded by an experienced graduate-level TA according to a rubric. *** The average was 64/100.*** My class averages at UBC are usually 80-85. Context: • This was the first midterm, covering ONLY 4 weeks of material. • Students had a list of possible questions in advance: no surprise questions. • Questions included (a) 3 concept definitions, (b) 3 paragraph-long questions, and (c) a 1.5-page essay. • I have taught this class multiple times. Nothing in my teaching style changed this semester. • We read entire paragraphs of text in class, so students don't have to do something on their own that wasn't covered during the lecture. • Students take a 10-question multiple-choice quiz at the end of every class (30% of the final grade). • Attendance is 95-99% every class. Attention during lectures and participation in pair-work activities are very high → anticipating the end-of-class quiz. *** But unfortunately, I suspect many students are not reading the material on the syllabus. They are asking LLMs to summarize it instead.*** After the midterm, students reported: • They thought they knew concept definitions but couldn't produce them on paper. • They thought they understood the arguments but struggled to connect them or identify points of agreement and disagreement. My view: It might be “cool” or “innovative” to teach students to summarize readings with ChatGPT or write essays with Claude. But we may be doing them a disservice: reducing their ability to retain material, think creatively, and reason from what they know. If you only read what AI has summarized for you, you don’t truly "know" the material. Moving forward: We have a second midterm coming up. I don't know how to convey to students that the best way to do better on the exam is to rely on and improve their own reading skills.

🚨BREAKING: MIT hooked people up to brain scanners while they used ChatGPT. What they found should concern every single person reading this. ChatGPT users showed 55% weaker brain connectivity than people who didn't use it. Not after years. After just four months. Here's how they tested it. 54 people were split into three groups: one used ChatGPT to write essays, one used Google, and one used nothing but their own brain. They wore EEG monitors that tracked their brain activity in real time across four sessions over four months. The brain-only group built the strongest, most widespread neural networks. Google users were in the middle. ChatGPT users had the weakest brains in the room. Every time. Then the memory test hit. Participants were asked to recall what they'd just written minutes earlier. 83% of ChatGPT users couldn't quote a single line from their own essay. They wrote it. They couldn't remember it. The words passed through them like they were never there. It gets worse. In the final session, ChatGPT users were told to write without AI. Their brains were measurably weaker than people who never used AI at all. 78% still couldn't recall their own writing. The damage didn't go away when the tool was removed. Meanwhile, brain-only users who tried ChatGPT for the first time? Their brains lit up. They wrote better prompts. They retained more. Their brains were already strong enough to use AI as a tool instead of a crutch. The researchers also found that every ChatGPT essay on the same topic looked almost identical. More facts, more dates, more names. But less original thinking. Everyone using ChatGPT produced the same generic output while believing it was their own. MIT gave this a name: cognitive debt. Like financial debt, you borrow convenience now and pay with your thinking ability later. Except there's no way to pay it back. The question isn't whether ChatGPT is useful. It's whether the price is your ability to think without it.

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If your child becomes a reader, about 80% of the education job is already done. That's my honest assessment after working in education for over thirty years. Everything else is secondary. Most parents think science education is important. Yes it is. But if you can't read the biology textbook, you're not going to learn biology. Reading is the meta-skill that enables all other skills. History requires reading. Science requires reading. Even math increasingly requires reading as it becomes more sophisticated. The child who reads voraciously will figure out everything else. The child who doesn't will struggle with everything.

Lloyd Axworthy, former 🇨🇦 Liberal cabinet minister, has written an excellent piece in the Toronto Star on @MarkJCarney’s support of trump’s attack on Iran. “We invoke international law and the “rules based international order” when adversaries engage in unlawful actions, but abandon those same rules entirely when it's the Americans — whose current government 60 per cent of Canadians now see as a threat — doing the bombing. For a country that depends on law more than force for its own security, that is not realism; it is recklessness.”

Canadians who have recently noticed that the way the US regime describes living conditions in Canada do not line up with our day to day reality living here would do well to consider what other countries might be being lied about to create narratives beneficial to US interests.