Ian G. Williams

The world is being set on fire by a 79 year old with a ten year old’s vocabulary whose adult advisors interact with him like he’s a hangry toddler who skipped his nap.

don’t doomscroll.
read a chapter instead.

Huzzah!

On the one-year anniversary of his detention by federal authorities, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and First Lady Rama Duwaji welcomed Mahmoud Khalil, his wife Noor, and their baby boy, Deen, to Gracie Mansion to break the fast together.

AI can slowly shift an organisation’s core principles. How to spot ‘value drift’ early When new technology can produce the texts companies or departments use to explain themselves, core values can shift incrementally without anyone really noticing.

This short essay on "value drift" in organizational adoption of generative AI systems and efforts for AI alignment is really good: theconversation.com/ai-can-slowl...

Writing this article w/ @mikemassey.bsky.social, Grace Polistina, & Eathan Breaux was a joy of 2025. I joined the team after we met at #SSWR2025/@sswrorg.bsky.social & now it's published. Read it, let us know what you think, & explore other articles in the issue here: anzswjournal.nz/anzsw/issue/...

New paper: "Opportunities, challenges, and conspicuous absences: An integrative review of the social work literature on artificial intelligence." For a special issue of critical perspectives on technology and social work. Check it out: anzswjournal.nz/anzsw/articl...

#SocialWork #SWTech #CriticalAI

remember when the IRS put out a a free online tax filing system where you could just do your taxes through the IRS and it was actually well made and was pretty well recieved and then the tax filing industry and Republicans killed it and now you have to use TurboTax again

'this "ctrl+f w/ extra steps" bullshit' completely circumvented congressional oversight' --> pretty much sums up DOGE and their entire approach to automation and "efficiency".

anyway, propaganda-fueled autocracy is now centrist, get the latest at Ben Smith's semafor

State Department Bypasses Congress to Send Israel More Than 20,000 Bombs

Unconscionable.

Congress needs to aggressively reassert its authority. Stop this illegal war from becoming even more deadly. Now we know it was likely a U.S. bomb that caused mass casualties at the girls' school in Iran.

No more of our taxpayer dollars funding this savagery.

“In the last year, it’s gotten a lot worse” A Qualitative Investigation of Barriers to Disability Benefits in 2025 - DREDF This report is based on interviews with 52 benefits professionals serving over 8,000 disability claimants nationwide. The independent research finds that recent Social Security Administration administ...

In this new report, @ksavin.bsky.social, and @calliefreitag.bsky.social and I explain how Trump 2.0 and DOGE built up new barriers to the already-difficult process of getting disability benefits.

Let's talk about what we found, and what we recommend to address the issues. 🧵

long shot of Carvins Cove Reservoir in Roanoke Valley in West Virginia, from WSLS-TV

How much water do the data centres use? It’s a secret!

Google goes to court not to tell you

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ4W... - video
pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260306-how... - podcast

time: 7 min 35 sec

Killing people should not be something we do quicker than the speed of thought

nyt website currently resembles one of those mock covers people made before 2016 election: economy floundering, war in the middle east, scandal-plagued cabinet sec, brazen corruption....

This ⏬

"We further argue that AI resignation fulfils a strategic affective function within digital capitalism: by naturalizing dependence on predictive AI infrastructures and normalizing diminished expectations of the power to act, it stabilizes the very sociotechnical structures that produce it."

Oh,ok

Global sea levels have been underestimated due to poor modelling, research suggests Analysis shows average levels are 30cm higher than thought, and up to 150cm in south-east Asia and Indo-Pacific

Well, this doesn't look good... www.theguardian.com/environment/...

NYC Open Data Week 2026 schedule is up. Excited to have a panel in the lineup on public scholarship & open data with colleagues at @thegraduatecenter.bsky.social and @ccnysustainability.bsky.social, and to attend many other events, including @schoolofdata.nyc.

opendataweek.nyc

#OpenData

This is a fantastic reflection. Really interesting ideas about possibilities for organizing data leverage, strikes, and withdrawal.

Screenshot of a 3hr old post from the GW Hatchet: “BREAKING: GW sold its Virginia campus to Amazon Data Services, an Amazon subsidiary that manages the company's data centers, for $427 million on Friday. The deed, obtained by The Hatchet, authorizes ADS to develop the campus into a data or information technology center. STORY TK”

GW‘s student newspaper appears to have broken the story that the institution has sold a satellite campus to Amazon to be turned into a data center, which is just about chef’s kiss for the state of American higher education rn

Hearing Testimony Registration Together, we make the laws governing New York City

SAVE THE DATE for next Thur, Mar 12 - the NYC city council libraries subcommittee is meeting to talk about the prelim budget.

Register to testify and say "booo, where is the promised 0.5%?" at: council.nyc.gov/testify/

A 3x3 grid titled "Is it a library? Alignment chart". Horizontal axis categories: Contents purist: Must contain books Contents neutral: Must contain information Contents rebel: Can contain anything Vertical axis categories: Curation purist: Must be managed by a professional librarian Curation neutral: Must be curated by someone Curation rebel: Can be managed by nobody Examples represented on the grid: Curation purist, contents purist: New York Public Library is a library Curation purist, contents neutral: A newspaper archive is a library Curation purist, contents rebel: A school information commons is a library Curation neutral, contents purist: A home bookshelf is a library Curation neutral, contents neutral: A Spotify playlist is a library Curation neutral, contents rebel: A zoo is a library Curation rebel, contents purist: A street library is a library Curation rebel, contents neutral: A PC downloads folder is a library Curation rebel, contents rebel: A junk drawer is a library

📚

White text on black background that says NO WAR ON IRAN with the logo of the American Friends Service Committee appearing below

Today the US & Israel launched an unprovoked war on #Iran, dropping bombs on Iranian cities and calling for regime change. At least 80 children were killed after a strike on a girls’ school. Iran responded by firing missiles at Israel and US military bases in the region. afsc.org/newsroom/war...

Another war, more of the same. I tire of waking up to bad news, to more conflict, crisis, and despair in the world. To greedy old men driving the world into ruin for their own selfish gain, and other old men, stubbornly clinging to power when they cannot muster the strength to mount an opposition.

Take note Senator.

bsky.app/profile/ocas...

“The war continues working, day and night.
It inspires tyrants
to deliver long speeches
awards medals to generals
and themes to poets
it contributes to the industry
of artificial limbs
provides food for flies
adds pages to the history books
achieves equality
between killer and killed”

Read it all:

A screaming cat

You know, I kinda preferred US gov't AI policy when it wasn't a soap opera.

In a long tweet about Anthropic, Pete Hegseth, through the offical "SecWar" Twitter account says "the Department of War must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic’s models for every LAWFUL purpose in defense of the Republic."

Hegseth is wholeheartedly endorsing the core premise of fascism: industry, as part of the private sphere, must be subordinated to the military objectives of the state.