Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Goodhart's Law (of AI); and more!
Archived at: pluralistic.net/2025/08/11/fiv…
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Goodhart's Law (of AI): When a metric becomes a target, AI can hit it every time.
mamot.fr/@pluralistic/11501108…
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Hey look at this
* Cybertruck Leads Tesla’s Used-Car Collapse gizmodo.com/cybertruck-leads-t…
* Hackers Went Looking for a Backdoor in High-Security Safes—and Now Can Open Them in Seconds wired.com/story/securam-prolog…
* I clustered four Framework Mainboards to test huge LLMs jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/i-c…
* The Framework Desktop is a beast world.hey.com/dhh/the-framewor…
* Leaving MAGA leavingmaga.org/they-left-maga…
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Cybertruck Leads Tesla’s Used-Car Collapse
Luc Olinga (Gizmodo)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
#15yrsago Bill Ayers’s To Teach: The Journey, in Comics, a humanist look at education memex.craphound.com/2010/08/10…
#10yrsago Kansas officials stonewall mathematician investigating voting machine “sabotage” kansas.com/news/politics-gover…
#10yrsago Chinese mega-manufacturers set up factories in India web.archive.org/web/2015081104…
#10yrsago Oracle’s CSO demands an end to customers checking Oracle products for defects arstechnica.com/information-te…
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Oracle security chief to customers: Stop checking our code for vulnerabilities [Updated]
Sean Gallagher (Ars Technica)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
#10yrsago Girl Sex 101: “for EVERYone who wants to bone down with chicks, regardless of your gender/orientation.” ohjoysextoy.com/girlsex-101/
#10yrsago John Oliver on the brutal state of sex-ed in America youtube.com/watch?v=L0jQz6jqQS…
#10yrsago Insurance monitoring dashboard devices used by Uber let hackers “cut your brakes” over wireless wired.com/2015/08/hackers-cut-…
#10yrsago US lobbying for TPP to lock up clinical trial data theconversation.com/how-the-ba…
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How the battle over biologics helped stall the Trans Pacific Partnership
The ConversationCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
#10yrsago Larry Lessig considers running for the Democratic presidential nomination youtube.com/watch?v=CaqrQz71bM…
#10yrsago Felicia Day’s “You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)” memex.craphound.com/2015/08/11…
#10yrsago Overshare: Justin Hall’s biopic about the first social media/blogging youtube.com/watch?v=AxD4mqFtyS…
#5yrsago When you hear "intangibles"… pluralistic.net/2020/08/11/nor…
#5yrsago How they're killing the post office pluralistic.net/2020/08/11/nor…
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overshare: the links.net story
YouTubeCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
#5yrsago Terra Nullius pluralistic.net/2020/08/11/nor…
#5yrsago Uber lost $4b in H1/2020 pluralistic.net/2020/08/10/fol…
#5yrsago Warren Buffet, monopolist pluralistic.net/2020/08/10/fol…
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Pluralistic: 10 Aug 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Saturday's threads: Millionaire on billionaire violence; and more!
mamot.fr/@pluralistic/11499918…
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Cory Doctorow
2025-08-09 14:04:30
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
My latest novel is "Picks and Shovels," a historical technothriller set in the Weird Era of the PC, about Ponzi schemes, techbros, and the dawn of enshittification:
us.macmillan.com/books/9781250…
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My next nonfiction book is "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," out from MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux on October 7:
us.macmillan.com/books/9780374…
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Book details - Macmillan Publishers
MacmillanCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
My ebooks and audiobooks (from Tor Books, Head of Zeus, McSweeneys, Beacon, Verso and others) are for sale all over the net, but I sell 'em too, and when you buy 'em from me, I earn twice as much and you get books with no DRM and no license "agreements."
craphound.com/shop/
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Shop | Cory Doctorow's craphound.com
craphound.comCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Upcoming appearances:
* #Ithaca: AD White keynote (Cornell), Sep 12
deanoffaculty.cornell.edu/even…
* #DC: Enshittification at Politics and Prose, Oct 8
politics-prose.com/cory-doctor…
* #SanFrancisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
app.gopassage.com/events/docto…
* #NewOrleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
contraflowscifi.org/
* #Miami: Enshittification at Books & Books, Nov 5
eventbrite.com/e/an-evening-wi…
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Booksmith presents: Cory Doctorow Enshittification
Passage - Your event. Your fans. Your mobile box office.Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Upcoming appearances (cont'd):
* #SanFrancisco: Enshittification at Public Works (The Booksmith), Oct 20
app.gopassage.com/events/docto…
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Booksmith presents: Cory Doctorow Enshittification
Passage - Your event. Your fans. Your mobile box office.Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Recent appearances:
* Tariffs vs IP Law (Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons)
youtube.com/watch?v=LFABFe-5-u…
* ORG at 20: In conversation with Maria Farrell
youtube.com/watch?v=M9H2An_D6i…
* Why aren't we controlling our own tech? (Co-Op Congress)
youtube.com/live/GLrDwHgeCy4?s…
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Co-op Congress 2025 – Friday 4 July
YouTubeCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
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Pluralistic: Goodhart’s Law (of AI) (11 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCavyherd
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •"Good policymaking consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome)."
My favorite formulation of this notion: "If it doesn't work, do it harder."
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
vxo
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I cracked up laughing when I went to read that article about the automotive canbus enabled spy dingus and the site howled "YOU HAVE READ YOUR LAST FREE ARTICLE!"
rise of the shitty machines 😁
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Khleedril
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Wayne Werner
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Poligofsky 🇨🇦
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •If some measures become targets, then some targets were formerly measures.
Money (net worth) has become a target. Was/is money also a measure?
Is the “measure everything” mentality used inappropriately, like the proverbial hammer? Is this one of those bad side effects of the corrupted “rationalism” that has haunted the IYIs since the enlightenment—as John Ralston Saul argued, in Voltaire’s Bastards? (“IYI”: Intellectual Yet Idiot, Taleb’s term.)
Once someone learns how to use a tool, they always want to use it everywhere, even if it’s ill-suited. That’s a fundamental characteristic of the human psyche. It’s efficient, except when it’s not
It takes a kind of meta-cognition to recognize the pitfalls of this behaviour. A sort of self-awareness that is usually only acquired by failure and self-reflection. Not a thing common to bros, especially young cis-het tech bros, who believe that the world belongs to them.
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Poligofsky 🇨🇦 • • •@8r3n7 Money is definitively a measure. To qualify as money, a given instrument must serve as:
* A unit of account (a measure);
* A store of value;
* A medium of exchange.
More here:
locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doct…
Cory Doctorow: Moneylike
Locus OnlineCory Doctorow
Unknown parent • • •@clayfoot @cavyherd
I think that's the wrong framing for vaccines.
When we use vaccines, disease rates go down, so we assume that if we use more vaccines, disease rates will continue to decline. That's doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the *same* outcome.
Cavyherd
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •@clayfoot
Yes, thank you. That was what was confusing me.