Want to join in? Respond to our weekly writing prompts, open to everyone.
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from
Roscoe's Quick Notes

Home now from my 4-month follow-up appointment with the GP. This visit went well, he and I exchanged more words this afternoon than in all our previous visits combined. All the issues I had in mind were discussed, and plans of action were made.
To help me wind down and relax my way through the evening I've found a MLB Game to follow via MLB's Gameday Service: Toronto Blue Jays and New York Yankees will be playing. I'm listening to the pregame show now on Yankees Radio and I'll stay here for the radio call of the game.
And the adventure continues.
from
wystswolf

How could I ever be lonely when you are everywhere beauty thrives.
[Verse 1] There was ache in the morning There was want in the light I lay still in the silence Thinking of you through the night
Madness, I know it But it felt like a sign Something moved in the dawn air And whispered your name into mine
[Pre-Chorus] You were there and you were not A ghost inside my skin So I left my flesh behind me And went searching on the wind
[Chorus] Past the little beach at sunrise Where the gulls broke the dark Past the blue and endless water With your name against my heart
Over stone and over sorrow To the place where wild things grow I found you in tiny miracles Where the Burren flowers show
[Verse 2] I went looking for your loneliness In the hollow of the day Sure that I would find you In the empty, aching space
But you were not abandoned You were held by something true Peace was blooming all around And it looked so much like you
[Pre-Chorus] Blue and yellow, red and periwinkle Soft against the stone You were love and you were quiet You were never quite alone
[Chorus] Past the little beach at sunrise Where the gulls broke the dark Past the blue and endless water With your name against my heart
Over stone and over sorrow To the place where wild things grow I found you in the miracles Where the Burren flowers show
[Bridge] And maybe love is not possession Maybe longing learns to kneel Maybe beauty doesn’t answer It just teaches us to feel
So I sat beside the flowers Where the ancient limestone sleeps And I loved you without reaching And I wanted without need
[Final Chorus] Past the little beach at sunrise Where the gulls broke the dark Past the Cliffs of Moher standing Like a wall around my heart
Over ache and over wanting To the place where wild things grow I found you in the miracles Where the Burren flowers show
[Outro] You were there and you were not You were near and out of view In the blue, yellow, red, and periwinkle Every tiny bloom was you
#song #poetry #wyst #FM
from
wystswolf

To the Tune of 'Sound of Silence'
Hello headache, my old friend, I’ve come to bargain with you again. Somewhere between “just one more round” And waking up face-down, profound, There’s a lesson I ignore with brewski beer: Morning’s here. And it brought drums.
In yesterday’s rooms, not quite alone, Searching for my lover’s tone. ’Neath the judgment of the bathroom light, Bleary-eyed blossom, avoiding the light. And the coffee whispered, “Poor thing, you were too immersed.” Could be worse. Now here comes the thrum.
And in this home’s quiet presence, Outside, a cardinal in the tree. His song today sounds blurry. No one dared Disturb the couch of silence.
“Hey, AI, can you sing my song for me? Make it easy and folky.”

#poetry #songwriter #beer
I’m a printaholic. I love printing PDFs into booklet form, folding, and stapling them. Sometimes, I’ll cut at the folds, two-hole punch them, and insert those two-prong holders if the book is too thick.
I love the way fresh blank pieces of paper is imprinted with jet ink and heated on both sides, how stacks of finished sheets are ready to be folded or sliced in half, and how freeing it is to give the middle finger to those who keep saying “we’re going to live in a paperless society.”
Unfortunately, today is a bad day in my printing world. I had to print out a lot of PDF documents for my son’s school to sign and turn in. When I tried to print them out my laptop didn’t recognize the hardware. Even after reinstalling the drivers the printer still didn’t work. My wife tried printing on her computer and it didn’t work as well.
The printer is a Canon MX-522 that I’ve had for years. After being a dedicated and reliable printer surviving multiple computers and operating systems, moving from one house to another, and replacing countless ink cartridges, it’s finally time to retire it. So thank you for your service Canon MX-522. Maybe someone else can put it to good use when I donate it.
Now the hard part is finding a reliable printer with ink cartridges that isn’t too expensive.
#printing #printer #documents #ebooks #ink #PDF #technology
from
Image Not Found
Things move in strange ways.
Sometimes an idea starts as a pothole.
Sometimes it becomes a link.
Sometimes someone puts that link on a website where people argue, upvote, comment, ignore, save, repost, translate, or send it to one more person.
That is enough.
HackerNoon published “We Treated Potholes Like Software Bugs and Accidentally Built a Civic Hacking Playbook” on May 20, 2026.
They framed the pothole action as engineering, debugging, civic hacking, and a repeatable playbook.
That is funny.
Because we did not start with a playbook.
We started with holes.
Then we painted them.
Then someone called it a system.
Maybe that is how systems begin.
Urbanism Now, issue #69, included the pothole action on May 17, 2026, under “Pothole ARTivism, Mapping Biometric Surveillance, and Colorado Codifies Bike Safety.”
They described citizens using spray paint to highlight neglected potholes, prompting repairs and inspiring similar artivism in Sofia, Bulgaria.
That felt right.
Not because it was big.
Because it was placed where it belongs.
Next to bikes.
Next to surveillance.
Next to streets.
Next to the question: what can people do where they live?
Hacker News picked up the pothole story under the title “Cursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does.”
People voted.
People commented.
People probably argued.
Good.
A pothole is also a user interface.
The city gives you an error.
You report it.
Nothing happens.
So you highlight the bug in production.
A Chinese Hacker News mirror, HN Buzzing, also listed the pothole story.
It showed the link after it crossed the 100-point mark.
That is a small thing.
But small things matter.
A painted pothole in Sofia ends up on a Chinese HN mirror.
Not because anyone planned that.
Because someone linked it.
Because someone else clicked.
Because the internet still has little side streets where things can travel without permission.
On Reddit, the story appeared in link-sharing threads.
No big introduction.
No manifesto.
Just the headline, the link, and the hole.
That is probably enough.
The better Reddit moment was not a post about us.
It was a conversation about potholes damaging cars.
Someone was talking about popped tires.
Someone else brought the article in.
That felt right.
Not in a marketing thread.
Not in an art thread.
In a broken-car conversation.
The hole was already there.
The link just pointed at it.
On LinkedIn, Rozario Chivers shared “The holes we painted (and why we did it anyway).”
One post.
One link.
One professional network suddenly looking at a painted pothole and maybe thinking:
this is also work.
Not a campaign.
Not a grant proposal.
Not a strategy deck.
Work.
Remark.as created discussion pages for Image Not Found posts like “The stickers we made for the smartphone zombies” and “Paint the cameras dead.”
No big noise.
No fireworks.
Just open doors.
A page with no comments is still a place where comments can happen.
Mastodon and the fediverse picked up the links too.
There was the Hacker News bot, carrying the pothole story into another stream.
There was a toot from etc on toot.wales, sending it through a smaller, stranger, more human corner of the network.
And there was a post from bogo on hapyyr.com, letting it move again.
Small accounts.
Small boosts.
Small tunnels through the algorithmic wall.
This is how things move when they do not have a marketing budget.
Not as a campaign.
As spores.
A few aggregators and mirrors surfaced the links as well.
They are not love letters.
They are pipes.
But pipes matter.
Water moves through pipes.
So do ideas.
A link is not just a link.
It is a small witness.
Someone saw the thing and decided it should be seen by someone else.
That is how a painted pothole becomes a conversation.
That is how a sticker leaves a table and enters a city.
That is how a camera stops being invisible.
Some people will say nothing will change.
Share it anyway.
from Cosmos

Many a times I ask myself who do I want to learn photography. It is not a career option for me. It is not something I had always wanted to do. It’s just something I picked up last year.
Not long ago, I was writing an article. In that article, to emphasise my point, I wanted to add a pic of an umbrella that has come from the rain. A few droplets of the rain was supposed to be on the umbrella.
I wanted that picture to be clicked by myself. Obviously I could download one from google or unsplash but that does not produce the same emotion as the one that I had clicked with my own hands. The one I had edited according to my own preferences.
I could not find any.
This is when I thought why people take picture. Not because they also write something and need to hammer their point but the picture represents something to them. A lady wearing a red in autumn can mean nothing to me but it can very well remind someone of their home. Or the time when they were very emoted.
from Littlefish
I am in my mid twenties and currently in a partial hospitalization program for intensive trauma therapy. And honestly, I had no idea what untangling years of suppression could actually look like.
I thought healing would be as simple as talking things out. That’s always what I had done. In a weird way, I think that’s why I convinced myself I had already worked through a lot of my trauma — because I was never secretive about it. I could name it. I could explain it. I could tell the story without crying.
What I didn’t realize is that naming something is sometimes only barely grazing the surface.
The truth is: I am exhausted.
I am having nightmares. My depression and mood swings feel like a new rollercoaster every day. I never know when the ride is going to drop suddenly or take a sharp turn. Sometimes it throws me into a corkscrew I didn’t see coming and I come out physically hurting — my neck tight, my head pounding, my forehead tense like I’ve been clenching against something for years.
That’s metaphorical, but also very literal.
My brain feels swollen. My body feels banged up. My nervous system feels like it’s screaming at me after spending years whispering.
I didn’t know healing could feel this physical. I didn’t know finally feeling things could make me feel worse before better. I didn’t know how much I had actually been carrying.
And maybe the hardest part is realizing how much I gaslit myself into believing I was “dramatic” because other people had it worse. But trauma is not a competition. Your body does not care whether someone else “deserved” to hurt more than you did. It only knows what it experienced and what it had to do to survive it.
So this is a trigger warning for anyone reading this: I am going to use this space to be honest about my experience. That may include talking openly about trauma, mental health, emotional instability, physical symptoms of stress, fear, grief, anger, and the ugly parts of healing people don’t romanticize online.
Please protect yourself accordingly if those topics are triggering for you. My goal is never to set anyone back. I just want to be real about what it can actually mean to unravel years of both little and big traumas.
I am learning as I go.
And despite how hard this is, my goal is not to stay trapped in the pain or turn my suffering into my identity. My goal is to build a brain that feels safe. A mind that is loving instead of constantly at war with itself. A nervous system that no longer feels booby-trapped by the survival mechanisms that protected me for years, but are no longer helping me grow.
I want my life back.
And I think that starts with finally telling the truth about what healing actually looks like.
from
hex_m_hell
My therapist asked me to write about the ways in which my early childhood trauma affected the direction of my life. So, naturally, I spent the following several days reading about cybernetics, coming up with projects, writing on my work-related blog, and generally avoiding the subject.
I'm intensely drawn to the idea of spending several hours writing about threat modeling, which overwhelmed my mind last night. I lay awake thinking about formal languages based on constrained English, threat inheritance, and using data flow graphs to identify risk. During that time I did not think about how frustrated I can get when my kids start fighting, or how overwhelming their feelings must be for them right now.
I designed and wrote a testing framework, now used by thousands of people. Tests are developed by multiple teams. Test definitions are relatively easy to write, and (unlike many other things) actually lend themselves well to being written by LLMs. This is true, despite the fact that LLMs didn't exist when I designed and wrote the first prototype.
I spend days, weeks, in deep thought. I thought about code. I thought about organizational structures. I've spent so much time reading and learning, trying to understand. I focused to the exclusion of everything else: first my pregnant partner, then my kids.
The first six weeks after the birth of each of my children was the most human I have been for a long time. The first week is nothing but survival. You must be present because a tiny life is relying on your constant attention. But even as the weeks rolled on, as I was off of work and able to focus on my family, the trial crept back in and pulled my attention away. Then the disability and leave team, having messed something or other up, threatened me.
It's so much easier to follow those threads: logic, fear, distraction. It's easier to fill my head with something than to leave it empty and quiet enough for the feelings to come in.
I never noticed before. It just felt exciting to hack for hours straight, order a sandwich to eat while reading some specification or other, focusing on each detail until my roommates broke my concentration with a glass of whiskey and chants of “bar night.”
Focus, then numb, for decades now. When did it even start? From the moment I got my eyes on the Internet, I was always thinking. Perhaps some of that was a reaction to the boredom of rural living, spending most of the day alone in my house while my mom was at work. I wasn't much older back then than my oldest is now. How much different it must be for her, unending activity vs my unending isolation.
The more I've unwound it, the more I've been able to allow myself to feel, the worse I feel I've gotten at my job. Then one day I couldn't do it anymore. I noticed it before I actually snapped. This time I noticed my feelings.
Years earlier I had put my fist through a window. That's what it had taken for me to realize there was a problem.
Before the shooting, I had spent a few years in therapy. After those few years I experienced something I hadn't ever experienced: I stopped thinking for a few moments. My internal dialog, which had never really stopped as long as I could remember, was silent. My therapist was Buddhist. We had focused on mindfulness. I had been gone to a meditation course at Toorcamp a little earlier and had been working on my awareness. After a bit more work, I was able to be present for a bit.
I hadn't noticed how much I had been suppressing my emotions by thinking. But the more I would take a moment here and there to just be present, the more I noticed them. I realized I needed to stop working as a consultant for a bit. I went to work somewhere else. On the walk to work every day I would stop for a moment and breathe.
Then Trump happened. It was a reminder of something I had left behind. My experience in the rural part of the American West Coast were dark. I was different, and the places I lived were not very tolerant of difference. And I was bored. There was a crushing boredom, a hopelessness, a feeling of being trapped. Looking back now, I realize it's not so much rural living as a reality constrained by my lack of access to a car. The Internet changed some of these things. Some people opened their minds a bit. (Other people became more radically entrenched in their intolerance.)
But at that time, in that place, I had felt trapped and hopeless. It had almost killed me, but I had escaped. Now the horrible thing I recognized, the wild incompetence, the anti-intellectualism, the fanatical religious authoritarianism, the blatant corruption, they were all there. They were all embodied in one man.
Folks living in cities felt the time warp. This thing didn't belong to the modern era. It was old and weird, clawing us all back in time. But for me that time also had a place. I had felt the time warp in reverse when I escaped. But the monster had followed me.
That focus, filling my mind with so much information that nothing else could get in, was adaptive under capitalism. It got me job after job. I was a top performer wherever I worked, because I never stopped trying to get better. My personal life would vanish as I poured myself into learning, growing, improving. I read books and took classes. No one could believe I had dropped out of high school. All of my peers had secondary degrees. I could pass for something that I wasn't, and part of that was driven by fear: fear that I would be found out, fear that I would, somehow, have to go back.
But back came for everyone, so I organized.
I had learned this skill, the skill of learning, the skill of focusing at the exclusion of everything. I had learned it to adapt to capitalism, to adapt to my trauma, to keep myself safe. I applied the skill. I applied it to my organizing, I applied it at work. I was always working on something. I worked on organizing plans. I wrote code. I worked on software architectures. I wrote papers, so many papers, to get these ideas funded. I pushed myself without feeling. I pushed until I broke. (or, I guess, until I broke a window.)
Time off, therapy, things started to get better. We realized we could leave. I paid attention to my feelings. We moved to the Netherlands.
I thought that things could be better, and they were. The longer I've been here, the more I've been able to be with my feelings. When I stopped working, I realized I needed to focus on my emotions if I wanted any hope of getting back to work. So I've been writing.
The more I do this, the more I let myself engage with feelings, the more I've started to notice this thing that I do. Sometimes it even comes in when I'm in therapy or talking about my feelings. I shift to the theory, the context, depersonalize it and think about my experience as part of the system.
But I didn't follow that thread last night. I let myself drift away from theory and notice what I had been doing.
This adaptation, which I learned to deal with childhood trauma, works well for capitalism but poorly for parenting. So here I am, trying to figure out how to balance the need to fill my head with information, theory and code, to get back to work against the needs of my kids for me to be emotionally available. And the transition is harsh.
I want to talk about capitalism. I want to talk about how it tunes people in maladaptive ways. I want to talk about how it is a system of death, a system that gradually makes social reproduction more difficult until it kills the society it infects. I want to talk about all this, so I don't have to think about how bad it feels to actually be in the thing. By thinking about this as a system, I can rally a comfortable anger against something horrible. By thinking about this as a system, I can remove myself from the experience of it. By thinking about this system, I can not feel it.
It is far easier to talk about this monstrous system, to clinically analyze it, than to admit that I feel scared, and sad, and helpless. The monstrosity of this faceless system, operating on the emotionless logic of profit, mirrors the incomprehensibility of the world of my own childhood.
And there's the answer. How has my childhood trauma shaped my life? How hasn't it? Every part of who I am is intermeshed with my strategies for adapting to this trauma. So then, what am I left with if I treat the trauma? How do I survive if survival in the capitalist system has been predicated on an adaptation to trauma that eliminates the feelings I need to help my kids grow?
How do I let go of something I need? How do I provide for my family without the tool that makes me successful?
from
ThruxBets
Have been a little quiet on here of late, work, life and the end of the football season has been transpiring against me.
Calmer seas ahead so finding a little more time to spend with the formbook and I’ve found two today …
3.10 Catterick I wish there were eight runners here, but there isn’t. I’m am however, still going to put up INGLEBY ARCHIE as a selection. The 5yo will have absolutely needed his reappearance run LTO so I’m putting a line through that and what interests me here is he is – LTO aside – back in a class 5 off what is with Jack Nicholl’s claim, a career low mark at a grade where he is 3321158214. First run at the course against some rivals who love it here, but 13/2 seems a fair price for a horse who seems to relish racing at this time of year.
INGLEBY ARCHIE // 0.5pt E/W @ 13/2 (Bet365) BOG
4.50 Catterick An each way bet to nothing on Jedd O’Keefe’s old timer SAISONS D’OR here. A good winner LTO on the tapeta at Southwell and should find this easier than recent turf assignments with this being a 0-60. Is 5lbs lower than his last winning mark (over C&D) and similar to the selection in the 3.10, actually finds himself on a career low turf mark too. Ticks plenty of other boxes (course form, ground, trip etc) and hopeful he can be very competitive.
SAISONS D’OR // 0.5pt E/W @ 11/2 (Coral) BOG
from POTUSRoaster
Hello again. I hope you and your family are well.
POTUS has decided that those who attacked the capital during the constitutionally mandated ceremony of counting the votes of the electoral college must be rewarded. POTUS, in ordering the settlement of his own suit against the IRS, has ignored congressional power to spend money and forced them to create a fund to reward those who would have burned down the capital if they had had just a little more time.
In addition he has forced the justice department to make his family, business and any other organization they create, immune to any action by the irs. So, he can ignore the law, ignore the requirement to pay any tax, and prevent the department from auditing his or his family or business tax returns. So, if he fills in every line of his 1040 with zeroes, there is nothing the irs can do. No one else in the world has such immunity.
This is just another example of why POTUS and his cohorts must be removed from their positions as soon as possible. Otherwise POTUS and the MAGA Monsters will destroy our democracy.
POTUS Roaster
Thanks for reading my posts. If you enjoy them, please tell your friends and family, If you want to read more, please go to write.as/potusroaster/archive/
from 下川友
仕事らしい仕事の入っていない朝だった。 曇った窓を眺めているうちに、特に外へ出る理由もないまま、結局、公園まで歩くことにした。 外は、小雨が降っているようで降っていない。水たまりだけが残っていて、空はぎりぎり曇っている。
撥水の効いたシャツに黒いパンツ。 棚の下には、ゴアテックスのスニーカーが置かれていた。
橋の下を抜ける途中、軒下でノートパソコンを開いている人がいた。 雨粒が地面を叩く音のなかで、キーボードだけが乾いた音を立てている。
最近、自分のなかで、気分が変わる条件が変わった気がする。 前なら、新しい下着をまとめて買い替えるだけで、生活が少し更新された。 けれど今は、それではもう足りない。 何を変えれば、新しい日付の側へ移れるのか、自分でも分からなくなっている。
公園のベンチに座りたかったが、少し湿っていたので、立ったままうろうろしていた。 濡れた木の匂いがした。
微妙な寒さに、そういえば昔、腹巻きを買ったことがあったのを思い出した。 冷え対策だったと思う。 数日だけ真面目に着けて、すぐにやめた。 ああいう、生活を改善しようとする小さな決意は、たいてい静かに失踪する。
雨脚が少し強くなった。 遠くで、どこかのビルのエレベーターの音が聞こえた気がした。 エレベーターのなかでは、たまにピアノのイージーリスニングが流れていることがある。 この先の人生は、たぶんこんなふうにレールの上を進んでいくのだと、不意に脳へ感覚が浮かび上がり、少し抵抗したくなる。
植物園にも行きたいし、夜の天体観測もしてみたいし、釣りもしたい。 落語だって見に行きたいと思い続けている。 まだ、やりたいことをほとんどできていない。
けれど、やりたいことは、やる前がいちばん均整の取れた形をしていて、実際の生活はいつもその手前で止まり続ける。
年末の大掃除が待ち遠しい。 まだ梅雨も明けていないのに。 全部を捨てて、床を拭いて、空気を入れ替える日のことを考えると、少しだけ安心する。
公園の時計を見る。 まだ昼にもなっていなかった。 雨のせいで、時間が薄く伸びている。
立ち上がる。 帰ったら、多分、好きなソファに座って、夏に着る服でも眺めるのだと思う。
from
SmarterArticles

There is a particular kind of professional disappearance that does not show up in the unemployment figures. The illustrator still has a desk. The translator still has a website. The session musician still owns a violin. None of them have been fired. None of them have been informed, in any official capacity, that their occupation is being phased out. Their names remain on the same freelance registers, the same union rolls, the same tax filings as last year. And yet, quietly, almost imperceptibly at first, the floor underneath their work has begun to give way.
This is the strangest economic story of the decade, and it is unfolding without a moment of high drama. There are no factory closures, no mass layoffs, no town-square photographs of redundant workers carrying cardboard boxes. Instead, there is a slow, grinding compression of the rates a cover illustrator can charge for a magazine commission, a slight but stubborn drop in the volume of subtitling work coming through the agency in São Paulo, a pause in the email chain from the German publisher who used to commission a translator in Lagos every six months. Each individual moment is deniable. Taken together, they describe a structural rearrangement of the creative economy that the existing policy vocabulary, fixated on automation and job displacement, is not equipped to name.
UNESCO's flagship report on creativity and digital transformation, published on 18 February 2026 as the fourth edition of its Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity series, attempted to put a number on the rearrangement. Drawing on data from more than 120 countries, the report projected that creators worldwide are on course to lose up to 24 per cent of their revenues by 2028 as a direct consequence of generative AI, with music creators bearing the heaviest exposure and audiovisual creators close behind. An accompanying analysis published the same week by Inter Press Service amplified the geographical dimension of the problem, observing that the income losses are falling most heavily on freelance and self-employed creators in the global south, layering a new digital injury on top of long-standing inequalities in the cultural economy.
The numbers are striking, but they are not the most interesting part of the story. The most interesting part is the mechanism. This is not, in the conventional sense, a tale of automation. The translator working from Yoruba to Spanish has not been replaced by a translation engine in any specific role. She is still the translator on her own letterhead. What has happened is that the demand curve she used to live on has been displaced, almost overnight, by something that produces an approximate substitute for her output at near-zero marginal cost. The publishers, the production companies, the marketing agencies who used to commission her have not declared that they are switching to machines. They have simply stopped commissioning at the same volume, or they have begun negotiating from a position that assumes her labour competes with a free alternative. There is no transition point. There is no redundancy notice. There is no clean moment at which the policy concept of retraining becomes applicable, because the person is still doing the job. It is the job, as a paid activity, that is being hollowed out.
This distinction matters, and not only as semantics. The entire architecture of late twentieth-century labour policy, from unemployment insurance to active labour market programmes, was built on the assumption that economic dislocation comes with a clear event horizon. Someone is hired. Someone is laid off. Someone is retrained. Someone is rehired. Generative AI breaks the model not by accelerating the cycle but by detaching the harm from any of these events. The freelance writer is never laid off because she was never on a payroll. The illustrator does not get a redundancy package because there was no employer. The market she sold into has simply contracted, and the policy instruments designed to catch falling workers were not built to catch a falling market.
If the diagnosis is right, then the question that follows is the one the UNESCO report, the IPS News analysis, and a fast-growing literature on AI and the creative economy have all begun to circle. What policy instruments, beyond copyright reform, can address the harm? And who, in any meaningful sense, is responsible for the structural losses already under way?
To understand why this matters, it helps to look at what the existing debate is mostly about. Almost every legal and political fight currently being waged on behalf of creative workers concerns the upstream side of the AI value chain: whether AI labs should be allowed to train models on copyrighted works without permission, whether they should pay licensing fees for ingesting them, whether opt-out registers should be opt-in, whether the European Union's text-and-data-mining exception should narrow or expand. These are real and important fights. The Copyright Licensing Agency in the United Kingdom announced its Generative AI Training Licence to allow collective compensation for ingestion. The US Copyright Office has explored extended collective licensing on the Danish model. The Court of Justice of the European Union held its first hearing on generative AI and copyright in March 2026 in Like Company v Google, a case that may reshape the press publishers' right across the bloc.
Yet copyright, in any of its forms, only addresses one half of the harm UNESCO identified. The CISAC global economic study published in late 2024, conducted by the consultancy PMP Strategy on behalf of the international confederation of authors' societies, was unusually clear about this. The losses creators face split into two distinct streams. The first stream is the value of their existing works being scraped into training data without consent or remuneration. Copyright reform, however imperfectly, is built to address that. The second stream is the substitution effect: AI-generated outputs competing in the market against human-made works, depressing rates and shrinking commissions. Copyright, as currently understood, has very little to say about that second stream. Even a perfectly negotiated training licence does not change the fact that, once the model is trained, the marginal cost of producing a passable cover illustration falls towards zero, and the rate the illustrator can charge falls with it.
This is the harder problem, and it is the one to which the policy debate is only beginning to turn. The question is no longer simply how to compensate creators for the use of their work in training. It is how to sustain a market for human creative labour at all, when the marginal product of that labour can be approximated, however crudely, by a system that does not pay rent, sleep, or eat.
The good news, if it can be called that, is that the policy toolkit available to address market collapse is broader than the copyright debate sometimes suggests. The bad news is that almost every instrument involves redistributing money from somebody who currently does not pay to somebody who currently does not receive, and the political economy of that redistribution is brutal.
The most direct proposal, and the one that has gained the most traction in European policy circles over the past year, is a levy on AI systems pegged to their commercial use of human cultural output. Arthur Mensch, the chief executive of the French AI lab Mistral, surprised many observers in 2025 when he publicly endorsed a revenue-based levy of roughly 1 to 1.5 per cent on commercial providers placing AI models on the European market, with funds channelled into a central pot to support cultural creation. The Mistral proposal is hardly altruistic; it would also, conveniently, harden a continental moat against American and Chinese model providers. But its underlying logic is sound, and it draws on a legal heritage that goes back six decades.
The German Copyright Act of 1965 introduced the first private copying levy, attaching a small charge to the cost of devices and media that allowed users to duplicate protected works. The principle was that where copying is structurally uncontrollable, levy-funded compensation, distributed by collective management organisations, is a more workable alternative than litigation. Generative AI presents an almost perfect analogue. The training and inference of a foundation model, at any meaningful scale, is structurally beyond the reach of one-by-one licensing. A statutory levy on commercial AI services, collected by reformed collective management organisations and distributed to creators on a metered basis, would close the substitution-side gap that copyright cannot reach. It would also avoid the worst pathology of contemporary copyright reform, which is that platforms can outspend rights holders in any line-by-line negotiation.
There are real objections. A levy must be set high enough to matter and low enough not to suppress useful applications. It must be administered by institutions trusted by both creators and developers, which is not how the existing collective management landscape is universally regarded. And it must avoid becoming a moat for incumbents who can absorb a 1.5 per cent levy more easily than a research lab in Nairobi or a co-operative model in Buenos Aires. None of these objections is fatal. All of them require institutional design rather than policy retreat.
A close cousin of the levy approach is the statutory remuneration right, which decouples permission from payment. Under such a regime, AI developers might be permitted to train on lawfully accessible works without negotiating individual licences, but they would owe a non-waivable payment to authors through a collective body. The European Parliament's commissioned study on generative AI and copyright, published in 2025, examined this possibility in detail. Springer Nature's International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law has run a series of analyses, by scholars including Christophe Geiger, arguing that a statutory remuneration right grounded in fundamental rights to participate in cultural life could be the most workable foundation for a new compact.
The advantage of a statutory remuneration right over a pure levy is that it sits more comfortably within the existing copyright framework. The disadvantage is that it still ties payment to the use of identifiable works, which means it primarily addresses the ingestion side rather than the substitution side. Combined with a levy, however, it begins to look like a serviceable architecture.
While the levy debate continues, a quieter experiment has been running in Ireland since 2022. The Basic Income for the Arts scheme, originally a three-year pilot, paid 2,000 randomly selected artists 325 euros a week, regardless of output. The Irish Department of Culture, Communications and Sport opened applications for the 2026 to 2029 successor scheme in April 2026, and a published cost-benefit analysis found that for every euro invested, society received a return of 1.39 euros, a number that has been disputed in the Irish press but has not been seriously dislodged.
The Irish scheme is not a response to AI. It was designed to address the chronic under-monetisation of cultural work in a digital economy that had already eroded the freelance commercial base before generative models arrived. But its logic transfers cleanly. If the market for creative output is being structurally compressed by a technology whose externalities are not internalised, then a state instrument that decouples income from market success becomes more, not less, defensible. A universal creative income, scaled to the working population of practising artists in any given country, would stand to working creatives roughly as agricultural support payments stand to small farmers facing global commodity competition. It is unromantic, slightly bureaucratic, and precisely the kind of thing that has historically allowed cultural production to survive market shocks.
The political objection is that it looks like a cultural welfare state. The substantive objection is that, depending on how it is administered, it can entrench the credentialing power of arts councils and reproduce existing gatekeeping. Both are genuine. Neither is decisive against an instrument that, in Ireland at least, has empirical results to its name.
A surprisingly underused lever is the purchasing power of governments themselves. Public sector bodies are, in aggregate, among the largest commissioners of design, illustration, translation, audiovisual production, and music in most economies. The US General Services Administration's draft AI procurement clause, the December 2025 OMB memorandum M-26-04, the United Kingdom's Procurement Policy Note 017 from February 2025, and California's executive order on AI vendor certification signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in April 2026 all introduce disclosure obligations for AI-generated content within government contracts. None of them, however, goes the further step of creating a procurement preference for human creative work in cultural production funded by public money.
A modest reform would be to require, for example, that any public broadcaster, national museum, ministry of culture, or city government commissioning creative output beyond a defined threshold use human creators where reasonably possible, with transparent disclosure when generative tools are used. This costs the state more, in the short term, than letting procurement officers chase the cheapest bid. It also creates a stable demand floor for working creatives and signals, with the kind of clarity that markets respond to, that public money will not be deployed to accelerate the collapse of the freelance creative class. India's labelling thresholds for AI-generated visual and audio content, and the EU AI Act's transparency requirements, are early sketches of the disclosure architecture this would require.
The 2023 agreements between the Writers Guild of America, the Screen Actors Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers are, for all their imperfections, the most concrete demonstration that collective bargaining can produce workable rules around AI in creative work. The WGA contract specifies that AI-generated material cannot be considered literary material for credit purposes and gives writers the right to refuse to use AI tools, while preserving their ability to challenge the use of writers' work to train AI. The SAG-AFTRA contract distinguishes digital replicas of identifiable performers from synthetic performers built from no individual likeness, and creates compensation and consent obligations around both.
These provisions are not perfect. The 2024 SAG-AFTRA video game performer strike, which ran for many months over precisely these AI consent and compensation issues in the interactive sector, demonstrated how quickly a contract negotiated for one segment of the industry begins to look incomplete when applied to another. But the agreements demonstrate the principle that collective bargaining can do work that copyright cannot, by setting industry-wide floors on consent, attribution, and compensation that apply regardless of the specific upstream provenance of any given AI output.
The implication for creative workers outside the unionised entertainment sector is uncomfortable but unavoidable. The freelance illustrator, the literary translator, the independent musician, the documentary editor often have no equivalent collective body. Building one, on a national or transnational basis, becomes infrastructure rather than ideology. The European Federation of Journalists, the European Writers' Council, the International Federation of Translators, and the Concerts Promoters Association are all operating in this space, as are emerging co-operative models among illustrators in continental Europe. Any serious policy response to the structural compression of creative labour markets needs to take seriously the question of how to fund and support these bodies.
A more radical proposal, occasionally floated in policy circles and yet to find a serious political champion, is the sovereign wealth approach. The argument runs that the corpus of human cultural output ingested by foundation models is a non-rival public resource analogous to a national fishery or a hydrocarbon basin. Where states extract rents from companies exploiting natural resources, the rents fund either current public expenditure or, in the Norwegian case, an intergenerational sovereign wealth fund. By analogy, a national or supranational creative commons fund, capitalised by an ingestion-based levy on commercial AI training and operation, could be invested to provide perpetual support for cultural production.
The sovereign wealth analogy is imperfect. Cultural output is not extracted from a finite reservoir; it is generated, continuously, by living people whose labour the fund is meant to compensate. But the analogy is useful precisely because it forces a recognition that the value flowing into AI labs from human cultural output is, in macroeconomic terms, an unpriced externality of historic scale. The OECD's 2025 report on intellectual property and AI training data raised, without endorsing, the question of whether the absence of pricing on this externality represents a market failure that justifies non-market correction. That is exactly the conceptual frame a sovereign wealth approach would adopt.
Any honest reckoning with the policy space has to confront the dimension that the IPS News analysis put squarely on the table: the income losses from generative AI are not falling evenly across geography. They are falling disproportionately on freelance and self-employed creators in the global south. UNESCO's data, repeated in the Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity report, is sobering. In developed economies, 67 per cent of people possess essential digital skills; in developing economies the figure is 28 per cent. Cultural and creative leadership in developed countries has reached 64 per cent women in some institutional categories; in developing nations it is 30 per cent. Public funding for culture sits below 0.6 per cent of global GDP and is projected to decline. Only 61 per cent of countries surveyed have intellectual property frameworks UNESCO considers adequate.
These structural baselines were already producing inequality. Generative AI compounds them. Viviana Rangel, a Colombian independent expert quoted in the IPS News analysis, framed the problem in a sentence: the region does not produce this kind of technology; it consumes it. The economic flow runs in one direction. Cultural workers in Lagos, Lima, Manila, and Karachi see their commissions evaporate as European and North American clients route work through models trained on a corpus from which their own contributions are statistically marginal. The royalties and rents from those models, when they exist at all, flow to collective management organisations and rights holders concentrated in the North Atlantic.
This dimension has implications for every instrument discussed above. A European AI cultural levy, however well designed, will tend to recapture funds from European AI providers and recycle them through European collective management organisations to predominantly European creators. That is not necessarily wrong, but it is not a global solution. The CISAC study's projection of 22 billion euros in cumulative losses to music and audiovisual creators globally over five years is a number that needs distributional analysis. Where do the losses fall? Where do the few gains fall? UNESCO's framing of the problem as a global development issue, rather than a North Atlantic intellectual property dispute, opens space for instruments that the copyright debate alone would not generate.
The most credible candidates, at this point, are international transfers built into the supranational architecture of AI governance. A share of any revenues raised through training data taxes, statutory remuneration rights, or AI cultural levies should be directed, by treaty or legislative carve-out, to a global fund supporting creators in the regions where the harm falls hardest. This is not charity. It is restitution for an extraction whose proceeds are presently retained by a small group of companies whose corpora include cultural output from every continent. UNESCO, by virtue of its mandate over cultural diversity and the global character of its 120-country reporting, is the obvious institutional vehicle, although the World Intellectual Property Organisation and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development have credible roles to play.
The harder version of the global south argument concerns sovereignty. If a Senegalese government wants to protect its translators, illustrators, and musicians from market compression caused by foundation models trained largely outside its borders, what tools does it have? The honest answer is: not many, in the short term. National AI levies on a small market produce modest revenue. National copyright reform reaches AI labs only weakly. National public commissioning and basic income programmes are constrained by fiscal capacity. This is one reason why the architecture of any serious policy response has to be partly supranational. It is also why policy frameworks that treat the global south as an afterthought, or that solve the problem of the European illustrator while leaving the Lagos illustrator untouched, will be morally and politically unstable.
The question of responsibility is the one most likely to be flattened by political slogans, so it is worth taking slowly. There are at least five candidates for the moral and economic ledger, and a serious policy framework needs to assign weight to each rather than collapsing them into a single villain.
The AI labs themselves are the most obvious candidate. They built the systems whose outputs are compressing creative labour markets. They trained the models on corpora they did not pay for, in most cases, and they continue to extract economic rent from those corpora at scale. The defence offered by lab leadership tends to combine the argument that training on publicly available content is fair use with the argument that the productivity gains from foundation models will, over time, raise everyone's incomes including creators'. Both arguments are contestable. The fair use claim is being litigated across multiple jurisdictions. The productivity-spillover claim has, so far, generated almost no observable benefit for the working creators whose markets are contracting fastest. Responsibility, on any plausible reading, sits substantially with the labs, and the policy instruments above should be priced accordingly.
The platforms that distribute creative work are a second locus. Streaming services that ingest AI-generated music into the same recommendation streams as human-made music; stock image platforms that have become, in some categories, predominantly synthetic; commissioning marketplaces that allow buyers to specify AI-generated drafts as deliverables. Each of these platforms makes choices about how to label, reward, and surface human versus synthetic output. UNESCO's report observes that opaque algorithms and platform consolidation are themselves part of the structural undercutting. Procurement-style transparency requirements, content provenance standards, and labelling rules are the relevant instruments here, and platforms are properly the subjects of them.
Governments are the third candidate. They license the regulatory environment within which labs and platforms operate, and they hold the fiscal and statutory authority to introduce levies, statutory remuneration rights, public commissioning rules, and basic income schemes. They also have the slowest reflexes. The EU AI Act, the UK text-and-data-mining consultation, the patchwork of state-level AI laws in the United States, and the regulatory regimes emerging across Asia and Latin America operate on time horizons measured in years; market compression is occurring in quarters. Responsibility for that gap falls on legislatures and on public agencies that have not yet pivoted from a copyright-only frame to a market-structure frame.
The fourth candidate is the end user: the corporate or individual buyer who chooses an AI-generated cover, a synthetic voice-over, or an automated translation over a human alternative. Moral responsibility here is real but limited. Buyers respond to prices, and prices are an artefact of upstream institutional architecture; no buyer can plausibly be expected to internalise an externality the policy regime has not bothered to price. End-user weight matters most in the public sector, in editorial institutions whose readers care about provenance, and in industries where reputation rewards transparency. Disclosure rules, labelling standards, and provenance technologies make this responsibility legible and therefore actionable.
The fifth candidate, the most diffuse and the least talked about, is the public itself, conceived as the political constituency that decides whether to treat creative labour as economically valuable enough to defend. The Irish basic income scheme exists because Irish politics decided it should. The WGA and SAG-AFTRA agreements exist because audiences, in the end, did not want to consume an industry whose writers and performers were being squeezed past tolerance. The slow shift in European policy thinking towards an AI cultural levy exists because European publics and their elected representatives have, for now, not lost their attachment to the idea that cultural work is a public good worth supporting through institutional design. That political attachment is not automatic. It can erode. Where it erodes, the labs and platforms set the frame.
A serious policy settlement, on the analysis above, is not a single instrument but a stack. Copyright reform sits at the bottom of the stack, addressing the upstream ingestion question that copyright is institutionally suited to handle. Statutory remuneration rights and AI cultural levies sit above it, addressing the substitution-side compression that copyright cannot reach. Public commissioning rules and procurement preferences sit above those, deploying the state's purchasing power to maintain a demand floor for human creative work. Universal creative income schemes, on the Irish model, sit above those, decoupling baseline livelihood from market success. Collective bargaining and trade-association infrastructure sits across the stack, providing the institutional capacity for creators to negotiate consent, attribution, and compensation in real-time as the technology evolves. International transfers, capitalised by the levies and routed through multilateral cultural institutions, sit on top, addressing the global south dimension that no national policy can solve alone.
No single country has the full stack today. Ireland has a basic income scheme. France and the European Union are debating a levy. The United Kingdom has a collective licensing prototype. Spain has labelling rules. Germany has a private copying levy heritage that could be retrofitted. The United States has the WGA and SAG-AFTRA agreements, the GSA procurement clause, and California's vendor certification regime. India has labelling thresholds. UNESCO has 8,100 catalogued policy measures across 120 countries. The pieces exist; what is missing is the integration.
This is, in some sense, the unromantic conclusion. The problem that generative AI has created in the creative economy is not, primarily, a problem that demands a new philosophical framework, although philosophical frameworks help. It is a problem that demands the assembly of a known set of instruments into a coherent stack, with serious institutional design and credible enforcement, and with explicit redistribution towards the creators and regions where the harm is concentrated. The political difficulty of that assembly is high. The intellectual difficulty is lower than the public debate sometimes implies.
The alternative, if no such stack is built, is reasonably easy to describe. The compression continues. The freelance creative class, in the global north and more sharply in the global south, contracts. The cultural production that survives concentrates among those with independent means, institutional employment, or audiences large enough to bypass the compression. The texture of cultural output narrows in ways that are hard to see in real time but legible in retrospect, in the same way the disappearance of regional newspapers became legible only after the fact. The labs and platforms continue to capture the rents from a corpus they did not build. Lodovico Folin-Calabi, the UNESCO director who told the press at the report's launch that the world must critically examine how these technologies are deployed and whose voices are represented, may turn out to have been describing not a turning point but a wake.
Whether the settlement gets built is, finally, a political question rather than a technical one. The technical question has answers. The political question, whether public, labs, platforms, and governments collectively decide that the structural losses already under way are worth correcting, has only the answers a generation chooses to give. The 24 per cent number is a forecast. It is also a decision, not yet made.

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer
Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.
His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.
ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk
Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast
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Roscoe's Story
In Summary: * Spent over an hour this morning on yard work, trimming front walks and trying to tidy up the pile of branches by the front curb waiting to be picked up. Though I was very unsteady on my feet, I didn't fall. Thank God.
Happy to see the Indiana Fever leading by 21 points early in the 3rd quarter. Playing very well even without Caitlin Clark tonight. Hoping the Spurs win their game later tonight.
And I hope all goes well tomorrow at my GP apt. It's just a regular 4-month check up, but at my age, ya' never know. Ya' know? We do have issues to talk about.
Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.
Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.
Health Metrics: * bw= 234.90 lbs. * bp= 141/84 (66)
Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups
Diet: * 07:10 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 09:50 – air-popped popcorn * 12:15 – beef chop suey, fried rice * 16:00 – egg drop soup, fried rice
Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:15 – listening to local news talk radio * 05:20 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 06:05 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap, * 11:00 to 12:15 – cut branches and trim walks in front yard * 12:15 to 13:30 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 14:00 – tuned into the warmup show for this afternoon's Rangers vs Rockies MLB game. First pitch is only mnutes away. * 17:15 – Rangers win, 5 to 4. * 17:30 – listening to Indiana Fever Pregame Show ahead of tonight's game vs the Portland Fire
Chess: * 19:10 – moved in all pending CC games
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The happy place
There’s not so much going on in my head lately, for some reason. It’s like a blank space which I picture as being white rather than black
So that is good, because I am feeling good
it feels good to feel good.
I am working as an IT Sheriff now, or soon will be. Met some clients today and we had a lunch
I could help them with anything really, by going into bitbucket for example, and put Borg Cubes as icons for all of their kubernetes repos
If need be
It doesn’t matter that much
I can patch stuff,
I feel the carpenter last year said some wise words; I asked whether he could do these dressings around the massive windows. He said that as long as he got paid he could, and he could even mow the lawns
If he got paid
And there is wisdom in this, of course
Furthermore, on this special lunch, by happenstance, I saw a travelling friend who was visiting my town today
And we decided to have a beer this evening
Which we did
I had a black one, a stout, which the bartender said tasted of decadence. Sweet, strong and bitter. I think he was right about that
I often dip my toes in decadence, like the yin to my yang (or vice versa), I think it’s a way of finding a sort of balance
It balances the humours, I feel
And still, I picture a grey mind as being way worse than having a black one
Ok thanks for reading this text straight from my heart (because like I said, there’s nothing much going on in my brain)
from brendan halpin
I did not know green burials were a thing until my mom said she wanted one. So I made the arrangements but didn’t really know what to expect. And my mom died on Saturday, and on Tuesday we buried her. (There’s no embalming with a green burial, so you have to get it done pretty quickly. They told us it could be as long as a week.)
Here’s what it was like. (We did this in Greater Cincinnati, so obviously the details may be different depending on your location, but I just wanted to give people an idea of what the process is like)
First, the burial ground is a beautiful and peaceful meadow that is also a nature preserve with hiking trails. Scattered around the meadow are little mounds with grass growing out of them where folks have been buried. So it doesn’t feel like a cemetery—there are no rows of granite markers or anything—it just feels like a field.
My mom’s body was in the back of the hearse, wrapped in a (thick and definitely not see-through) shroud that was in a big wicker basket. Me and five of my relatives moved the basket onto a little wagon, and I pulled the wagon to the gravesite. Once there, we lifted the shroud out of the basket and placed it on planks that were over the grave.
My mom’s priest said some words, and a representative from the place said some words. We had a moment of silence and listened to the breeze and the birds flying overhead. There were straps under the shroud, and we grabbed those and held my mom’s body up while the staff pulled the planks away. We then used the straps to lower my mom’s body into the ground. And then a mix of staff and relatives grabbed shovels and filled in the grave. (It was hot and I was in a suit, so I did one shovelful. Some of my relatives really went hard on the shoveling).
I’ve been to a fair amount of funerals, and this felt much better to me than seeing a body in a metal casket lowered into a concrete vault. My mom’s body quite literally returned to the earth, and in a few years there will be nothing left of her as the matter of her body will have become the soil that feeds the grass. There will be a marker—a little stone flush with the ground that has her name on it. Like, a literal stone, not a granite monument.
Once the grave was filled in, they gave me a rock to place on a cairn that was made up of rocks placed in honor of everyone who’d ever been buried there.
I was really struck by the beauty and simplicity of the entire process. It felt very natural and respectful, and at no point in the process did I feel like anyone was trying to upsell me in that “Don’t you want the $500 pillow for your loved one?” way that funeral directors so often do.
Throughout the day afterward, people kept coming up to me and saying how much the appreciated the green burial and that they’d never heard of it but now wanted one for themselves.
I should also mention that the entire process cost about half what a traditional burial would have cost.
There aren’t too many places that offer green burials yet, but I think as more people experience green burials, more people will want them. If you’re have questions about the process that I didn’t answer here, please feel free to click on the ol’ contact me link above. I’m just a consumer here, but I think this is a really nice process, and I’d like to help people who are interested.
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Proyecto Arcadia
¡Noticia! Ciudad Telaraña, el juego de terror y alienación que hemos terminado de crear, se publicará en formato físico con la editorial 77Mundos, esperemos que después del verano.
Nos hemos colado en el canal de Friki Vetusto, en el programa Mundos Críticos de este mes, para anunciar la publicación en físico del juego. Además de presentar el origen de la colaboración con esta editorial, explicar la ambientación de Ciudad Telaraña y el sistema, de juego y contestar a las preguntas del público, pasamos un rato estupendo. Echadle un ojo al vídeo en el enlace de debajo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQvVM4hEBCY