Happy Monday, friends. It's the eve of Election Day in America, and I really hope tomorrow doesn't kick off a civil war! 🫠

(I'm trying this thing where I do a lightweight rundown post on Mondays and then the main weekly rant on Fridays. Yell if it's too much!)

Last week’s rant:

• I finally crashed out about AI. I’m real sick of it, y'all. (There are some anti-AI resources at the end, too.)

A few newsy bits:

• Both the Society of Authors and the Authors Guild recently released their suggested best practices for using AI, and in both cases they’ve declined to take a clear anti-AI stance, choosing instead positions of enablement and appeasement. These weak stances contribute to a normalization of AI use and reduce its many, many harms to simplistic disagreements over rights and compensation. Both charters should just be “don't fucking use it, the end”.

• Why No AI is a great, straightforward explainer of the myriad harms of this technology as it stands today. Keep it in your back pocket for sending to tedious people!

Some housekeeping:

• I registered thehellscape.wtf over the weekend, so you should see this and future emails coming from that domain instead of Buttondown’s. To avoid the spam folder, add josh@thehellscape.wtf to your contacts. (You can also email me there if you want!)

• There's no website behind the domain yet, so… yeah. TBD on that. Soon™?

• Honestly I just think it's fucking hilarious to have a .wtf TLD for this project at all, and I am immensely pleased with this life choice. 😊

• If you want to follow along in your RSS reader instead of (or in addition to!) email, you can do that with this feed link.

Up next:

• Proton’s CEO is in full AI psychosis mode (404 Media) and it is immensely frustrating. More on that—including discussion of potential alternatives—is coming this Friday. It's a whole clown show!

Good luck out there this week, and remember: if it costs you your peace, it's too fucking expensive.