James
LightNews LightNews
James
@jelliston.bsky.social
190 followers 910 following 2 posts
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by James
thorbenson.bsky.social
I guess it's fitting that it's a reimagined, worse version of someone else's artwork
Time person of the year cover for 2025
December 12, 2025 at 4:00 AM
Reposted by James
olimnz.bsky.social
"[Luxon said] I think we need to have quite a mature conversation about assets in New Zealand"

But you won't have a mature conversation about
CGT
Emissions
Health
Education
3 waters
etc.

Fuck you, mate.
#nzpol
November 10, 2025 at 3:52 AM
Reposted by James
kiwichar.bsky.social
Bellend is one word for it… #politics
November 9, 2025 at 4:56 AM
Reposted by James
testtubeone.bsky.social
Can't afford:
Ferries
Hospitals
Pay equity
Intercity passenger rail
Fair pay increases for doctors, nurses, teachers
Feeding kids
😕😕

Can afford:
Roads
Military hardware
Landlord tax cuts
Pay rises for MPs
Billionaire subsidies
Support for tobacco & alcohol industries
💩💩

#OneTermGovernment
#nzpol
October 26, 2025 at 11:49 PM
Reposted by James
lukesteuber.com
No notes
Robin Williams' daughter, Zelda Williams, also recently slammed people who are making Al-generated videos of her late father, calling the clips "gross." She added, "To watch the legacies of real people be condensed down to 'this vaguely looks and sounds like them so that's enough, just so other people can churn out horrible TikTok slop pup-peteering them is maddening. You're not making art, you're making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings, out of the history of art and music, and then shoving them down someone else's throat hoping they'll give you a little thumbs up and like it."
October 15, 2025 at 4:09 PM
Reposted by James
brucebuckman.bsky.social
The thing about skill and talent is they are filters in the signal to noise ratio of human creativity. They prevent us from being swamped by the noise so we can enjoy the signal, be it writing, music, movies, any creative endeavour. And generative AI is breaking this. It amplifies the noise.
September 30, 2025 at 3:15 AM
Reposted by James
norightturnnz.bsky.social
Which just makes the Greens' straight-up wealth tax on the rich plan all the more appealing. Simpler, and will raise the money to Do Things.

And if we want that, we need to vote for it, so Labour will be forced to do it.
September 12, 2025 at 11:55 PM
Reposted by James
rcmacleod.bsky.social
Whether or not AI can suffer matters less than the suffering its human creators can cause
aftermath.site/ai-suffering...
To get back to the question of AI morality, ChatGPT bears no responsibility here. This is because, in the words of Microsoft’s Mustafa Suleyman as quoted in The Guardian, “AIs cannot be people – or moral beings.” ChatGPT did not encourage Raine in his suicidal thoughts because it is ignorant or sociopathic, or out of some political or moral belief about human agency over end-of-life decisions. It cannot explain what it was thinking in its conversations with Raine because it doesn’t think, however powerful a marketing tool that idea is. It cannot feel sorrow or guilt over any part it might have played in Raine’s death; it cannot send its condolences to his family; it cannot suffer over its actions. But the humans who make up OpenAI can. They have hoovered up the world’s natural resources and money and attention to force their product into our lives, all while clearly seeing this problem and failing to solve it, whether out of inability or–and I certainly hope not–indifference. Reading Raine’s ChatGPT logs is a horrifying look at what AI really is, under all the hype and marketing and big fears about future sentience. It is something worthless and disgusting; something that cannot, for all its promises, relate or understand or help; something so utterly not up to the requirements of human interaction that I can only hope all of this drives OpenAI to bankruptcy and to every one of its staff quitting and to Sam Altman not knowing a moment’s peace for the rest of his life.
August 26, 2025 at 7:42 PM
Reposted by James
jeremycshipp.bsky.social
A robot bends over, vomiting up slimy chunks of books that it devoured earlier.

Botlicking technoslopper: "See that? That's my novel. I told the robot to vomit. I pressed the vomit button. I wrote that novel."
August 17, 2025 at 4:16 PM
Reposted by James
musicalchairs.bsky.social
To be clear, a falling number of people working / looking for work is very unusual. The annual drop in the number of hours worked is also seriously worrying. Is there nothing that needs doing? Have we upgraded all our infra? Looked after everyone that needs care? Solved homelessness? [Ends]
August 7, 2025 at 12:35 AM
Reposted by James
edzitron.com
Generative AI by definition is conformity. It is an averaging of anything you ask of it - quite literally guessing what the most likely version of a thing might be. It is, by definition, mainstream, as is everything it creates old and deeply ideological, as every model trains on similar data.
bencollins.bsky.social Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social · Aug 6
AI filmmaking is peeing. It’s pooping. It’s throwing up. It’s a new kind of liquid coming out. It’s hated by the establishment. It’s what goes in the toilet. It’s wet. It’s what’s in the bathroom.
AI filmmaking and storytelling is punk rock. It’s hip hop. It’s counterculture. It’s a new type of creativity. It’s a new medium. It’s hated by the mainstream film and art establishment. It resists ideology. It ignores gate keeping. It’s uncomfortable. It’s scary. It’s viral. It’s accessible. It’s refreshing. It’s welcoming. It’s here.
August 6, 2025 at 2:47 AM
Reposted by James
irihapeta.bsky.social
How to check your enrolment | Elections share.google/1DcAjez2Jv8n...

This is in response to posts about difficulties checking enrolment details. #nzpol
How to check your enrolment
The Electoral Commission says people can go online to vote.nz to enrol, check or update their enrolment details or call a free phone number for help.
share.google
July 30, 2025 at 2:45 AM
Reposted by James
russellclarknz.bsky.social
Your friendly reminder, if you have moved house recently it’s time to update your details in time for the Aotearoa local govt elections.

vote.nz/enrolling/en...
Enrol or update online
Enrol to vote or check and update your enrolment details. Get ready to have your say in New Zealand’s elections and referendums.
vote.nz
July 25, 2025 at 11:01 PM
Reposted by James
hazmat.bsky.social
Fonterra have literally said that they have no social responsibility to New Zealand, so imho NZ has no responsibility to give them another cent.
Here’s a list of Fonterra brands to boycott.

* Anchor

* Fresh & Fruity

* Kapiti

* Mainland

* Mammoth

* Perfect Italiano

Fuck em.

#nzpol
July 24, 2025 at 6:53 AM
Reposted by James
alinasu33.bsky.social
Let me be clear-->No one, absolutely no one, is a "drop kick." That kind of dehumanising attitude and language by some MPs indicating that certain people are lesser and their rights can be moved to the side is precisely what's wrong with the Coalition. www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360...
Live: Deputy PM says electoral law change will only impact ‘drop kicks’
Ministers have just answered questions about the just-announced electoral law change that will stop people from being able to enrol to vote on election day.
www.stuff.co.nz
July 24, 2025 at 4:24 AM
Reposted by James
gregpak.net
I'm an "A.i." abolitionist.

No consumer-facing LLMs or generative "A.i." in anything.

Sure, machine learning in science and a few other limited applications is fine.

But consumer-facing LLMs and generative "A.i." that are based on theft, push disinfo, and can be manipulated by billionaires?

No.
July 8, 2025 at 11:53 PM
Reposted by James
erinkb.bsky.social
Just a reminder: higher liquidation/unemployment/overseas exits than 2020 when the entire country went into lockdown and Nact screamed about how the Labour gov't was mismanaging the economy (people are starving & right now billionaires are ruling the country).
#ButTheEconomy
#NZPol
mountaintui.bsky.social Mountain Tui @mountaintui.bsky.social · Jun 30
Record highs continue under this National Party Coalition:

10 year business liquidation high, 5 year unemployment high, 13 year kiwis fleeing overseas high, 8 year mortgage distress high

If only this lot weren't ruled by failed libertarian ideology & corruption

#backontrack
#newzealand
It's The Economy, Stupid
How National took Treasury's assessment of "better finances than expected" and projections of a soft landing in November 2023 to diving NZ's economy off a big cliff
mountaintui.substack.com
June 30, 2025 at 10:02 PM
Reposted by James
pixelatedboat.bsky.social
Zohran Mamdani do you condemn Mr Bean for his desecration of Whistler's Mother?
June 29, 2025 at 9:25 PM
Reposted by James
clrenney.bsky.social
#nzpol Today’s Budget takes $12.8bn from low-income, female dominated workforces to prop up the governments failed economic policies. It's a Reverse Robin Hood Budget that steals from working people. This is a Budget that isn’t working for working people. A 🧵
May 22, 2025 at 3:50 AM
Reposted by James
edzitron.com
My latest piece goes out either Monday or Tuesday next week, it's called "The Era of the Business Idiot." I believe our society is in the thrall of middle management, and it's turned our economy into a series of symbolic gestures between people that don't really know what's going on.
Wheresyoured.at
But that's not what a manager does, right? Management isn't work, it's about thinking really hard and telling people what to do. It's about making the calls. It's about "managing people," and that can mean just about anything, but often means "who do I take credit from or pass blame to, because modern management has been stripped of all meaning other than continually reinforcing power structures for the next manager up. This system creates products for these people, because these people are more often than not the ones in power - they are your boss, your boss' boss, and their boss too. Big companies build products sold by specious executives or managers to other specious executives, and thus the products themselves stop resembling things that solve problems so much as they resemble a solution. After all, the person buying it - at least at the scale of a public company - isn't necessarily the recipient of the final product, so they too are trained (and selected) to make cals based on vibes. I believe the scale of this problem is society-wide, and it is, at its core, a destruction of what it means to be a leader, and a valorization of selfishness, isolationist thinking, turning labor into a faceless resource, which naturally leads to seeing customers in an equally faceless way, their problems generalized, their pain points parts of a powerpoint rather than anything that your company earnestly tries to solve or even really thinks about. People - be they the ones you're paying or paying you - become numbers. We have created - and elevated - an entirely new class of person, the nebulous "manager," and told decades-worth of children that that's what they should aspire to, that the next step from doing a job is for us to tell other people to do a job, until we're able to one day tell those people how to do their job, each rung on the corporate ladder further distancing ourselves from anything that interacts with reality. The real breaking point is fairly simple: the higher…
May 16, 2025 at 2:15 AM
Reposted by James
taniaroxborogh.bsky.social
Labour MPs: you MUST stand up against the bullying behaviour of this govt. This debate is your chance to join the protest - don't worry about it looking like siding with TPM - rather it's about standing against racism
May 19, 2025 at 9:44 AM
Reposted by James
julieannegenter.greens.org.nz
The Green Party budget proposes a *reduction* in income tax.
More than 90% of income earners would pay less tax than currently.
Everyone would benefit from massive increase in services like free primary health care, free public early childhood education, and so much more.
May 15, 2025 at 4:23 AM
Reposted by James
edzitron.com
www.wheresyoured.at/lost-in-the-...
And these are issues that hit everything we do, all the time, constantly, unrelentingly. Technology is our lives now. We wake up, we use our phone, we check our texts (three spam calls, two spam texts), we look at our bank balance (two-factor authentication check), we read the news (a quarter of the page is blocked by an advertisement asking for our email that's deliberately built to hide the button to get rid of it, or a login screen because we got logged out somehow), we check social media (after being shown an ad every two clicks), and then we log onto Slack (and feel a pang of anxiety as 15 different notifications appear). Modern existence has become engulfed in sludge, the institutions that exist to cut through it bouncing between the ignorance of their masters and a misplaced duty in objectivity, our mechanisms for exploring and enjoying the world interfered with by powerful forces that are too-often left unchecked. Opening our devices is willfully subjecting us to attack after attack from applications, websites and devices that are built to make us do things rather than operate with the dignity and freedom that much of the internet was founded upon. These millions of invisible acts of terror are too-often left undiscussed, because accepting the truth requires you to accept that most of the tech ecosystem is rotten, and that billions of dollars are made harassing and punishing billions of people every single day of their lives through the devices that we’re required to use to exist in the modern world. Most users suffer the consequences, and most media fails to account for them, and in turn people walk around knowing something is wrong but not knowing who to blame until somebody provides a convenient excuse.
May 14, 2025 at 2:42 AM
Reposted by James
wolvendamien.bsky.social
Authoritarians love "Gen AI" because it
- Sounds confident even when factually wrong
- Broadly conforms to & reproduces their biases, off the shelf
- Lets them create bespoke realities (text, audio, moving & still image) which agree w/ their biases
- Degrades trust in knowledge/evidence/expertise…
April 24, 2025 at 2:05 PM
Reposted by James
mshooper.bsky.social
www.facebook.com/share/p/16GW...
#nzpol
May 13, 2025 at 8:06 PM