Obey Giant

The Art of Shepard Fairey

LOST AND FOUND: Cold Chillin’ from 2008 Available Thurs, Dec. 11th at 10AM PT!

Two posters

Lost & Found is a series of releases pulling from the archives of Obey Giant Art. This week, we are excited to announce the release of a limited number of Cold Chillin screenprints from 2008 in red or blue, which will be available on Thursday, December 11th at 10 AM PT in the Obey Giant Store. A limited number of screenprints will be available as matching numbered sets.

*Price Note: These highly sought-after limited edition prints are priced according to the increased value of the print over time.

The “Cold Chillin” print was created when I was working regularly on my series of faux 12” LP sleeves that were a tribute to album covers and the influence music has had on my aesthetics and philosophy. While working on a hip hop penguin for one of the album cover tribute pieces, I decided that the “Cold Chillin” penguin worked well enough as a two color image to make print editions in two color ways. I found it amusing to take the metaphor of “cold chillin” and present it very literally with the penguin on a floating bit of ice with a fan that doubles as a turntable literally and metaphorically blowing cool air on him. The frame is inspired by the hip hop/graffiti device of making tag stickers out of “Hello My Name Is” labels. Track suit and dookie rope chain are also tributes to the gear of hip hop pioneers like RUN DMC, LL Cool J, etc… if you speak the lingo you get it!
-Shepard

PRINT DETAILS: Cold Chillin (Blue). 24H x 18W inches. Screen print on 80# cream Speckletone paper. Signed by Shepard Fairey in 2008. Numbered edition of 350. Comes with a Digital Certificate of Authenticity provided by Verisart. $200. Available on Thursday, December 11th @ 10 AM PDT at https://store.obeygiant.com. Max order: 1 per customer/household. International customers are responsible for import fees due upon delivery (Except UK orders under $160).⁣ ALL SALES FINAL.

PRINT DETAILS: Cold Chillin (Red). 24H x 18W inches. Screen print on 80# cream Speckletone paper. Signed by Shepard Fairey in 2008. Numbered edition of 350. Comes with a Digital Certificate of Authenticity provided by Verisart. $200. Available on Thursday, December 11th @ 10 AM PDT at https://store.obeygiant.com. Max order: 1 per customer/household. International customers are responsible for import fees due upon delivery (Except UK orders under $160).⁣ ALL SALES FINAL.

The post LOST AND FOUND: Cold Chillin’ from 2008 Available Thurs, Dec. 11th at 10AM PT! appeared first on Obey Giant.

Formula 1 News

Formula 1® - The Official F1® Website

All the drivers taking part in the post-season test

The 2025 F1 season might have drawn to a close, but the action has not quite stopped yet, with the post-season test in Abu Dhabi taking place today.

Bottas embarks on first day as a Cadillac driver

Valtteri Bottas has marked his first day with the Cadillac F1 team, just weeks before the new outfit will make their track debut during pre-season testing.

Drivers hit the track for Abu Dhabi post-season test

New names and old faces will take to the track one final time in 2025 for the Abu Dhabi post-season test at the Yas Marina Circuit on Tuesday.

The Moscow Times - Independent News From Russia

The Moscow Times offers everything you need to know about Russia: Breaking news, top stories, business, analysis, opinion, multimedia

Russian Soldiers Returning From Ukraine Linked to Over 1K Killings and Injuries Inside Russia

At least 551 people died in incidents involving veterans of the invasion of Ukraine, 274 of whom were murdered, Vyorstka reported.

Russian Military Cargo Plane Crashes East of Moscow

Seven people were on board the plane, which was undergoing a test flight after repair work.

Ukrainian Drones Injure 14 in Russia’s Republic of Chuvashia

Russia’s Defense Ministry said its air defense systems shot down or intercepted 121 Ukrainian drones overnight.

The Register

Biting the hand that feeds IT — Enterprise Technology News and Analysis

IBM touts progress on tech stack for AI-enabled airline with no passengers or alcohol

Digital native? Cloud native? No, we need to be AI native, says Riyadh Air

IBM and Riyadh Air have upgraded their contracted agreement, meaning the Saudi operation will not be the world's first digitally native airline, but will instead be the first AI native operator.…

Care leavers mired in red tape trying to get their own records

UK data watchdog demands public sector improves subject access request processing

UK public sector organizations need to improve access for those who want to see their own records of growing up in care, the Information Commissioner says.…

thexiffy

Last.fm last recent tracks from thexiffy.

Eels - Restraining Order Blues

Eels

David Bowie - Cactus

David Bowie

Le Peuple de l'Herbe - Transmissions

Le Peuple de l'Herbe

The Chemical Brothers - Lost in the K-hole

The Chemical Brothers

Sleepy Sun - Creature

Sleepy Sun

System of a Down - 36

System of a Down

Slashdot

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Evidence That Humans Now Speak In a Chatbot-Influenced Dialect Is Getting Stronger

Researchers and moderators are increasingly concerned that ChatGPT-style language is bleeding into everyday speech and writing. The topic has been explored in the past but "two new, more anecdotal reports, suggest that our chatbot dialect isn't just something that can be found through close analysis of data," reports Gizmodo. "It might be an obvious, every day fact of life now." Slashdot reader joshuark shares an excerpt from the report: Over on Reddit, according to a new Wired story by Kat Tenbarge, moderators of certain subreddits are complaining about AI posts ruining their online communities. It's not new to observe that AI-armed spammers post low-value engagement bait on social media, but these are spaces like r/AmItheAsshole, r/AmIOverreacting, and r/AmITheDevil, where visitors crave the scintillation or outright titillation of bona fide human misbehavior. If, behind the scenes, there's not really a grieving college student having her tuition cut off for randomly flying off the handle at her stepmom, there's no real fun to be had. The mods in the Wired story explain how they detect AI content, and unfortunately their methods boil down to "It's vibes." But one novel struggle in the war against slop, the mods say, is that not only are human-written posts sometimes rewritten by AI, but mods are concerned that humans are now writing like AI. Humans are becoming flesh and blood AI-text generators, muddying the waters of AI "detection" to the point of total opacity.

As "Cassie" an r/AmItheAsshole moderator who only gave Wired her first name put it, "AI is trained off people, and people copy what they see other people doing." In other words, Cassie said, "People become more like AI, and AI becomes more like people." Meanwhile, essayist Sam Kriss just explored the weird way chatbots "write" for the latest issue of the New York Times Magazine, and he discovered along the way that humans have accidentally taken cues from that weirdness. After parsing chatbots' strange tics and tendencies -- such as overusing the word "delve" most likely because it's in a disproportional number of texts from Nigeria, where that word is popular -- Kriss refers to a previously reported trend from over the summer. Members of the U.K. Parliament were accused of using ChatGPT to write their speeches.

The thinking goes that ChatGPT-written speeches contained the phrase "I rise to speak," an American phrase, used by American legislators. But Kriss notes that it's not just showing up from time to time. It's being used with downright breathtaking frequency. "On a single day this June, it happened 26 times," he notes. While 26 different MPs using ChatGPT to write speeches is not some scientific impossibility, it's more likely an example of chatbots, "smuggling cultural practices into places they don't belong," to quote Kriss again. So when Kriss points out that when Starbucks locations were closing in September, and signs posted on the doors contained tortured sentences like, "It's your coffeehouse, a place woven into your daily rhythm, where memories were made, and where meaningful connections with our partners grew over the years," one can't state with certainty that this is AI-generated text (although let's be honest: it probably is).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wel.nl

Minder lezen, Meer weten.

Wanneer kun je een verjaarde factuur zonder problemen in de prullenbak gooien?

Je betaalt altijd braaf je rekeningen, maar wat als er ineens een vergeten factuur op de deurmat valt. Soms hoef je een onverwachte aanmaning helemaal niet te betalen en mag je hem gerust in de prullenbak mikken. De wet beschermt consumenten namelijk tegen bedrijven die jarenlang in slaapstand staan. Maar let op de valkuilen.

In Nederland geldt: ook schuldeisers hebben een houdbaarheidsdatum. Voor consumentenkoop is de verjaringstermijn slechts twee jaar. Denk hierbij aan kleding, elektronica, boodschappen en zelfs de energierekening. Stuurt een webshop pas in 2024 een herinnering voor iets dat je in 2021 hebt besteld? Dan zijn ze te laat. Als de betalingstermijn bijvoorbeeld op 1 december 2022 afliep, is de schuld op 2 december 2024 verjaard. Klaar.

Uitzonderingen

Maar er zijn uitzonderingen. Voor diensten en leningen geldt een langere termijn: vijf jaar. Dat geldt bijvoorbeeld voor je telefoonabonnement, verzekeringen, leningen, de tandarts en bijvoorbeeld je advocaat. Bij dit soort contracten mogen bedrijven dus langer aankloppen.

De grootste valkuil zit in het juridische woordje 'stuiten'. Daarmee wordt de verjaringstermijn opnieuw gestart. Dat kan op twee manieren:

– de schuldeiser stuurt een officiële aanmaning of dagvaarding;

– jij erkent de schuld, al is het maar per ongeluk.

En daar gaat het vaak fout. Zodra jij reageert met iets als “Ik heb nu geen geld, mag ik in termijnen betalen?” of “Klopt die rekening wel?”, erken je de schuld. De teller springt weer terug naar nul. De verjaring is gestuit, zelfs als je nog één dag verwijderd was van de deadline.

Niet direct reageren

De gouden regel is om bij een oude factuur nooit impulsief te reageren. Niet bellen, niet mailen, geen uitleg geven. Controleer eerst de data en check of er eerdere brieven zijn geweest.

Betaal je de late aanmaning en blijkt de schuld later verjaard? Pech. Een verjaarde schuld blijft een ‘natuurlijke verbintenis’: de schuld bestaat nog, alleen kan hij niet juridisch worden afgedwongen. Wie toch betaalt, krijgt het niet terug.

Is de termijn echt verstreken en is er nooit gestuit? Dan is één simpele zin genoeg om het dossier definitief te sluiten: Je stuurt een aangetekende brief waarin je "Ik beroep mij op verjaring" schrijft. Daarna weet het bedrijf: hier is juridisch niets meer te halen.

Bron: Panorama


De Speld

Uw vaste prik voor betrouwbaar nieuws.

NTR zwicht voor dreigementen: Sinterklaasjournaal plots van de buis gehaald

​Het Sinterklaasjournaal lag vorige week flink onder vuur: een verhaallijn rondom ouders die de Sint zouden helpen met het kopen van cadeautjes, kwam het programma op woedende reacties te staan. De Hoofdpiet werd zelfs bedreigd. De NTR lijkt nu te zwichten voor de bedreigingen, want het programma is in allerijl van de buis gehaald. Het Sinterklaasjournaal heeft na vorige week geen reguliere uitzendingen meer op televisie gehad.

“Ik vind dit toch niet sterk overkomen”, zegt tv-kenner Victor Vlam. “De NTR zegt het Sinterklaasjournaal te steunen, maar zet het programma bij een beetje tegenwind meteen aan de kant. Dat is geen sterk signaal, natuurlijk.” De NTR laat weten dat het einde van het Sinterklaasjournaal al gepland was, maar dat gelooft Vlam niet. “Dat is een typisch tv-trucje: zeggen dat het volgens de programmering al gepland was. Geloof mij: zo’n publiekstrekker haal je niet zomaar van de buis, dan moet er wel meer spelen.”

“De kijkcijfers waren erg goed, dus moet er meer spelen”, zegt kijkcijferkenner Tina Nijkamp. “Kijkcijfertechnisch zie je in ieder geval dat de kijkcijfers dik in orde waren, dus als kijkcijferdeskundige denk ik dat de NTR bezweken is onder de druk – en dat heeft dus met niets kijkcijferigs te maken.”

Vlam concludeert: “Ze laten hun oren hangen naar de bedreigers. Dat kan, maar wees daar dan gewoon eerlijk over.”

​​

&


Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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Pluralistic: Big Tech joins the race to build the world's heaviest airplane (09 Dec 2025)


Today's links



A 1960s ad for IBM mainframes, featuring a woman in an office chair seated at a console, surrounded by large processing and storage units. It has been modified. A man in a business suit, impatiently checking his watch, looms out from between two of the cabinets. His head has been replaced with the glaring red eye of HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The woman's head has been replaced with a hacker's hoodie. Both the woman and the man have been tinted red.

Big Tech joins the race to build the world's heaviest airplane (permalink)

I have a weird fascination with early-stage Bill Gates, after his mother convinced a pal of hers – chairman of IBM's board of directors – to give her son the contract to provide the operating system for the new IBM PC. Gates and his pal Paul Allen tricked another programmer into selling them the rights to DOS, which they sold to IBM, setting Microsoft on the path to be one of the most profitable businesses in human history.

IBM could have made its own OS, of course. They were just afraid to, because they'd just narrowly squeaked out of a 12-year antitrust war with the Department of Justice (evocatively memorialized as "Antitrust's Vietnam"):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/02/the-true-genius-of-tech-leaders/

The US government traumatized IBM so badly that they turned over their crown jewels to these two prep-school kids, who scammed a pal out of his operating system for $50k and made billions from it. Despite owing his business to IBM (or perhaps because of this fact), Gates routinely mocked IBM as a lumbering dinosaur that was headed for history's scrapheap. He was particularly scornful of IBM's software development methodology, which, to be fair, was pretty terrible: IBM paid programmers by the line of code. Gates called this "the race to build the world's heaviest airplane."

After all, judging software by lines of code is a terrible idea. To the extent that "number of lines of code" has any correlation with software quality, reliability or performance, it has a negative correlation. While it's certainly possible to write software with too few lines of code (e.g. when instructions are stacked on a single line, obfuscating its functionality and making it hard to maintain), it's far more common for programmers to use too many steps to solve a problem. The ideal software is just right: verbose enough to be legible to future maintainers, streamlined enough to omit redundancies.

This is broadly true of many products, and not just airplanes. Office memos should be long enough to be clear, but no longer. Home insulation should be sufficient to maintain the internal temperature, but no more.

Ironically, enterprise tech companies' bread and butter is selling exactly this kind of qualitative measurements for bosses who want an easy, numeric way to decide which of their workers to fire, and leading the pack is Microsoft, whose flagship Office365 lets bosses assess their workers' performance on meaningless metrics like how many words they type, ranking each worker against other workers within the division, with rival divisions and within rival firms. Yes, Microsoft actually boasts to companies about the fact that if you use their products, they will gather sensitive data about how your workers perform individually and as a team, and share than information with your competitors!

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

But while tech companies employed programmers to develop this kind of bossware to be used on other companies' employees, they were loathe to apply them to their own workers. For one thing, it's just a very stupid way to manage a workforce, as Bill Gates himself would be the first to tell you (candidly, provided he wasn't trying to sell you an enterprise Office 365 license). For another, tech workers wouldn't stand for it. After all, these were the "princes of labor," each adding a million dollars or more to their boss's bottom line, and in such scarce supply that a coder could quit a job after the morning scrum and have a new one by the pre-dinner pickleball break:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#are-more-equal-than-others

Tech workers mistook the fear this dynamic instilled in their bosses for respect. They thought the reason their bosses gave them free massage therapists and kombucha on tap and a gourmet cafeteria was that their bosses liked them. After all, these bosses were all techies. A coder wasn't a worker, they were a temporarily embarrassed founder. That's why Zuck and Sergey tuned into those engineering town hall meetings and tolerated being pelted with impertinent questions about the company's technology and business strategy.

Actually, tech bosses didn't like tech workers. They didn't see them as peers. They saw them workers. Problem workers, at that. Problems to be solved.

And wouldn't you know it, supply caught up with demand and tech companies instituted a program of mass layoffs. When Google laid off 12,000 workers (just before a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for 27 years), they calmed investors by claiming that they weren't doing this because business was bad – they were just correcting some pandemic-era overhiring. But Google didn't just fire junior programmers – they targeted some of their most senior (and thus mouthiest and highest-paid) techies for the chop.

Today, Sergey and Zuck no longer attend engineering meetings ("Not a good use of my time" -M. Zuckerberg). Tech workers are getting laid off at the rate of naughts. And none of these bastards can shut up about how many programmers they plan on replacing with AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/05/ex-princes-of-labor/#hyper-criti-hype

And wouldn't you know it, the shitty monitoring and ranking technology that programmers made to be used on other workers is finally being used on them:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/10/microsoft_copilot_viva_insights/

Naturally, the excuse is monitoring AI usage. Microsoft – along with all the other AI-peddling tech companies – keep claiming that their workers adore using AI to write software, but somehow, also have to monitor workers so they can figure out which ones to fire because they're not using AI enough:

https://www.itpro.com/software/development/microsoft-claims-ai-is-augmenting-developers-rather-than-replacing-them

This is the "shitty technology adoption curve" in action. When you have a terrible, destructive technology, you can't just deploy it on privileged people who get taken seriously in policy circles. You start with people at the bottom of the privilege gradient: prisoners, mental patients, asylum-seekers. Then, you work your way up the curve – kids, gig workers, blue collar workers, pink collar workers. Eventually, it comes for all of us:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

As Ed Zitron writes, tech hasn't had a big, successful product (on the scale of, say, the browser or the smartphone) in more than a decade. Tech companies have seemingly run out of new trillion-dollar industries to spawn. Tech bosses are pulling out all the stops to make their companies seem as dynamic and profitable as they were in tech's heyday.

Firing workers and blaming it on AI lets tech bosses transform a story that would freak out investors ("Our business is flagging and we had to fire a bunch of valuable techies") into one that will shake loose fresh billions in capital ("Our AI product is so powerful it let us fire a zillion workers!").

And for tech bosses, mass layoffs offer another, critical advantage: pauperizing those princes of labor, so that they can shed their company gyms and luxury commuter busses, cut wages and benefits, and generally reset the working expectations of the tech workers who sit behind a keyboard to match the expectations of tech workers who assemble iPhones, drive delivery vans, and pack boxes in warehouses.

For tech workers who currently don't have a pee bottle or a suicide net at their job-site, it's long past time to get over this founder-in-waiting bullshit and get organized. Recognize that you're a worker, and that workers' only real source of power isn't ephemeral scarcity, it's durable solidarity:

https://techworkerscoalition.org/

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)


Hey look at this (permalink)



A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago WaWa Digital Cameras threatens to break customer’s neck https://thomashawk.com/2005/12/abusive-new-york-camera-store.html

#20yrsago Keyboard used as bean-sprouting medium https://web.archive.org/web/20051205011830/http://www.nada.kth.se/~hjorth/krasse/english.html

#15yrsago Judge to copyright troll: get lost https://torrentfreak.com/acslaw-take-alleged-file-sharers-to-court-but-fail-on-a-grand-scale-101209/

#15yrsago Ink cartridge rant https://web.archive.org/web/20101211080931/http://www.inkcartridges.uk.com/Remanufactured-HP-300-CC640EE-Black.html

#15yrsago 1.1 billion US$100 notes out of circulation due to printing error https://www.cnbc.com/2010/12/07/the-fed-has-a-110-billion-problem-with-new-benjamins.html

#15yrsago EFF wants Righthaven to pay for its own ass-kicking https://web.archive.org/web/20101211011932/https://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/payup-troll/

#15yrsago danah boyd explains email sabbaticals https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/12/08/i-am-offline-on-email-sabbatical-from-december-9-january-12.html

#15yrsago TSA subjects India’s US ambassador to public grope because of her sari https://web.archive.org/web/20101211113821/http://travel.usatoday.com/flights/post/2010/12/india-diplomat-gets-humiliating-pat-down-at-mississippi-airport-/134197/5?csp=outbrain&csp=obnetwork

#15yrsago California’s safety codes are now open source! https://code.google.com/archive/p/title24/

#10yrsago When the INS tried to deport John Lennon, the FBI pitched in to help https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2015/dec/08/john-lennons-fbi-file-1/

#10yrsago The Big List of What’s Wrong with the TPP https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/how-tpp-will-affect-you-and-your-digital-rights

#10yrsago Concrete Park: apocalyptic, afrofuturistic graphic novel of greatness https://memex.craphound.com/2015/12/08/concrete-park-apocalyptic-afrofuturistic-graphic-novel-of-greatness/

#10yrsago Denmark’s top anti-piracy law firm pocketed $25m from rightsholders, then went bankrupt https://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-lawyer-milked-copyright-holders-for-millions-151208/

#5yrsago Uber pays to get rid of its self-driving cars https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#goober

#5yrsago All the books I reviewed in 2020 https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#recommended-reading

#5yrsago Ford patents plutocratic lane-changes https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#walkaway


Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.



A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)



A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)



A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026



Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING


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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

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Internationaal Strafhof veroordeelt Soedanese militieleider tot twintig jaar cel

Abd-Al-Rahman was een van de leiders van de inmiddels ontbonden Janjaweed-militie. Hij stond bekend als een trouwe bondgenoot van de toenmalige Soedanese president Omar al-Bashir.