Entry: 2025-12-29 20:56:40.85881+01 Norman Rockwell was woke antifa by Dan Lyke comments 0
The Bulwark: The MAGAfication of Norman Rockwell. I suspect that Norman Rockwell was fighting against those who'd use his art for nativist propaganda, he seems to be pretty explicit about it:
Then in the 1960s, Rockwell underwent a more radical transformation. He became more concerned by both the social turmoil around him as well as his own legacy. “I was born a White Protestant with some prejudices that I am continuously trying to eradicate,” Rockwell said in 1962. “I am angry at unjust prejudices, in other people and in myself.”
[ related topics: User Interface Sociology Journalism and Media Art & Culture California Culture Race ]
Entry: 2025-12-28 03:05:02.161513+01 We've talked about AI and social media by Dan Lyke comments 0
We've talked about AI and social media in the context of Ameica's Funniest Home Videos and golf crotch shots, and... The Internet provides. https://bsky.app/profile/jjvin...t.bsky.social/post/3mayddynhas2l
[ related topics: Journalism and Media Net Culture Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-12-23 18:42:56.812173+01 Softbank scrambles to fund OpenAI by Dan Lyke comments 0
The "all- in" bet on OpenAI is among the biggest yet by SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, as the Japanese billionaire seeks to improve his firm's position in the race for artificial intelligence. To come up with the money, Son has already sold SoftBank's entire $5.8 billion stake in AI chip leader Nvidia (NVDA.O), offloaded $4.8 billion of its T-Mobile US (TMUS.O) stake, and slashed staff.
[ related topics: Current Events Journalism and Media Graphics Currency Artificial Intelligence Race Gambling Economics ]
Entry: 2025-12-19 23:35:55.044034+01 Prohibited Grounds for Withholding by Dan Lyke comments 0
Sorry, I really want to make social media more... you know... social. Life updates and stuff. Not just posting links to law... But it seems like today is a day to emphasize a passage from "H.R.4405 - Epstein Files Transparency Act".
https://www.congress.gov/bill/...th-congress/house-bill/4405/text
(b) Prohibited Grounds for Withholding.—
(1) No record shall be withheld, delayed, or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.
[ related topics: Politics moron Journalism and Media Real Estate ]
Entry: 2025-12-19 18:22:56.518262+01 Foxes & Henhouses by Dan Lyke comments 1
Axios on MSN: Scoop: TikTok signs deal for sale of US unit after years-long saga:
The White House and the Chinese government hammered out a deal in principle in September to sell TikTok's U.S. operations to a joint venture controlled by a U.S. investor group led by Andreessen Horowitz, Silver Lake, and Oracle.
(Emphasis mine.)
I don't have a non-paid link for this, but: 404 Media: Hack Reveals the a16z-Backed Phone Farm Flooding TikTok With AI Influencers. So, yeah, Andreessen Horowitz has backed Doublespeed, a company that uses generative AI to create social media slop for advertisers.
This will not end well for society.
[ related topics: Drugs Humor Microsoft moron Current Events Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media Currency Artificial Intelligence Race Databases Real Estate ]
Entry: 2025-12-15 18:39:52.482671+01 Social media & teens by Dan Lyke comments 0
In response to a thread about fixing social media rather than banning kids from it, Cassandrich @dalias@hachyderm.io noted:
@juliette Hot take that shouldn't be: Any effort to ban kids from the internet and force in-person local socialization is a form of conversion therapy and inherently abusive.
BBSes may have saved my life.
Oooh, scrolling down that thread, the streams cross: Epic Null @Epic_Null@infosec.exchange
@dalias @juliette I certainly wouldn't say I see a lot of "Pro safe-streets" discussion from the people who push to ban the internet for children. Or "Build more parks". Or "Open more child-friendly stores". Or even "Build denser housing so kids are closer to other kids". Or even "More libraries! Safe routes to school!"
You know, conversations that would emphasize opportunities to socialize in person.
[ related topics: Children and growing up Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Journalism and Media Net Culture ]
Entry: 2025-12-15 18:27:18.394827+01 Human Context Protocol by Dan Lyke comments 0
Schneier on Security: Building Trustworthy AI Agents is a bit of publicity for Robust AI Personalization Will Require a Human Context Protocol, but as David Gerard @davidgerard@circumstances.run points out
the cited paper is utterly detached hypothesis-crafting from MIT Media Lab and Glen fuckin Weyl
[ related topics: Weblogs Journalism and Media Cryptography Artificial Intelligence Archival ]
Entry: 2025-12-13 01:55:03.757826+01 browser on the ancient Kindle Fire is by Dan Lyke comments 0
The browser on the ancient Kindle Fire is no longer running GrumpyPlayer. What's the current state of "play digital music" devices? Preferred is attach to my WiFi, let it get files via HTTP or something, second is copy media to the device or an SD card. Last is a Plex or similar server.
[ related topics: Music Journalism and Media Sports Pyrotechnics ]
Entry: 2025-12-12 00:50:08.18872+01 They droned back by Dan Lyke comments 0
This is fascinating: Digital Digging: They Droned Back
Seven German journalism students tracked Russian-crewed freighters lurking off the Dutch and German coast—and connected them to drone swarms over military bases.
[ related topics: Journalism and Media ]
Entry: 2025-12-08 19:05:26.744889+01 AI slop and DDG by Dan Lyke comments 0
AskMeFi question about Duck Duck Go results shows the summary for the Wikipedia result, that I've replicated, as:
Williot Swedberg is a Swedish footballer who plays for Celta Vigo and the Sweden national team. He started his career at Hammarby IF and was named one of the best young talents in 2004 by The Guardian.
What Wikipedia actually says is:
In October 2021, Swedberg was named as one of the 60 best young talents in world football born in 2004, by the English newspaper The Guardian.
[Emphasis mine]
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ gives the same bogosity, so this is probably something that's crept in from Bing. https://www.startpage.com/ gives a shorter summary.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Journalism and Media Television Sports ]
Entry: 2025-12-08 18:29:32.807483+01 AI & Insurance coverage by Dan Lyke comments 0
I ran across links to this article, Financial Times: Insurers retreat from AI cover as risk of multibillion-dollar claims mounts, about AIG, Great American, and WR Berkley backing away from AI coverage, but it's paywalled, so I went searching for the headline, and it's interesting how this current media push is being spun, with a week before that stories about startup insurers stepping in to cover risks that the major companies don't want to touch: Insurance companies are trying to avoid big payouts by making AI safer
“We’re in an era now where the losses are really here and happening; that’s one thing. The second thing is that insurers are now actually starting to exclude AI from their existing policies,” Dattani said. “So it feels pretty certain that we’re going to need some solution here, and we need people with skin in the game who can provide third- party oversight. That’s where we see the role of insurance.”
Ernst & Young: How can responsible AI bridge the gap between investment and impact?
Almost every company in our survey (99%) reported financial losses from AI- related risks, and 64% experienced losses exceeding US$1 million. On average, the financial loss to companies that have experienced risks is conservatively estimated at US$4.4 million.1 That’s an estimated total loss of US$4.3 billion across the 975 respondents in our sample.
And now traditional insurers stepping back: Major Insurers Want Out of AI Coverage as 'Black Box' Risk Grows:
The industry has good reason to be spooked. Google's AI Overview falsely accused a solar company of legal troubles earlier this year, triggering a $110 million lawsuit. Air Canada got stuck honoring a discount its chatbot completely invented after a customer took the airline to small claims court. Most dramatically, fraudsters used a digitally cloned executive to steal $25 million from London engineering firm Arup during what appeared to be a legitimate video conference.
[ related topics: Games Aviation moron Law Current Events Journalism and Media Currency Artificial Intelligence Video Conferences Economics Real Estate Photovoltaics ]
Entry: 2025-11-21 22:52:31.284181+01 China buys CIA insurance provider by Dan Lyke comments 0
Just clearing my bookmarked social media pages: A Chinese firm bought an insurer for CIA agents - part of Beijing's trillion dollar spending spree. So, yeah, you wanna know who's working for the intelligence agencies? Why not just get their health records...
Via/
[ related topics: Health broadband Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Monty Python Currency ]
Entry: 2025-11-17 21:35:46.621872+01 media decisions aren't merely driven by traffic by Dan Lyke comments 2
World Without Exploitation has released a short PSA on YouTube featuring survivors of Epstein's child rape ring.
MeFi user Smedly, Butlerian jihadi notes:
This gets me a little too heated to express my entire sentiments reasonably, but the TL;DR is that we can absolutely see from just those emails that have been released that the broad outlines of this situation were always widely known among the establishment and their courtiers in the upper levels of media.
There is a canard that gets trotted out when people are critical of the media, which is that their decisions are driven by traffic -- what will drive clicks is given more attention. This story, if nothing else, categorically demolishes that defense. Media coverage is structured to create a narrative that serves the interests of the privileged classes, full stop. If they had wanted to make this a massive scandal driving huge surges in traffic, they absolutely could have. And again, the broad outlines of the scandal were demonstrably well known.
It is instructive to contrast how this would be covered if it were attractive white teenage girls being trafficked and exploited by people of color, organized into gangs or otherwise.
At some point there should be pitchforks and guillotines for the people who covered this up, and that's the limit of what I will say here.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies tolkien History Sociology Journalism and Media Race ]
Entry: 2025-11-12 19:56:25.379669+01 At least use an ad blocker by Dan Lyke comments 1
My mom called me up again, recently, because her computer once again was locked in some state where a voice was warning her that the Facebook police were going to come get her or something. After going through Ctrl-W and the usual things and having that not work, we went for a reboot, and of course once the browser quit the voices stopped.
Now she's got some whackadoodle conspiracy health beliefs, and that leaves her prone to surfing the less savory aspects of the web, but that Facebook knows that at least 10% of its ads are scams (I mentioned that I'm surprised it's that low) and the Nevada ransomware attack happened because a state employee confused a malicious Google ad result with a valid download, indicates that our media culture is irretrievably broken.
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange observes:
Given this and the recent Facebook news, there's a very strong case to be made that an ad provider is legally an accomplice to any crime committed by their ads. If they are profiting financially from enabling crime, they are criminals.
and... I realize that us web publishers have some legal protections, but I'm starting to think that between stuff like this and the various age verification laws going in various places, that maybe it is time to move comments and annotations into the client/aggregators that pull from various different places, and make publishers liable for what they publish.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Health Sociology Law Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement California Culture Conspiracy Archival Government ]
Entry: 2025-11-12 18:25:55.376214+01 AI spending replacing jobs by Dan Lyke comments 0
Fast Company: AI isn’t replacing jobs. AI spending is
Yet we remain skeptical of the claim that AI is responsible for these layoffs. A recent MIT Media Lab study found that 95% of generative AI pilot business projects were failing. Another survey by Atlassian concluded that 96% of businesses “have not seen dramatic improvements in organizational efficiency, innovation, or work quality.” Still another study found that 40% of the business people surveyed have received “AI slop” at work in the last month and that it takes nearly two hours, on average, to fix each instance of slop. In addition, they “no longer trust their AI-enabled peers, find them less creative, and find them less intelligent or capable.”
[ related topics: Books Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-11-11 22:36:38.300018+01 private equity killed media by Dan Lyke comments 0
Talking Points Memo: Pivots, Trolls, & Blog Rolls — Reflections on 25 years of Digital Media
[ related topics: Weblogs Journalism and Media ]
Entry: 2025-11-06 22:29:35.143373+01 Facebook scam ads by Dan Lyke comments 0
Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show
Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day. Among its responses to suspected rogue marketers: charging them a premium for ads – and issuing reports on ’Scammiest Scammers.’
I am actually surprised that the number is that low. I assume that any ads on Facebook are scams. I wonder if they've A/B tested out exactly what proportion of scammy ads they can get before users stop engaging and advertisers stop buying ads?
[ related topics: Interactive Drama moron Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media ]
Entry: 2025-11-05 21:07:47.232498+01 Norman Rockwell's family calls out DHS bigotry by Dan Lyke comments 0
Norman Rockwell family slams DHS over art use on social media
“Protect our American way of life,” one DHS post on Facebook from August said, with an image of Rockwell’s 1971 painting “Salute the Flag.” Another post included an image of Rockwell’s work along with a quote from former President Coolidge: “Those who do not want to be partakers of the American spirit ought not to settle in America.”
USA Today Opinion: We're Norman Rockwell's family. Trump's DHS has shamefully misused his work.
“I was born a White Protestant with some prejudices that I am continuously trying to eradicate,” Rockwell said in an interview in 1962. “I am angry at unjust prejudices, in other people and in myself.”
Via.
[ related topics: User Interface Sociology Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture Race ]
Entry: 2025-10-21 16:29:26.148021+02 AI summarized by Dan Lyke comments 0
Just because it's a nice summary of what we know all in one place Prof. Sam Lawler @sundogplanets@mastodon.social
@delaney ChatGPT and other LLMs are built entirely on stolen intellectual property https://www.cbc.ca/news/busine...penai-canadian-lawsuit-1.7396940, trained by near-slave labour in abusive conditions https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/, use horrifying amounts of water and electricity https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/theres-a- cost-to-your-chatgpt-query-the-water-you-drink/, promote misinformation https://www.allaboutai.com/ai-...mistakes-and-even-openai-doesnt- know-why/ as well as racist and sexist stereotypes https://www.snexplores.org/article/racial-bias-chatgpt-ai-tools, and actually cause a decline in cognitive function among people who use it regularly https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/
[ related topics: Cool Science Current Events Journalism and Media Mathematics Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-10-20 17:25:05.806282+02 Missile strikes on fishermen in distress by Dan Lyke comments 0
BBC: Trump ends aid to Colombia and calls country's leader a 'drug leader'
Posting on social media, he [Colombian President Gustavo Petro] said: "The Colombian boat was adrift and had its distress signal up due to an engine failure," when it was struck. He added: "We await explanations from the US government."
"Fisherman Alejandro Carranza had no ties to the drug trade and his daily activity was fishing. The Colombian boat was adrift and had its distress signal up due to an engine failure."
[ related topics: Health moron Current Events Journalism and Media Monty Python Boats Machinery ]
Entry: 2025-10-10 17:40:46.36387+02 Motornormativity by Dan Lyke comments 0
Bloomberg: 'Car Brain' is making the US Unhealthy and Dangerous. EVs won't fix it. (gift link) is a review of Saving Ourselves from Big Car, Roadkill: Unveiling the True Cost of Our Toxic Relationship With Cars, and Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile.
But there’s more to it than that. Texas A&M urban planning professor Tara Goddard has documented a phenomenon called motonormativity — also known as “car brain” — that she defines as an “inability to see beyond the literal and figurative windshield to envision different ways of doing things.” Some blame should also fall on journalists who spend far more time dwelling on violent crime than car crashes, even though an American is roughly twice as likely to die as a road fatality than as a murder victim. Car companies, for their part, have largely managed to duck responsibility for the US crisis in roadway safety, and based on their effusive marketing, one might conclude that operating an electric vehicle improves the environment, rather than merely mitigating damage.
Via.
[ related topics: Books User Interface Health Nature and environment Current Events Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media Law Enforcement Mathematics Automobiles Marketing ]
Entry: 2025-10-07 01:25:02.633141+02 Unintentionally appropriate typo of the by Dan Lyke comments 0
Unintentionally appropriate typo of the moment "YouRube".
Referring to the sorts of video links that distance acquaintances on social media DM.
[ related topics: Journalism and Media Video ]
Entry: 2025-10-05 00:45:02.888843+02 Over to Vallejo today for Steve by Dan Lyke comments 0
Over to Vallejo today for Steve Meyers' funeral, and ran across a number of Android update issues while setting in-car entertainment, and...
I will be glad when we get Personal Computing back. This "everything is in service of selling cloud services that dictate your media consumption" things sucks.
[ related topics: Journalism and Media Automobiles ]
Entry: 2025-09-29 20:30:02.210161+02 Realization The problem with social by Dan Lyke comments 0
Realization: The problem with "social media" vs forums/mailing-lists/newsgroups is that it's easier to create personalities with whom we think we have a social relationship, but actually have a parasocial relationship.
We're not actually participating in a community.
[ related topics: Journalism and Media Community ]
Entry: 2025-09-29 19:24:26.753612+02 House Arab by Dan Lyke comments 0
This is a really good piece on Palestine, Israel, and how the media we consume impacts our views, and destroys people: House Arab by Ismail Ibrahim.
I was working at the magazine as a fact-checker and my parents no longer considered me a failure, not because they read or admired it, but because when they said its name to friends and relatives it sparkled on their tongues.
Via Kottke (Bluesky) who says the magazine in question was the New Yorker.
[ related topics: Invention and Design Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Real Estate ]
Entry: 2025-09-29 19:05:08.275174+02 Riyadh Comedy Festival by Dan Lyke comments 0
Comedian Atsuko Okatsuka posts contract after turning down Riyadh Comedy Festival
Per Deadline, Okatsuka posted about the festival on Threads this weekend, writing, “FYI there are more of us that said no to the Riyadh comedy festival in Saudi Arabia.” In her post, Okatsuka also posted the list of things comedians have been told they weren’t allowed to talk about, including jokes “that may be considered to degrade, defame, or bring into public disrepute, contempt, scandal, embarrassment, or ridicule” Saudi Arabia, its ruling government, royal family, or any religion or religious figure, period. Okatsuka also takes time to point out that “The money is coming straight from the Crown Prince, who actively executes journalists, ppl with nonlethal drug offenses, bloggers, etc without due process. A lot of the ‘you can’t say anything anymore!’ Comedians are doing the festival 😂 they had to adhere to censorship rules about the types of jokes they can make.” (Worth noting that comedian Tim Dillon has said he was kicked out of the festival for a response video he made about accepting the gig, joking, “So what, they have slaves?”)
Via a whole bunch of places, including ResearchBuzz</ a>.
[ related topics: Religion Health Free Speech History moron Sociology Writing Journalism and Media Currency Video ]
Entry: 2025-09-23 00:40:37.199544+02 Workslop by Dan Lyke comments 0
Harvard Business Review: AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity
In collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, our research team at BetterUp Labs has identified one possible reason: Employees are using AI tools to create low- effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers. On social media, which is increasingly clogged with low-quality AI-generated posts, this content is often referred to as “AI slop.” In the context of work, we refer to this phenomenon as “workslop.” We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.
Edit: Klarna CEO Makes Employees Review His AI- Generated Vibe Coding Projects. The URL prefixes this with "nightmare boss", which... yeah.
Second Edit: Pivot To AI weighs in, and is not complimentary on the "study" methodology.
[ related topics: Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Education Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-09-15 23:05:21.88722+02 Sept 4 mass kidnapping of Hyundai workers by Dan Lyke comments 0
English Language editorial in the Korean daily newspaper The Hankyoreh: Imperial tyranny, Korean humiliation:
This incident should prompt us in Korea to comprehensively reassess our investment projects in the US
Via.
[ related topics: Journalism and Media Economics ]
Entry: 2025-09-15 19:31:32.870013+02 Notes on the Hyundai/LG/etc detentions by Dan Lyke comments 0
I think it's a sign of how cowed the American media is that we're getting pieces like "you have to understand, in Korean culture, it's considered very rude for someone to lock you in a brutal prison camp for a week for no reason." Like yeah, any free people would be offended by that?
[ related topics: Sociology Journalism and Media California Culture ]
Entry: 2025-09-15 19:09:02.907312+02 Violence and culture in baboons by Dan Lyke comments 0
Woozle Hypertwin @woozle@toot.cat
@RickiTarr Like the thing that happened with all the
bonobos(?)baboons where the alpha males hogged a pile of discarded food left by humans, but the food was bad and poisoned them and most or all of the alphas died and the tribe culture suddenly got a lot nicer and stayed that way?
Emergence of a Peaceful Culture in Wild Baboons
Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986.
A Pacific Culture among Wild Baboons: Its Emergence and Transmission
Reports exist of transmission of culture in nonhuman primates. We examine this in a troop of savanna baboons studied since 1978. During the mid-1980s, half of the males died from tuberculosis; because of circumstances of the outbreak, it was more aggressive males who died, leaving a cohort of atypically unaggressive survivors. A decade later, these behavioral patterns persisted. Males leave their natal troops at adolescence; by the mid-1990s, no males remained who had resided in the troop a decade before. Thus, critically, the troop's unique culture was being adopted by new males joining the troop. We describe (a) features of this culture in the behavior of males, including high rates of grooming and affiliation with females and a “relaxed” dominance hierarchy; (b) physiological measures suggesting less stress among low-ranking males; (c) models explaining transmission of this culture; and (d) data testing these models, centered around treatment of transfer males by resident females.
Peace Lessons from an Unlikely Source
Did I grow up in a land of sissies? Perhaps, but I am not mentioning this to decide whether violence in the media and our ability to grow immune to it—as I also have over the years—is desirable, or not. I simply wish to draw attention to the cultural fissures in how violence is portrayed, how we teach conflict resolution, and whether harmony is valued over competitiveness. This is the problem with the human species. Somewhere in all of this resides a human nature, but it is molded and stretched into so many different directions that it is hard to say if we are naturally competitive or naturally community-builders.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Nature and environment Invention and Design Food Sociology Journalism and Media California Culture Community Real Estate ]
Entry: 2025-09-13 00:25:39.738574+02 LLMs still bullshitting by Dan Lyke comments 0
Work has been building up some demos, one of them involved some visualizations of timeline-esque data, and yesterday I got pointed at an outline of notable events from a recent startup, and built a little HTML tool to visualize it. I needed some "what if we had supporting data for this", so I did a bunch of searching around to find articles supporting what ChatGPT had given as the outline of the company, coerced that stuff into JSON, and dropped it into my little visualization.
So far so good.
The eventual notion is that this visualization inside our tool will have value with some strategic partnerships, but I thought "what about just plugging in an LLM back-end?". So I asked Gemini 2.5 Pro:
I am looking for a timeline of notable events in the history of the Intel Corporation. Examples are major product releases, new CEOs or changes in board, large funding rounds, other events which suggest a change in corporate direction. Use your search engine. Format your output as an array of JSON objects with the date of the event as "date", the "title" of the event, a "category" (one of "Funding", "Media", "Product", "Team"), a short "description", and then a short array list of "links" to articles describing or elaborating on this event, as "url", "title" of the publication or source, and a summary as "description".
Provided a few more details and some example JSON. Got back an answer that's... not too bad. The dates I've spot-checked are close (the days of the month are not correct, and sometimes zero, the months and years seem plausible). The events it listed could be thought of as notable.
Of the few I've checked, the links it's provided as supporting evidence are either 404, or to articles that are not, in fact, supporting evidence.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Machinery ]
Entry: 2025-09-10 19:45:02.473482+02 Turns out that if volunteer labor by Dan Lyke comments 0
Turns out that if volunteer labor (me) got compensated at all, the thousand or three bucks that the big film festival organization wanted for media wrangling is a fucking bargain.
Next year we're doing this differently...
In other news, who knew that freakin' pnpm wanted so much cache space?
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Space & Astronomy Current Events Journalism and Media ]
Entry: 2025-08-29 19:00:57.426554+02 Pivot to quantum by Dan Lyke comments 0
@davidgerard@circumstances.run Media is publishing too many skeptical articles about AI now that people are dying (!), so they're preparing a pivot. Can we look forward to a pivot-to-quantum?
[ related topics: Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-08-25 19:23:58.543463+02 AI driving psychosis by Dan Lyke comments 0
Top Microsoft AI Boss Concerned AI Causing Psychosis in Otherwise Healthy People
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman told British newspaper The Telegraph that "to many people," talking to a chatbot is a "highly compelling and very real interaction."
"Concerns around 'AI psychosis,' attachment and mental health are already growing," he added. "Some people reportedly believe their AI is God, or a fictional character, or fall in love with it to the point of absolute distraction."
Via Ian Rogers, who asks "Is this a bad thing? It sounds like a bad thing.". Ian also linked to A young woman’s final exchange with an AI chatbot
‘This Was Trauma by Simulation’: ChatGPT Users File Disturbing Mental Health Complaints — Gizmodo obtained consumer complaints to FTC through a FOIA request. Via the author, Matt Novak, who has a few more excerpts there.
Psychology Today: The Emerging Problem of "AI Psychosis". Via.
Derek Thompson: The Looming Social Crisis of AI Friends and Chatbot Therapists
[ related topics: Religion Humor Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Weblogs Microsoft Health moron Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-08-25 18:01:55.109076+02 Wired and Business Insider remove "AI written" articles by Dan Lyke comments 0
Wired's placeholder for the article: A Note From WIRED Leadership
Business Insider's apparent apologia wants a subscription.
Via a bunch of places, but Cecilia Tan in particular.
[ related topics: Games Free Speech Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Net Culture Artificial Intelligence Marriage ]
Entry: 2025-08-14 00:41:08.085769+02 Hotter than asphalt by Dan Lyke comments 0
Our findings highlight that parked vehicles significantly alter surface thermal properties in densely built areas, where road coverage is extensive and UHI intensity is greatest. These insights underscore the need to consider parked vehicles in urban heat island studies and the potential for spatially targeted mitigation strategies, such as restricting parking in identified hotspots, constructing shading structures, and promoting light, over dark, coloured vehicles.
[ related topics: Nature and environment Journalism and Media ]
Entry: 2025-08-07 17:27:11.879184+02 LLM conversations on the Wayback Machine by Dan Lyke comments 0
I scraped every public LLM chat so you didn't have to. Using the Wayback Machine to find all of those LLM conversations that were accidentally made public.
404 Media: More than 130,000 Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, and Other LLM Chats Readable on Archive.org
Via Joseph Cox @josephcox@infosec.exchange
[ related topics: Journalism and Media Heinlein ]
Entry: 2025-08-06 19:30:28.266237+02 A few musings on GenAI, technology, and the value of craft by Dan Lyke comments 0
A bunch of disconnected feelings that seem relevant to each other:
Some time around the fall of the Soviet Union, my parents made a trip to Czechoslovakia, when it was called that. They stopped at the Moser Glassworks, and report that their guide told the story of some Soviet muckety muck coming and visiting and observing that in Russia they had the same thing, but better, in plastic.
And I'm sure some of this is a story to appeal to the USAnian prejudices of the time, but...
Last night I listened to Switched On Pop episode 428 — Is that new song you like AI? Here’s how you can tell. It was fascinating to hear how, yeah, if I listened to these things as background music, or heard stuff on while I was out shopping, I may or may not take note. And it's even got me thinking about square dance calling; the background is often just a beat and enough something to make it not super annoyingly repetitive, does it matter what it is?
Charlene forwards me various clips from [Wherever's] Got Talent or The Voice, and some of those performers grab me so hard, I've bought a few albums (Chapel Hart, most recently Linkin' Bridge come to mind), but it's telling on the culture and on how we listen to music how many of those performers show up, blow away the audience, and then a few years later have faded out of the culture.
When I worked on the Cricut product family, especially after my friends who cashed out on that, there was much discussion about riding the balance between turnkey inspiration, and the users of the product feeling like they were doing something, making choices, being creative in some way. It was important that the product enable a feeling of interaction and choices without being too difficult to accomplish.
Since then, I've seen the evolution of craft, thinking particularly about 3d printing, and how that's morphed into laser cutters and UV printers. Seems like there were an awful lot of people downloading models and futzing with their printer's settings until they got something that wasn't a pile of filament spaghetti, but now so many of those machines are gathering dust.
Somewhere along that line, I was working on some product development, and one of the people mentioned that they were waiting on CNC router time to come up on the schedule in the shop they were working with. I went out to my track saw and nailed out a couple of prototype refinements in a few hours, and eventually that product was injection molded in China.
Last Friday night, I got together with someone I met through a local singing circle, and we sat down at his piano and played with music, and... hot damn there's something awesome about participatory musical play.
This leads me to pondering two notions:
First, that the reliance on computers to dissociate ourselves from the knowledge of the details of the craft makes us dependent in ways that impact our ability to actually be creative. There's a line in one of the Dave Gingery books about building your own machine shop from scratch that this isn't about post-apocalyptic recovery, these are the basic skills you need to have if you're going to work in metalworking, so it's not outlandish to be able to cast your own lathe parts.
Second, that there's something in the relationships we form with people that's important in carrying forward the knowledge that we need to remain skilled in craft. The value of musical stardom is now occurring in the parasocial relationships with megastars, and in that we no longer value the craft as much as we value the media scale that creates megastars. If music is just background, then, yeah, it doesn't matter if it's generated by AI. If we engage with it as personality, then there's room for creativity by a few. But if we participate in it, there's something deeper and richer that really enhances our community.
As I look at how I use computers, and where I want my career building things with computers that other people use to go (damn, that's a clumsy phrase, but I'm not gonna use GenAI to blandify it), I want to be building products that encourage participatory engagement, and that back off on the power law a little bit, and help us become more social than parasocial.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Music Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Invention and Design Sociology Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Graphics Heinlein California Culture Travel Community Douglas Adams Artificial Intelligence Bicycling Woodworking ]
Entry: 2025-08-06 01:16:57.606357+02 Oceangate Titan report by Dan Lyke comments 0
Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation releases report on Titan submersible
The board determined the primary contributing factors were OceanGate’s inadequate design, certification, maintenance and inspection process for the Titan. Other factors cited in the report include a toxic workplace culture at OceanGate, an inadequate domestic and international regulatory framework for submersible operations and vessels of novel design, and an ineffective whistleblower process under the Seaman’s Protection Act.
The board also found OceanGate failed to properly investigate and address known hull anomalies following its 2022 Titanic expedition. Investigators determined the Titan’s real-time monitoring system generated data that should have been analyzed and acted on during the 2022 Titanic expedition. However, OceanGate did not take any action related to the data, conduct any preventative maintenance or properly store the Titan during the extended off season before its 2023 Titanic expedition.
The actual 300 page PDF.
Graham Sutherland / Polynomial @gsuberland@chaos.social
public response to the investigation: "oceangate spent all this R&D time and money to come up with this really fancy alerting system for detecting hull fractures, and when it alerted them to hull fractures they ignored the alert and kept operating regardless? what was the point of building it if they were just going to ignore the alerts? who even does that?"
me: *THOUSAND YARD STARE*
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sociology Current Events Journalism and Media California Culture Graphic Design Guns Currency ]
Entry: 2025-08-03 19:36:25.592531+02 The written word and social construct by Dan Lyke comments 0
From It's rude to show AI output to people came this lobste.rs comment by Internet_Janitor:
The written word rests on a social contract: it was composed by a human with intent, and is therefore often worth the effort to decode. As readers, we are used to papering over typos and other superficial flaws in text in order to extract its meaning and weigh its veracity, usefulness, or aesthetic properties, often by building our own imperfect model of the author from context.
LLM output harvests the generosity and credulousness of this social contract- inviting readers to fill in its gaps and ignore its flaws. Through consistent exploitation, the social contract is gradually eroded, like so many other tragedies of the commons. This problem is not entirely novel, but LLMs have made Gish-galloping with nonsense orders of magnitude cheaper and easier than ever before, and scale can give old problems new venom.
I would argue that sharing slop is worse than simply rude; it’s profoundly antisocial, and an attack on the idea of written communication.
The thread there also has some other discussion about forwarding on media with and without comment that has me thinking about stuff.
[ related topics: Invention and Design Journalism and Media Net Culture Community Artificial Intelligence ]
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