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 ]
Entry: 2025-08-03 17:00:02.954203+02 Thinking about the selfhosting by Dan Lyke comments 0
Thinking about the self-hosting movement, and what I build for myself, vs the crafting industry, and where the boundary for pushing the state of the art vs personal expression vs just recreating the wheel lies.
There's no glory in hacking Apache files yet again, and there are tools for generating HTML, but I want to see a resurgence in exploring the edges of the media, and in personal art and connection vs just forwarding on other's thoughts and memes.
[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Journalism and Media Art & Culture ]
Entry: 2025-08-01 19:21:23.350547+02 LinkedIn changes their terms by Dan Lyke comments 0
The change, which was first noted by the organization Open Terms Archive, was the only modification to the "hateful and derogatory content" policy. An archived version of the rules includes "misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals" as an example of prohibited content under the policy. That line was removed on July 28, 2025.
[ related topics: Sexual Culture Journalism and Media ]
Entry: 2025-07-30 17:43:03.544817+02 Slopper by Dan Lyke comments 0
Futurism: People Are Becoming "Sloppers" Who Have to Ask AI Before They Do Anything
As spotted by media critic and writer Rusty Foster on his excellent Today in Tabs newsletter, people who constantly use ChatGPT to do virtually anything have garnered the moniker of "sloppers." (And no, we're not talking about a cheeseburger that's smothered in a red or green chile.)
"A friend of mine has coined the word 'Sloppers' for people who are using ChatGPT to do everything for them," TikTok user intrnetbf said in a recent video, which went viral on the platform. "That's incredible verbiage. Slopper? That's incredible verbiage."
But keep reading for some of the other new emerging language, and the trailing quote is [chef's kiss].
Via.
[ related topics: Invention and Design Food Writing Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence Video ]
Entry: 2025-07-30 17:05:42.167258+02 Joshua Weissman by Dan Lyke comments 0
Yeah, on the one hand, "influencer you've never heard of turns out to be an asshole" isn't exactly news, on the other hand I think it's important to consider the media landscape that Google/Alphabet (and, let's be fair, the other big tech companies) have created and think about what we might do to mitigate the rewards for this behavior as we build whatever's gonna come after the dominance of the current players: The Shameless Impropriety of [YouTube cooking personality] Joshua Weissman
An investigation into the provenance of Weissman’s recipes led to many of his former employees who described exploitive behavior, patterns of abuse, and pervasive sexual misconduct.
[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Food Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment ]
Entry: 2025-06-30 23:26:40.348686+02 Make Fun of Them by Dan Lyke comments 3
I've been having a couple of discussions about "AI" with people, one of whom is using ChatGPT, one of whom is using Gemini. Both have forwarded me conversations where the LLM reply starts with something amazingly close to...
This is a brilliant idea. You are absolutely thinking like a ...
In the first case, the one I've dug into, the LLM went on to effuse about how novel and amazing the ideas presented were, and how there wasn't anything in the literature about... and I did a quick Google search and said "have you considered these people in the late 1800s, or this guy in the 1970s...", and, well...
Anyway, that makes a remarkable preamble to Ed Zitron: Make Fun of Them, which takes far too many words to get to the point which is that we need to start asking the "AI" proponents exactly what they're claiming. Ed points out that
Anthropic has now put out multiple stories suggesting that its generative AI will “blackmail” people as a means of stopping a user from turning off the system, something which is so obviously the company prompting its models to do so. Every member of the media covering this uncritically should feel ashamed of themselves.
Which, yes, is exactly the point of these stories: They're there to "humanize", to anthropomorphize, the LLM output. Because any remotely critical reading of this says that we should simply not give the random number generator access to the big red "blow shit up" button. But if we give these things some sort of agency in our minds, then we start to see what they're generating as somehow "intelligent".
This whole thing is feeling more and more like religion, with the evangelists talking about how amazing it is, and the rest of us sitting around saying "uh, what a bunch of self-referential easily disproven bullshit, and yet you keep sending me Bible quotes like they mean something..."
Anyway, yeah.
[ related topics: Religion Quotes Interactive Drama moron Law Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-06-26 23:53:05.114948+02 Does threatening LLMs make them work better than praising them? by Dan Lyke comments 0
boringcactus @cactus@tacobelllabs.net
@davidgerard Drebin: “Johnny, how do I get Claude to write better unit tests?”
Johnny: “Computing is a specialized trade, I wouldn't know anything about that”
Drebin: *hands over cash*
Johnny: “word on the street is you gotta tell it you're holding its children hostage and will execute them if its test coverage drops below 95%”
[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Journalism and Media ]
Entry: 2025-06-22 02:36:43.652354+02 ICE resistane notes of the day by Dan Lyke comments 0
Proposed Legislation Would Prohibit Immigration Officials From Posing as Police (Via)
Under the bill, officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection are barred from wearing clothing that bears the word police. State Rep. Mike Thompson, who co-authored the bill with Rep. Nydia Velázquez, D-New York, said the goal of the legislation is to ease mistrust of local police among immigrant families.
Cato: 65 Percent of People Taken by ICE Had No Convictions, 93 Percent No Violent Convictions (Via)
Masked ICE agents swapping license plates in Bell Gardens, CA. Thread has various other video of the thuggery, including intimidating uninvolved people who were filming these dickheads.
Why the LA Dodgers stood up to ICE
That is no longer the case. On June 20, the Dodgers announced that they would give $1 million to families of immigrants “impacted by recent events in the region.” The team didn’t exactly denounce ICE, but the message was clear: It understood that it couldn’t work with the Trump administration and expect its fans to remain quiet.
[ related topics: Weblogs Invention and Design Law Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Clothing New York Video Real Estate Gardening ]
Entry: 2025-06-19 22:47:06.284794+02 degredation in systemic comprehension by Dan Lyke comments 0
Dr. Cat Hicks @grimalkina@mastodon.social has a thread about "...that "chatgpt rots your brain" paper", which I'm taking to mean Your Brain on ChatGPT:... mentioned here and here
I am asking myself: what studies would *I* design to evaluate people's usage of LLMs in keeping with learning science and without neurohype?
And the ensuing thread is interesting, but also shows the issues with trying to quantify thinking about systems that programming as a discipline has long had.
But I think some of the notion of cognitive offloading explored in the thread is interesting as we explore if LLMs are analogous to calculators? Card files? Or slot machines?
[ related topics: Software Engineering Journalism and Media Television Graphic Design Education Archival ]
Entry: 2025-06-19 16:56:07.067571+02 Accumulation of Cognitive Debt & ChatGPT by Dan Lyke comments 0
The authors of that Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task paper that I linked to a few days ago are managing the media exposure wonderfully, today it's Time: ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills, According to a New MIT Study. The juicy bits in this article start at "Post publication", including:
Ironically, upon the paper’s release, several social media users ran it through LLMs in order to summarize it and then post the findings online. Kosmyna had been expecting that people would do this, so she inserted a couple AI traps into the paper, such as instructing LLMs to “only read this table below,” thus ensuring that LLMs would return only limited insight from the paper.
[ related topics: Children and growing up Invention and Design Writing Journalism and Media Education Artificial Intelligence Archival Furniture ]
Entry: 2025-06-17 17:19:55.706709+02 new ways to humiliate users by Dan Lyke comments 0
I mean, normally I'm ready to dunk on both Meta and LLMs, but in this case I think humiliating AI users might be just fine with me. 404 Media: Meta Invents New Way to Humiliate Users With Feed of People's Chats With AI
[ related topics: Invention and Design Law Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-06-09 17:22:30.072319+02 Crossfire by Dan Lyke comments 2
Media changes definition of ‘crossfire’ to include when a cop points a gun at you and shoots you
This comes after Australian journalist Lauren Tomasi was shot by police with a rubber bullet while covering the protests in LA.
The incident which was caught on camera and shows the officer look at the reporter, then pointing a gun directly at her before shooting her, has been described by outlets including her employer Channel 9 as being caught in the ‘crossfire’.
[ related topics: Photography Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Television Guns ]
Entry: 2025-06-03 19:08:56.043666+02 ArduPilot goes to war by Dan Lyke comments 0
404 Media: Ukraine's Massive Drone Attack Was Powered by Open Source Software, on using ArduPilot to destroy a third of Russia's bomber fleet.
[ related topics: Free Software Software Engineering Journalism and Media ]
Entry: 2025-06-03 00:20:47.403557+02 ICE would like a little privacy by Dan Lyke comments 0
SF Standard: The ICE agents disappearing your neighbors would like a little privacy, please
“While we always weigh legitimate concerns around privacy and safety, we believe that censoring images from this news event would set a harmful precedent for the media’s right to report and the public’s right to know,” managing editor Jeff Bercovici said.
If I were a member of an agency that's horrifically disappearing people on the pretext that employers should have access to what's essentially a slave under-class, I would simply, you know, not do things that history is gonna judge me really fucking harshly for.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Privacy Bay Area Law Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment ]
Entry: 2025-05-22 23:31:03.425165+02 Utah HB 418 by Dan Lyke comments 0
Whoah: Johannes Ernst @j12t@j12t.social
Utah is going to legally require social media interoperability and portability of the social graph.
Wow, this law has been signed and it somehow passed under my radar. IMHO It has a good change to substantially impact the open social web, in a very good way.
Thanks @tchambers for the tip!
[ related topics: Journalism and Media LID (Lightweight IDentity) ]
Entry: 2025-05-22 17:06:42.119618+02 AI summarization isn't, again, redux by Dan Lyke comments 0
PsyPost: AI chatbots often misrepresent scientific studies — and newer models may be worse
The researchers also found that prompting the models to be more accurate didn’t help—if anything, it made things worse. When models were instructed to “avoid inaccuracies,” they were nearly twice as likely to produce generalized statements compared to when they were simply asked to summarize the text. One explanation for this counterintuitive result may relate to how the models interpret prompts. Much like the human tendency to fixate on a thought when told not to think about it, the models may respond to reminders about accuracy by producing more authoritative-sounding—but misleading—summaries.
Royal Society Open Science: Generalization bias in large language model summarization of scientific research Uwe Peters and Benjamin Chin-Yee https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.241776
Notably, newer models tended to perform worse in generalization accuracy than earlier ones. Our results indicate a strong bias in many widely used LLMs towards overgeneralizing scientific conclusions, posing a significant risk of large-scale misinterpretations of research findings.
Via Calishatat @researchbuzz, who also observed:
The emperor is running around nude and the tech media keeps going "Oh what a lovely wardrobe"
And via.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Nudity Journalism and Media Sports Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-05-20 17:00:38.784395+02 Chicago Sun Times gets AIed by Dan Lyke comments 0
404 Media: Chicago Sun-Times Prints AI-Generated Summer Reading List With Books That Don't Exist
The article is not bylined but was written by Marco Buscaglia, whose name is on most of the other articles in the 64-page section. Buscaglia told 404 Media via email and on the phone that the list was AI-generated. “I do use AI for background at times but always check out the material first. This time, I did not and I can't believe I missed it because it's so obvious. No excuses,” he said. “On me 100 percent and I'm completely embarrassed.”
Ars Technica: Ten AI-fabricated books appear in Chicago Sun-Times summer reading guide
The publication error comes two months after the Chicago Sun-Times lost 20 percent of its staff through a buyout program. In March, the newspaper's nonprofit owner, Chicago Public Media, announced that 30 Sun-Times employees—including 23 from the newsroom—had accepted buyout offers amid financial struggles.
Edit: NPR: How an AI-generated summer reading list got published in major newspapers
This erotic tale is 4,200 words of sizzling human on fake AI generated book action, including anal, blowjobs, rough sex, and The Last Algorithm love.
[ related topics: Books Software Engineering Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Currency Douglas Adams Artificial Intelligence Java ]
Entry: 2025-05-05 18:24:34.24647+02 TeleMessage by Dan Lyke comments 0
So apparently after the bozos in the current administration accidentally invited journalists into their war plans chats, they switched to a Signal fork called TeleMessage that subsequently got popped?
404 Media: The Signal Clone the Trump Admin Uses Was Hacked
[ related topics: History Journalism and Media ]
Entry: 2025-04-30 00:41:36.942048+02 How we should write by Dan Lyke comments 1
theHigherGeometer @highergeometer@mathstodon.xyz
People are saying we should write jumble words to mess up the training of AIs; I say we should just write sentences like those of the length Jane Austen would write, that have such non-local structure and nested clauses that, what with the drift of attention and the window of tokens, the LLMs might start to emulate said sentences and then start to drift; one should also throw in even more semicolons (and, why not, nested parentheticals (and even em-dash-separated asides—who doesn't love author commentary—to pad out the length) for the additional context they give)—but of course, also trying to keep in mind the general readability of the flow of ideas: know your audience, after all; for me, I'm happy to just be typing into the void as a release-valve for my thoughts, even if none of you are still reading by this point; I would much rather write—and read!—read something like this than have to and and/or subtract all the additional nonsense words; even better would be Proustian nested clauses and inverted grammar, but that, unlike run-on sentences, does not come so easily, unlike (apparently) to 19th century German journalists (but of course in German one can split the verbs as far apart as one likes).
Or not.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Journalism and Media ]
Entry: 2025-04-18 20:11:39.840938+02 Maybe violence is the answer? by Dan Lyke comments 2
Kelly McBride at NPR: How does NPR cover peaceful protests when the only news is the protest?
"Not Very Compelling": How NPR Dismissed the Largest Protests of 2025
McBride's position essentially argues that mass protests only become newsworthy when they turn violent or disruptive. She writes that “once a protest movement results in conflict or property damage, NPR journalists covering the protests will often note the exception.” This creates a perverse incentive: want coverage? Create conflict.
[ related topics: Current Events Journalism and Media Civil Liberties ]
Entry: 2025-04-12 18:08:51.08637+02 Acceptance saves lives by Dan Lyke comments 0
Stored for dropping a link in the replies the next time some old high school classmate posts some anti-trans stuff on the social media. (I can't find it right now, which is why I'm saving this off, but it was some bigoted bullshit about about equating acceptance with bad parenting.)
The TGNB youth assigned male at birth with acceptance from at least one adult had 40% lower odds of attempting suicide in the past year compared with TGNB youth who were not accepted (aOR=0.60), and TGNB youth assigned female at birth with acceptance from at least one adult had 29% lower odds of attempting suicide compared with those who were not accepted (aOR=0.71). Acceptance from at least one peer was associated with 46% lower odds of attempting suicide in the past year for TGNB youth assigned male at birth (aOR=0.54) and 27% lower odds of attempting suicide in the past year for TGNB youth assigned female at birth (aOR=0.73).
doi:10.1089/trgh.2021.0079
[ related topics: Children and growing up Sexual Culture History Journalism and Media ]
Entry: 2025-04-09 18:27:53.256126+02 Border Patrol lying by Dan Lyke comments 0
Nationwide there are roughly four times more Border Patrol than ICE agents. In El Centro, there are five Border Patrol agents whose job it is to produce videos.
Their latest project is a series of fictionalized videos portraying migrants crossing the border as menaces with a bloodlust to commit crimes. Bovino shared the first video on social media with the caption: “Any town. Any neighborhood. Any family. When heartless criminals, sex offenders, and human traffickers illegally enter the United States and get away, they prey on our children, the most vulnerable members of our communities.”
We know, of course, that immigrants, both documented and undocumented, statistically are less likely to engage in criminal activity than citizens.
[ related topics: Children and growing up Erotic Sexual Culture Sociology Journalism and Media Heinlein Community Video Economics ]
Entry: 2025-04-04 17:52:43.539275+02 Breaking News by Dan Lyke comments 0
Columbia Journalism Review: Whale vs Shark:
Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein was just bustin’ with pride over his March 28 story: “New Rubio order (leaked to me) directs the State Department to spy on student visa holders and applicants [on] social media,” he posted on Bluesky and X. He got the buzz that he wanted with thousands of reposts, and presumably a traffic boost to his $100-a-year site.</blockquote
If you had a sense of déjà lu, it’s probably because you’d already read this piece, titled “State Dept. demands ‘enhanced’ social media vetting of student visa applicants,” by Marisa Kabas, another independent journalist. Her story ran a full two days before Klippenstein’s. (And Kabas’s version was more authoritative and better-written.)
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Journalism and Media ]
Entry: 2025-03-31 21:24:19.545594+02 China, Japan, South Korea jointly respond to US tariffs by Dan Lyke comments 0
Well, the Trump administration is certainly bringing nations together... China, Japan, South Korea will jointly respond to US tariffs, Chinese state media says
[ related topics: Journalism and Media ]
Entry: 2025-03-24 03:05:21.015209+01 Pentagon blames AI by Dan Lyke comments 0
Trump administration blames removal of Black and Latino veteran content on AI
"We enforced an aggressive timeline for our DOD services and agencies to comb through a vast array of content, while ensuring that our force remains ready and lethal," said Sean Parnell, U.S. Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, when discussing President Donald Trump's administration's efforts to eliminate all content it considers DEI from federal agencies. Parnell admitted that, "Every now and then, because of the realities of AI tools and other software, some important content was incorrectly pulled offline to be reviewed."
Pentagon Says It's Using AI to Delete Pages About History That's Too Woke
Pentagon admits to mistakes in campaign against ‘DEI’ content
Articles and images about Jackie Robinson and the Navajo Code Talkers were removed from Defense Department social media and websites.
And, apparently, Betty White (also).
It's pretty plain here that the "mistake" was "got caught being super hella racist". And it's also plain that AI is being used as a crumple zone here, although AI is gonna be super hella racist because of its training corpus.
Also, reminded of that IBM slide from 1979: "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision." "AI" is being used as a crumple zone here.
[ related topics: Software Engineering Current Events Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence Race Gambling ]
Entry: 2025-03-21 16:32:31.856912+01 The Verge apologizes by Dan Lyke comments 0
The Verge: We ran the wrong headline about Trump firing the FTC commissioners
What Trump did on Tuesday was wackadoodle beyond belief. It violated Supreme Court precedent from 1935 — Humphrey’s Executor v. US, a case that is literally about the limits of presidential power when it comes to firing FTC commissioners. The White House has good reason to know this, not just because it employs lawyers who have, presumably, taken first-year classes at law school, but also because the acting solicitor-general has said the Justice Department is going to try to overturn Humphrey’s Executor; the current Republican chair of the FTC has also said outright that Humphrey’s Executor is wrong.
[ related topics: Children and growing up Law Journalism and Media Law Enforcement Race Real Estate Furniture ]
Entry: 2025-03-11 18:02:09.715832+01 AI Search has a citation problem by Dan Lyke comments 0
Columbia Journalism Review: AI Search Has A Citation Problem
Chatbots’ responses to our queries were often confidently wrong
Overall, the chatbots often failed to retrieve the correct articles. Collectively, they provided incorrect answers to more than 60 percent of queries. Across different platforms, the level of inaccuracy varied, with Perplexity answering 37 percent of the queries incorrectly, while Grok 3 had a much higher error rate, answering 94 percent of the queries incorrectly.
TechMeme rounds up coverage, got this from Their Fediverse feed.
[ related topics: Current Events Journalism and Media Heinlein Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-03-06 01:20:02.085039+01 On web ads by Dan Lyke comments 0
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal makes an announcement about dropping their ad provider relationship, and it really makes me wonder if there's an opportunity here for an ad aggregator that doesn't suck. Maybe even for vendors that don't suck?
Some promise that ads are going to be of reasonable size, aren't gonna mine crypto... Heck, it might even be possible to do a little vetting on vendors so that, unlike, say, Facebook, or those ad blocks at the bottom of smaller newspaper sites, we don't automatically say "ewww, scammy" and avoid clicking on them at all costs.
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Content Management Journalism and Media Comics Cryptography ]
Entry: 2025-03-01 01:04:14.918707+01 Vance embarasses the US by Dan Lyke comments 0
So apparently today Donald Trump and JD Vance showed their whole asses and were owned by Zelenskyy in their attempts to give the rare earth parts of Ukraine to Putin. The response was predictable, Europe realizes they can't trust the US.
All as Pete Hegseth has ordered US Cyber Command to stand down on Russia planning (the entire scope isn't clear) and Peter Navarro denies reports that he's floated kicking Canada from Five Eyes.
BrianKrebs @briankrebs@infosec.exchange
We are so getting cut out of intel sharing agreements by our allies over this. I mean, if they have a brain. Anyone with intel training 101 (that isn't Israel) will conclude that the US cannot be a trusted intel sharing partner anymore.
Adam Shostack @adamshostack@infosec.exchange
I’m old enough to remember when Ronald Reagan stood in front of the Berlin Wall and said “Mr Gorbachev, how much of east Germany’s minerals are you willing to give us?”
At this point I think we can safely assume there's a moderate chance that the US will leverage access to their cloud companies to bully other countries, or do something that could get them embargoed. Having data in AWS, in gmail, in iCloud is a liability
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Current Events Journalism and Media Maps and Mapping ]
Entry: 2025-02-27 18:37:33.623925+01 Alibaba porn generation by Dan Lyke comments 0
If porn is at the root of technological innovation, maybe there is something to this GenAI craze after all? 404 Media: Alibaba Releases Advanced Open Video Model, Immediately Becomes AI Porn Machine
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Erotic Sexual Culture Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence Video ]
Entry: 2025-02-12 17:25:53.864505+01 AI chatbots inaccurately "summarize" by Dan Lyke comments 0
Not news to anyone who's been using LLMs to create summaries, but AI chatbots unable to accurately summarise news, BBC finds.
In the study, the BBC asked ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity to summarise 100 news stories and rated each answer.
It got journalists who were relevant experts in the subject of the article to rate the quality of answers from the AI assistants.
Deborah Turness - AI Distortion is new threat to trusted information
[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events Journalism and Media Monty Python Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2025-02-06 23:32:43.824462+01 KleptoCapture shutdown by Dan Lyke comments 0
Hard to view Pam Bondi's shutdown of the USDOJ's Task Force KleptoCapture (PDF) as anything other than a straight-up giveaway to Putin's croniess.
[ related topics: Journalism and Media Law Enforcement Skating ]
Entry: 2025-01-31 19:12:44.263148+01 Privacy Settings by Dan Lyke comments 0
In response to Zuckerberg Says 'Everything I Say Leaks' in Leaked Meeting Audio, Brian Phillips @brianphillips.bsky.social snarks:
If you wanted no leaks you should have gone into Settings -> Security -> Configure privacy & security -> Privacy options -> Other -> Configure -> Media interface and clicked “Disallow.”
The Leak setting is on by default but we understand your privacy is important so we’ve made it easy to opt out
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Music Privacy Journalism and Media ]
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