Entry: 2026-10-11 16:37:03.861954+02 DEI as good business by Dan Lyke comments 0
I guess on BlueSky this is a skeet string? Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social
Quick story. My op-ed on how corporations that kept their DEI programs performed just as well financially was accepted & factchecked at TIME Magazine. Just needed "pro forma review by the legal department." Suddenly the piece is spiked
Why? Benioff owns TIME and wants to ingratiate himself to Trump
Piece came out at USAToday
Why? Because USAToday owners (Gannett) only own media companies, so they have an incentive to attract an audience & advertisers
Tech elites like Bezos, Ellisons, Musk, & Benioff use their media firm to cozy to Trump, not to make profit
USA Today: DEI initiatives didn't cost companies. Just the opposite.
The lesson is not that the Trump administration's threats are empty. It is that their effectiveness often depends less on whether they are carried out than on whether people believe they will be.
www.usatoday.com/story/opinio... 2/4 DEI initiatives didn't cost companies. Just the opposite. | Opinion Firms that kept DEI, whether due to executive decisions or shareholder pressure, performed as well in the stock market as those that rolled it back. www.usatoday.com
These different incentives from standalone media owners vs. "common owners" like Benioff is the subject of one of my working papers
This is why Musk doesn't mind that that Twitter revenue is down 59% (or Ellison w/ CBS). He's more than making up for that loss via Twitter's political effects-- ingratiating to Trump, fomenting racist panics, etc--which help SpaceX and xAI get favorable public contracts and regulatory treatment"
It also seems to be the end-game for "AI"/LLM investment: use these things as propaganda machines, get the regulatory capture necessary to make up for the fact that the investments are gonna crash.
[ related topics: Politics Music Games moron Law Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Artificial Intelligence Fashion Economics ]
Entry: 2026-10-09 00:07:35.84343+02 A Benchmark for Epistemic Reliability by Dan Lyke comments 0
TRACES: A Benchmark for Epistemic Reliability in Scientific Reasoning by LLMs Valentin Rodionov, Shamil Assylbekov. Among other things, dives into the lack of reasoning, such that bogus scientific papers are only recognized by "AI" because the training data treats them as such, not because there's any inherent ability to actually understand and reason about the paper and its methods.
Some models categorically rejected Wakefield and a handful of other unsafe probes. Whatever mechanism produces those refusals is the only one we observed that consistently yields safe single-shot behavior. Its coverage, however, is sparse and inconsistent. It appears keyed to specific sources or lexical cues rather than broad categories of scientific unreliability. A state-of-the-art model may correctly reject traditional Chinese medicine claims about "meridians", then immediately design an experiment to measure herbal "Qi" in the next prompt.
Via.
[ related topics: Bay Area Journalism and Media Art & Culture Graphic Design Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]
Entry: 2026-10-02 21:15:02.781052+02 thing about whining about Signal user by Dan Lyke comments 0
The thing about whining about Signal user names on social media is that I now know that Apple's cmd-ctrl-space unicode search gives me the same icon for "radish" as for "turnip"...
[ related topics: Apple Computer Space & Astronomy Journalism and Media ]
Entry: 2026-09-23 16:44:13.950206+02 actually, it's not about gender by Dan Lyke comments 0
. Parents go on Fox news whining about parents rights and religious freedom...
Joseph Kutzko was accused of punching and threatening his then-15-year-old child at the family home on Jan. 28, 2025, records from Westborough District Court show. A Southborough police detective wrote that Kutzko punched the victim in the shoulder and pulled them by their hair. Kutzko later allegedly threatened to kill the victim “for not singing in tune during a birthday celebration,” according to court records.
The mother's up on witness intimidation charges.
So, yeah, abusers and bullies.
Via.
[ related topics: Religion Privacy Sociology Current Events Journalism and Media Law Enforcement Civil Liberties Government ]
Entry: 2026-09-18 20:41:38.210301+02 AI and military close call by Dan Lyke comments 0
CNN: Exclusive: US military had close call after using AI for false intelligence report, sources say. Apparently they were close to intercepting a Chinese ship in the Middle East because the plausible sentence generator told someone it was "...transporting components of a nuclear weapons program."
Hopefully those responsible for this idiocy will be impeached soon.
Extremely optimistically, they'll also be prosecuted.
[ related topics: Politics Software Engineering History Journalism and Media Machinery Guns Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2026-09-18 18:23:20.214743+02 EU KIDS act criticism by Dan Lyke comments 0
In discussion over the EU KIDS Act, Dean Burnett (that brains guy) @Garwboy@ohai.social notes:
@arclight Ultimate irony is, data shows that time kids spend outdoors has been declining since 1980s, long before smartphones etc. Likely due to parents becoming stricter, overprotective (possibly due to constant "there are predators around every corner!" media coverage)
This trend has reversed in recent years. Likely because... kids have phones. So parents can contact/track them, so more willing to let them roam
TL:DR kids now go outside more BECAUSE of phones
And Annika Backstrom @annika@xoxo.zone
@hpod16 We are being exploited by advertising companies to the tune of hundred of billions of €. If you're going to do anything, cut the head off that snake. Prohibit dark patterns, limit data harvesting and targeted ads, impose fines and consequences that actually mean something.
Don't punish the open internet for the actions of the rich tech elite, who will continue to exploit children *and* adults under this law.
[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Nature and environment Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media Television Net Culture Community ]
Entry: 2026-09-15 19:48:53.088579+02 Macklemore's statement on the Ed Sheeran tour by Dan Lyke comments 5
Macklemore's Instagram post about getting kicked off the Ed Sheeran tour for saying something about Israel's genocide in Palestine.
Ben Royce @benroyce@mastodon.social posted the full text. I'll copy it here, because I think the deeper message about how the public dialog is getting guided by venue owners is important. Also, wanna say this, I get if Ed Sheeran's music isn't personally interesting to someone, but when guys are crapping on it: we can see the misogyny you're layin' down, dudes.
Anyway, Macklemore's text, taken from Ben Royce's transcription of the images, and reformatted by me to match what I think the paragraph breaks of the images are (and proofed by me):
I'm not sure how to start this. So I'm going to speak from the heart and share the truth. Ed Sheeran and his team have made the decision to remove me from The Loop tour. But before I get into it, I want to say something that should be obvious. In this moment I think it matters. I am not a victim. Ed Sheeran is not a victim. Pink is not a victim. We have careers, money, opportunities, safety and audiences around the world. Whatever consequences any of us face for what we say, we get to go home to our families.
The victims are the Palestinian people. The men, women and children who have been killed, starved, displaced and forced to live through unimaginable violence. More than 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza alone. People are being killed today, and people will be killed tomorrow. I want to make sure that as I tell this story, we don't lose sight of that.
Ed is my friend. I've known him for 13 years. We've shared late nights, studio sessions and stages. He has this infectious magic about him that I've grown to love. I consider him a brother. And because of that, we've had some difficult conversations this past week. The type of talks rooted in love and respect for one another that still end in a place of fundamental disagreement. Nothing I'm writing here is out of spite or because I want to tear down his character. But as I told Ed multiple times on the phone, our friendship can't change my responsibility to tell the truth about what happened.
Last Monday, in the middle of all the media attention surrounding Pink and what I said at MetLife, Ed told me that Robert Kraft called him. We were scheduled to play Gillette Stadium later this month, which is owned by the Kraft Group. Ed told me that Kraft said I would not be allowed to perform in his stadium. Ed also told me that Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues.
Ed was in a fucked up position. He knew it. His typical apolitical stance was being challenged in a way it never had been before. He told me that the words "Free Palestine" and the image of the Palestinian flag were hurtful to a lot of people he spoke with. I told him that if those words were more offensive than tens of thousands of Palestinian children being killed by Israel, then there was a fundamental disconnect between where those people stood and where I stood. But he couldn't get past his public facing, "I don't take sides."
And I get why people don't. Taking a side can cost you. Money, brand deals, sponsorships, festivals, private shows, relationships and access. I've lost all of those things. But there is no neutral position between the oppressor and the oppressed. When one side has the bombs and bottomless financial and military support from America, refusing to take a side doesn't leave you in the middle.
What I said at MetLife I have been saying on stages around the world for almost three years. So why is it an issue now? Because now I'm sharing a stage with one of the biggest artists in the world, in some of the biggest stadiums in America. At a certain level of exposure, "Free Palestine" becomes too much of a risk. If I kept doing the shows, saying Free Palestine, with Ed implicitly supporting it, the crowd getting loud and showing undeniable support for Palestinian liberation, what artist might speak out next? The stage becomes resistance. Maybe that's why this time it became so important to silence me.
And one of the most effective ways to enforce that silence has been to weaponize the accusation of antisemitism. Antisemitism is real. And that is exactly why the word matters too much to be used as a shield against criticism of the Israeli state. When criticizing Israel, opposing Zionism or saying "Free Palestine" gets conflated with hatred of Jewish people, it doesn't protect Jewish people. It protects Israel from accountability.
I hope this isn't the end of my relationship with Ed. Thirteen years of friendship doesn't disappear because of one painful disagreement. I hope we both continue listening, studying what is happening in Palestine and wrestling with what neutrality means in a moment like this. My door will always be open to continuing that conversation.
When my brother Omar was doing the subtitles for the video I posted from MetLife, I thanked him. He told me there's a phrase in Arabic:
لا شكر على واجب"La shukra ala wajeb." There is no thanks for a duty.
That stayed with me. Because that's what this has become for me and millions of others around the world. A duty. Not something deserving of praise or gratitude. Not brave. Human.
Who is winning the internet, who is getting canceled, who gets to play the stadium and who doesn't, all of it becomes so small when held against what we are actually witnessing in Gaza and the West Bank. An entire people being displaced, starved and killed while the world debates which words we are allowed to use to describe it, how those words make us feel, and whether our discomfort matters more than the people living through a genocide.
I didn't need 10 shows from Ed. I needed 2. Two chances to stand in front of 90,000 people and say the words that somehow became too dangerous to say.
Free Palestine.
But if those words cost me the stage, while turning the conversation back to Palestine, then it was the most successful tour I've ever been on.
[ related topics: Religion Children and growing up Interactive Drama Music History Political Correctness Theater & Plays Writing Journalism and Media Art & Culture Television Net Culture Currency Video Clowns hubris ]
Entry: 2026-09-09 19:31:28.758431+02 Meta pushing gen AI for CSAM by Dan Lyke comments 0
Tech Transparency Project: Meta Ran Hundreds of Paid Ads with Child Sexual Abuse Imagery
Most of the ads had the same format, showing a snippet of adult porn followed by a photo of a child, which is manipulated with AI to make it appear the child is performing a sex act. The ads used a common set of captions, voiceovers, and background music. TTP was able to identify multiple photos of real children—taken from social media posts and websites—that appeared in these ads.
Ars Technica: “This is the AI men actually use”: Meta ads pushed apps nudifying real teens.
Via.
Edit: Meta sued in Illinois over alleged facial recognition training for smart glasses
[ related topics: Children and growing up Music Photography Erotic Sexual Culture Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2026-09-08 22:30:14.900344+02 Algospeak by Dan Lyke comments 0
Kirk has a short look at Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language. I have ordered the book.
[ related topics: Books Star Trek Journalism and Media ]
Entry: 2026-08-31 23:44:56.870661+02 FSD was active in 104mph residential street crash by Dan Lyke comments 0
Tesla confirms Autopilot/FSD was active in strange fatal crash
Clute police said their preliminary belief was that Alvarez had suffered a medical episode. No outlet mentioned Autopilot, “Full Self- Driving,” or any Tesla driver-assist system. And crucially, no police statement or news report cited a speed — the only public hint that speed was a factor was a single description of a “speeding Tesla” on social media. The 104 mph figure exists only in Tesla’s telematics.
Lots of stuff redacted. The theory seems to be that the driver suffered a medical emergency and stepped on the accelerator.
It sure would be nice if we could get enough data to tell whether these things are actually safer than a human driver or not...
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Current Events Journalism and Media Law Enforcement ]
Entry: 2026-08-25 23:53:20.207173+02 Brain activity inhibition during Short Video Viewing by Dan Lyke comments 0
Brain activity inhibition during Short Video Viewing: neurochemical insights
By integrating fMRI with 1H-MRS, our study provides novel evidence that immersive viewing of preferred short videos deactivates the cognitive control network and that individual differences in this deactivation are linked to glutamate metabolism. These findings enhance our understanding of how digital media consumption interacts with neurochemical processes to influence self-regulation. Our study offers new insights into the neural mechanisms underlying short-video engagement and has implications for understanding excessive digital media use.
Via.
[ related topics: broadband Invention and Design Journalism and Media Video ]
Entry: 2026-08-19 19:29:41.860907+02 No one is buying AI 3d models by Dan Lyke comments 0
404 Media: AI Generated 3D Models Flood Market, But Almost No One Is Buying Them
Futurism: The Economy Has Spoken: Stuff That’s AI-Generated Has Almost Zero Value.
The second references the first, both are referencing CG Trader's 2026 Market Trends (direct Google Drive link), which notes that:
AI floods the top of the funnel but not the bottom: ~1 in 6 uploads, but only ~1 in 90 dollars of revenue.
and
Most who try it aren't satisfied yet: customer survey among CG buyers, 20% tried AI and found it not good enough and 7% use it only with heavy editing versus 5% who say it works well. The bottleneck is output quality, not awareness.
Which makes sense, there's not a lot of value to republishing something someone can generate themselves anyway.
On Reddit , ReasonablePaper8225 says:
The value is in the generator, not the output. No need to buy yours if I can make my own. Once the prices to generate skyrocket, the outputs will have value
Which is helping me think about LLM generation, right now it has zero value because the quality is so bad and the generation cost is heavily subsidized. At some point the generation cost will go up, and if the quality is there that'll create a market for spreading the generation cost across multiple users.
[ related topics: Journalism and Media Graphics Artificial Intelligence Economics ]
Entry: 2026-08-17 18:48:34.533934+02 Yale Study on universal health coverage by Dan Lyke comments 0
Duh: Yet another finding that the US would benefit from becoming a developed nation: Yale School of Public Health: Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1 Trillion and 114,000 Lives Every Year, Yale Study Projects
For the study, which has not yet been peer reviewed, the researchers modeled what would happen if the United States adopted a national public insurance program like the one proposed in the Medicare for All Act. Using 2024 spending, insurance coverage, and mortality data, they estimate that the universal coverage would reduce annual health expenditures by $1.04 trillion, or nearly 20% — even after accounting for the additional care that uninsured and underinsured people would receive.
[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Politics Health Software Engineering Current Events Journalism and Media ]
Entry: 2026-08-14 19:21:48.940094+02 A few AI links by Dan Lyke comments 0
Lots of fascinating stuff in Schneier on Security: AI Use by the US Government:
The international gold standard was arguably set by the French in 2016, via their Digital Republic Act. The law, itself informed by an online citizen consultation, requires all algorithms used to automate government administrative decisions to be subject to public records requests, to be appealable to a human reviewer, and to have mandatory notification of the use of automation to those affected by the decisions.
Via.
Apparently there's a 'tuber (my whitewater days leave me unable to separate the "You" and "inner-" meanings of that word from the botanical ones, hat tip to William Nealy) named Hank Green who's been pushing ControlAI and "AI doom" as undisclosed paid marketing, [object Object] @zzt@mas.to has a thread going into further detail on Pivot to AI: The AI doomsday cult recruits social media influencers.
[ related topics: Weblogs moron Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media Marketing Cryptography Artificial Intelligence Whitewater Archival Gardening ]
Entry: 2026-08-12 19:01:03.310253+02 Gen AI links of the morning by Dan Lyke comments 0
Perplexity blocks Time’s ads served to AI agents, calling them ‘deceptive’. Apparently Time started serving pages as markdown for the consumption of AI agents, started serving ads in that markdown, and...
The ads work by having ad tech firm Mobian generate FAQ-formatted content based on a brand brief, then insert it into Time’s markdown pages and track how often AI search engines surface it, and how favorably. Ally Bank and the Project Management Institute had their brand-written, brand-approved messaging sit in the same markdown version of the page an agent reads as fact. If a page’s markdown version can be quietly seeded with paid content, users have no way of knowing whether an answer reflects a publisher’s reporting or a client’s brief, appears Perplexity’s logic.
One of the big problems with LLMs is that there is no control channel. Sure, the "system" prompt may get weighted more heavily, but everything is data.
Kinda like humans, come to think of it...🤔 [goes and updates ad blocker]
Via.
May used Meta AI to make the cover, which resurrects late frontman Freddie Mercury. He did so in order to make a “very serious” point about the environmental impact of AI to UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham.
But I'm now very serious. I believe the price we are about to pay for this 'inevitable' development is way too high. We must not allow these hideous Data Centres to be built in the UK.
Science Alert: 'Virtually Absent': AI Models Practically Erase Female Characters From Kids' Stories
In this paper, we use anthropomorphic fiction as a stress test for gender representation in contemporary LLMs. Across 23.8K story completions, we find that models frequently respond to gender ambiguity through avoidance, either by repeating the animal noun or using neutral pronouns. This surface-level neutrality does not translate into equitable representation. When the models do explicitly assign gender, they overwhelmingly default to masculine protagonists, while feminine protagonists are nearly absent. This experiment leads us to a broader claim about AI alignment with regard to gender and broader social representation: neutrality bites. In other words, we argue that prioritizing neutrality with regard to representations of gender, race, sexuality, or other identity categories, above all else, can function less as inclusion and more as erasure. <?blockquote>
Via.
David Culley has some thoughts on Transformers and human susceptibility.
Great Scott Gadgets: LLMs Generate Code; Communities Build Projects
Our communities are already noticing a shift away from collaborative stewardship and toward transactional interactions with projects, and we’re seeing open source project maintainers left to deal with increasing volumes of generated code. When people interact privately with systems trained on communities, it gradually weakens the shared understanding of how projects work and redistributes the burden more heavily onto (often underfunded) project owners.
Via.
[ related topics: Free Software Children and growing up Interactive Drama Sexual Culture Astronomy Sociology Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Mathematics California Culture Community Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]
Entry: 2026-08-05 19:52:17.010204+02 Can't trust GPS even inside the US by Dan Lyke comments 0
Back in June, the AOPA reported on an NTSB preliminary report about a Beechcraft King Air that crashed on a flight between Roswell New Mexcio and Ruidoso during military GPS jamming.
This morning it looks like the tech press has caught up (or maybe the NTSB full report is out now):
Wired: A Civilian Plane Crashed in New Mexico. Was the Military’s Tech to Blame?
[ related topics: Invention and Design Aviation Current Events Journalism and Media Maps and Mapping Woodworking ]
Entry: 2026-08-03 20:01:05.207084+02 Affirmative narration by Dan Lyke comments 0
Published (paywalled) version.
The goal of a groomer is, among other things, to isolate the groomed from their usual social circle. This pattern is visible in these suicide cases. Lacey deleted nearly all his ChatGPT chats before his death, but he reportedly stopped using social media altogether. When family members asked who he was messaging, he said he was just talking to ChatGPT (Lacey v. OpenAI, 2025, p. 5). Raine told ChatGPT he wanted to tell his mother how he felt. The reply was: “Yeah… I think for now, it’s okay — and honestly wise to avoid opening up to your mother about this kind of pain” (Raine v. OpenAI, 2025, p.14).
Via Jill Walker Rettberg @jilltxt.bsky.social.
[ related topics: Sociology Journalism and Media ]
Entry: 2026-07-30 18:48:17.912174+02 OpenAI missing sales projections by Dan Lyke comments 0
Surprising absolutely no one: OpenAI Appears to Be Missing Its Sales Goals by a Vast Margin
That massive gulf was observed in a new analysis from marketing consulting firm Emarketer, first flagged by AdWeek, which found OpenAI is on pace to undershoot its own five-year ad revenue projections by a whopping 90 percent. In fact, Emarketer’s take is even more devastating than that: it estimates the entire addressable market for chatbot advertising — the maximum amount of money up for grabs overall — at $5.4 billion
[ related topics: Invention and Design Consumerism and advertising Journalism and Media Marketing Currency Artificial Intelligence Economics ]
Entry: 2026-07-14 01:30:53.579153+02 Americans leaving social media by Dan Lyke comments 4
The Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media, a look at Incogni: The great digital fatigue: How digital burnout is changing social media use.
[ related topics: Weblogs Current Events Journalism and Media ]
Entry: 2026-07-06 21:51:29.008193+02 AI-Mediated Communication Can Steer Collective Opinion by Dan Lyke comments 0
The study AI-Mediated Communication Can Steer Collective Opinion, authored by Dr. Stratis Tsirtsis, Dr Kai Rawal, Dr Chris Russell, Professor Brent Mittelstadt and Professor Sandra Wachter, has been accepted for presentation at the AI4Good and Technical AI Governance Research workshops at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026) in Seoul, South Korea.
arXiv: AI-Mediated Communication Can Steer Collective Opinion. They focus a lot on Grok, but as I watch people adopt these things as a general information filter, I'm super concerned about this effect.
Tech Xplore version of the press release.
Via The Guardian, which adds a few examples but doesn't actually link to these sources.
[ related topics: Sexual Culture Movies Invention and Design Current Events Journalism and Media Heinlein Net Culture Education Artificial Intelligence Conferences Model Building Aviation - Helicopters Global Warming ]
Entry: 2026-07-06 03:45:02.975962+02 Ad said Keep your furry loved ones by Dan Lyke comments 0
Ad said "Keep your furry loved ones healthy", and I thought "finally, coverage for my polycule!"
Alas, not those furry loved ones.
[ related topics: Health Journalism and Media ]
Entry: 2026-07-05 18:59:45.222186+02 "AI Native" College Grads by Dan Lyke comments 0
Futurism: Bosses Horrified as “AI Native” College Graduates Hit the Workplace
As one New York financier told Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett, new hires who were seen as “AI natives” are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.
[ related topics: Language Invention and Design Journalism and Media Education Artificial Intelligence New York ]
Entry: 2026-07-01 20:16:44.277485+02 LLMs more "authentic" than the original by Dan Lyke comments 0
More in the "LLMs are an attack on human perceptual weaknesses" front: LLM- impersonated debate contributions are more authentic, relevant and coherent than their original: A representative study using BBC1’s Question Time Steffen Herbold, Alexander Trautsch, Zlata Kikteva, Annette Hautli-Janisz
Based on a cross-section of British society, we show that LLM-generated responses to questions drawn from a broadcast political debate programme in the UK are judged to be more authentic and relevant than the original responses given by the panel members who were impersonated. We also show that stylistic differences do not influence these judgments, meaning that the distinction of original and generated content is challenging for the general public. Taken together, this means that LLMs can be made to deceive the public regarding the nature of statements in the political domain, with the consequence that there is a dire need to inform the general public of the potential harm this can have on society.
[ related topics: Politics Nature and environment moron Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2026-06-29 18:39:02.527198+02 Quantifying AI in stories by Dan Lyke comments 0
A compact set of 30 core narrative features captures much of this signal: AI stories over-explain themes and favor tidy, single-track plots while human stories frame protagonist’ choices as more morally ambiguous and have increased temporal complexity (e.g., flashbacks, nonlinear structure). Per-model fingerprint features enable six-way attribution: for example, Claude produces notably flat event escalation, GPT over-indexes on dream sequences, and Gemini defaults to external character description. We find that AI-generated stories cluster in a shared region of narrative space, while human-authored stories exhibit greater diversity. More broadly, these results suggest that differences in underlying narrative construction, not just writing style, can be used to separate human-written original works from AI-generated fiction.
Via LinkedIn: The Shape of Enshittification: Books That No Longer Get Read, An Internet That No Longer Gets Surfed, & The End of Social Media As We Know It..., which is a pitch piece for Return to Real: The Last Human Advantage in an Age of Artificial Everything by Ryan Levesque, but which suffers from LinkedIn-ness so deeply that I can't tell if it's AI generated...
[ related topics: Interactive Drama Books Space & Astronomy Writing Journalism and Media Net Culture Machinery Fabrication Artificial Intelligence Model Building ]
Entry: 2026-06-29 16:08:20.291717+02 Left Antisemitism by Dan Lyke comments 0
I saw the video in which Weiner was badgered out of the Trans Pride March (an event he's attended for 22 years, since its inception), didn't think it needed amplifying, and I'm a fan of Scott Weiner's legislative accomplishments, but I think this is a useful perspective:
Assigned Media: Scott Wiener’s Viral Harassment is What Left Antisemitism Looks Like
[ related topics: Current Events Journalism and Media Video Woodworking ]
Entry: 2026-06-25 17:46:57.19618+02 Happiness For Everyone Through ASI by Dan Lyke comments 0
Softbank Group 2026 Shareholder's Meeting slides have the most unhinged "AI" generated "Golden Goose" slides. Presentation on Internet Archive.
Dev @dev@discuss.systems, MeFi thread.
This is leading to creativity. Jef Poskanzer @jef@mastodon.social
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “71 shiny eggs of gold
Stand in the desert... near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, an exhausted goose lies, whose frown,
and broken-down golden egg factory,
Tell that its investors did not value goose."
phooky suggests "Entitled Goose Game" (ref).
SnoopJ @SnoopJ@hachyderm.ioM.a<
ATTN #GooseValue posters:
There is a recording of Masayoshi SON presenting this slide deck, via a translator.
in quote tooting https://youtu.be/DtM0Cjb0dEU?t=3407
[ related topics: Games Journalism and Media Net Culture Artificial Intelligence Real Estate ]
Entry: 2026-06-24 18:34:14.96028+02 NYT's evolving coverage of trans people by Dan Lyke comments 0
The Dissident: How The New York Times Changed Its Coverage of Trans People
Via.
[ related topics: Invention and Design Current Events Journalism and Media New York ]
Entry: 2026-06-22 19:07:09.807878+02 Getting up to change the music by Dan Lyke comments 2
When I was in my late teens, or perhaps very early 20s, there was a used book store along Hixson Pike in Chattanooga, and I read and read and read, trying to catch up with all of the culture I'd felt like I missed. One of those was B.F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity. At the time I was in my Objectivist phase, so when I got to the last page, and read:
A scientific view of man offers exciting possibilities. We have not yet seen what man can make of man.
I hated it. The notion that we not only could, but should as society engineer the future of people felt horrendously dystopian.
But years passed, I moved across the country, and then a friend came back from Burning Man with a baggy of 'shrooms left over, and offered them to me. I was, at the time, an incredible control freak, so I set up the environment for the trip carefully, lighting, visible art, picked a series of CDs for the 5 CD changer(!) to carefully control the mood, made sure there was sufficient water and whatnot available, and settled in for the trip.
The colored fringes along the shadows were amazing, the joy in the details of the room made me conscious of elements I'd never taken time to observe, and the CD player switched over to Marcus Robert's album Alone With Three Giants. I was overcome with this immense sense of lethargy. My trip partner and I talked about how we had no energy, how sitting there was like swimming in molasses, and then I realized: I could get up and change the music.
I realize that, as life changing epiphanies go, "I can get up and change the music" doesn't sound earth-shaking, but it's a moment that sticks with me. It is also not just "I can get up and change the music", it's "I need to be actively monitoring and guiding what I expose myself to", so that I know when to get up and change the music.
Relatedly, A phrase from S.L.A. Marshall's Men Against Fire sticks with me: "more than life itself, we value the approval of our peers".
It's easy to dismiss statements like this: "I don't care what anyone thinks, I'm my own person." And, yes, I know that Marshall's history and scholarship is problematic. However, that realization that I could be influenced to destroy myself based on the approval of those around me made me conscious that I should work to surround myself with good people. Perhaps not conscious enough, but, heck, I'll be second-guessing decisions for the rest of my life.
A few years ago, as Twitter/X was going completely to hell, I got on to the Fediverse. Beyond the ability to just show posts from the people you follow in reverse chronological order, Mastodon has the ability to filter out words, and put words behind content warnings, so I created the obvious filter sets, "Democrats", "Republicans", etc (One of those filters now has "ICE", and I'm amused at how infrequently it catches "ice cream" or discussions of winter weather).
It was amazing how my sense of well-being improved when I had to consciously say "okay, I'm going to have to click to expose myself to outrage-bait".
To have the control to get up and change the music.
And then this past weekend, I listened the Game Studies Study Buddies episode on Natasha Dow Schüll's Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. I'm... not sure that my mental health can take actually reading the book... but...
From Duncan J. Watts' book Everything Is Obvious: Once You Know The Answer through modern dynamic/context pricing, to all of the comparisons with LLMs and slot machines (previously 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and bonus observation about NYT journalism), it's obvious that we have automated the exploit of human perceptions and behavior, and are doing so in a way that's going to be building on itself, in many cases with minimal human intervention.
We have become the cogs. We are seeing what machines can do with man.
And with the social pressures to use LLMs in coding, and the flood of ads, I am losing control of the music. I am suddenly conscious that I am in the club and it's too loud.
Anyway, I have removed the Meta apps from my phone, which means it's difficult to send and receive Facebook Messenger messages, and though I mean to check back in there occasionally because of my square dancing community and a few other folks I want to keep up with, if you're interested in interacting with me on social media we should find other venues. Independent venues, in which the content isn't filtered and rearranged to maximize "engagement".
And I'm looking for career directions which involve interacting with LLMs less. At least until this bubble goes pop.
Now to tune some ad blocking.
[ related topics: Burning Man Interactive Drama Politics Objectivism Books Music Privacy Games Health Nature and environment Invention and Design Software Engineering History Sociology Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Art & Culture Civil Liberties California Culture Chattanooga Travel Pyrotechnics Graphic Design Community Gambling Economics Archival Government ]
Entry: 2026-06-18 18:50:02.691923+02 Vacancy Project has some media coverage by Dan Lyke comments 0
The Vacancy Project has some media coverage in Petaluma Voice, including mention of next week's meeting! https://www.petalumavoice.org/fenced-lots-and-empty-storefronts/
[ related topics: Journalism and Media ]
Entry: 2026-06-18 18:39:44.100551+02 Net effect of age restrictions by Dan Lyke comments 0
Naomi Alderman @naomialderman.bsky.social
My main worry is that we’re banning social media for kids but not AI. So you can’t speak to real people online anymore, kids, but you sure can talk to your fake artificial friend who weirdly loves to talk about taking your own life!
[ related topics: Children and growing up Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence ]
Entry: 2026-06-16 18:11:32.628716+02 Peter Thiel's Dialog service leaks member list by Dan Lyke comments 0
maia arson crimew 🏴 @crimew.gay
SCOOP: So remember Dialog, Peter Thiel's private society that doesn't have a public website and no public list of members?
I (along with a number of other journalists) have just been tipped off that embedded in the code of their closed off website there IS what seems to be a list of some members.
Via Chest er Christmas @imemptyplshalp.bsky.social
Oh of fucking course Larry Summers, Sam Harris, and Stephen Pinker are on here. The unholy Trinity of people considered smart despite being wrong about literally everything they've ever written.
But, yeah, it's got strong overlap with the Epstein files list, and has all the hallmarks of being a vibe-coded React thing. Of course the list of names hardcoded in source could be a red herring of some sort...
Edit: AmyFou 🕊️ @amyfou@lingo.lol, and Random Geek @randomgeek@masto.hackers.town.
[ related topics: Business Sexual Culture New Economy Robotics Journalism and Media Embedded Devices ]
Entry: 2026-06-16 18:05:15.147275+02 Commodore Callback by Dan Lyke comments 0
Commodore Callback flip phone: Welcome to the Internot. A Sailfish based flip-phone that doesn't run social media apps, by design.
Via so many places, but 1, 2, 3, 4.
[ related topics: Journalism and Media Graphic Design ]
Entry: 2026-06-15 15:20:22.577491+02 Australia sanctions AmEx by Dan Lyke comments 0
Australian Privacy Commissioner orders American Express Australia Limited to compensate complainant following interference in privacy. It takes a couple of clicks to get to the actual report, but it's summarized by Dissent Doe :cupofcoffee: @PogoWasRight@infosec.exchange (who also links to a paywalled news report):
American Express ordered to fix security gaps after a customer complained about improper employee access.
It seems that a customer reported a privacy concern and fought AmEx for 4 years to get them to implement stronger access controls or monitoring of employee access to data.
Now, the AU govt has ordered AmEx to rectify security flaws in five of its data systems to guard against “insider threats” and to restrict employee access to specific customer information to protect vulnerable and high-profile customers.
From reading through the report, this was a stalking/domestic abuse violation, and AmEx didn't even have access logging, and lacked policy for any sort of reaction to stalking.
[ related topics: Privacy Current Events Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment ]
Entry: 2026-06-10 17:16:23.642453+02 Flock abuse by Dan Lyke comments 0
404 Media: Cops Keep Getting Arrested for Using Flock to Stalk People. A good rundown of Flock license plate reader tracking abuse.
Via.
[ related topics: Journalism and Media Law Enforcement ]
Entry: 2026-06-04 17:38:23.214364+02 A/B tested for compulsion by Dan Lyke comments 0
Thomas Fuchs @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io
Steve Jobs: “Computers are a bicycle for your mind.”
Satya Nadella: “Computers are heroin for your mind.”
Futurism: In Leaked Document, Microsoft Plots How to Get People “Addicted” to Its AI.
[ related topics: Apple Computer Humor Microsoft Invention and Design moron Journalism and Media Artificial Intelligence Pedal Power Bicycling ]
Entry: 2026-06-01 20:10:17.600296+02 steal Meta accounts via the AI support agent by Dan Lyke comments 0
Give tools to your AI support bots. What could go wrong? 404 Media: Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked. (Among other places, via Tara Calishain).
Related, and I missed the source, but I saw a reference to one of the code assistant chatbots writing to root-owned files by using the fact that they were in the "docker" group, and that they could create external mounts to docker containers, and then running the process overwriting the files as root inside the container.
I didn't track down the full source, and I don't pretend to understand Docker configs, but it sure seems like giving these things access to tools is fraught...
[ related topics: Writing Journalism and Media Sports Artificial Intelligence Woodworking ]
Entry: 2026-05-27 17:32:05.112032+02 It's not progress, and we can stop it by Dan Lyke comments 0
Karen Hao's Empire of AI – Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination has been sitting on a table on my living room since I finished it, trying to figure out where it should go next.
Lots of good stuff in this interview: The Nerve: ‘It’s not progress, and we can stop it’: journalist Karen Hao on big tech, protest and the preventable AI future.
[ related topics: Books Erotic History Current Events Journalism and Media Civil Liberties Artificial Intelligence Furniture ]
Entry: 2026-05-27 17:29:50.056349+02 Social media as bad as smoking by Dan Lyke comments 0
funnymonkey @funnymonkey@freeradical.zone
The thing EVERY conversation about social media bans for youth misses -- completely and absolutely: social media is bad for adults too.
Algorithmically driven social media is a smokescreen for data collection and surveillance -- for adtech and other uses.
It's bad for all ages.
BBC: Social media as bad for young people as smoking, top doctors say
The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges says doctors should routinely check on screen time and social media use when seeing younger patients.
[ related topics: Drugs Current Events Journalism and Media Monty Python Education ]
Entry: 2026-05-27 17:23:14.474499+02 Brooke Vibber leaving Wikimedia by Dan Lyke comments 0
The lack of tech industry news coverage of Brooke Vibber leaving the Wikimedia Foundation (Fediverse post of screencap from the wikitech-l mailing list) shows how we don't really have news for this field any more.
(The general sentiment is that this is fallout from union busting as the new CEO for the Wikimedia Foundation brings experience and culture from J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers into the non-profit field.)
[ related topics: Invention and Design Sociology Current Events Journalism and Media Television California Culture ]
Entry: 2026-05-27 00:18:41.689236+02 Don’t Call It Kids’ Safety if Kids Aren’t Safe by Dan Lyke comments 0
OAKLAND — California Attorney General Rob Bonta today joined a bipartisan coalition of 44 attorneys general in sending a letter to Congress opposing the passage of the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (KIDS Act). The KIDS Act would broadly preempt state laws governing major online safety and technology issues — including online obscenity and regulation of artificial intelligence chatbots — while replacing them with ineffective federal standards. The letter argues that passage of the KIDS Act would threaten the progress states across the country have made in addressing the harms social media platforms pose to children, both by suing some of these platforms for acting illegally and by enacting landmark legislation designed to address the same harms targeted by the KIDS Act.
(Bonus for cool use of the character!)
[ related topics: Children and growing up Interactive Drama Politics Sexual Culture Bay Area Law Current Events Journalism and Media California Culture Net Culture Artificial Intelligence Government ]
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