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 ]
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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