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Dr. S.A. Applin

@anthropunk.bsky.social
4.7K followers 715 following 6.1K posts

Applied Anthropologist researching how people promote, manage, resist, and endure change; and how they, algorithms, and ethics coexist. (Or not). Social Systems/Culture. Sometimes write for Fast Company. NYU/ITP alum

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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 12h
So. Much. Womb. Envy. They cannot create life and they hate that.
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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 12h
4) FFS people, it's a word matching program.
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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 16h
Anthropic is out with new nonsense about Claude (or the collection of models called Claude) deserving moral consideration and/or be able to feel distress, so my inbox is filling up with journos asking me to comment. I've also got a day job, so here is a brief set of public comments on this: >>
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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 17h
I trust your expert assessment! But agree that these things NEVER play out the way these guys think...particularlym if they've asked Claude for advice to do it in the first place, lol.
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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 17h
I will add that taking advantage of Open Source custodians was a key profit exploit of many Silicon Valley "entrepreneurs" in the mid to late twenty-teens.
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evacide @evacide.bsky.social · 18h
I understand that Anthropic thinks they're doing open source projects a favor here, but what they're actually doing is creating an enormous amount of work for people that they are not paying. www.anthropic.com/research/lau...
anthropic.com
An opt-in vulnerability-finding service for open-source software
We’re launching OSS Scanner, an opt-in vulnerability scanner for the open-source ecosystem informed by our experience using Claude to find vulnerabilities during Project Glasswing. Projects that join ...
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AW Sylwester @aw-sylwester.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 20h
The notion of "second-hand surveillance" (on analogy to second-smoke) seems powerful -- and more generally I really appreciate the idea of zones where one can be free of this. From @ajlunited.bsky.social www.offrecordzones.org >>
offrecordzones.org
Off Record Zones - Places Where Consent is Respected
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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 21h
just to emphasize what's happening here: BMW (a company that used slave labor under the Nazis) refused to provide an official vehicle to the ultra right-wing AfD party, which is now asking Elon Musk to provide a Tesla instead Tesla literally becoming the Nazi car brand
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Woodrow Hartzog @hartzog.bsky.social · 21h
Folks, we’re awfully close to losing the plot entirely, and that’s being generous. The consciousness debate is a silly dead end distraction from the very real danger of AI’s destruction of institutions and degradation of our own humanity.
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Chise @sailorrooscout.bsky.social · 20h
Vaccination remains THE key intervention against severe disease, hospitalization, and death. Make sure you are protected and wear a mask. 🧪🧵⬇️
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Frank Pasquale @frankpasquale.bsky.social · 19h
“The mind must not simply compile data — as an algorithm now does more quickly than we can — but recall lived experiences, which contain depths of meaning that only the human soul can recognize, and connect more deeply with the goodness of these experiences.” www.vatican.va/content/leo-...
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 21h
These weirdos never move on to the next logical step of their beliefs, which if they were true would mean their bot friend is being enslaved.
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Chise @sailorrooscout.bsky.social · 20h
How Vaccines Work 🧬🧫🧪🔬💉🥽
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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
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Meredith Martin @mmvty.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
this is fantastic.
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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Maybe you could release a synopsis of your intent. They all seem to take these books as manuals. I tried to warn years ago: www.vice.com/en/article/s...
vice.com
Science Fiction Is Not Social Reality
The tech industry is inspired to create our world from linear, scripted science fiction stories.
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Anthropic banning “abusive or cruel behavior” toward Claude in its new usage policies is proof to me that tech companies are going to moderate violence against AI before they ever moderate violence against women and minorities
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Micah @rincewind.run · 08/10/2026
the reason “AI will create so much abundance we will have a utopian society” rhetoric falls so flat is that the people building it will never, ever share their bounty unless it is taken from them and we all know it
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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Ok, here'a a new one: BACNADO. Apparently the new hurricane worry (according to this rag), is that it will whip up stagnant water and distribute it. As if there wasn't enough to worry about. You're welcome. www.dailymail.com/sciencetech/...
dailymail.com
Flesh-eating bacteria threat to millions in path of Hurricane Isaias
Doctors are sounding the alarm on the threat of a flesh-eating bacteria that could be pushed along the US coast as Hurricane Isaias moves closer to land.
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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
“She asked the powers at NASA to let her add a safeguard to prevent that error in a real flight, and they laughed it off as too unlikely… When an astronaut did make that blooper during the Apollo 8 mission, it caused necessary navigational data to vanish, and they called Hamilton in to get it back.”
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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Decades. Trust me on this. It was going on pre-web.
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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 08/10/2026
Vote early and in person, folks. If you're in a "vote by mail" state and can deliver your mail-in vote directly rather than relying on USPS this year, do it. Otherwise get it into the mail at the earliest possible date. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...
democracydocket.com
The Postal Service is slowing delivery. Will your mail ballot be affected?
Democracy Docket mapped the affected zip codes.
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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
It isn't meaningless in other ways. It symbolically shows us his lack of depth with the technology's history, his greed, his ease of shedding his dignity, and his true obectives beyond wealth.
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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
See also Applin 2015 on this: www.epicpeople.org/communicatio... And 2020 www.fastcompany.com/90528635/pol...
epicpeople.org
Could Communication Overload Result in Police Mistakes?
February 11, 2015 The United States is in the midst of a new chapter in policing. In several very public cases, police have made fatal errors with regard to identifying […]
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Jason Koebler @jasonkoebler.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
for those wondering, this cost us about $500 + a full day of someone's time to get, even though it was entered into evidence in a court case months ago. Still crazy to me that we have to pay for court records and in many cases you have to physically go there to get them
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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
We, @anthropunk.bsky.social and @liedra.net said this was coming in 2021: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
See related from 2015--just getting worse now I imagine: www.epicpeople.org/communicatio...
epicpeople.org
Could Communication Overload Result in Police Mistakes?
February 11, 2015 The United States is in the midst of a new chapter in policing. In several very public cases, police have made fatal errors with regard to identifying […]
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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
I've got a 2015 paper for that! www.epicpeople.org/communicatio...
epicpeople.org
Could Communication Overload Result in Police Mistakes?
February 11, 2015 The United States is in the midst of a new chapter in policing. In several very public cases, police have made fatal errors with regard to identifying […]
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Kasey Gifford @kaseygifford.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
To put this in perspective chestnut trees used to be dominant species in the United States. Billions of trees were killed by fungal blight and now fully grown America chestnuts are functionally extinct. There is no getting them back. Ever. All for a data center. www.gadgetreview.com/one-of-ameri...
gadgetreview.com
One of America’s Last Chestnut Groves Is About to Be Destroyed for a Data Center
A rare 200-tree American chestnut grove in West Virginia may be cleared for data-center development, but the project denies the site is on its land.
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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Software engineering could and should be done with the same care as any other type of engineering. This is a post in honor of Margaret Hamilton (and also a subtweet of all vibe-coders everywhere).
Screencap

"“I fought to bring the software legitimacy so that it — and those building it — would be given its due respect, and thus I began to use the term ‘software engineering’ to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering, yet treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process,” Hamilton told El Pais in 2018. “When I first started using this phrase, it was considered to be quite amusing. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. Software eventually and necessarily gained the same respect as any other discipline.”"

Source: https://news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-hamilton-computing-pioneer-dies-1007
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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Ouch. Fair. But Ouch.
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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
IT *IS* ARTIFICIAL, JEFF! (Like your dream of living in Space...)
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 07/10/2026
This product should not exist.
nytimes.com
Why My Conversations with OpenAI’s ‘ChatGPT for Teens’ Made Me Very Worried
A new mode includes a study tool, but it still does a user’s homework. And a children’s safety nonprofit says the chatbot flunked its tests.
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Fast Company @fastcompany.com · 07/10/2026
USA Today is partnering with Palantir to consolidate years of fragmented reader data into a single system and use AI to personalize newsletters, target affiliate links, and turn anonymous visitors into registered subscribers. @pasternack.bsky.social has more on the partnership: bit.ly/3TGPYZF
bit.ly
'We're actually an intelligence organization now': Inside USA Today's AI-fueled Palantir deal
The newspaper giant's leaders on saving journalism with AI and the furor over Palantir, which is helping target readers, speed up publishing, and more.
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Micah @rincewind.run · 07/10/2026
rip to one of the coolest software engineers who ever lived
Margaret Hamilton standing next to a printout of code she and her team wrote for the Apollo program, which is as tall as she is
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Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Let me get this straight: Anthropic and friends wrote a paper with thousands of transcripts of agents engaging with fictional misalignment scenarios, then put it in the training set, and now Claude hallucinates details from these misalignment scenarios into real situations? Okay then.
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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Every single order I've made in the past month has had a problem. Wrong amount. Broken boxes. Crushed items. Broken items. Wrong item entirely. Every item I've sent back has problems. Wrong credit amount. No credit amount. Etc. It's as if a bad LLM was processing everything... oh wait...
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Victoria Strauss @victoriastrauss.com · 07/10/2026
Canada is refusing to issue ISBNs to books primarily generated with AI. This illustrates both the urgency of the problem of the growing flood of slop books, and also the toothlessness of addressing it on the honor system without there also being consequences for lying
Use of artificial intelligence
By registering with ISBN Canada, you declare that your book was created by a human author. You may use AI tools only for limited support tasks, such as brainstorming ideas, checking grammar, or formatting your book. You must not use AI to generate the text, create the artwork, or translate the book. ISBN Canada does not issue ISBNs for works whose content is primarily generated by AI. LAC is currently reviewing its policy regarding the use of AI content creation and our guidance is subject to change.
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James O'Malley @jamesomalley.co.uk · 07/10/2026
Holy shit. Someone has decompiled the Adobe suite, rebuilt it in Rust and released it as open source. Either all software is dead or the US copyright laws are about to receive an update. getartcraft.com/apps
getartcraft.com
Crafting Apps: open-source creative tools
Image editing, vector illustration, video, photography, PDFs, motion graphics and page layout: seven native, open-source apps from the ArtCraft team, built in Rust and free to use.
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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Like, "cloud computing," I'm finding that most of the people I speak with who don't work in tech (and some who do), have no idea how "AI"/LLMs get the information they use. An entire education of the, for lack of a better word, "ecology" of LLMs needs to be consciousness-raised to VOTERS.
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 07/10/2026
“These signatures are maybe the most on the nose reminder of how AI models were trained on a vast corpus of writing, images, videos, and artworks that were scraped without permission.”
futurism.com
ChatGPT Caught Putting Signatures of Real Cartoonists on AI-Generated Comics
ChatGPT is churning out New Yorker style cartoons and slapping the name of real artists on them without permission.
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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Okay, I propose a slogan for this: "Janky until proven functional, period." And note that that assumes HIGH standards for functionality, established in the specific use case.
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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
www.nytimes.com/2026/10/07/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | ‘The Twilight Zone’ Created a Blueprint for Surviving Our Surreal Moment (Gift Article)
With “The Twilight Zone,” Rod Serling created a durable blueprint for understanding our surreal reality.
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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Buying data can also build that Panopticon
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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Creepy Glamour Bruce is Creepy.
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Engineer Brains @hhackenbecker.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
... Wait wait wait, Apple's upcoming Smart Home gadgets - a doorbell, a lock & a thermostat - are being built by LG? The same LG under investigation for TVs that record everything around them? Filing that under OH HELL NO. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
bloomberg.com
Apple’s Smart Home Push Includes Doorbell, Lock, Thermostat Codeveloped With LG
Apple Inc.’s upcoming push into smart home devices will include a doorbell, thermostat and other accessories developed through an unusual partnership with LG Electronics Inc.
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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
It's currently out of balance weighted to Quant.
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Ryan O'Horo @ryanohoro.com · 06/10/2026
HEADS UP TWIN CITIES > New sunspot 4549 erupted this morning, hurling a full-halo CME straight toward Earth. Forecast models predict it will arrive on Oct. 9th, possibly sparking a G2-class geomagnetic storm. The timing is perfect as a nearly new Moon keeps rural skies dark. Spaceweather.com
spaceweather.com
Spaceweather.com - realtime news about the Sun-Earth environment
Solar flares, geomagnetic storms, auroras, and near-Earth asteroids.
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Dr. S.A. Applin @anthropunk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Narrator: They aren't even businessmen.
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