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Baja Blastoise

@bajablastoise.bsky.social
4.1K followers 1.3K following 7.2K posts

macguffin afficionado

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Reposted by Baja Blastoise
Fred Coppersmith @unrealfred.bsky.social · 4h
“AI is just another tool.” No one’s arguing that. We’re arguing that it’s a *bad* tool, right now often dangerously bad, and that if it’s going to be used at all, some very fundamental problems with it first need to be addressed.
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lauren @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com · 1h
odd to me that there's been little innovation in the folding card table space the last 60 years. A card table my grandmother could buy in 1974 would largely look and function the same as today
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Gwen C. Katz @gwenckatz.bsky.social · 1h
All those used bookstores that are getting bulk orders from AI book-shredding companies have a golden opportunity to do some data poisoning, I'm just saying
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Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · 1h
This reminds me of how anyone who has *ever* had to do wfh timekeeping has had to deal with software that is not at all designed for how humans work, and they end up having to mcguyver things to fit into how the timekeeping program wants stuff logged.
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Eric Ravenscraft @lordravenscraft.bsky.social · 56m
everyone knows gAI is software, and it's not a magic guy living in the computer everyone knows chatbots and "agents" or whatever don't do anything if they're not set up by a human to do something so do you recognize them as tools humans use? or are you playing a game?
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Eric Ravenscraft @lordravenscraft.bsky.social · 1h
my basic bar for journalists anthropomorphizing AI is this: if Kermit the Frog ran over and killed a guy with his car, would you report Kermit was driving and maybe we shouldn't give licenses to frogs? Or would you drop the kayfabe and say some puppeteers committed vehicular manslaughter?
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Shoshana 🏳️‍⚧️ @shoshana.bsky.social · 19h
"When I first saw the lead concentrations, they were so high I thought our instrument was broken" 😬 Disposable vapes are also horrible for the environment, throwing away so much plastic, batteries, and electronics.
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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 1h
uh,
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Katherine Alejandra Cross @quinnae.com · 42m
Secondly, Reed apparently let an AI hallucinate a pro-trans quote from Graham Platner that didn't exist. One wonders if this contributed to the way some other prominent trans writers glazed him for months.
This is how Reed wrote an entire article on anti-trans politicians in Maine, while claiming Graham Platner was defending the rights of trans kids. In reality, the supportive quote belonged to Jordan Wood, a different politician from a different race. Her source cites the quote correctly, but her own article gets it wrong.

The source she cited for this does talk about Platner and Wood. The quote from Wood is in the paragraph before the cited article talks about Platner, but it does not directly quote any of Platner’s words.
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Katherine Alejandra Cross @quinnae.com · 48m
A couple of things stand out from The Needle's analysis. I have written professionally for about fifteen years, including for some pretty lofty publications, and I have *never* made 60k a year from writing. The money has to be coming from somewhere. Fear sells, apparently.
8.2: Personal Experience

Jane Migliara Brigham, one of the writers on this story, has spoken to Erin Reed about her journalism in the past.

In Jan. 2025, Brigham was interviewed by Erin Reed for a writing position at Erin in the Morning. She was offered $60,000 to write 4 articles a week at 600-800 words each. 

For contrast, in that same month, Artemis T. Douglas, the other writer of this story, interviewed at Colorado Public Radio for a role that would involve daily quick-turn stories, roughly one brief a day, about something that happened in Colorado, for $45,000-$50,000.
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Katherine Alejandra Cross @quinnae.com · 53m
Anyway, this story dropped today, which I'm sure everyone will be very normal about. These are very serious allegations that, if true, are effectively career-ending. But it does fit the pattern of becoming captive to an audience expectation for ever more panic.
theneedlenews.com
Erin Reed Has Been Hiding AI-Generated Text in Her Reporting For Years
Much of what she has written for Erin in the Morning since Spring 2023 has been written and/or influenced by AI. The resulting articles are full of unacknowledged and unretracted errors.
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Katherine Alejandra Cross @quinnae.com · 56m
It is maximally profitable right now to either sell panic *about* trans people, or sell panic *to* trans people. Both impulses feed the media consumer's desire to feel mastery over events. One is simple bigoted conspiracism, the other is a defensive crouch that offers a false sense of security.
Emily: I think about this as a journalist and a novelist: I cannot control how the reader takes what I write. Especially when reporting, I try to be as careful as I can, but somebody might read what I write and conclude, Well, we're all going to die. And there's such an incentive structure to walk right up to the edge of catastrophe or even stick a toe over the line, and even publications I think are terrific will get as close to that line as they can because they know that drives subscription dollars and clicks. That's not just true of trans media; it's true of the media writ large. How do you think about that incentive structure, especially as it relates to social media?

Me: There's two ways to generate clicks about trans issues. One is to sell panic about trans people; the other is to sell panic to trans people. The social media incentive structure there, as it is with so many issues, is the septic, perverted version of that old classic about local TV news: If it bleeds, it leads.

Selling people that sense of control is, as I noted, the same thing at the root of a lot of conspiracism: not to trust mainstream sources who tell you things aren't quite so bad or things could get better or don't panic. It's the cinematic logic of a disaster movie where the people who are saying, "Actually, you should panic!" are correct. Think about everything from the narrative structure of Independence Day or Mass Effect. The catastrophizer is actually correct against all the people saying, "I'll calm down. It won't be so bad." That story structure is very, very popular, and it gets you invested in the protagonist with a pleasing sense of dramatic irony for the audience. They know something many of the other characters don't or refuse to accept.

We are all reared on some version of this story, and it seeps into everyday life. There's an excellent piece from CBS News in 1967 by Eric Sevareid reporting on the findings of the Warren Commission [whi
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Katherine Alejandra Cross @quinnae.com · 1h
Recently, I did a wonderful interview with the indefatigable @emilystjams.bsky.social about trans people's online information environment and why there are very strong incentives to spread panic. It was a wide-ranging discussion that I think is more relevant than ever.
episodes.ghost.io
What's the matter with trans panic media?
Scholar Katherine Alejandra Cross on why it's so profitable to "sell panic to trans people."
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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 45m
i think the much-discussed "what's wrong with the video game industry" issue falls along similar lines. weaponization of dark patterns to turn what should be a fun activity into a grim addictive grind that serves to benefit the game's publisher
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Mel Buer @melbuer.bsky.social · 50m
In a rare Newsom W, today he signs AB 2222, the Community NEWS Act, which would establish some of the best tax incentives/rebates for newsrooms in the country. It would send $40M/year back into California newsrooms to keep journalists employed. Check out the presser happening live right now:
youtube.com
Governor Newsom Signs Legislation & Speaks with Media
YouTube video by California Governor Gavin Newsom
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Nick Lutsko @nicklutsko.bsky.social · 1h
If you like infowars you’ll love the muppets
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Brian G. aka urbanbohemian 🪩🥂💖 @urbanbohemian.com · 1h
We're on Bluesky, put the link in your post. Put the link in your post. Put. The. Link. In. Your. Post. Links in posts aren't buried or de-prioritized here. This is one of the last platforms you don't have to make interested users do detective work to find the link. Just put it in the post.
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Baja Blastoise @bajablastoise.bsky.social · 1h
i hate that this week i saw one social media team for a museum do a silly "crappy" post because their graphics person was out on medical leave and since then i have seen three different extremely active accounts do a "tee hee crappy graphics" post. you suck. trends suck. i respect you less now
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Jason Scott @textfiles.com · 1h
Oh come on, make it subtext at least
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McSweeney's @mcsweeneys.net · 18h
"Restaurant operating with non-functioning sink. Oven apparently being used as storage space and employees make whirring and sizzling sounds to make food." buff.ly/QahTR38
buff.ly
Health Inspector’s Notes from the Fisher-Price Kitchen in Miss Carol’s Preschool Classroom
“Witnessed chefs frequently dropping food on floor, retrieving items with bare hands, and immediately serving food to customers.” reposted 7/13/23
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Tony Corsentino @notalegalrecord.net · 1h
sorry to post about something Aaron Sorkin said in an interview, but I was pleased to hear him say that to him it doesn’t matter how “good” LLMs get at “writing” scripts or novels; if he were to learn that some piece of writing he liked was generated by a chatbot, he’d just sigh and forget about it
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Mike Rothschild @rothschildmd.bsky.social · 1h
Right after the Eaton Fire, Ben reached out to let me know he talked to some folks he still knew at NBC to get me on the air. I was on MSNBC the next night. There was nothing in it for him, he just did it. One of the best people I know, and he deserves everything good he gets.
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Alex Ip 葉清霖 @alexip718.com · 1h
I still strongly believe that air conditioning is a human right. But we've got to figure out what to do with aging A/C units across the world — fast.
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Nicholas Slayton @nslayton.bsky.social · 1h
Bass straight up said she does not consider the genocide in gaza to be a genocide. No unclear wording, she was direct
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Tuta @tuta.com · 1h
We did it: The EU Parliament continues to OPPOSE #ChatControl 2.0! 🥳 Thanks everyone for writing to representatives. 🫶 The next trilogue is scheduled for November, we must make sure that end-to-end encryption and private communication remains to be protected! #privacy
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 1h
How many years and billions in investment, just to learn we should be doing it the way we've always done it
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 1h
I decided to re-do this old calculation + LLMs test, and now it seems the big models just create a piece of code to do the calculation instead of brute-forcing it. IE: LLMs work best when they're doing at little LLM as possible, and every advancement is just less LLM and more stuff-that-works
Python
num1 = 4679865
num2 = 1346792
result = num1 * num2
print(f"Result: {result}")
print(f"Formatted: {result:,}")

Code output
Result: 6302804743080
Formatted: 6,302,804,743,080

4,679,865 × 1,346,792 = 6,302,804,743,080
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Stomak @eevee.pmd.social · 6h
this is absolute bullshit
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CrimethInc. Ex-Workers' Collective @crimethinc.com · 1h
The shift from industrial to post-industrial did not just take place on the macro-economic scale. At the scale of the household, our grandparents knew how to repair appliances that we cannot understand today. Just as neoliberalism *de-industrialized* our society, AI is *de-intellectualizing* us.
“Part of how A.I. is making us dumber,” says Dr. Adam Green, a cognitive neuroscientist at Georgetown University, is “undercutting the development of learning how to think in younger people that now have an alternative.”
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Yell In a War @jelenawoehr.bsky.social · 2h
Denver has banned all lawn watering due to drought (good, there should be no lawns in arid ecosystems). No water use restrictions for CoreSite’s datacenter, which by the company’s own estimates will use 115,000 gallons per day—not counting the additional two buildings currently paused for one year.
denverpost.com
Separating fact from fear when it comes to our Elyria Swansea data center (Opinion)
CoreSite’s planned DE3 data center near the National Western Center has been at the center of … worries. I want to address the five most common concerns.
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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 1h
Even hotter take: the fact that ebikes let teens in the suburbs suddenly have freedom to move around the public realm unsupervised is precisely why many older people are trying to ban them (using safety as a pretext)
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Chappell Ellison @chappelltracker.bsky.social · 2h
today's hardware designers could never conceive of what Kazuo Kawasaki was doing in 1996
A colorful retro computer setup featuring a purple keyboard, a small teal touchpad, and a teal circular CD-ROM drive with a matching keypad-style controller resting on top. The hardware is arranged against a dark background in a vivid purple-and-turquoise color scheme.
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Karen K. Ho @karenho.bsky.social · 2h
It's inspiring to learn the idea for this school first started in 2019 and education scholars have been working on it for years: www.tc.columbia.edu/articles/202...
tc.columbia.edu
Hip-Hop Education Enters a New Era in the Bronx
The Bronx School of Hip-Hop was co-created by TC’s Maxine Greene Chair for Distinguished Contributions to Education, Christopher Emdin
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molly conger @socialistdogmom.bsky.social · 3h
don’t turn my mailman into a cop, that sucks
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Erica C. Barnett @ericacbarnett.bsky.social · 3h
In San Francisco, Lurie's RV ban—on which Dan Strauss' similar proposed ban in Seattle appears to be modeled—hasn't gotten people into shelter, but it has pushed them outside city limits, often after losing their RVs and becoming unsheltered. Is this what "success" will look like here?
missionlocal.org
S.F. cracked down on RV dwellers. A year later, many have left the city altogether.
Data shows that a year after San Francisco's RV ban, 1/3 of RV dwellers using city aid have moved outside city limits.
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Bruno Dias @brunodias.dev · 6h
the virgin AI ("it's inevitable and here to stay but also we are gonna need a government bailout and we need you to force people to use it") vs the chad photovoltaics (accelerating deployment in spite of a totally hostile policy environment)
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Mando @mrmandolino.itch.io · 6h
this is not just a meme btw. solar can't be stopped even when governments are blatantly against it this is the real tech of the future. it's here, it's getting adopted whether idiots want it or not, even if more slowly it just makes sense on an economic level www.yahoo.com/news/us/arti...
yahoo.com
Byron Donalds says solar power is a ‘fad’ but Florida utilities are expanding its use
Despite the Trump administration’s hostility towards renewable energy, information released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that utility solar capacity — large scale projects that ...
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Susan Rinkunas @susanrinkunas.com · 2h
NEW / HUGE: Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama sued nearly three dozen abortion pill providers + a pharmacy and The states asked the Supreme Court to be able to sue New York, Massachusetts, and California to challenge their telehealth shield laws @autonomynews.co storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Dear Mr. Cayce:
I write to notify the panel of two legal developments material to the
panel’s resolution of this case.
First, today Louisiana—joined by Arkansas and Alabama—filed a
lawsuit in the Western District of Louisiana against nearly three dozen
individuals and entities responsible for remotely dispensing FDA-
approved mifepristone in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama. See
Louisiana v. Nouhavandi, No. 2:26-cv-03836 (W.D. La.) (attached). As
the complaint in that case illustrates, none of those individuals and
entities could carry out their current operations without the 2023
REMS’s removal of the in-person dispensing requirement.
Second, also today Louisiana—joined by Arkansas and Alabama—
filed a motion for leave to file a bill of complaint (attached), Louisiana v.
New York, in the United States Supreme Court against New York,
Massachusetts, and California. The bill of complaint challenges the
telehealth shield laws of those states on various legal grounds.
Both complaints explain how Louisiana’s success in Louisiana v.
FDA will eliminate the flood of FDA-approved mifepristone into the
State. Louisiana’s success in Louisiana v. Nouhavandi will eliminate the
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ability of nearly three dozen of the most prominent actors to illegally send
any abortion drugs into the State. And Louisiana’s success in Louisiana
v. New York will strip all shield-law state residents—regardless of any
back-up drugs they may try to use—of the claimed authority to violate
Louisiana’s laws with impunity.
espectfully,
/s/J. Benjamin Aguiñaga
J. Benjamin Aguiñaga
Solicitor General
Counsel for Louisiana
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Karen K. Ho @karenho.bsky.social · 2h
In 2024, I was diagnosed with HPV again and had to have LEEP surgery for an 8% chance of cervical cancer. I did general instead of localized anaesthesia and it cost me $1600+ with insurance, plus $40 per appointment with my OB-GYN. And the Gardasil vaccine has been approved for adults up to age 45!
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Mike Stabile @mikestabile.bsky.social · 1h
audiences know that there's nothing behind it. You lose the drama. It's not limited to AI. Think about Milli Vanilli, or James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. A huge best-selling memoir — until it was revealed to be semi-fiction. The story itself didn't change. But the context did. It was empty.
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Mike Stabile @mikestabile.bsky.social · 1h
They tried this with adult content and it largely failed. While there have been some niche use cases, audiences want to feel a connection to the creator — whether that's an author, a porn performer or a musician. It's not because the technology isn't believable, it's because
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Matt Orion @orionmatt.bsky.social · 1h
FRIGHT NIGHT PART 2 (1988) has a funny tooling up scene. Peter Vincent recites all the films his weapons appeared in, as he packs them for the fight
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lauren @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com · 2h
google should be forced, by law, to fully fund wikipedia for a thousand years
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W.E.D.em Boyz @leftistwonk.bsky.social · 2h
In our media landscape, having enough money makes you too big to fail. It doesn’t matter if Gates has extremely credible allegations of what he took part in with Epstein or if Musk does Nazi salutes and pushes white genocide. They can get a profile/interview with any outlet they want at any time.
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phil @philjamesson.com · 4h
as always when this is posted, i have to fondly remember the time someone stole this tweet word for word, including using my name as the punchline, then claimed it was just independent discovery
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utopia deferred @utopia-defer.red · 6h
destroying Greek life would be useful for stemming an entire mode of social reproduction which, as I must remind everyone, was born of the confederate south. Greek life prides itself on keeping the tradition of rape alive in more than one form. Sometimes literal.
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𝚃𝚊𝚛𝚊𝚜 𝙶𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚌𝚘𝚎 🚇 @taras-grescoe.com · 19/12/2024
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.”
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Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social · 3h
A little bit of whimsy along a curbside bike lane in London. I love these tulips!
green plastic bike lane post with purple plastic tulip on top.Row of bike lane posts with red and pink and orange plastic tulips on top.Cyclist in curbside bike lane on city street.
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Eric Ravenscraft @lordravenscraft.bsky.social · 2h
I know it's been said a million times before, but it's worth a reminder: this kind of thing is marketing. This guy sells AI courses. "You hate me for being right about how much you all will love this" gets attention from haters and is a lightning rod for potential customers. It's a gimmick
@nicksaraev: "Yes, this probably hurts your feelings. It's still going to happen."

Quoting himself: "The general public hates Al music.

Here are other things the general public hated over the years."@nicksaraev profile, with 5,854 followers: "I help entrepreneurs & small businesses implement Al, 500K on YouTube, 500K on Instagram"
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