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Glenn Ellingson

@geewiz.bsky.social
109 followers 341 following 84 posts

Humans gonna human. Gotta love 'em anyway, and maybe try to help out a bit...

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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 28/09/2025
iOS 26 is a disaster. Stunningly fugly; unreadable blurs under your text; the widget screen (leftmost swipe) is a disaster - they even broke the one usable widget (recent/search apps); controls keep hiding and morphing so you can't find or hit them... I used to blame Jony Ive... who do I blame now?
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 24/09/2025
Correct. Hosting this stuff itself is not very net profitable; that is not the incentive here. Notice that the “announcement” was in the form of a letter to Jordan’s committee. This is just YT caving to a dangerous government to dodge threats of meddling. I worked on this stuff inside a platform
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 13/08/2025
This is actually my field; this piece of reporting is a lazy summary of an interesting paper, albeit one with very real limits - including that it had LLM actors, not human participants. Algorithmic fixes in real world usage can very significantly affect (improve or degrade) our online experiences
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 03/07/2025
One crazy old man here saying “just give me the transcripts, doesn’t anyone read anymore??”
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Reposted by Glenn Ellingson
Techdirt @techdirt.com · 02/07/2025
Trump’s Immigration Enforcement: Free The Criminals, Jail The Innocent The Trump administration's immigration enforcement has revealed itself to be not just cruel, but fundamentally backwards: They're literally freeing dangerous criminals while manufacturing cases against innocent people. And…
techdirt.com
Trump’s Immigration Enforcement: Free The Criminals, Jail The Innocent
The Trump administration's immigration enforcement has revealed itself to be not just cruel, but fundamentally backwards: They're literally freeing dangerous criminals while manufacturing cases against innocent people. And they're doing it all to cover up their own massive legal fuckups. Take the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. We covered this last week when Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes ordered his release, noting that the Justice Department appeared to have leaned on actual criminals to fabricate evidence against him.
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 13/05/2025
I write paper checks AND drive a stick shift... and I'm a young'un, several months younger than you are! (I also drive an electric car and build systems for ecommerce and internet platforms... it's yes and, not either or!)
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 21/04/2025
No no this is a perfect use of AI for efficiency: this is the most efficient way to tell your customers to go F themselves, you don't care....
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 15/03/2025
Do you use LLMs for search/answers? Do you have friends who do? It's time to sit down and have an intervention! Across all vendors LLMS confidently misidentify information (e.g. fabricating sources) more than half the time -- even when "plain" google does not. arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/a...
arstechnica.com
AI search engines cite incorrect sources at an alarming 60% rate, study says
CJR study shows AI search services misinform users and ignore publisher exclusion requests.
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 15/01/2025
And while I'm at it, another hot take: the Apple Watch SUCKS. I will spare y'all my 15 bullet points on why. TL;DR: after 4 days of constant use (and twiddling, and googling) I still have almost no idea what it's doing most of the time, and it apparently feels the same way about me.
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 15/01/2025
Only figured out that one when the friend eventually jogged up and said "hey, what are you doing?" -- and when I explained, he checked his pockets...
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 15/01/2025
Once, a friend accidentally brought them with him while running, and I spent 20 minutes searching a specific spot in the bushes on the side of a road where FindMe *swore* they were (and I had biked past there earlier, so it was vaguely plausible).
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 15/01/2025
FindMy knew they were "with me" but I walked the whole house 5 times and it couldn't point me directionally, and the sound it eventually deigned to play was so faint that I could tell when I was in the right room but STILL could not pinpoint them. This is my typical experience.
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 15/01/2025
Apple's FindMy is both the best AND the worst feature ever. I misplace EVERYTHING so I love this idea SO MUCH but I just spent 15 minutes using it to find my AirPods, which were within arm's reach when I started searching, hidden under a faraday cage -- oops, I mean a cardboard box lid from See's.
image of airpods on side table, with candy box lid that had been on top of them
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 19/12/2024
Block and ignore, man. Don’t give the trolls oxygen.
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
Do you have specific performance/reliability/bias criteria in mind? We did, and we met them or we didn't launch (and we "unlaunched" if standards or performance changed). Not perfectly, of course. But there were a lot of subject matter, data, and ML experts making those decisions.
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
I will also, with respect, challenge the description of Meta's AI detection as "hamfisted." Content moderation at scale without errors is impossible -- whether done with AI or even (given infinite staff and resources) by humans. (Humans disagree with each other and make mistakes too.)
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
To see Mark Zuckerberg & Nick Clegg now highlighting only false positives -- and ignoring false negatives -- to cozy up to the current political regime is, frankly, pretty disgusting. Pure politicking, IMO
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
Speaking as someone who was there, I respectfully disagree that Meta overstepped during covid. The tradeoffs are challenging, of course, and reasonable people will disagree on specific policy decisions. But all work was undertaken with clear and explicit weighing of competing principles.
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
My favorite analogy is: would you eat a package of chips you saw randomly floating past you in the gutter? News quality is important just like food quality. Get it from somewhere you trust.
quality.et
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 03/12/2024
We built that same intervention at Meta. Tested well. Not sure if it’s still in use
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
Yeah, our team tried to do the VR meeting thing; novel, kinda interesting once, but nope & we stopped
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 23/11/2024
As a social media safety professional, 💯. Social media, especially open threaded (aka "twiitterlike") social media is COMPLETELY unsuitable for getting news, discussing politics, and especially any form of deliberation. Just have fun!
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Totally different system, with different goals, at bsky. Bsky does minimal required moderation in-house and provides really cool tools for others to build (and easily share to other users) custom labeling and feeds. (Maybe 'cause they have 10 engineers not 10K+ like Meta....)
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
You might be onto something. I worked on Instagram back in the pandemic days... but have never once posted 😅. Honestly, I felt that a lot of people in that company did not really understand their products -- just their team metrics.
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 22/11/2024
Hang in there, you're all doing great! I remember scaling pressures at PayPal loooong ago, when we tracked how many days until the site would be hard down due to organic growth overloading our non-sharded database architecture that we could only scale by "can anyone sell us a bigger server??" (heh)
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
In fairness I think most republicans want criminals out too. And various sleazebags, cheats, etc. It’s party leaders, faced with narrow margins and fear of political losses, that circle the wagons. Which, screw their lack of backbone. Plus, DJT is an idiot. Our leaders have bent sometimes too
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
And, when used as a signal, CN (and other fact-checking programs) can be used to evaluate account/source quality, which is a factor that can be used to affect the distribution of *future* contributions from sources that do/do not have a history of high-quality posting
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
What do I mean by knock-on value? Well, it gets some group of people actively engaged with evaluating and responding, for one. And effectively coaches them (due to the algos used in the product) to produce "answers" that will have broad appeal across diverse audience members
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
Community notes is a really interesting & great product. But it's not a T&S solution, or a way to materially impact misinformation distribution; the original authors conceed as much. It's too slow and cannot scale to match the production of misinfo. It *can* add value in some knock-on ways, however.
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
You're doing social media wrong, Tracy. That's not outrageous (although I am getting FOMO, looks delicious!). Post only airport meals. 🙄
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
It's remarkable that not only is Trump the least fit president-elect ever, but that likely 95% of his *voters* would be less unqualified. Very few Americans have hit his tilt combo of idiocy, bankruptcies, corruption, brazen lying, sexual assaults, insulting military heros, impeachments, ...
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 11/11/2024
Yes, will be up at least a couple million from 2020 as well when all votes are counted (and votes for Dems will be considerably down). Fascism is winning fans -- or at least some people are choosing it over the alternatives, right now in this moment.
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 01/11/2024
Very fair, and important thinking. How the structural aspects of our media systems affect behaviors and outcomes. I do think, though, that discovery has mostly moved entirely out of a channel/surfing paradigm and into feeds ("for you" feeds & discovery feeds that may *look* less like feeds but are)
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 01/11/2024
Sending my moral support to a vulnerable community, but also really interested to see how this application of the principles of earned access works out. I think this is a strong model to encourage and reward prosocial contributions while raising barriers/costs for bad actors
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 31/10/2024
Who still has tv channels?
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 14/09/2024
This is what happens when noisy privileged people raise a stink in crisis moments to push out the people they don't like.... who TOTALLY RANDOMLY (sarcasm alert) somehow keep turning out to be less male and less white (and less rich, and less "platformed") than the complainers....
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 23/07/2024
Act Blue is pure evil. I have totally stopped giving donations hoping against hope that someday my number will fall off their spam lists
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 08/07/2024
These reporting flows are terrible(I used to work in this area @ Meta). That tag is intended to allow reporting of (illegal per US gov) terrorist financing ops etc. 100% ineffective processes though
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Reposted by Glenn Ellingson
Mike Masnick @masnick.com · 26/06/2024
Pretty much every one of these studies comes up with similar results.
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 17/05/2024
Ooo, what pairs well with expense reports? I have a couple I need to send in… (sorry, sigh)
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 24/04/2024
I should clean up my remarks above: we don't need -- or want -- companies out of business. We just need to wipe out the shareholders. That will align incentives rather sufficiently, I should think, to change behavior. (And yes, I own stock, through funds, in all these companies.)
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 24/04/2024
Google and Meta *buy* your data, and use it to sell ads. Everyone else sells your data. It's maddening. We need legilation clearly establishing liability for this sort of behavior (and for data breaches). Strong enough liability to put fortune 500 companies out of business.
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 18/04/2024
Wish I had time to write it myself! But really hope some people build interesting feeds with these (and other) signals. Can't wait to consume & see how they do
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 12/04/2024
@matthewcbell.bsky.social o hai!
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 01/04/2024
Woo-hoo! Just in the nick of time to preorder!
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 28/03/2024
This ex-felon official deserves the sanction, a fine & reprimand, for voting while ineligible in what plausibly could be a mistake. But contrast this punishment with black ex-felons in FL getting long jail time for the same error. (As for the GA GOP employing ex-felon election deniers, well...)
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 28/03/2024
Scaring people makes them more fearful; more likely to retrench and seek security than be open. The fear-of-immigration-and-immigrant xenophobia works particularly well, unfortunately, for "conservative" (really fascist) leaders. Opponents of fascism are fighting uphill against fear-based appeals
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 28/03/2024
I defer to you & other qualified persons re: the constitutionality of this effort. To add 2 more significant concerns: the lack of evidence that verification badging has any impact on trust; and if badging does increase trust why "a human was near this account at one time" should earn such a bump
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 27/03/2024
As a Resident Old, I'll just leave this here for any Yutes wandering by who may not have seen it in the original... www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgHx...
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Glenn Ellingson @geewiz.bsky.social · 27/03/2024
Counterpoint: if a comment system was added, it would distract me from the actual content I'm trying to consume. RSS is for distribution, not discussion. I don't usually care about what other people think of the content I consume via RSS. (As you note, social media serves the interaction purpose)
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