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Lucy Makes Stuff

@lucymakesstuff.bsky.social

Lucy Makes Stuff @lucymakesstuff.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

@britishlibrary.bsky.social Will tickets for your online Fairy Tales event tonight include a replay option for those who can’t listen in live?

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Reposted by Lucy Makes Stuff

The Author, Séamas O'Reilly @seamas.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

An excellent thread of historical cases of dangerous info-slop, and how it contaminates through generations. I made similar points in my Gist piece from 2024, below. www.thegist.ie/the-gist-3/

Let’s take Large Language Models as an example, since they’re the most well-known piece of broadly usable AI tech on the market. Much of their notoriety stems from the fact that its hallucinations are so infamous as to be cliché. We all, I’m sure, have our favourites, like meal planners that recommend putting glue on pizza and eating three rocks a day; mushroom foraging bots which suggest users cook and prepare entirely fatal fungi; or supermarket apps that cheerfully prescribe recipes for “aromatic water” AKA chlorine gas.

It should be observed that such examples are not merely failures because they advocate things that kill their users (although this is not ideal) but because they take the place of existing repositories of information which had little-to-no use case for replacement. In so doing, they’ve also managed to muddy the waters of online information gathering to the point that that even if we scrubbed every trace of those hallucinations from the internet – a likely impossible task - the resulting lack of trust could never quite be purged. Imagine, if you will, the release of a car which was not only dangerous and unusable in and of itself, but which made people think twice before ever entering any car again, by any manufacturer, so long as they lived. How certain were you, five years ago, that an odd ingredient in an online recipe was merely an idiosyncratic choice by a quirky, or incompetent, chef, rather than a fatal addition by a robot? How certain are you now?

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Reposted by Lucy Makes Stuff

~daniel_barker~ @daniel-barker.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

It's the 3rd of January 1939, your name is professor James Smith and you are staring at a drawing of a fish. It's not a regular fish. It is a completely impossible fish.

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Lucy Makes Stuff @lucymakesstuff.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

It’s been a long time since I posted anything in this sort of format so I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing here. But I am here.

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