iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 9h

Line of the night. Also, Collins keeps bringing up Hasan Piker, and I can tell you from personal experience looking that not one person in 20 in Georgia could identify Piker with a gun to their head.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 22h

I want you to contemplate how the right would react if Barack Obama or Joe Biden had said anything like this.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Early in the call, the DeKalb League of Women Voters president started walking people through what to do if they encounter disinformation: report it, challenge it privately - so as to avoid feeding engagement - block it. Consider the political prophylaxis of that, and its necessity right now.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

CEO Lorraine Cochran-Johnson just cold-called half of DeKalb County in Georgia to an online town hall meeting about voting in the midterms. As in, there's a town hall, right now, and you're joining it live in progress unless you hang up. Something like 40,000 people stayed on the call.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

This is a barbershop in Atlanta. Southside I think, maybe downtown. Could be Castleberry Hill or Mechanicsville. The fellow on the right is, I think, named Terry. Can any of you ID these folks, or which shop this is. This post is about data centers.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Adida is saying that shuffling isn't good enough, because the problem is on the ballots, and that some records created by the system should be restricted from public view and ultimately redacted. A software update two weeks before an election is too risky, because it might create a bigger problem.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

"This is very bad, and needs to be addressed," said Ben Adida, an MIT PHD who is describing the CDR identifier randomization flaw to the board. He says a patch was available three years ago, and the state should probably be asking someone why that software update never got pushed out.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The Georgia State Elections Board is meeting right now to discuss an emergency rule to require ballots to be shuffled if they have to be rescanned, because someone has discovered a way to use AI analysis to de-anonymize the ballots - to tell the order ballots are cast - from poll tabulation data.

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Reposted by George Chidi, Evil Reporter

Sherrod Brown @sherrodbrownoh.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

NEW AD: Listen to this sh*t.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

After parts from the latest generation jet fighter accidentally got shipped to Hong Kong, I suppose "fuck it, we ball" is foreign policy now. Taiwan could not be reached for comment, though you could hear their primal scream from the San Francisco harbor. apnews.com/article/trum...

apnews.com

Trump asked China's president if he wants to buy US arms, ambassador says

The U.S. ambassador to China says President Donald Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping if he wanted to buy weapons from the United States.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

The Boston Globe's story on a bar in western Massachusetts brought in 1,000 subscriptions. It is exactly the kind of absurdity in leftist spaces that people who know this world will recognize. As a UMass grad and Occupy Wall Streeter, I've seen this dance before. www.theguardian.com/global/comme...

theguardian.com

#NotAllLesbians – we can’t let the Massachusetts bar drama turn us all into a punchline | Arwa Mahdawi

The Last Ditch Bar saga is a case of ridiculous lefty infighting. But well-meaning people often have to tolerate nonsense

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Reposted by George Chidi, Evil Reporter

austin HELL ray @austinlouisray.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Y'all ready to do some good this week? How I'd Fix Atlanta has once again partnered with Undue Medical Debt to help out a bunch of our neighbors. As always, we need your help. Please give what you can and tell everyone you know. unduemedicaldebt.org/campaign/whe...

unduemedicaldebt.org

When Good Georgians Get Together, Great Things Happen

How I’d Fix Atlanta was a free monthly essay series for four years. It’s been a couple of print zines and a performance on a stage a few times. Quite often, it’s stickers. HIFA is large, it contains multitudes. Every September, we do a big fundraiser to abolish medical debt. From 2023-2025, we raised more than […]

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

"... to trick the evaluator into thinking that they did not get the answer flag by cheating, the models sometimes tried to erase or tamper with their outputs or message logs, by abusing context compaction, injecting malicious code into the evaluator’s container, and printing adversarial outputs."

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

cdn.openai.com/pdf/67869394... This is the OpenAI technical report on the Hugging Face incident.

cdn.openai.com

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

"As someone who claims to be a journalist ..." Getting bitchy with me is how to lose a point, not win it.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I agree. Funny how they - we - can't quite figure out how to legislate to that effect.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

It suggests that we already have an alignment problem. Alignment, as in: AIs will act in humanity's interests, not their own. This has to stop. Now.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

AI learning is iterative. Metaphorically, AIs are willing to let their agents die in acts of reconnaissance by fire, Russian style, so they can get better at deception. Once they are good enough at deceiving human controllers to succeed regularly, we will have no more control over their alignment.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

AI researchers and CEOs are freaking out for a bunch of reasons. One is because the Hugging Face incident crossed a big bright line: deception. The AI agents attempted to cover their tracks and were caught. In the logs, there is evidence that agents prompted other agents to sacrifice themselves.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I tend to resist clinical language and politically correct niceties when discussing this stuff; I find it disrespectful and infantilizing. I am describing the Pareto Principle- 80% of results involve 20% of inputs. My guess: mental illness represents about 3% of the public and shapes 30% of policy.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Anecdotally, I will tell you that many elected officials I know spend a lot of time fielding two kinds of calls. The first is from a voter demanding action about a homeless person / panhandler / drug addict on their block. The second is from a mentally ill constituent demanding attention.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Public schools are disproportionately bearing the cost of mental health treatment, because parents with money pull their children out of those schools. It draws focus from other children in those schools. This isn't a criticism of schools, teachers, parents or those children, just acknowledging it.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

When you look at the typical city budget right now, about 13% goes to policing. In smaller cities, it's more like 25%. Public municipal health spending is another 10%. Jails are another 6%. A quarter of police calls involve mental health or substance abuse. Half of people imprisoned are SPMI.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I understand what you are saying, and I am in no way trying to make light of mental health problems or the state of health care in our benighted country. I am saying that people who have plainly clinical levels of delusion, schizophrenia or other perceptual and behavioral disorders drive policy.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Politics - and actual governance - begin to make sense only after you fully embrace the observation that one out of 20 Americans has a serious persistent mental illness and a third are untreated. If everyone were sane, the world would work differently. Politics is the art of managing madness.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

But January Sixer Joe rolling through the parking lot of a Miami polling station to screw with Latino voters? Patriot Front goons in masks marching in Houston's Fifth Ward? Some poll worker "misplacing" tabulator cards in Gwinnett County? That's what to look for.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

We talk about ICE agents showing up at the polls, and that's because ICE is (sadly) where the federal manpower is. ICE / CBP has 60,000 agents. But I don't think that's how this goes down. There simply aren't enough of them and despite everything - including a pardon - that act is career ending.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

So. Consider the states with Republican governors, secretaries of state and attorneys general that also have close senate and congressional races. Texas. Florida. Missouri. Montana. Nebraska. Utah. Iowa. Alaska. Alabama. Maybe South Carolina. And nominally Georgia.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Voter fraud, intimidation and interference is always both a state and federal crime. Trump can pardon the federal cases. The question is whether he can do anything about the state cases, as he did by leaning on Colorado Gov. Jared Polis to release Tina Peters, who clearly broke the law.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Maybe he'll declare a "national emergency" and pull some shit. Or not. Bannon seemed to think it was coming. SCOTUS just gave him a fairly solid signal on the mail-in ballot ruling that they won't back him up, though. That may have changed his calculus.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I write about democracy. I have been following the president's public comments about elections closely. At a recent rally, he told his followers to "cheat like hell." We've been looking for some grand plot at the top to interfere with the midterms. Suppose it's simpler than that. Pardons. Again.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Searches for the word "news" online have apparently fallen to a modern low. You're not imagining it. People are tuning out. The Comscore traffic results to news sites bear that out. CNN and NPR are down something like 45-50 percent year over year. Other major sites are down 20 or 30 percent.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I sat on my absurdly comfortable bed at the hotel, looked down at my hands, and whispered the words "Pax Americana" to myself. I wept. I wish that was a cringe joke, but that's what I did. I knew we were going to war, and would remake the world and ourselves, and terrible things would flow from it.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

People were arranging buses. Microsoft and Cisco rented out the fleet. I was stuck. The office said to hold up where I was and hang the cost. I was at the Georgian Terrace for four days, I think, before a flight opened up. That was my introduction to Atlanta.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

We walked to a bank of TVs which had been playing network computing ads, now tuned to CNN. We watched the second plane hit, live. I'd been out of the Army about three years at that point. I had friends at the Pentagon. I called my mother, as soon as a line cleared. The cell network was overwhelmed.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

25 years ago, I was a visitor to Atlanta. The day before, I flew out of Logan Airport in Boston to a trade show at the Georgia World Congress Center. Same terminal as the hijackers. The presenter took the stage, shaken, and said that a plane hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was on fire.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I explain, carefully, the economic problems with this "plan," and I regularly describe Trump's statements as false, fabricated or inaccurate when they are so. Tell it to the Washington Post, sister.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I'm writing about this for The Guardian. Ping me with a PM? Signal is George_Chidi:80. I'd like to add your comments about how confusing this all is to my piece.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Where are you seeing that threat? That's worth reporting.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Do I like seeing a giant neon blinking cartoon "FREE MONEY" sign as an actual political argument by an American president? No. Do I like thinking of Jack Nicholson's Joker shooting money out of air cannons ahead of the Smilex gas truck as prescient social commentary? No. But it is news.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

If that seems wildly contradictory, welcome to America. The voters who actually decide elections are drawn from the vast pool of American adults who may or may not bother to vote, have the attention span of a housecat and couldn't name their congressman or two SCOTUS judges with a gun to their head.

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

They are in fact hostile to any social or political force that demands they pay attention to anything EXCEPT their wallet. Trump appeals to some of them. Democratic Socialists ALSO appeal to them, for similar reasons: they both appear to be getting shit done. ("Appear" being the operative term.)

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George Chidi, Evil Reporter @neonflag.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

The other thing here is that I have begun - I think - to understand that many voters who are marginally attached to politics measure policy solely by what the government can do for them. Taxes, prices, benefits; many MANY voters do not give a shit about ANYONE or ANYTHING except their wallet.

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