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Paul Coen

@paulrcoen.bsky.social
482 followers 659 following 374 posts

Higher Ed IT Director Native New Englander living in New Jersey. ADHD. Amateur photographer (Digital/Film - 35mm, 120, Polaroid), love films, music.

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by Paul Coen
Eoin Higgins @eoinhiggins.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
AI isn't sentient, but that's not what this is about anyway.
eoinhiggins.substack.com
The AI “consciousness” debate is all about corporate control
As the political conversation on AI picks up steam, it’s essential to maintain perspective on what the technology is and what it isn’t.
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Paul Coen @paulrcoen.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
It’s feeling an awful lot like their strategy is to be as irresponsible as possible, pretend it isn’t a choice, and get a federal law shielding them liability because “accountability would put us out of business and help China”.
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Gail Simone @gailsimone.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
You guys want to hear a short but adorable story that happened right in front of me at the baggage claim in NYC yesterday? I wasn't part of it and there are bits I didn't catch but holy crap, I can't stop thinking about it.
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Paul Coen @paulrcoen.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Looking forward to this remake of "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover" with Marvel characters
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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I've heard people make claims that AI would lead to a new Renaissance, but I didn't imagine it'd happen like this:
Screenshot of a Tweet from Pope Leo XIV. It reads: 

"In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgen to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity."
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
static.klipy.com
Duck Season Rabbit Season
Alt: Daffy duck and Bugs Bunny arguing over Duck Season or rabbit Season on loop, ripping signs off a tree
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🇵🇸Martin “Doomsday” Pfeiffer🖖🏳️‍🌈 @nuclearanthro.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Fake USDA seals needs to end your business. You have demonstrated an unwillingness to produce in society AND you’ve endangered health & life of large number of people with tonnes of bogus meat products in order to increase profit.
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Sherrilyn Ifill @sifill.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
So much of what we are confronting today is best understood by the actions undertaken by white communities in response to integration orders. White supremacy is a form of democratic nihilism. Every institution, norm, and value of democracy will be sacrificed for it. calendar.eji.org/racial-injus...
calendar.eji.org
Sep. 27, 1958 | White Little Rock Voters Choose to Close Public Schools Rather Than Integrate
Learn more about our history of racial injustice
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Jared Yates Sexton @jysexton.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Just helping with editing here. These bots aren’t sentient. They’re doing what they’re programmed to do. OpenAI, a private company supposedly bound by laws, committed federal crimes.
Screenshot of BBC article: OpenAI bots (struck through) meddled with multiple US government agency sites
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 26/09/2026
“Everyone hates cameras in smart glasses. But if the camera is contained in a charm you wear around your neck, it shifts the agency. Suddenly, you’re not recording people. It’s just a cute little animated avatar looking out on the world.”
theguardian.com
‘Charming and disarming’ … how Meta’s technology-packed Muse harnesses the power of cuteness
The tech giant has launched a cute ‘little guy’ that can answer emails, book travel or do your weekly food shop
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 26/09/2026
Joe Camel unavailable for comment.
wired.com
Meta’s Muse Is Adults-Only. Why Does It Look Like a Kids’ Toy?
Meta says Muse is just for adults, though its cuddly, Labubu-like mascot—and upcoming Tamagotchi-style AI device—may be disarming for users of all ages.
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Astra Taylor @astra.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Forget grandiose talk of curing cancer - this is what AI is actually doing to healthcare. In the words of one cardiologist: “it’s bots fighting bots, agents fighting agents, a horrible dystopic future nobody wants to live in.”
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Zack Whittaker @zackwhittaker.com · 25/09/2026
Interesting nugget in the AP's morning wire, in which it recommends using an ad-blocker (always a great idea) to avoid tracking on health/healthcare-related websites, which track people's activity and location and share with third-parties. apnews.com/newsletter/m...
a snippet of copy from the AP's story, which reads: "In recent years, FTC officials have filed cases against more than half-dozen telehealth companies. In some cases, regulators said the companies shared users’ health data with online platforms such as Meta and Google, without getting permission. Read more.
What to know before signing up:

    Privacy experts recommend using ad blockers and private web browsers — sometimes called “incognito” windows — when logging onto telehealth websites. Those tools can make it harder for companies to track your location, online history and other personal information."
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Ezra Klein asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about AI making kids worse at math and reading. Huang’s reply: “Does it matter?” Then he said he doesn’t know his own address or phone number. “We’re going to lose some fine intellectual dexterity.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/o...
So the message of this research out of China, where you were seeing a lot of kids using A.I. to help them, was that when they were using the A.I., they were getting things done faster. But it turned out that the skills they were learning were not holding, that their actual personal performance, at least in the way we traditionally measure it, was degrading.

What do you think when you hear that?

The last part — I completely agree. Try to get a kid to do long division right now. The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots, my goodness. Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter?

That’s my question for you.

Yeah. I don’t think it does. I don’t think it does.

But there must be some set of skills that matter.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But maybe not those. We’re going to discover new ones. Just maybe not those.

There are a lot of skills that don’t matter. My first confession, I actually don’t know my address.And I ——

I don’t really believe that to be true.

It’s completely true. Janine will tell you and Lori will tell you.

One day I had to pump gas — it was a few years ago. They needed my ZIP code, and I panicked. I didn’t know my ZIP code. I don’t know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it.

But let me take the other side because I don’t want to fall into a thing where, because some skills can be safely offloaded ——

Yeah.

I also can’t get anywhere without a mapping system now. Never could, frankly. But I’m a big reader. And one of the skills I really value, one of the capacities I have that I really value is an attention span formed on physical books.

You’re a big reader. I’ve read about the kind of reading you do. And there is, prior to A.I., a lot of concern and noticing among college professors and others that the way people use the internet has probably shortened attention spans.
Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.

Yeah. Well, I think that we’re going to lose some finer intellectual dexterity, but we’re going to be better systems thinkers.

Today’s engineers are far better systems thinkers than I was when I graduated from school. But I was a much better transistor thinker.

What do you mean by systems thinker?

They think of large systems. Today’s computers have trillions, hundreds of trillions of transistors in them. When I first graduated from school, the first chip I worked on had 200 transistors. I knew every one of them by name. No engineer does that today. Most engineers now work well above the transistor, well above the functionality, and they’re cobbling things together to do things.

So you need to think much more about systems and interactions of systems. So some of the lower-level knowledge is gone.
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AP Stylebook @apstylebook.com · 23/09/2026
Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics.
apnews.com
https://apnews.com/article/openai-safety-ai-framework-089e75b95bc935af092da7b79d92706d
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AP Stylebook @apstylebook.com · 23/09/2026
This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects. Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it. apnews.com/article/open...
apnews.com
https://apnews.com/article/openai-safety-ai-framework-089e75b95bc935af092da7b79d92706d
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Paul Coen @paulrcoen.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Passing of a RI icon
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Matthew Eadie @mattheweadie.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Video obtained by @cnn.com shows part of the incident on Sunday in Evanston where ICE agents attempted to detain the wrong man before leaving him lying in the street and driving off
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The Register @theregister.com · 22/09/2026
Gartner predicts 55 percent of enterprise VMware users will be investigating an exit by 2029
theregister.com
Gartner predicts 55 percent of enterprise VMware users will be investigating an exit by 2029
Chasing pack has its problems too, with maturity, cost, and complex licenses
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John Timmer @jtimmer.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Ok, this "there are two separate brains" thing appears to be making the rounds, and I want to be absolutely clear: this is a press office overhyping some perfectly reasonable science that won't come as a surprise to most developmental biologists.
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CZEdwards @czedwards.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Re This case: Most media are focusing on their own states, but this was a multi-state trip. The person took the whole route of the Southwest Chief, so Illinois through the midwest, then across S. Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona before LA. Then up the coast, and back across on California Zephyr.
yahoo.com
Person with measles rode Amtrak trains and buses across CA, health officials say
The California Department of Public Health said the unvaccinated passenger stopped at six California stations, including downtown Sacramento.
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Flying Mezerkis @bananapantz.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Gifting this article 🎁 www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/u...
nytimes.com
How President Trump Broke the Kennedy Center (Gift Article)
Internal emails and documents demonstrate the political capture of the institution, including how officials once pursued a plan to unload much of the art collection.
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Omar Wasow @owasow.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
FBI devises Groucho Marx’s Guide to Dating
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Programme 4 @programme4.tv · 18/09/2026
The world of Programme 4 is created by humans, for humans
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Jed Brown @jedbrown.org · 16/09/2026
Oh. That's a heck of a subsidy.
At MIT, Harvard, or any other school, supervising an undergraduate researcher is a lot of work, costs a lot of money, involves a lot of meetings, and the results are not reliably excellent. Asking Claude is easier, faster, and may produce better results. It’s also cheaper, which is no accident: Harvard allows every Harvard student and faculty member to request a Claude token budget of $2,500 per month, even as research funding is continuously threatened and the University lays off staff.
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Liberal Currents @liberalcurrents.com · 14/09/2026
"Our illiberal enemies have made it very clear that they don’t want to ignore the arts: they want to weaponize them… But we have a historical model for how to respond to this, one that we can both draw on and improve upon." www.liberalcurrents.com/we-need-a-ne...
We Need a New Federal Writers Project

Drawing on and improving the model pioneered during the New Deal.
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Paul Coen @paulrcoen.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
“Here's the thing though. As a 25-year consumer protection reporter, I regret to inform you that corporations are not capable of meaningfully self-auditing themselves on ethics.”
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Karl Bode @karlbode.com · 14/09/2026
Over at the newsletter I wrote about the completely insane last few weeks of AI doomsday rhetoric and media coverage
karlbode.com
AI Doomsday Panic Is Completely Out Of Control
The press obsession with software-powered doomsday is a misdirection overshadowing a much deadlier reality: our public interest regulators no longer function.
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Paul Coen @paulrcoen.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Eventually, the inevitable will happen and some guy with a restraining order uses the fact that he's still got the Wifi Motion, etc. alerting him and uses it to know when his ex is at home and can be targeted.
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Paul Coen @paulrcoen.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
"Xfinity Shield - we prey on suburban paranoia while getting you to pay extra so we can surveil you and sell data about you, your home, and your friends and family."
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J.A. Killingsound @kislingconnection.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
"It used to be if you were on TV, you had to have charisma, or at least a good name. Names like Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Morrow. Now I turn on the TV and I don't know these names at all. Russ Douthat. I don't now how to spell it and I don't much care. . . "
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The Register @theregister.com · 13/09/2026
The improbable music of the ZX Spectrum's one-bit speaker
theregister.com
The improbable music of the ZX Spectrum's one-bit speaker
Ingenious coders coaxed multichannel chiptunes from the humblest of sound hardware
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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 12/09/2026
Have we discussed "AI" doomsday cults + Epstein? “parachuting humanity into a different evolutionary era...even obsoleting the human race as we know it...is a running theme in the Epstein files, and...tech evangelists...“It’s eugenics all the way down” www.codastory.com/authoritaria...
codastory.com
"All my fundees have blue eyes." Epstein and the tech world's dark ideology - Coda Story
The Epstein files reveal beliefs about race, eugenics, and engineering humans that run to the heart of Silicon Valley.
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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 12/09/2026
Once you understand the corporate culture of AI hyperscalers is everyone cooking their brains by locking themselves in the bathroom, holding flashlights under their chins, and saying "Aaaaaaaaaay Eyeeeeeee" until they wet themselves in terror, things snap into focus: pluralistic.net/2023/06/04/a...
A cutaway view of a stone tower containing an elaborate water-powered medieval geared machine. Rising out of the machine is a rainbow-tinted, pixelated God with the robes, beard and all. To one side of this scene is a cluster of tiny people in Jesus-era robes, falling about themselves in religious ecstasy all over a stone staircase, atop of which stands a robed priest with his hands upraised. The background is a set of shining golden rays, emanating from pixel-God.
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 12/09/2026
for those looking for a long answer that also ends in "no", feel welcome to read our papers linked below bsky.app/profile/abeb...
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 12/09/2026
no
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Kevin M. Kruse @kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
You might be wondering, hey, is it bad that this young American man was obsessed with a white supremacist nation that ceased to exist decades before he was even born? Well, remember that Dylann Roof wore a jacket with a Rhodesian flag on it and posted his racist manifesto to "lastrhodesian.com"
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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 11/09/2026
It means there’s potentially over a hundred billion dollars’ worth of GPUs in warehouses bsky.app/profile/drin...
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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 11/09/2026
Holy shit. Bloomberg just verified one of my biggest scoops - that Microsoft only has 2gw of operational capacity. I had it at 1.993GW in prep for the story that @aishadown.bsky.social and I did for the guardian. Vindication! www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Brody Ford @BrodyFord
Lot of speculation out there about how many GPUs are actually deployed.
Today, Microsoft has about 2GW of Al-specific capacity live. around 17% of the total fleet.
Only about 2 gigawatts of the company's current 12-gigawatt capacity is centered on Al-specific chips, the people said. This is expected to grow to about a third of the 38 gigawatts Microsoft plans to have online in 2032, they said.
Brody Ford @BrodyFord_ • 23h
scoop: Microsoft is planning a massive expansion of its data center fleet to 38 gigawatts. $msft w/ @mattmday bloomberg.com/news/features/...
3:15 PM • Sep 11, 2026 • 12.5K Views



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Are Microsoft's AI
plans being held back by a shortage of chips?
Guardian investigation finds
apparent discrepancy between what tech company has said about its AI capacity - and the
number of advanced chips it
has in operation
By Aisha Down and Ed Zitron
A Microsoft datacentre in the North Holland village of
Middenmeer in the Netherlands. Photograph: Ramon van
Flymen/EPA
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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 11/09/2026
This begs several questions: 1. Where is Microsoft’s capex going? 2. Why has it been saying it’s added a GW of capacity a quarter? 3. As one of NVIDIA’s largest customers: where are the GPUs Microsoft is buying going? Because it clearly isn’t into a data center.
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Prof. Eliot Jacobson @climatecasino.net · 11/09/2026
As of September 10th, the Nino 3.4 anomaly is now 2.94°C (preliminary) above the 1991-2020 baseline, setting the 104th consecutive daily record, a full 1.09°C above the previous record for the day, set in 1997. The Climate 8-ball is gobsmacked.
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Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Writer for NBC10 Boston fuckin HATES Mercury
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Public Citizen @publiccitizen.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
ICE announced it will create a national voter database. It is planning to award up to a $5 BILLION contract for the project. ICE could soon be using YOUR taxpayer dollars to track your party affiliation and voting record. This should alarm every American.
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Catherine Rampell @crampell.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
This is lunacy. Reis didn’t call Trump names or scream bloody murder. He made a measured comment about what academic research said about prior Trump tariffs. This appears to be the offensive tweet:
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tunes to make you run away @whippoorwont.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
"people are anthropomorphizing LLMs because they are so astonishingly good at processing human thought and language" people will anthropomorphize a chair if you put the stitches in the right place.
chair with a "face"
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Jerry Chen @jcsalterego.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
FIRST LOOK: bluesky designs for the upcoming foldable iphone have been leaked
a 4:3 screenshot of the bluesky app with the butterfly logo, hamburger and hashtag icons at the top. in the middle are two sections labeled "people yelling at you" and "people you're yelling at". at the bottom is the standard nav for home, search, messages, notifications, and profile. there are 20 unread notifications
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jon christian @jonchristian.net · 09/09/2026
NEW: In one of the most horrifying stories I've ever reported, I found that Facebook is hosting huge quantities of AI-generated videos of violent child abuse -- kids being beaten, burned, and far more But the genuinely shocking thing was how little Meta seems to care futurism.com/artificial-i...
futurism headline:

> Facebook Is Hosting Huge Numbers of Horrifying AI-Generated Videos of Violent Child Abuse, and Meta Is Barely Even Pretending to Care About Taking Them Down

> Facebook is filled with AI-generated videos of children being beaten, burned, and bludgeoned with heavy objects. Meta doesn't seem to care.
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404 Media @404media.co · 08/09/2026
404 Media is revealing the name of Border Patrol's predictive policing units, which analyze financial data and have local cops pull people over. The people are not suspected of any particular crime.
404media.co
A Secretive DHS ‘Predictive Policing’ Unit is Analyzing Americans' Financial Habits and Pulling Them Over
404 Media is revealing the name of Border Patrol's predictive policing units, which analyze financial data and have local cops pull people over. The people are not suspected of any particular crime.
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Spencer Ackerman @attackerman.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Extremely important story. Predictive policing is a euphemistic way of saying DHS is doing pre-crime, because of its improper access to your data. As @jakelaperruque.bsky.social says here, this takes a sledgehammer to the concept of probable cause of the commission of a crime. It can’t be reformed.
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