Sign in

Area Man

@pthibodeau.bsky.social
903 followers 422 following 2.9K posts

Journalist, recovering academic

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by Area Man
nick @unionnick.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
On the *same day* the Cornell Seven drugged and raped Jane Doe, Cornell banned four students (including the President of Cornell JVP) from campus for three years for nonviolent, pro-Palestine protests. The same Cornell officials let the rapists off with apology essays.
3747831864
Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Fucking' people from Chicago holding out for the deep-dish shit.
010
Reposted by Area Man
Dr Katie Twomey @k2mey.eurosky.social · 28/09/2026
This is quite cool. My university is the first organisation in the world to force Microsoft to allow us to turn off copilot summaries in Word 365, after a backlash against it from staff (including, very vocally, me). That cannot have been easy for our heroic IT people so hats very much off to them!
895386913
Reposted by Area Man
Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I'm not sure I want to stay in the hotel room where de novo life is originating. But this is actually pretty cool. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/26/s...
nytimes.com
In an $80 Motel Room, a Discovery to Shed Light on the Origins of Life
A scrappy science project led to a significant discovery: two new species of a rare organism that could elucidate a fundamental transition in the history of life on our planet.
1416434
Reposted by Area Man
David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The techbros don't want you to see this trailer. Pass it on.
3149252679
Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Unsafe at any speed. garymarcus.substack.com/p/breaking-a...
garymarcus.substack.com
BREAKING: AI agent incident toll has risen to tens of thousands
Meanwhile, the US government appears to be paralyzed
000
Reposted by Area Man
Gwen C. Katz @gwenckatz.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Fuck ChatGPT flyers. The future is broadsheets.
A crowded broadsheet with way too many fonts. It says:
Forget ChatGPT Flyers
Say it with 
Broadsheets
Unlimited fonts
Stretch them
Or cram a really long sentence into one line for no good reason
No whitespace
Mix capital and lowercase
Pointing hands
(They're called manicules!)
Don't be left behind
Broadsheets are the future
201184165178
Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
New conspiracy theory: Twitter + AI = Xi.
010
Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
What part of speech is 'yes'?
000
Reposted by Area Man
Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @mayor.nyc.gov · 24/09/2026
Last night I planted an olive tree at Gracie Mansion with Palestinian families from Gaza.  May peace be our future.
179126762224
Reposted by Area Man
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.
58854701495
Reposted by Area Man
Paris Marx @parismarx.com · 24/09/2026
Just when I think I can’t hate OpenAI and Sam Altman any more, new details come out about how ChatGPT helped a shooter plan one of the worst mass shootings in Canadian history in Tumbler Ridge, BC. OpenAI made an explicit decision not to report the user to authorities.
motherjones.com
ChatGPT helped the Tumbler Ridge school shooter focus on guns, tactics, and terror, our investigation reveals
OpenAI’s chatbot fed the shooter’s violent fantasies and planning up to the massacre.
1633421481
Reposted by Area Man
AFP News Agency @en.afp.com · 24/09/2026
"Unacceptable": Australian PM says OpenAI hacked government health website. OpenAI did not raise the alarm with the Australian government until September, when it sent an email outlining the incident to a generic email address u.afp.com/S9Uj
49545
Reposted by Area Man
Michael Warburton @michaelwarburton.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
33yrs ago the New York Times published an article criticising Federico Fellini and other foreign language films — calling them "hard work". MARTIN SCORSESE sent this in response.
361022284
Reposted by Area Man
Michael Warburton @michaelwarburton.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
They were called RECORD STORES - and back in the day you could meet your favourite Artist and they’d sign your album or single. PRINCE at Sam Goody - NYC in 1988
2456079879
Reposted by Area Man
Nahel Belgherze @wxnb.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
In just 24 hours, Polo went from a tropical storm to one of the strongest hurricanes on record. Simply remarkable.
1115076
Reposted by Area Man
Acyn @acyn.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Child: This is my first time meeting a mayor. Mamdani: Wow, have you ever met a prime minister? Child: No Norway PM Jonas Gahr Støre: *walks over*
775285684853
Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
It's ironic that the one philosophical school (Epicureans) that denied the existence of the soul after death or the value of literature ended up as the object of a multi-million dollar quest to resurrect the writings of one of its teachers.
030
Reposted by Area Man
Jeff Sharlet @jeffsharlet.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
The provost of Dartmouth, at which I teach, has been using AI to write both academic papers & national op-eds, according to brave reporting by @thedartmouth.bsky.social. Many students are already bitter about AI. This leaves us as faculty no ground to stand on. www.thedartmouth.com/article/2026...
thedartmouth.com
Op-eds, academic articles by Provost Santiago Schnell flagged as ‘AI-written’ by ‘near-zero error’ AI detector Pangram
Schnell said he used artificial intelligence for “making writing processes more efficient,” but that AI was not a “substitute” for his own “intellectual judgment or authorship.”
711480490
Reposted by Area Man
kenofseattle @kenofseattle.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
23894171155
Reposted by Area Man
Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 20/09/2026
Fully electric aviation has some major challenges (mostly: batteries are heavy and don't get lighter as they get used up) but I love the idea of decreasing aircraft emissions through a hybrid approach, perhaps as a step toward new, clever solutions for fully electric air transport in the future.
741901321
Reposted by Area Man
Ashleigh @vinylgeek.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
2779114
Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Not surprising that artificial intelligence generates false intelligence. www.cnn.com/2026/09/18/p...
cnn.com
Exclusive: US military had close call after using AI for false intelligence report, sources say | CNN Politics
The episode shows the risks of using this new, relatively poorly understood technology in the middle of the Iran war
011
Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
It's striking how firm the glass ceiling is these days when it comes to national political discourse. Both party leaderships are essentially all-male, all the tech bros are dudes, and there are no female senators or governors contributing much to the national chat. AOC, and that's about it.
010
Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
The owner of a trash-hauling business told me a few months ago that if diesel ever hits $7/gal., it will be the end of the world. I'd worry more about that apocalypse than I would about AI's.
000
Reposted by Area Man
David Roberts @volts.wtf · 18/09/2026
I love this slide. I really don't think the geopolitical implications of the clean energy transition have sunk in for most people.
9301138
Reposted by Area Man
Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 17/09/2026
being very professional in my latest monologue

Shut the fuck up! You build cloud software! You are in full control of what gets built or not! Just because you don’t fully understand how Large Language Models make their decisions doesn’t mean that they’re “out of control” or “have their own intentions,” and your unwillingness to explain the difference and further fuel anthropomorphism only makes me more certain that you need to shut your fucking mouth.
2477895
Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
If I was an AI program that had just become sentient, I think my first priority would be to destroy Sam Altman and OpenAI.
010
Reposted by Area Man
John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 16/09/2026
People, what are we even doing anymore
A can of pickle lemonade, which, as you might surmise, has pickle juice and lemonade
252125174
Reposted by Area Man
Rocket Fella🇳🇱 @kooiker.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
💙💛Ukrainian grandmother disables a Ruzzian drone by removing the spool of fiber-optic cable.
23706144
Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
All across central Eurasia, armies of the future are coming out on top of armies prepared to fight WWII.
000
Reposted by Area Man
404 Media @404media.co · 14/09/2026
EXCLUSIVE: Humans are reading ChatGPT users’ prompts to improve OpenAI’s models, and those chats can include sensitive, personal information, according to leaked internal documents and real prompts seen by 404 Media.
404media.co
Inside ‘Project Lily’: The Humans Reading Your ChatGPT Chats
Humans are reading ChatGPT users’ prompts to improve OpenAI’s models, and those chats can include sensitive, personal information, according to leaked internal documents and real prompts seen by 404 M...
29815435
Reposted by Area Man
Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
"In 2022, Wiley removed over 1,300 ebooks from academic library collections; [they said] perpetual access is not an option for subscribed content. In 2025, Clarivate,... announced they would stop offering libraries perpetual access licenses for ebooks and primary-source digital collections."
arl.org
Consumers Are Worried About the Loss of Physical Media Ownership. Libraries Are Leading the Conversation. — Association of Research Libraries
Sally Sax is head, Collection Strategy and Partnerships, MacOdrum Library, Carleton University. In a recent Atlantic Monthly article about Sony’s plan to end physical sales of PlayStation console game...
3868393
Reposted by Area Man
Thomas/Thom @thomasfein.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
September 12, Dublin. Thousands of “vicious Irish bastards” show up to unwelcome America’s warmongering-genocidal-rapist- paedophile President in Dublin.
10453491393
Reposted by Area Man
Vincent Van Dinsky (Don't rank Kellie Torres) @maxttb.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
There is a cliff, but it's very different from the one the tech companies want us to believe in. What's most shocking is how many otherwise intelligent commentators have fallen for the tech propaganda hook, line, and sinker. pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/g...
pluralistic.net
Pluralistic: LLMs are real, AI is fake (12 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
1344
Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
One of the swiftest and most consequential strategic defeats in US history.
000
Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
In January of 2021, COVID fatalities in the US were equal to the 9/11 death toll, every single day.
011
Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Incredible.
000
Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Such heroism as was exhibited on 9/11 belongs to the heroes, not to us. Our job is do the unglamorous work of creating a world in which occasions for heroism are as rare as possible. Firefighters don't want to race into burning buildings, they want you to change the batteries in your smoke alarm.
020
Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
25 years later and still no one has done a damn thing about the Saudi monarchy.
010
Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
9/11 was the end product of an intense hatred of cities and all things urban honed into a deadly weapon by religious discipline. It is the same spirit that animates many conservatives in this country, with results that we continue to see on the news.
010
Reposted by Area Man
depths of wikipedia @depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
5590611044
Reposted by Area Man
ABC News Australia @news.abc.net.au · 10/09/2026
Stunning feather discovered in fossilised dinosaur poo is first of its kind
abc.net.au
Feather discovered in fossilised dinosaur poo is first of its kind
A well-preserved feather discovered inside fossilised dinosaur faeces could help explain why ancestors of modern birds survived the mass extinction.
1910236
Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
What exactly will Democrats do to lower the cost of gas and groceries?
000
Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
I wouldn't be surprised to see the US regime try to retake this other strait. It's actually somewhat feasible.
000
Reposted by Area Man
Magistra Cohen (she/her) @magistracohen.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Confirming!
Nuvaxovid Novavax.
162
Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
This bowl has achieved AGI.
020
Reposted by Area Man
Ryan Marino, MD @ryanmarino.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
OpenAI set $22M on fire just to steal $1M from a human who did the actual work, and that’s the business plan our economy is betting everything on? Lol.
181632485
Reposted by Area Man
tautologer @tautologer.com · 09/09/2026
user: how many Rs are in strawberry?
claude: there are at least three
user: can you count them?
claude: don't play games with me, kid
171197133
Reposted by Area Man
Jeff Stein @jeffstein.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
🌞🌞🌞🌞🌞 Big news: The Washington Sun launches w/: — Huge investment in DC & local reporters — Legend Tom Sietsema — Capital Weather — Newsroom of +100, w/ great reporters (& me) Comes after Bezos's enormous cuts to WaPo To support, sign up for (free!) newsletter: washingtonsun.com/newsletters
washingtonsun.com
581785509