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Area Man

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

Journalist, recovering academic

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Reposted by Area Man
ProPublica @propublica.org · 05/10/2026
NEW: Remember when John Oliver opened a church to expose how easy it was to get tax exemptions? This year, ProPublica reporters set out to establish private schools to test if, truly, anyone could open one. We founded two. Here’s how.
propublica.org
How ProPublica Reporters Became Private School Owners in 24 Hours
The reporting experiment demonstrates how easy it can be to open private schools that might then access public money. No credentials or background checks required.
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Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Learning the names of the lunar maria when you are young will get you through the third declension.
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Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
This is very true. A huge theme in a lot of recent coverage that AI is a bit like Saving Private Ryan. Everybody's gotta step up and adopt AI to get it across the goal line.
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Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Another kind of fun is when you have lunch with someone who turns out to be on the other side and you come away hungry because you were so close to punching them in the face that you had spend the whole meal sitting on your hands.
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Rob Tilsley @stargazerrob.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Update to my Saturns. This goes: 2015, 2016, then annually from 2020 onwards.
9 telescopic closeups of Saturn presenting in a horizontal row, oldest captures on the left with poorer technique and equipment going through to run of clearer images. The ring tilt can be seen going from open to closed, and now opening in the other direction.
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Ji||| Ke|||y @jrkelly.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
This is super interesting from a rhetorial point if view. Harvard public health research finds cancer correlation w residential proximity to nuclear plant. Industry spokesmen "replicate" the study and claim to debunk by using their caricature methodology to "show" cancer risk from living near Costco
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Andraste Sideyr @andraste.fuckbgp.com · 03/10/2026
Lane || Boot.dev v @wagslane
Holy shit, America is cooked. They were able to perfectly clone the Microsoft Teams experience.


POLTICO
POLITICOEurope
@POLITICOEurope • Oct 1
The European Commission has rolled out an alternative to Microsoft Teams.
But officials using it aren't impressed, with one describing the tool as "absolute shit."
vist.ly/5kje9
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The Mouthy Renegade Writer @mouthyrenegade.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Today's choice for the football game:
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Joel @sentantiq.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
what's happened to the chronicle
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I was reminded by @joshtpm.bsky.social that this kind of thing was happening four years ago, and like he says it seems worthwhile to remind yourself of this stuff when thinking about the current AI boom. www.digitalengineering247.com/article/meta...
Headline of article about a 2022 McKinsey report: "Metaverse could grow to $5 Trillion by 2030."
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
"I hope we can....calmly hear the things people in my industry already know: "1) We must never stop building the Universal Bone Dissolver. "2) The Bone Dissolver is out of control, and seems intent on dissolving our bones. "3) We are the smartest men who have ever lived..." (Gift link, I think)
theatlantic.com
I’m Calling for a Pause in the Development of the Universal Bone Dissolver
A recent incident has raised my concerns: Last month, the Bone Dissolver unexpectedly dissolved a number of bones.
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Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @mayor.nyc.gov · 02/10/2026
Calling all NYC artists — painters, filmmakers, poets, musicians and more! Did you know our city provides grants to support your work every year? And this year, we're DOUBLING the amount — from $5,000 up to $10,000 per artist! Deadlines are approaching fast — apply today at nyc.gov/artistgrants.
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Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
There was a trend for a while for local Republicans in our R-majority town to sport those ghastly Nazi-fade haircuts, but in just the past month or so they seem to have disappeared.
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Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
How hard would it be for a bad actor to initiate a Kessler cascade? www.livescience.com/space/space-...
livescience.com
An American Cold War-era spy satellite just exploded above Earth — and nobody knows why
The defunct USA 32 (or Farrah III) satellite, which launched in 1988, broke apart without warning on Sept. 13, around 480 miles above Earth's surface. Experts are still unsure what caused this sudden ...
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Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
This is all heads-on-a-pin argumentation. They're going to gamify the Assistant and make it a time-suck just like what it replaced. How do I know this? Because it's the only way this thing can MAKE MONEY.
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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
There is a moment at the very very end of Abdul El-Sayed's podcast with Ezra Klein (book recommendation section) where he talks about the idea of "speaking truth to pain" and this will be staying with me for an extremely long time. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/25/o...
But there’s also something about truth to pain. We talk a lot about truth to power, but I think it’s actually a lot harder to speak truth to pain. I say that as someone who went to medical school, realizing that in a lot of our politics right now, we’ve got to get a lot better at speaking truth to pain if we’re going to get through some of these challenges that we have.

What does “truth to pain” mean?

It’s one thing to look power in the eye and say: You’re wrong about this. But there’s a way in which pain is very difficult to reason with. Because when somebody is in their pain, they’re in their trauma. They see that pain, and they may not see what’s causing it.

I remember just very explicitly being in a trauma ward with a gunshot wound patient and watching this big guy with his hand on his gunshot wound. All the folks are trying to pull his hand off his pain, that point of his gunshot wound, this clear vulnerability.

And this emergency room doctor had the presence of mind to be like: Everyone, stop. And she looks him in the eyes, and she’s like: I get that really hurts, and I’m so sorry that you’re here. You don’t want to be here. We don’t want you to be here. But if you don’t let us fix this, you could die. So I’m going to take your hand, and I’m going to move it off, OK? Because I need to get there so that you can live.

She was speaking truth to pain. He understands he’s at the hospital, he needs care, but he also doesn’t want anybody to touch the wound. Which is a natural thing. And I think it is a really great metaphor for how we think about a lot of these challenges we talked about today.
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𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚛𝚕𝚎𝚜 𝙲. 𝙼𝚊𝚗𝚗 @charlescmann.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Say what you like about Caitlin Flanagan's politics, but that woman knows how to write a lede. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...
Opening paragraphs of Caitlin Flanagan article: 

One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.

Also on the deck, and also in the thrall of the night’s pleasures, was one Louis Helmburg III, an education major and ace benchwarmer for the Thundering Herd baseball team. His response to the proposed launch was the obvious one: he reportedly whipped out his cellphone to record it on video, which would turn out to be yet another of the night’s seemingly excellent but ultimately misguided ideas. When the bottle rocket exploded in Hughes’s rectum, Helmburg was seized by the kind of battlefield panic that has claimed brave men from outfits far more illustrious than even the Thundering Herd. Terrified, he staggered away from the human bomb and fell off the deck.
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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.
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Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Fucking' people from Chicago holding out for the deep-dish shit.
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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!
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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.
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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The techbros don't want you to see this trailer. Pass it on.
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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
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Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I've always suspected that the ancient Greeks had feathers.
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Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
So, ‘Super Intelligence Czar’?
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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
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Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Q: What's John's problem today? A: 'Don't ask.'
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Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
New conspiracy theory: Twitter + AI = Xi.
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Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
What part of speech is 'yes'?
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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.
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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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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.
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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
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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.
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Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
They thought running the center would be as hard as posting on X.
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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
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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.
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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*
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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.
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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.”
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kenofseattle @kenofseattle.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
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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.
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Area Man @pthibodeau.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
We had three little F-0 and F-1's within walking distance of my house in North Haven CT in the space of sevem years. One of my first Zoom classes of the COVID era featured me being summoned by my wife to shelter in the basement. Many houses in the neighborhood treed, fortunately no injuries.
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Ashleigh @vinylgeek.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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