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sfenster.bsky.social

@sfenster.bsky.social
398 followers 217 following 10 posts
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Lauren Harper @laurenleharper.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Cop is subject of community complaints (including for punching a driver in the face during a traffic stop). Local newsroom files a public records request about him. Eugene, Ore says sure thing, that’ll cost $2.5 million and take at least 44,000 hours to complete. My latest for @theintercept.com:
theintercept.com
Oregon Police Are Charging a Local News Outlet $2.5M for Records About One Cop
Eugene-based Double Sided Media requested police officer Justin Peckels’s records. The city slapped the publication with an exorbitant fee.
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Sam Thielmonster @samthielman.com · 02/10/2026
Born
Personal details
Angela Nixon February 27, 1984 (age 42)
Jacksonville, Florida, U.S.
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Eileen Clancy 🧿 @clancyny.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Fatou Traore, a legal resident in the U.S. for 20 years, was grabbed by ICE on her way to work at the University of Iowa on Sept. 24. Traore was told she'll be sent to Sierra Leone, which she’s never even visited, leaving her husband & sons: Yousouf, 3; Boubacar, 8; Mamadou, 14; and Esoumaila, 19.
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Elizabeth Picciuto @epicciuto.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
At no point while reading this sentence did I correctly predict what was coming next.
Twitter screenshot: New: Kyrsten Sinema's ex-boyfriend and former bodyguard said he threw her paintings into her swimming pool in part because he felt disillusioned by her relationship with a major
U.S. Artificial Intelligence software developer amid the war in Gaza
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Pam Spaulding @pamspaulding.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
😵‍💫 In the TIME interview, Trump is asked about Zombie Mitch. "Q: Have you seen the videos of Mitch McConnell back in the Senate? Do you think he should resign because of his health condition?" 👉 Please ID where the Q is answered in this epic Grandpa Chaos crash out below.🤔 🧾 t2m.co/xcnpWHr
Have you seen the videos of Mitch McConnell back in the Senate? Do you think he should resign because of his health condition?

It was a disappointment to a lot of Republicans. So that's just—well, Sleepy Joe gave pardons to everybody. He gave them to Fauci. He gave them to this. But you mean I'm not allowed to give them, but Sleepy Joe's allowed to give them? This ain't gonna be much of a story. Here we are doing this. You haven't asked me one fucking positive question. All of this. What about this? What about that? What about that? What about this? All negative. Why are you devoting all this time to the White House? You know how I do, I do that out of my back pocket. I pay for a lot of it, but I fix it because the White House should look like that. It shouldn’t look like—if you would have stood in that balcony and looked at that wall, half the wall was falling. It's actually dangerous. People are walking under, crap was falling off it all the time. Every time it rained, it was leaking, horrible. Now it's perfect, and I would say that I should be given credit for fixing the White House because I'm also doing very well with the war. I'm doing very well with another war that we already won, Venezuela. Do you notice you haven't asked me a question about Venezuela?
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Mother Jones @motherjones.com · 02/10/2026
Good's family is accusing the United States of being liable for the actions of federal agents, alleging wrongful death and excessive force.
motherjones.com
They called her a domestic terrorist. Now Renée Good’s family is suing.
The family alleges wrongful death and deprivation of civil rights.
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Mike Masnick @masnick.com · 28/09/2026
Oh wow! Again, seeing more people realizing the power of atproto/Atmosphere to rebuild a better, more distributed internet with fewer chokepoints (not just as a new way to do microblogging) is important...
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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
the cornell gang rape has me thinking about the pervasiveness of this mindset:
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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
the cornell case has me thinking about how existing as a woman means knowing you could be the victim of sexual violence at any moment, all while knowing there's a high likelihood no one will believe it even happened if you come forward.
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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
the cornell case has me thinking about christine blasey ford and how she so bravely testified in 2018 about how future supreme court justice brett kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her. i'm thinking about what i wrote at the time and how nothing has changed:
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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
the horrific cornell gang rape case has me thinking about emma sulkowicz who alleged she was raped as a student at columbia in 2014 and never got any justice. it has me thinking about the physical and mental weight young women are forced to carry while their safety is subsumed by male potential.
Emma Sulkowicz carrying around a mattress on the Columbia campus in 2014 to raise awareness of her alleged rape and the university's inaction.
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WholesomeMemes @wholesomememe.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
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Ryan Enos @ryanenos.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
One note about this, because I was curious: remarkably, the state-level explanatory power of Google searches for testosterone and Trump vote survives controls for education, income, and rurality.
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Dan Diamond @ddiamond.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Russell Brand, who's awaiting trial in London next month on rape and sexual assault charges, will moderate a panel at DC's MAHA summit tomorrow on reforming a U.S. health agency
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Ned Pyle @nedpyle.com · 29/09/2026
In China hotel elevators (at least at two IHGs I stayed at last) your room key wave activates your floor with no button push but if you want to go somewhere else you can tap your floor off and tap a new one 🥹
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Matthew Haughey @mathowie.xoxo.zone.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2026
I’ve lived all my life where the “close doors” elevator button does nothing so it’s truly remarkable to be in Japan where the same button instantly closes the doors on every elevator you board.
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Abdul El-Sayed @abdulelsayed.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
When I say we desperately need a Democratic doctor in the US Senate I mean it.
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Pam Spaulding @pamspaulding.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Trump's SCOTUS w/this stay affirms sending non-citizens to third-party countries on no notice is A-OK, while case "plays out." Shouldn't non-citizen, illegally here RW slime Milo Yiannopoulos have been sent to some 3rd world gulag rather than the UK? 🧐 Just asking... 🦋 bsky.app/profile/reic...
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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 28/09/2026
but perhaps there are some tasks that are not best performed by a nail gun
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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 28/09/2026
noticing linguistic patterns which imply a solution to a notoriously difficult unsolved math problem is actually quite a feat!
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Colin @colin-fraser.net · 28/09/2026
unlike many other AI enthusiasts I think that there is still a good case to make that this is basically true, just as it is true that a nail can be driven without a nail gun. But with a nail gun at your disposal you can drive many more nails in a short amount of time.
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Crazy in Moloch @sengarrasbear.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Absolutely, but the research problems here aren't analysis of precanned numerical data. They require formulating theories based on existing research+SME interactions, applying domain specific tools, and adapting direction and approach based on findings. That goal-seeking behavior ~requires an LLM.
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Corey Rayburn Yung @coreyryung.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
And autoregressive models have long been very good for some purposes (image and text creation) but less well suited for others. If you are analyzing numerical data, there are much better ML tools to use.
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Connor Lynch @connorlynch.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
When they do major/minor discoveries (navier stokes, Jacobian conjecture, that other conjecture w the “do a breakthrough” prompt, this thing) they are *reasoning* to find the answer and the starting point is ~”the sum total of human knowledge in the training corpus + context.”
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Connor Lynch @connorlynch.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
They do reason, actually. I have no reason to think they have self-experience and some reason to think they don’t, but they are plainly capable of logical reasoning.
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Connor Lynch @connorlynch.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
The framing isn’t wrong because it necessarily implies an inability to reason; it’s wrong because virtually every reader (apart from, or maybe including, the authors themselves) *take that away from the framing*, and if you don’t take that away from the framing there’s almost nothing left.
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Connor Lynch @connorlynch.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
oh no. no no no. this view of them is really outdated and the person you’ve linked steadfastly refuses to engage with what they are actually capable of, retreating into semantics that embed ancillary questions into words like “thinking” instead.
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Connor Lynch @connorlynch.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
This just strikes me as basic insincerity. If you took 10 people who casually accepted the “stochastic parrot” framing and 10 people who accepted the “reasoning” framing and asked them to predict what frontier models can do, virtual guaranty the latter group would outperform the former group.
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Cool Ed @eddasaurus.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
It’s not really secret sauce, and it’s not just Claude. AI vendors have been developing “reasoning” models since late 2024, and they do the “interactions between agents” internally. Break down problem, research data as needed, pursue multiple approaches, critique and revise candidate responses
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Clint Popetz @cpopetz.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
In the process of this it’s very much dealing with concepts, like “thread synchronization” and “race conditions, etc.
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Clint Popetz @cpopetz.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
It will figure out how that part of the app should work, how the error could have happened given the data in the database for the user id in question, and what change would prevent it from happening. It will then build a suggested fix, test the scenario with and without that fix, document it.
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Clint Popetz @cpopetz.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I use them as a programmer to do all kinds of work that is very much in the realm of what I would call “reasoning.” For example, point it at a source base, a sanitized view of a database, a logging stream, and an error stack trace and say “diagnose this error.”
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Pwnallthethings @pwnallthethings.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
it's the same basic reason why it's good at coding and hacking too. Earlier generations were good at producing just syntax, but newer ones are genuinely handling concepts, including ones they haven't seen before
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Kate Sills @katelynsills.com · 28/09/2026
I think perhaps one part of the confusion is that you're assuming that LLMs are only good at linguistic / language tasks, therefore math has to be linguistic somehow. No, a model like Claude Fable is excellent at generalized reasoning. That's why it can do a variety of things.
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Kate Sills @katelynsills.com · 28/09/2026
We know for certain that the LLM version provides value that traditional ML approaches do not. I don't know why you are asking this theoretically. The reason we know this for certain is because we are seeing LLMs solve problems that no traditional ML approach has solved.
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Meta is the Torment Nexus @priva.cat · 28/09/2026
Unlike a human, Claude has access to and can quickly assess the existing state of the art/proofs/lemmas and other papers, and then just go to town testing all the potential theories until Lean (the verification language) compiles. That's how these theorems are resolved.
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Meta is the Torment Nexus @priva.cat · 28/09/2026
The reason LLMs do better than a ML-based proof assistant, is that they're not just solving the math as such. The utility is that between the mathemetician end the model, they're also clarifying assumptions made by the author of the paper that are not always as self-evident as the author assumed.
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Meta is the Torment Nexus @priva.cat · 28/09/2026
My husband has been using Claude to derive Lean proofs of existing papers. The reason the stochastic parrot line is old and tired, is because it's not an accurate representation of what these models do. You can't parrot something that hasn't been done yet, and these types of proofs have not yet
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Kate Sills @katelynsills.com · 28/09/2026
We don't even need to get into theory. There are direct and easy to understand counterexamples that disprove what you say here. For example, Levant Alpöge used Claude Fable (an LLM) to show the Jacobian Conjecture was false, and this was neither brute force nor a targeted machine learning model.
I'm baffled by these PR stunts. Targeted machine learning models and brute force algorithms can sometimes solve difficult problems that have eluded human beings. But using an LLM doesn't add anything (and makes success less likely). They are not "AI." They are stochastic parrots. 
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Kathleen Bachynski @bachynski.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
“As a result, the U.S. market will be left with just one antibiotic approved for the same three uses for combating KPC, a superbug that produces an enzyme that makes most germs resistant to antibiotics, according to John Rex, editor of the AMR Solutions newsletter and chief medical officer at F2G”
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Illinois Traffic Cameras @iltrafficcams.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Willis Tower Skydeck (West View) 🌇 Sunset: 6:33 PM - 6:42 PM CT (20x speed) 🌡️ 63°F | Clear 📍: 41.878900,-87.635900
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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Rufo literally offered a bounty to anyone who could produce a video of Haitians eating dogs. He got nothing. So he found a video of Congolese men grilling chicken and tried to claim they were cooking cats.
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The Serfs (youtube.com/theserfstv) @theserfstv.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
It's not even destroyed buildings and rubble it's just dust and ash
Cover of the Scottish national showing the genocide in Gaza (it's just complete annihilation)
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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
“We’re finally going to finish Reconstruction & do what we should have done after Watergate, Iran-Contra, & January 6”
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Uptown Sinclair @tuckfriendly.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
This director is notorious for this sort of thing. He made a movie about twins and hired one guy to play both. Cheap bastard.
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T.J. Stiles @tj-stiles.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Never sell anyone out. In fact, if you're asked about banning 12-year-olds from softball, just say, "You're asking me to sell out kids for my political career. I'm not going to do that. Let's stop demonizing people in tougher circumstances than you or I will ever experience. They have guts."
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Eric Columbus @ericcolumbus.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
"The sources added that Patel consistently kept Bailey at arm's length and cut him out of meetings the deputy FBI director should attend because Bailey was constantly flagging things that were unconstitutional." www.cbsnews.com/news/top-fbi...
cbsnews.com
Top FBI official Andrew Bailey, who was once widely seen as Patel successor, resigns
Bailey was originally brought in to help ease tensions between former Attorney General Pam Bondi and former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino.
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Jack Jenkins @jackjenkins.me · 29/09/2026
Buried lede: among those speaking out against this is Gregory Baylor, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, a major conservative Christian legal group: “The government shouldn’t punish people who pursue socially valuable callings just because in its judgment they don’t earn enough money.”
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Johnny 🫧 Cowlick @jefferycowlick.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Elect a convicted felon, you get a criminal government.
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