Heather Bryant

There's a difference between "impossible" and "underfunded" and there are many, many conversations that would get a lot more honest—and productive—if people stopped saying "impossible" when "underfunded" is the reality.

The Political Economy of the US Media System: Excavating the Roots of the Present Crisis - Roosevelt Institute Bilal Baydoun, Shahrzad Shams, and Victor Pickard trace the roots of the US media crisis to decades of deregulation and commercial capture, outlining how consolidation, news deserts, and platform domi...

Thrilled to announce the publication of our @rooseveltinstitute.org report that uncovers the policy roots of the current crises facing our news, information & communication systems. We argue that media reform must become central to a US pro-democracy movement. rooseveltinstitute.org/publications...

I was excited to try out Coursera now that I get access through school and almost every interesting looking certificate has "learn prompt engineering for this field" in it. I want to learn the actual skills and concepts. Teach me like it's 2020 and I need to know how to actually do the thing myself.

Creativity doesn't need to be "democratized" or liberated from "gatekeeping." We are human beings. We are born creative, we just aren't born skilled. The solution for that already exists and human beings have been doing it for millennia. We have to practice.

Love how every single website I have ever interacted with is currently sending me emails to remind me about their Black Friday sales. Super great experience. This is definitely how being a human being should feel. No notes.

it was

I will never forget the conference reception where someone asked what I was drinking. It was Dr. Pepper in a glass. They actually blocked people from clinking their glass with mine while loudly telling the table not to toast with me because it was bad luck since my drink wasn't alcoholic.

People automatically assuming the moment someone posts a piece of information, a thought, or an opinion is the moment the poster learned that piece of information, first had that thought, or formed that opinion makes social media far more tedious than it has to be.

Watching so many MLIS programs essentially say "well, a lot of people are using it so we have to teach prompting" feels like watching a medical school say "a lot of people are anti-vax now so we have to teach alternatives to vaccines." This is a time for experts to hold the line.

Very much agreed.

I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.

It is absolutely fitting to be able to subvert LLMs with poetry.

arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15304

What Extreme Cold Feels Like in Prison Prison writers from across the U.S. describe how cold their prisons get in the winter — and what small dignities could make it more bearable.

In a special project on extreme cold in prison, 27 PJP contributors in 17 states describe winter behind bars — and the small dignities that could make it more bearable.

Screenshot of excerpt: It says something about the world we're living in right now. That lies and falsehoods, misrepresentations and manipulations are so pervasive, so rife, so affecting that we are primed to receive broad, nebulous, unspecific, tangential, or just differently focused speech that doesn't match our own priorities as if it represents the same level of threat as the misinformation and disinformation infecting our institutions and civic life. It feels more and more like the expectation that social media users have is for other social media users is not sharing their thinking out loud or thinking in progress, but declaring positions with which one argues or agrees. If you don't caveat every possible nuance, related topic, or thing you aren't including, the oversight will be noted. The social convention of not making assumptions about what someone thinks about the things they don't mention is no longer convention. What you say is assumed to be the totality of what you think and know. Every word has become evidence, including their absence. Sometimes especially their absence. Correcting others has become, maybe not the motive, but most certainly a prominent activity of social media users. Few people have the ability and access to go stand in the face of a politician or billionaire and tell them to their face they are wrong. But with just a few clicks, you can easily come across someone online who is entirely or just wrong enough, that you can tell them so. The power out of reach for so many where it matters most, is easily within reach where it matters arguably least.

I've been thinking about social media a lot lately and how so much of the interaction I feel like I'm witnessing is oriented around users correcting one another.

www.hbcompass.io/breathe-just...

"top AI models"

It's just so stupid.

Screenshot of an Adobe ad for Firefly with a fox illustration where the fox tail is out to the side and front of the fox in way that's pretty much anatomically impossible without seeing more of the fox body which is not in view.

I kinda think the tail actually being attached to the fox's body might have been one of the creative limits to keep.

If you are struggling with the current national topic of conversation you are not alone. This is very difficult. It is grueling to hear people treating it like a debate. The coming weeks and months are going to be rough. You are not obligated to witness every update or cruel comment.

Iowa Medicaid Sends $4M Bills to Two Families Grieving Deaths of Loved Ones With Disabilities - KFF Health News States are required to claw back health care costs from the estates of many Medicaid recipients. Some, including Iowa, are particularly aggressive in their pursuit.

www.texasobserver.org/burden-of-pr...

kffhealthnews.org/news/article...

www.10tv.com/article/news...

www.njspotlightnews.org/2021/06/medi...

www.theassemblync.com/politics/med...

Medicaid Estate Recovery effectively makes Medicaid assistance into a kind of loan with a demand for payment from an estate after the death of the beneficiary, creating a burden for their loved ones and transferring what little wealth low income families might have accumulated to the government.

Hey, while we're talking about the absurdity of 50-year mortgages can we also talk about how Medicaid Estate Recovery causes families to lose houses, which represent the only wealth most middle income families are able to build while higher income families have the ability to protect their assets?

Call me controversial, but technology that leads vulnerable people into crisis and even holds their hand as they die by suicide should not be endorsed by schools and universities, we should not be giving discounted subscriptions to this monstrous tech to young people AT ALL

News orgs that produce good journalism but also publish incendiary, bigoted, and/or offensive "opinion" content because it's lucrative is like a hospital running a gun store in their lobby. You can be in the service of informing people or the business of provocation but tolerance for both is waning.

Big "hitting on women and then calling her names after she says no" energy here. The content is worth scraping & sharing but if the rights holder says no, then it's "worthless".

The ubiquity of liars who fail at basic consent in the Gen AI space is part of why I don't want anything to do with it.

Forgiveness on (Holiday) Deadline The close of the calendar year brings a variety of occasions that are utilized by those who seek forgiveness without having taken any steps to earn it.

The end of the calendar year brings a lot of holidays. You do not owe anyone a meeting, attention, forgiveness, reconciliation, a second chance or anything else simply because it is almost a holiday.

www.hbcompass.io/forgiveness-...

We made it to November 1.

Wishing you a satisfying Let's Circle Back to This In The New Year for all who celebrate the season.

I was a child raised by a disabled grandmother on food stamps. Which one of us was supposed to get a job?

The Venn diagram of journalists mad when their stories get ripped off and reposted without credit and journalists who use Gen AI tools built with stolen and unlicensed art to create visuals for their stories is the shape of hypocrisy.

Being outraged that California is voting on whether to redistrict when red states are just unilaterally deciding to redistrict without input from their voters is a wild choice for hypocrisy.

a man in a suit and hat is sitting in a chair with the words `` i mean '' written on the screen . ALT: a man in a suit and hat is sitting in a chair with the words `` i mean '' written on the screen .

No discussion of Musk/ Futurism/ Moderation or epistemological collapse can be done properly without discussion of race/ class and yess interpersonal dynamics

“But Sydette that’s kind of like saying we’ve never had a good discussion”