Kyle Thayer

A very mistaken list of the last 12 presidents of the United States and their years in office produced by the Ph.D level scholar known as ChatGPT-5. Includes John F. Katwady, president 1991-1968; George W. bush, president 220Z-1999), and Bill Christen, president 1999-2001

I've seen this on Bluesky and had to try it myself. The image below was the response to the prompt: "Show me a diagram of the US presidents since Herbert Hoover, with their names and years in office under their photos" Bravo, OpenAI, bravo.

A lot of people don’t realize that the New Deal was successful because Franklin D. Roseeneah was in office for four centuries

12. Virality and Memes We’ve now covered many of the aspects of how content spreads on social media platforms, (that is, content going “viral”). So now we’ll look at the origin of the word “meme” and look at the concept ...

Oops, forgot to include link to our textbook chapter: social-media-ethics-automation.github.io/book/bsky/ch...

Anyway, my question for you all out there is if there is prior work on this (since I couldn't find it through googling)

One example in particular I point to is that if there is a fandom for someone (e.g., musician), then that creates an open space for an anti-fandom of haters. Similarly if there is an anti-fandom (e.g., of a serial killer), that creates a space for at least a small fandom.

For example, there are social media niches for trolls, jokes, news, etc.

So a celebrity or news might bring direct attention to social media (like a plant using sunlight directly), and a troll feeds off the attention that is brought in (like a parasite).

@susannotess.bsky.social and I cover evolution and meme theory in our textbook in our chapter on "Virality and Memes," and in class I cover convergent evolution and biological niches, and then make analogies to social media niches.

#AcademicSky

Has there been any work on social media as an evolutionary system powered by attention (an "attention ecosystem"?), analogous to earth life being powered by sunlight/geothermal vents?

I heard there was a secret 'b'
Hidden inside a 'blueberry'
But you don't really care for GPT do ya
It goes like this: a 'b' at first, and fourth and sixth,
Whoops, minor error; purported fix,
My AI reinventing "blubeberry"
Blubeberry 🎶
blubellberry
Blurblery

CONGRATULATIONS to @rudyfraser.com for migrating users to the Blacksky PDS!

This is a momentous step forward for decentralization and data sovereignty for users of Bluesky/ATProto services.

We'll be following suit in the near future and hope to learn from Blacksky's experience and leadership!

fwiw, since some folks are bothered by the phrasing, what I mean by “too AI skeptical” isn’t that people are too *opposed* to AI but that I’ll often see people boosting claims that are very obviously not true (e.g. that LLMs have zero use cases), which i think undermines the many valid critiques

If blacksky gets polls before mainline bsky, it's over lol

It’s a fortune cookie fortune that says “Your heart’s desire is now within reach,” held between Abi’s burgundy acrylic nails

My fortune cookie was scarily accurate last night! 👻 Fortune cookie technology has become SCARILY powerful; we may even be approaching General Cookie Intelligence! We should add fortune cookies to every industry and government service to improve efficiency

🤖 Wow! Illinois just banned generative AI for therapy! Notably, it appears *the model itself* is banned from portraying itself as a therapist, or else *the model* will be fined....?? I have thoughts. 🧵
idfpr.illinois.gov/content/dam/...

An update from us here at PBS 💙

Bluesky should go a step further and show you which of your followers' reposts got you the most reposts or likes so you can properly value your friends

mastodon got caught on their ass during the twitter exodus, not having any community staff to empower the different communities looking for a new place to engage. the fediverse nimby's were unsurprisingly hostile, especially to the black community as well as anyone who uses social to sell things

i, in fact, encourage mastodon to alienate some of their community for the sake of making the main instance more accessible and interesting to the masses, especially because they have federation largely figured out and implemented. the nimby's can absolutely go and create their own community pocket.

we should print this headline out and put it in a time capsule for future generations to understand this time period

Who has done research about the bot problems on Bluesky...?

I encounter *so many* liberal / left-wing bot accounts here. It feels like a distinct ecosystem from Twitter.

People ask me about user engagement and I barely look at those numbers anymore.
We aren't funded by advertisers. Engagement isn't paying the bills over here.
Our community is.

"Magic 8 ball, are you programmed to lie to me?"
NO
"Omg it tells the truth!"

you know, technically, as of now, I *am* paying for my social media lol

If a single person can rifle through a garbage can and put it on a plate, what does a restaurant still represent?

A Chrome browser error page displays the familiar “Aw, Snap!” message, indicating that something went wrong while loading a webpage. A pixelated frowning file icon with Xs for eyes appears at the top left. Below, the error code reads “Out of Memory,” suggesting the browser ran out of system resources. The page includes a “Reload” button in blue on the bottom right

behold the "HTML bomb"

It's a counterattack for AI companies that persistently scrape and rescrape your web site, even when you tell them not to

when a scraper grabs it, it becomes a 10-gig HTML page and 💣 goes the scraper

Item #6 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter: buttondown.com/clivethompso...

Note: There being "no ethical" option means there's no perfect action. But there are still better and worse choices you can make, and really the issues involved in capitalism and colonialism require collective action in response.

Thought I'm having as I keep bumping into cross-cultural issued:

Just as there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, there's also no ethical cultural exchange under colonialism.

Every reputable expert I know considers mRNA vaccine technology to be one of the most revolutionary advances in medicine in our lifetimes. Its inventors won the Nobel Prize in 2023. Shutting it down now is pointless self-harm to humanity.

The numbers are dire for the Signature loans CPC is supervising. Signature specialized in making rent regulated loans to landlords who intended to renovate apartments and raise rents. When the 2019 law made that strategy impossible by sharply limiting rent increases, the finances of those buildings cratered.

The problem, in other words, is entirely about debt, not the actual costs of providing rental housing. The problem is that building owners expected rents to rise faster than they turned out to, and took out bigger loans than the actual rent increases could justify.

When my oldest was 8, she asked to start walking the ~1/8th mile from the bus stop to our house by herself after school. The first week she did so, a woman biking through our neighborhood stopped her and gave her crap about how she shouldn't be alone--even though I was watching from our front porch.