Erin Kissane

18 Sept

look, the part of my brain that is in charge of punctuation is doing something else this year

I got a celiac diagnosis like 15 years ago and I am so careful and yet at least yet once a week every single week my dreaming brain is like HAAAY GLUTEN SAFE NOW WOOO and Dream Erin gets halfway through a loaf of bread and only then realizes it was a lie. Like: what??

10h

Just a reminder that there is no good data to support these uses in K12, we are just testing it live all on kids who won’t ever be these ages again and can’t get them back if we fuck it up.

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com

"AI can draft an essay for you, especially if you give it a high quality prompt." Really? This is what MIT thinks high schoolers should learn? MIT's "Day of AI" dayofai.org provides materials for K-12 teachers and claims to have reached over 5,000,000 students to date. 1/2

10h

I don’t care any more about the brains of managers who choose to write their emails and do their 360s with LLMs, though I feel for their reports. But you would think we had learned to be careful with children’s brains after the recent reading catastrophe, and yet. So much money to be made.

10h

Anyway! Where did all those Atlantic/NYT writers who were so deeply concerned about learning losses go, again, do you think? Fell in holes? Got Chotinered? Eaten by RFK Jr?

Erin Kissane reposted

Faine Greenwood

@faineg.com

13h

Related: I’m still looking for leads and help on jobs, fellowships, and freelance contracts on drones, GIS, aid, disaster, OSINT, tech ethics, and journalism. I simply will not work for evil people and/or weapons manufacturers, which is also why I haven’t had paying work since Trump 2.0 began.

Andrew (🎃)@athomashemlock.bsky.social

Drone tech has so many incredible applications for so many industries and if you want to make any sort of living you have to work for an illiterate Nazi pervert dweeb who collects erotic anime figurines.

npr.orgHow bots are overtaking humans on the internet : The Indicator from Planet MoneyThere are now more bots than humans online. What does that mean for how we experience the internet? Can bots and humans peacefully coexist online? Fact checking by Sierra Juarez.Your Next Listen –Can...

I got to talk to @wailinwong.bsky.social just a little bit about Dead Internet business. Boo! 👻 www.npr.org/2026/10/26/n...

I think it is incredible that the part they picked was me putting an estate lawyer on blast for ChatGPTing me

Oh no

Austin Wintory@awintory.bsky.social

Mass Effect was my ultimate white whale, my all-time dream project. For the last couple years I'd been in discussion w/ BioWare & EA to take on the project & as part of that I wrote close to 20 minutes of music to explore where the franchise can go next, may as well share it!

I’m not even a ME person but Wintory is a legend and this is all so sad

My family is going to see Wildwood today but I decided it would be too much for me so emotionally so I‘m going down the hall to see YCSE instead, ask me nothing.

Welp.

My family is going to see Wildwood today but I decided it would be too much for me so emotionally so I‘m going down the hall to see YCSE instead, ask me nothing.

I turn out to be seeing this with six (6) of my kid’s friends’ dads. I am the only mom. Brand weirdly consistent.

One by one, the independent artists whose shop newsletters I subscribe to have switched to Claudiform emails that all sound the same: The vase by the bedside. The quiet moment before sleep. A tea blend that reminds us to pause. It’s such a bummer.

Like, I loved them when they were a quarter of this length and just a person. (And yes, I know about the discourse but Pangram pings them as 100% generated.)

I myself only use Pangram when I feel pretty certain I’m looking at generated material a human hasn’t even bothered to edit. So maybe it’s confirmation bias but I think everyone has just collapsed.

…what are we supposed to be doing here, like, ”bucc naked”??

Merriam-Webster@merriam-webster.com

We acknowledge that no one has the bandwidth for this, but if it helps: -It’s ‘sleight of hand’ -It’s ‘bated breath’ -It’s ‘lo and behold’ -It's 'buck naked' -It’s ‘brass tacks’ -It’s ‘free rein’ -It’s ‘toe the line'

I object to the deprecation of “butt naked,” which deserves to stand (or sit) alone

Before I lose my phone for the weekend: Modern TAG programs are *intended* to be special needs programs for a group of kids who struggle with regular programs, not status or treats for bright kids with good grades. Profoundly gifted children are at high risk of a lot of bad things.

Some schools implement them in corrupted and unhelpful ways, but I think the core idea that many kids with many ability levels will need adaptation of some kind is a good one. (Also that generalizing from how schools were in your own childhood is maybe not ideal.)

Anyway I think this stuff is what we should do for all children all the time. Adaptations should layer on top of material and emotional well-being. Feed the kids. bsky.app/profile/kiss...

Erin Kissane@kissane.myatproto.social

10:1 student-teacher ratio, free food, later start times (and free childcare), triple the chances to play and move, no grades till high school, well-paid teachers and aides. Offer tutoring and quiet library time as needed. Now you have twice as many kids who can focus, so you can try some things.

Oop, my primary internal monologue loop got out

Erin Kissane@kissane.myatproto.social

law.cornell.edu47 U.S. Code § 230 - Protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material

Section 230 is really short and really important, but the collective online sense of it is really strange. You can just read it. www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/...

And no, a social media company that chooses to block links to e.g. adult content sites is not going to get in trouble bc of § 230, that is literally one of the main activities § 230 protects.

(Whether a social media company SHOULD do that is a separate question. There are absolutely things I think should be not be linkable, myself, through ye olde only fans is not one.)

osf.ioPresumed Effective: The Manufacturing of an Evidence Base for AI-in-Education Through Flawed Meta-AnalysisThis review employs a forensic methodological audit of 14 meta-analyses making broad claims about the impact of AI on education, evaluating construct coherence, primary study selection, and statistica...

Here’s the paper, for others who would always rather read. Wild stuff. osf.io/preprints/ed...

John Warner@biblioracle.bsky.social

I would love everyone in education, regardless of level, to watch this discussion of the grave methodological problems of meta analysis papers on "AI in education." We are years from even a potentially valid analysis. Anyone claiming to know something now is lying. www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuEv...

youtube.comPresumed Effective: The Manufacturing of an Evidence Base for AI-in-Ed Through Flawed Meta-AnalysisYouTube video by MIT Teaching Systems Lab

blog.zentropi.aiMeet CoPE-B-S1: A Decision Model Tuned for SafetyToday we're launching CoPE-B-S1, a safety-tuned decision model that speaks the System One spec, answers many policy questions in a single pass, and can be self-hosted. TL;DR * CoPE-B-S1 is a new me...

This is kind of bananas (appreciative)

Dave Willner@dwillner.bsky.social

We're shipping CoPE-B-S1, an open-weight decision model tuned for safety use cases. It's a significant step forward for our CoPE family of models in a few ways. A thread: blog.zentropi.ai/meet-cope-b-...

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people arguing against any AI in moderation either don’t understand the scale (which companies have been crap at explaining!) or they’re rooting for a world with only either small group networks or unmoderated, ultra-dangerous hellscapes (from the *relative* safety of AI-moderated platforms)

this tech is a mess for all kinds of reasons and also it is working better for moderation than what we had before and I will bite that bullet every time rather than accept the end of the social internet 🤷🏻

This is kind of bananas (appreciative)

Dave Willner@dwillner.bsky.social

for years, my sole completely pro-AI position has been “AI is essential for ethical content moderation, actually, and we need to get it much righter asap” and there has been so much progress on this

Evergreen post

Sonja Drimmer@sonjadrimmer.bsky.social

I wish more journalists and influential outlets could divorce themselves from the narrative of "undercover tourism of weirdo internet trend" and insted focus on how these trends are vehicles for diagonalism.

chaoticera.newsOpinion: The Danger of a Good NightThe head of a Democratic Super PAC warns that a potential “Blue Wave” shouldn’t give her party too much comfort heading into 2028

This framing is frustrating bc a.) you can absolutely do forward-looking celebration if your game is real progress and not consultant-brained status quo and b.) the idea that harnessing "the full potential of the internet" = Making More Content! is just deadly. www.chaoticera.news/p/opinion-th...

I guess if your party leaders are more afraid of the DSA than of your opponents' commitment to the revocation of rights, the end of research, and mass violence ad death, adopting a commitment to actual people power would be off the table. But I am just a person.

Gotta say, it's very annoying to have been a Markdown head all these godforsaken years and now have people act like I've generated (manually written) material because it's formatted using the most common human-friendly markup standard rather than a PDF.

Also, when I'm focused and not juggling nine projects, I can write *a whole lot of words* at a time. That is what decades of writing a lot of words will do! When I produce a long document it is because I ran out of time to edit it down, not because I squeezed a robot. 🌬️

(I've had to rely heavily on dictation software to heal up an RSI and it feels amazing to be able to be back at the actual keyboard for a few hours a day. My thinking is a lot better when I type rather than dictate, despite years of trying to make my talking brain smarter.)

Somewhere away from "We'll just win elections and make the big platforms behave!" and "All that matters is winning so we should just use whatever platform gets us the most eyes!" there has to be a recognition that Meta/TikTok/YouTube/X are permanent thumbs on the scale until we crush them.

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Pick one social platform giant and one AI company and hang em up on the city walls, watch the rest suddenly remember how to be governable.

nytimes.comHow Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes (Gift Article)Meta is exploiting a lucrative tax break intended to support research and experimentation. Its own accountants say the gambit is risky.

Crush this behavior, too. 🔨 bsky.app/profile/kash...

Kashmir Hill@kashhill.bsky.social

Meta is using a radical interpretation of a tax credit for “research and experimentation” to get billions of dollars off GPUs for its A.I. data centers. My latest with Jesse Drucker, @elitan.bsky.social and @mikeisaac.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2026/09/30/t...

cpd.gov.uaAnalytical report ‘When bots go silent: what the strikes on “Yandex” data centers affected’ | Центр протидії дезінформаціїThe Center for Countering Disinformation (hereinafter referred to as the Center) conducted an in-depth study of accounts displaying signs of inauthentic beh ...

What’s the common wisdom on the CCD assessment that in fact inauthentic messages focused on Ukraine (on FB and Telegram) really did drop after the data centers went down? cpd.gov.ua/en/report/an...

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When I say "crush them" I don't mean "Left Authoritarian Ban Them" I mean crush this. Give Lina Khan and all her nerds the big sticks and send her out there. bsky.app/profile/jess...

Jessica McKenzie@jessimckenzi.bsky.social

holy crap

And I'm sure I should care more about the future effects on new networks of big judgments against Meta right now, but right now Meta needs to be starved, staked, decapitated, and buried at the crossroads. Make them a warning.

Democracies letting platforms carry on as imperial powers is the same thing as surrendering to infinite permanent gerrymandering and election interference and just telling people to vote harder every time to keep up.