Kyle Thayer

"Social Media, Ethics, and Automation" is a free textbook written by me and @susannotess.bsky.social We teach new programmers to write social media bots (including Bsky), and think about the ethics of what they did. Visit the textbook here: social-media-ethics-automation.github.io/book/bsky/in...

I voted! (dropped off my ballot and got confirmation it was received) Have you made a plan for voting?

"Why don't you go to the bathroom in more survival games?" is a joke that came up during our podcast over the summer. I reached out to developers about it, and their answers were complicated and fascinating, from spiraling design issues to the deeper meaning behind where to put the toilet

This drives me CRAZY. I grew up playing sports w/ boys. I played on a U12 boys select soccer team, b4 switching to a U12 girls team that kept beating us. Nobody had any issue with any of it. Youth sports have never had the strict sex/gender boundaries that “XX-XY” activists are now trying to defend.

Our First Nations traditional territory maps are progressing. We're likely a week away from completing our alpha build. This will replace the Native-Land.ca territory maps, which went offline earlier this year (though they have other maps still online). It'll go online at knowledgekeepr.com

Your monthly reminder that if you're using ChatGPT to do your science, you're failing your colleagues, community, and all of us. Here, ChatGPT makes up data and presents it as the real thing — then apologizes when confronted.

An attempt to document important facts concerning AI Safety, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationalism and San Francisco Effective Altruism tldr definitely a millenarian death cult www.verysane.ai/p/ai-safety-...

HBD, iSchool! This year marks 25 years since the Information School was founded, and 115 years since the University of Washington's library school was established in 1911. Thank you to everyone who makes the UW Information School the welcoming learning community it is today.

ok so you know how, if you know a city's actual geography, car chase scenes drive you insane because shots jump all over the city? Here's a dumb visual gag someone should do: Each shot jumps to a different city, but *on the same street*, eg Broadway in SF to Broadway in NYC

JOB(S): My dept has an open rank open specialties (w/in Information Science / Library & Archival Science & closely related) search out of which we hope to make multiple hires! Im not on the committee but can say we'll have new teaching needs in social impacts of information technology & also ethics!

Hi @info103-teacher.bsky.social, please say something horrible

Hi @info103-teacher.bsky.social, please turn left

v1.136 is live! Introducing: Profile links We want independent writers, artists, developers, and creators to be able to build and fund sustainable projects on Bluesky. Help your followers know how to support you by adding buttons for Patreon, Ko-fi, your newsletter or website, and more.

Had this idea in lockdown, half-built it, forgot about it, remembered it again, though might as well finish it.

the computer nerds are saying "4" is a bad private key and yet no one had guessed it until now because they were trying all the big numbers instead

Yay! I got un-spam labeled!

gonna bury this one in the replies a little bit but while i think dx uptick for adhd is very much driven by awareness i think it's also driven by nicotine cessation-- we had a widespread-to-the-point-of-inescapability drug that ~worked pretty well for ADHD (shame about the other side effects)

it sounds kind of ridiculous but i think you can make a not entirely facetious case that 1) the industrial revolution and therefore ~modernity is downstream of mass-market stimulants (tea, then tobacco and coffee) and 2) a key impact of stimulants is their effect on specifically certain ND types

The New York Times editors' note on the Wedgewood Polls fiasco mentions FiftyPlusOne and links back to our investigation. We are happy our reporting on this bad actor is being recognized, and I applaud the reporting team, including Mary Radcliffe Cooper Burton, on their hard work!!

UPDATE: I found Wedgewood’s Kalshi account. He goes by Andrew and has been insider trading using the fake polls that he was posting. I reported this to Kalshi, hope they do something about it @gelliottmorris.com

Was inspired to make this in simple planes and it's worryingly competent...

Well, I guess I accidentally got my account labeled as spam. I guess that will make a good example in my social media bot class tomorrow

Seeing Oklab enjoyed and used by so many is mind-boggling! I still can’t quite comprehend that I wrote a blog post that ended up as a web standard and in software everywhere. Best part is seeing so many people say they enjoy Oklab and that it is a tool they regularly use.

I am a type 1 diabetic, and last night Dexcom forced me to agree to a new terms of use in order to continuing using the app and view my blood glucose data. Glad I had the foresight to "view agreements" and then copy the entire document. Because there appears to be NO WAY TO VIEW IT AGAIN. And...

This is actually a good idea tbh. Have bots that scan the web and invalidate keys if they're found. Services should mandate you agree whitehats are allowed to do this in ToS so it's not a violation of the CFAA. Would probably reduce their fraud dispute rate considerably.

I legit believe that this human-brain/network-scale mismatch is the problem at the root of the organic (rather than professional, propaganda-shaped) derangement of our online spaces, and therefore of our offline ones. We just cannot handle knowing what people think in their brains to this degree.

The internet has revealed to us that a.) people all around us passionately believe the goofiest, most nonsensical and sometimes obviously harmful things, and that b.) we are collectively unable to deal with this knowledge except by making each nonsensical thing absolutely everyone's problem.

While AI models and data centers can't replicate, I can easily imagine a new breed of computer viruses that use a prompt running on computers which hack into other computers and run, making new copies, etc.

Y’all, I hate to rain on the dead bot parade, but the Yandex data center destruction doesn’t seem to have significantly impacted social media bots. I made temporal graphs of X posts about AfD around the time of the attack and there’s no sign of a sudden dip or residual impact on that conversation.

No, bombing Yandex has not impacted automated Russian trolling operations in the U.S.

This is part of the endgame of Big AI in an era when everything we do is mediated through digital platforms. This is also why I keep trying to tell people that just wishing AI away isn’t a useful or effective answer — there has to be actual *countermeasures*. That means alternative technologies.

Remember to rewatch Over the Garden Wall this year.

This tracks with my experience peer reviewing heavily AI-generated papers—just crazy that it’s happening at this scale, with claims of disrupting an entire field. I feel bad for the mathematicians who have to sort through all this. They should get paid.

It’s notable to me that TWO of the most recent women who have won a NoBel Prize were denied tenure from their institutions: Anne Carson and Katalin Karikó

I feel like OpenAI could do a little bit better job acting like they give any amount of a shit whatsoever about the results they are publishing. They're just like, here, you piggies love this math shit right, here's a million pages of it. Should be mostly right.

Absolutely why I am working in this space, and trying to pursue clarity that is also liberatory. Gotta try.

we have an idea for communities in the app that we're calling "spaces" — places where people can gather around shared interests or social groups. here's a peek at some early prototypes. these are explorations, not polished or final. looking for feedback, esp from community builders 👀

Finished Steven Universe Future today, which means I’m now done with the whole series. Damn good show. Really liked Future. Really loved how it explored the psychological effects of being a kid hero in a long running TV show and being so unashamedly an epilogue to the show rather than an Epic Ending

Lanterns and the folly of Black excellence aftermath.site/lanterns-dc-st...

Exactly this. And in fact, many models *have* been created this way, and decades of prior machine learning systems *were* created this way, consensually. These things are choices! People are STILL working this way! It’s not just that a better world is possible — it already EXISTS. We can nurture it.

Watching the Netflix Matilda musical with the kids, my god the choreography goes harder than I expected youtu.be/EzPZ9VCCRmU?...

Spotted on Facebook: sicko game worlds colliding

Still think this is actually one of the best character arcs I have seen and its in a childrens cartoon. Then again Zuko's is another famously great character arc, so maybe we all just need to be putting more respect on children's cartoons names!