New pre-print: Stop using Media Bias/Fact Check in research.

https://theluddite.org/post/stop-using-mbfc.html

This project began as a post about a year ago, in which we followed the provenance of the data from a study about misinformation until, at the bottom, we found Media Bias/Fact Check. Upon further examination, it turned out that Media Bias/Fact Check is just some guy quantifying the vibes, and upon him, totally unwittingly, there rests a surprising amount of academic research.

RE: https://social.coop/@brainwane/116570195198165093

I hope you’re having a great time! When I lived in Providence I played a season of vintage baseball until I pulled my calf running out a single and couldn’t walk for days.

Still loved it.

The pic is from when I went up to Boston for a multi game day and the host team was short on players, so I played for their side.

"When we help students reclaim their attention, they’re well-positioned to think directly and critically about AI. ...we find African-American abolitionist writing to offer an especially powerful archive of reflections on literacy and power"

https://www.oakland.edu/cetl/teaching-tips/2026/4/Creating-AI-Free-Learning-Spaces.php

Today I came across an article about wetlands landscape archaeology up in Northeast Bolivia, like you do.

It referenced an area near Lake Ginebra.

For a bit of context, I opened up google maps and entered, "Lake Ginebra" into the search field. Google maps, no doubt high on Gemini, took me to Lake Geneva in Switzerland. And would not give me anything else no matter what markup I tried.

Oops I did it again... published another paper about #Mastodon through the lens of the asstodon hashtag

This one's not very rosy, it's about how a motivated harasser had a lot of room to perpetrate harassment in a decentralized network where big servers were not very inclined to intervene ...
https://openjournals.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/JoCI/article/view/6644

Rayvon Fouché’s research in history of technology reveals that Black inventors were largely excluded from “shop” cultures and “school” cultures where white Americans honed their technical skills through informal apprenticeship or formal education, then finding routes into scientific and industrial cultures where credentialed invention occurred. Even when they invented, though, they were often gatekept out of receiving credit for innovation. 2/

Yo computer touchers: there's a history of Black invention and ingenuity you may or may not know about, *and* a history of Black inventors' ingenuity being denied at a systemic level

🧵

Chilling and important read. "American universities are rapidly becoming test beds for the kind of repressive technology we associate with authoritarian states abroad"

https://truthout.org/articles/us-campuses-have-become-the-newest-laboratories-for-surveillance-technology/

#PolicingTheCampus #policing

Ever seen an ad for ground.news and wondered where they get their data? Well, they too get it from Dave. Depending on the metric, they average his scores with either 1 or 2 other so-called "trusted ratings systems."

A reminder that the anti-Iraq-war protests were some of the largest demonstrations in human history and they failed. The "carrying signs and yelling at empty buildings" theory of change comes from a sanitized retelling of past movements.

Today, every group with a twitter is calling for a demonstration in their town, but movements that don't cause power to feel pain and don't have the institutional capacity to negotiate if/when they do are doomed to failure.

If you're an REI member, the REI Union is asking you to register to vote in the REI board election and then vote "withhold" across the slate.

https://www.ourrei.com/2025-rei-board-elections

#REI #REIUnion

I'm often told that socialism isn't possible or realistic in the US. None of these people would've considered what's happening now realistic just 10 years ago.

That WaPo article (https://archive.md/XBO1R) going around about how self-driving cars don't stop for pedestrians at crosswalks is luddism 101. Driving is not a purely technical task, but instead mediated by complex social processes, of which the attached screenshot from the article is a good example. Integrating self-driving cars means renegotiating those processes, and we should never let capital dictate terms, because they don't value human life.

Naming cardiovascular and auto-immune diseases "lifestyle diseases" when often they might better be understood and treated as diseases of stress, trauma, and living in a poisoned environment, is a very peculiar framing. Making it sound as if we have choices and individual control about exactly those factors that we in fact have the least control over.

Maybe I should have started a #PolicingTheCampus thread way back...

Anyway here's the #UN saying that what uni's are doing "reveals a widespread hostile environment for the exercise of the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association"; & that this threatens "democratic systems and institutions; ...in addition to failing the responsibility to prevent atrocity crimes and to contribute to peace"

https://www.ohchr.org/en/statements/2024/10/universities-must-respect-peaceful-activism-and-revise-repressive-policies

#GazaProtests #HigherEd #academia

A plea to fellow leftists: If you want to have a serious discussion about AI, try to define what you mean by AI first. If your definition boils down to "mostly LLMs but also a smattering of other cool shit that computers can do, " maybe try to refine that a little before you publish, otherwise you end up parroting AI hype nonsense.

More updates: This bullshit study that we've been following for 9 months got cited on the freakonomics podcast. Jump to 23min.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/can-a-i-companions-replace-human-connection/

Good news, though. Our Matters Arising is through peer review and currently awaiting publication:

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/pkt6e

Also worth noting that without my coauthor's UVM affiliation, there's no way I'd be shelling out 4 figures to respond in the journal.

Nature* published an article titled "Loneliness and suicide mitigation for students using GPT3-enabled chatbots"

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44184-023-00047-6

Even among the awful #AI hype articles, this one is egregious, and that's before taking into account the sensitivity of the subject matter.

Here's my response, where I break down this outrageous piece of marketing pseudoscience:

https://theluddite.org/#!post/replika

@mediaarchaeologylab

Although it doesn't seem you have D-1 materials in your collection, I thought you might have the right connections to help out the ReBoot Rewind project:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gy_rYYNGj6pa-gDjw8sP5s296TV0i_cS7pbwdG24v44

@jessamyn :

"A section of Agre’s essay that specifically inspired this article is about blame: “Whenever they start to blame themselves, respond by blaming the computer. Then keep on blaming the computer, no matter how many times it takes, in a calm, authoritative tone of voice."

Me: Pumping my fists and hooting in approval.

The rest of this essay is also excellent.

https://www.infotoday.com/cilmag/jun24/West--The-Latest-Digital-Divide-Systems-Thinking-vs-Misinformation-and-Malfeasance.shtml