bcmerchant.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

OTK was meant to be an org for and by some of the world's biggest streamers, like asmongold and mizkif. but streamers' scandals and whims have repeatedly cost it sponsors, and now, following layoffs last year, it faces an uncertain future. my report:

submitted 1 day ago • 11 comments

"In an earlier post, she wrote: "As for the inevitable death, if I die, I want a loud death, I don't want me in a breaking news story, nor in a number with a group, I want a death that is heard by the world, a trace that lasts forever, and immortal images that neither time nor place can bury."

submitted 19 hours ago • 42 comments

NEW: The CFPB has been gutted. More than 1,400 workers received RIF notices this afternoon, agency sources tell me. Around 200 employees are left. www.wired.com/story/cfpb-h...

submitted 20 hours ago • 129 comments

Newsletter: Inside the Trump family’s sprawling crypto empire — from memecoins to mining — and how Trump is using presidential power to dismantle the regulators who could stop it. www.citationneeded.news/trump-crypto...

submitted 18 hours ago • 28 comments

To understand what Silicon Valley wants AI to do to art, we might look back 400 years, when the British textile industry used mass production to degrade the Indian craft of chintz—to the point that the entire art form was transformed into an insult for 'cheap-looking'. Chintz was the original slop:

submitted 19 hours ago • 4 comments

A big reason the fascist administration doesn't want Mr. Abrego Garcia back in the U.S. is because they know that when he tells his story in his own words more people will be disgusted.

submitted 2 days ago • 42 comments

In this Op-ed for Scientific American, Asmelash Teka Hadgu and I discuss one of the many reasons the idea of replacing US federal workers with so-called generative AI systems should terrify us. 🧵 www.scientificamerican.com/article/repl...

submitted 3 days ago • 4 comments

NEW: Andrew Cuomo used ChatGPT to help write the housing plan he released this weekend, which included several nonsensical passages. The plan even cites to ChatGPT on a section about the Rent Guidelines Board. hellgatenyc.com/andrew-cuomo...

submitted 4 days ago • 250 comments

In honor of the new season of Black Mirror, I wrote up the top 5 most luddite episodes Not the best, necessarily, but the most luddite — the ones with the best critiques of the tech industry, that encourage refusal and resistance www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/black-mirr...

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

so i'm in the climate skeptics subreddit for some reason (i'm a masochist) and have been horrified to find that they've latched onto a "paper" "written" by Grok 3 as "evidence" that humans are not causing global warming www.reddit.com/r/climateske...

submitted 4 days ago • 26 comments

Legitimately horrifying, not least for the cocktail party laughter from the audience offscreen

submitted 3 days ago • 2 comments

Newsletter: OpenAI is a systemic risk to the tech industry, requiring more money than exists every year, threatening the financial health of SoftBank, Oracle and NVIDIA, their future dependent on impossible debt and unproven startups to build their data centers. www.wheresyoured.at/openai-is-a-...

submitted 4 days ago • 39 comments

wtf Kaiser!

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

“AI puts patients in great danger,” Pacheco says. Great reporting on amazing push back from health care workers against the algorithmic undermining of quality of care, work, and life! This is exactly the conjunction of professional ethics and labor organizing that I think can show the way!

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Kaiser has been hiring clerks and relying on a semi-automated and algorithmic system to do mental health screenings/triage — including for suicide assessments

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

"Therapists went on a hunger strike to protest 'assembly line' conditions and the automation of mental healthcare" www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/therapists... - looks like a 'Writers' Guild' moment for therapy and AI. Great reporting from @bcmerchant.bsky.social

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

Psychs at Kaiser in PDX saved my life during the worst mental health crisis I’ve ever had while in an emotionally abusive relationship. One call to a crisis line, and in one day, I met 3 people who gave a shit, understood how to dx me, got me meds, IOP, and therapist referrals. Treat them right.

submitted 6 days ago • 2 comments

Kaiser is a big complicated system, but the therapists I've had thru it have been uniformly great, extraordinarily caring, and light years better than any other therapists I've seen

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

“We want more time to be with our patients... Kaiser treats therapy like a factory... They treat us like robots, like it’s an assembly line—therapy does not work that way.”

submitted 6 days ago • 4 comments

Therapists at Kaiser went on a hunger strike in Los Angeles to protest "factory" like working conditions and the automation of healthcare. I went down to the picket line on the last day to talk to the workers, some of whom hadn't eaten for 100 hours. www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/therapists...

submitted 6 days ago • 20 comments

Happy to help. Nothing happened. Everyone pretended like it didn't happen. It's almost entirely gone. Horizon World somehow exists. $45bn basically disappeared into a black hole owed to "lack of a clear vision and mismanagement." Who knows what happened! finance.yahoo.com/news/metas-r...

submitted 6 days ago • 149 comments

SCOOP: Palantir software is being used by IRS to ingest and sort agency data as part of the mega API project. www.wired.com/story/palant...

submitted 6 days ago • 25 comments

I’m not kidding; this is DOGE at work; multiple US citizens getting notices that they just leave the country because USCIS is revoking their humanitarian parole. www.politico.com/news/2025/04...

submitted 6 days ago • 145 comments

Really proud of the law students taking a hard line against collaboration with coercive measures from the Trump administration despite all of the uncertainty as they get ready to graduate. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

submitted 7 days ago • 3 comments

If you want to get information about your social security benefits, you will now have to log onto the website owned by President Trump's largest campaign donor, and get it between ads for boner pills and graphic videos of motorcycle crashes. www.wired.com/story/social...

submitted 6 days ago • 15 comments

I wrote about how Trump's trade war is falling flat in a moment when Americans don't feel as negatively about China as they once did www.wired.com/story/china-...

submitted 7 days ago • 7 comments

Impressively bad political calculus here. This bill is essentially pro-Elon Musk, since worldwide, BYD is Tesla's biggest threat in electric car markets. It's also anti-EV, period, which people tend to like and is supposed to be a climate solution, and plays as pro-Trump trade policy. Well done.

submitted 6 days ago • 6 comments