jasonkoebler.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy - Profile | ThreadSky

404 Media is throwing a party and a few hours of programming (live podcast, etc) with Flipboard at SXSW on Monday March 10. Come hang out please! And let me know if you're going to be in town or know cool people who will be: https://lu.ma/hffhi9sn

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

A German researcher captured the contents of "DEI.gov" before it was put behind a password wall. It contained a list of things USAID was funding filtered through the worst possible light: https://www.404media.co/dei-waste-gov-doge-list-behind-password/

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

New: A court ordered Trump administration to restore CDC, HHS, & FDA health websites. It did, but added a note to some pages saying the info is "extremely inaccurate" & "this page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the Administration reject[s] it" […]

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

Scoop: The databases powering doge. gov are insecure, and people outside the government have already pushed their own updates to the site to prove it: https://www.404media.co/anyone-can-push-updates-to-the-doge-gov-website-2/

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

A "True Crime" documentary YouTuber racked up millions and millions of views with fully AI-generated murders that did not happen https://www.404media.co/a-true-crime-documentary-series-has-millions-of-views-the-murders-are-all-ai-generated/

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

The entire contents of Waste. gov, the website tracking government "waste" are from a default WordPress theme about an imaginary architecture firm. Musk said yesterday DOGE is "maximally transparent" and all actions are being tracked on website […]

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

"Motivational" AI Slop of Elon Musk and Donald Trump is wildly viral on TikTok. Researchers identify videos with a total of more than 700 million views: https://www.404media.co/ai-slop-of-musk-and-trump-on-tiktok-racks-up-700-million-views/

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

Wikipedia is rolling out anonymity features piloted in countries with authoritarian governments in the US & is making a change to not show editor IP addresses in response to a global "increase in threats" from Elon Musk, Heritage Foundation, and governments […]

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

New Microsoft study finds that using generative AI at work makes employees' critical thinking skills "atrophied and unprepared" https://www.404media.co/microsoft-study-finds-ai-makes-human-cognition-atrophied-and-unprepared-3/

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

Just spoke very briefly to National Archivist Colleen Shogan, who confirmed she was fired by Trump a few minutes ago: https://www.404media.co/trump-fires-national-archives-director-colleen-shogan/

submitted 16 days ago • 2 comments

ABC News reported Marco Rubio has been acting as head of the National Archives for weeks. This is news to everyone at the National Archives, including, apparently, the current head of NARA […]

submitted 17 days ago • 1 comment

NEW: DOGE employees have been ordered to stop using Slack while the agency transitions itself to a legal regime that is not subject to FOIA and other government transparency laws […]

submitted 18 days ago • 1 comment

Manila folders. You don’t know nearly enough about them. I can fix that. 📂 https://tedium.co/2025/02/03/manila-folder-envelope-history/

submitted 19 days ago • 2 comments

AI-generated slop books are now in public libraries and librarians who are already stretched very thin, underfunded, and are under attack are struggling to deal with the onslaught https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-slop-is-already-in-your-public-library-3/

submitted 19 days ago • 1 comment

senator proposes bill that would criminalize downloading open source AI from China https://www.404media.co/senator-hawley-proposes-jail-time-for-people-who-download-deepseek/

submitted 20 days ago • 2 comments

New: Github reveals some of the code and banal back-and-forth discussion used to clean a federal database of "forbidden words" in a dataset that tracks spending effectiveness for Headstart, which affects "America's most vulnerable young children" […]

submitted 20 days ago • 1 comment

scoop: Musk's DOGE has brought in Stephanie Holmes, an HR consultant & attorney focused on "non-woke" HR and a version of DEI "aligned with our faith." Has spoken at Federalist Society, with members of Heritage Society, at religious conferences […]

submitted 22 days ago • 2 comments

"Everything I say leaks," Zuckerberg says in leaked meeting audio. "It sucks" https://www.404media.co/zuckerberg-says-everything-i-say-leaks-in-leaked-meeting-audio/

submitted 24 days ago • 3 comments

Thousands of datasets have disappeared from data.gov. Determining what's gone, why it's gone, and whether it moved elsewhere will to take time. Things are definitely being purged but archivists working hard to determine exactly what has happened to a given dataset […]

submitted 24 days ago • 1 comment

In its war on DEI and trans people, the Trump administration has bravely deleted a video about the grammatical concept of pronouns, demonstrating a scattershot, unserious effort that is nuking all sorts of things […]

submitted 24 days ago • 1 comment

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a declassified World War II-era CIA guide to sabotaging fascism in the workplace has become one of the most popular free ebooks on the internet: https://www.404media.co/declassified-cia-guide-to-sabotaging-fascism-is-suddenly-viral/

submitted 25 days ago • 7 comments

OpenAI shocked and appalled that an AI company would steal intellectual property https://www.404media.co/openai-furious-deepseek-might-have-stolen-all-the-data-openai-stole-from-us/

submitted 25 days ago • 1 comment

very sad LinkedIn is acting against these hard-working fake people looking for jobs https://www.404media.co/linkedin-ai-coworkers-marketeam-open-to-work/

submitted 26 days ago • 1 comment

Some of the OPM memos ordering hiring freezes, return to offices, etc were directly written by people who worked on Project 2025, according to metadata left embedded in the memos https://www.404media.co/opm-memos-to-federal-employees-metadata/

submitted 27 days ago • 0 comments

Oklahoma is considering a bill that would criminalize porn: https://www.404media.co/oklahoma-senator-dusty-deevers-porn-bill/

submitted 27 days ago • 3 comments

Turns out "incinerate money and boil the oceans" was not the smartest strategic gambit https://www.404media.co/deepseek-mania-shakes-ai-industry-to-its-core/

submitted 27 days ago • 2 comments

You can watch the Trump administration play DEI whac-a-mole with employee policies and public websites on GitHub, which is automatically cataloguing all of the changes the 18F agency is frantically making to its internal and external webpages […]

submitted 31 days ago • 0 comments

A web developer has created and released an infinitely generating "tar pit" designed to trap AI training bots in an endless maze: "Just me unleashing shear unadulterated rage at how things are going" https://www.404media.co/developer-creates-infinite-maze-to-trap-ai-crawlers-in/

submitted 31 days ago • 0 comments

Zuckerberg "loved" an AI slop image on a spam page that also posts AI images of children with amputations, elderly people, fake images of graves, links offsite to ad-loaded pages, etc. Exciting stuff for me […]

submitted 32 days ago • 0 comments

New: The manufacturer of a medical device that costs six figures has told hospitals that they will no longer be allowed to fix them. Hospitals must now sign repair contracts with the manufacturer if they want the device fixed. Repair monopoly in action […]

submitted 32 days ago • 2 comments

The last few weeks have really highlighted just how fragile corporate social media is, and just how beholden to political power it is. To build any sort of ground-up power we must continue to invest in decentralized alternatives that are resistant to intervention […]

submitted 33 days ago • 0 comments

We've been lucky enough that we are getting a lot of merch orders from Europe in particular, but we (and our customers) are getting killed on shipping for obvious reasons. If you know of a good EU merch printer/supplier/fulfiller, please let me know? Would be good to work with a small shop

submitted 38 days ago • 0 comments

Everything Zuckerberg is doing must be seen in context of the TikTok ban, the greatest gift the government could give Meta. I went through years of his testimony about China; he has been planting seeds for this for years, now desperately needs Trump to side with him […]

submitted 38 days ago • 0 comments

Stack Overflow & Discourse founder @codinghorror pledges to donate half of his wealth within the next five years, citing urgency of income inequality, housing costs, and wealth concentration: "wealth starts to unintentionally distance my family from other Americans" […]

submitted 39 days ago • 0 comments

The simple truth is that nonconsensual porn AI "nudify" apps are viable because they get almost all of their traffic from social media ads. One of the largest one is getting 90 percent of its traffic from Instagram ads. 90 percent! This is only going to get worse […]

submitted 39 days ago • 0 comments

The 404 Media RSS feed is down at the moment. We’re trying to figure out what’s going on and how to fix it asap. I think likely an outage with the provider who manages this service for us but we’re looking into it. Sorry for the inconvenience!!

submitted 41 days ago • 0 comments

Meta is deleting links to Pixelfed, a decentralized, open source Instagram competitor that has had skyrocketing signups in recent days: https://www.404media.co/meta-is-blocking-links-to-decentralized-instagram-competitor-pixelfed/

submitted 41 days ago • 3 comments

Beautiful stuff: "It’s not really enjoyable to make music now… it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you have to get really good at an instrument... I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of time they spend making music." […]

submitted 41 days ago • 7 comments

An Amazon delivery confirmation photo is the last time a Palisades resident saw her house standing. Amazon drivers say they have been delivering in neighborhoods that were evacuated soon after they left, are delivering in adjacent neighborhoods. Scary situation […]

submitted 41 days ago • 0 comments

New: Meta has deleted trans and nonbinary Messenger themes, as well as the blog posts announcing them. Happens the same week that it has changed its rules to allow users to say LGBTQ+ people are "mentally ill" https://www.404media.co/meta-deletes-trans-and-nonbinary-messenger-themes/

submitted 44 days ago • 6 comments

New: Meta employees are furious about a new policy that allows users to call LGBTQ+ people "mentally ill." Some have resigned in protest. Some LGBTQ+ employees have started saying they if they are 'mentally ill' they should get leaves of absence from work […]

submitted 45 days ago • 1 comment

We had to evacuate Los Angeles. Most of my friends have also had to leave. We are safe in San Diego and our apartment is unlikely to burn down. We are very lucky. But alongside the visceral horror of the wildfires there is also the mundanity of dystopia […]

submitted 45 days ago • 0 comments

Hundreds of police license plate cameras are misconfigured to stream unencrypted to the open internet. A privacy researcher took these streams and turned them into a real-time database that tracks car movements & information, highlighting how invasive this tech is […]

submitted 47 days ago • 0 comments

Sentences I did not think I would write: Videos of mass shootings, suicides, and gore are being run through Runway's AI, turned into Minions, and then posted to social media to evade content moderation https://www.404media.co/minion-gore-videos-use-ai-to-post-murder-to-instagram-tiktok-and-youtube/

submitted 47 days ago • 0 comments

NEW: On the same day Mark Zuckerberg announces Meta's new commitment to "Free Expression," internal employee dissent and criticism is being censored https://www.404media.co/facebook-deletes-internal-employee-criticism-of-new-board-member-dana-white/

submitted 47 days ago • 2 comments

New: Days after Meta had to kill its AI-generated profiles due to backlash, some Instagram users are now being shown AI-generated images of themselves that are being automatically created by Instagram and put in their feeds […]

submitted 48 days ago • 0 comments

The currently viral Meta AI profiles are old and are already inactive because they were such a colossal failure and were indistinguishable from AI spam. This 'inevitable' future Zuckerberg is trying to shove down our throats is being completely rejected […]

submitted 51 days ago • 0 comments

This YouTuber painstakingly reverse-engineered the interior case of an iPhone, 3D printed his own, then released all the design files so you can do it too: https://www.404media.co/how-and-why-a-reverse-engineer-3d-printed-an-iphone/

submitted 52 days ago • 0 comments