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

more and more i think the trump's actual revenge tour is against the american people www.nytimes.com/2025/03/01/b...

submitted 6 hours ago • 176 comments

Every time someone says they won’t try to use ai to replace teachers, you should put “yet” at the end of their sentence.

submitted 1 day ago • 14 comments

“The suit also accuses GM of using so-called ‘dark patterns’, a design technique aimed at tricking customers into agreeing to terms they might otherwise reject by ‘taking advantage of consumers’ cognitive biases to keep them from material information needed to make fully-informed decisions.’”

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

I love our piecemeal reproduction of Roman concrete. It's one of the best, most engaging real world examples of epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of technology there is. So damn good.

submitted 3 days ago • 10 comments

"AI technology appears to outperform humans. But a closer look reveals that these games are rigged. The competitions do not actually ask machines to perform human tasks; it’s more accurate to say that they ask humans to behave in machine-like ways as they perform lifeless simulacra of human tasks."

submitted 4 days ago • 2 comments

The Rise of AI Book Ripoffs Podcast: 🔗 www.404media.co/podcast-the-...

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

everyone seeing how when you takeaway the DEI the planes start falling out of the sky

submitted 5 days ago • 592 comments

Congrats, team!

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Wrote about how Bloomberg used WhatsApp to crowdsource data on rideshare labor practices for @gijn.org. gijn.org/stories/what...

submitted 7 days ago • 2 comments

"Multiple kidneys had to be thrown out because of transport delays — couriers not picking them up in time or airlines misplacing them. One was accidentally left on an airport luggage trolley." www.propublica.org/article/trum...

submitted 8 days ago • 100 comments

the rise of the fascist nerds was anticipated by Ellen Ullman's 1995 essay "Out of Time: Reflections on the Programming Life."

submitted 9 days ago • 38 comments

‘Venture capital is killing more value than it creates,' author and tech activist Catherine Bracy argues in a new book, World Eaters. Silicon Valley needs to focus more on solving real-world problems and less on fast profit, she says.

submitted 9 days ago • 46 comments

We’ve been ringing the alarm about the dangers of repro data collection but it’s not just period trackers you should be concerned about. Uber/Lyft + other apps tracking geolocation data are also risky for abortion seekers. https://tinyurl.com/2p89nr74

submitted 9 days ago • 1 comment

For decades, the US government has painstakingly kept American science #1 globally—and every facet of American life has improved because of it. The internet? Flu shot? Ozempic? All grew out of federally-funded research. Now all that's being dismantled. 1/ www.technologyreview.com/2025/02/21/1...

submitted 10 days ago • 83 comments

NEW: NIST staffers expect ~500 people—incl. 3 lab directors who were promoted in the last year—to lose their jobs as soon as tomorrow, as part of the DOGE purge, sources tell @wired.com. @willknight.bsky.social, @peard33.bsky.social, and @leahfeiger.bsky.social report: www.wired.com/story/the-na...

submitted 11 days ago • 16 comments

This is the perfect intersection of things on my mind this week: art and football and Philly. defector.com/eagles-win-l...

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

I talked to @dhm.bsky.social and @papapishu.bsky.social about the principles and practice of preserving both important and less-important video, and one of my favorite weird American performers, Ricky Jay. defector.com/someone-has-...

submitted 14 days ago • 24 comments

"It’s a familiar Silicon Valley mindset, the reason startups are forever reinventing a bus, or a bodega, or mail. It’s the implacable confidence that if you’re smart at one thing you must be smart at all of the things." www.wired.com/story/doge-i...

submitted 11 days ago • 15 comments

It appears irony is not dead after all.

submitted 12 days ago • 140 comments

Hello, journalism impact!

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

Let me know if I'm wrong, but if you are a student (or the parent of one) who's applied for financial aid this year, then DOGE likely already has access to your tax information through data shared by the FUTURE Act to the Department of Education?

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

NEW: The federal highway administration reversed its approval for the congestion pricing tolling program, and said it will pursue “the orderly cessation” of the system.

submitted 12 days ago • 6 comments

My year-long investigation into the multibillion dollar world of online scams is out today — on the cover of The Economist and in my new 8-part podcast series, Scam Inc Read the article: bit.ly/scam-inc Listen to the podcast: econ.st/3CFzGaL

submitted 25 days ago • 18 comments

“We continue to see this type of technology used and deployed in minority communities where there’s not a lot of political power,” says the ACLU’s Gary Daniels. “ I call it the wild west out there” — because there’s nothing that governs the technology’s use or misuse. gizmodo.com/clearly-disc...

submitted 13 days ago • 0 comments

1/ I am seeing a lot of comments on the slashing of NIH support along the lines of “universities should just spend their huge endowments.” I’m the last person to cheer on the institutional stratification rising endowments have contributed to. But let me explain why this is not a solution.

submitted 13 days ago • 46 comments

"AI summaries do very little to help us learn how to listen. Skim and speed-read, no physical discomfort of sitting through a tedious conversation... the summary of the meeting so you don’t have to go, and in the process, you don’t have to engage with the mess that is a bigger set of relations."

submitted 15 days ago • 3 comments

Moving beyond technochauvinism. Here for it!

submitted 15 days ago • 0 comments

Cool though. Let’s keep coming up with best practices for students to use chatgpt.

submitted 15 days ago • 12 comments

Last night, we broke the news that the top US election security watchdog has frozen all of its election security work and is reviewing everything it has done to help state and local officials secure their elections for the past eight years. https://wrd.cm/3QkfGh3

submitted 16 days ago • 230 comments

PhD students in social sciences studying "metascience" and AI: This looks like an AMAZING opportunity. Fully funded research postdoc that can be housed at whatever university you can find an appropriate mentor. sloan.org/programs/dig...

submitted 18 days ago • 1 comment

I was pleased to attend a State Dinner, hosted by Pres. Macron, for participants of the AI Action Summit. It was an honor to be invited to deliver remarks at Elysee Palace on Three Fallacies in how we think about AI, now published @techpolicypress.bsky.social www.techpolicy.press/three-fallac...

submitted 17 days ago • 13 comments

Correct. If the birthdate field contains corrupt or mismatched data, it defaults to 1875-05-20, which serves as a flag. May 20, 1875, is the day the international standards and metrics treaty was signed. Everything is a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works.

submitted 17 days ago • 273 comments

yes! the idea that the executive can simply make spending decisions independent of a legislature or parliament is basically antithetical to the entire anglo-american political tradition

submitted 17 days ago • 111 comments

Find out how much federally funded education programs benefit students in each congressional district in the US In this crucial new dashboard tool @UmichPoverty poverty.umich.edu/federal-educ...

submitted 18 days ago • 1 comment

www.realtor.com/news/unique-...

submitted 20 days ago • 7 comments

In Toledo, “living in subsidized housing now means being watched outside your home day and night by an officer you can’t see or speak to, thanks to the city’s contract with Fusus, a company whose controversial technology enables cops to access live streams from private camera networks”

submitted 20 days ago • 5 comments

JUST IN: A federal judge in Massachusetts has blocked the Trump administration's rate change to NIH grants. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

submitted 21 days ago • 74 comments

Everyone should be pointing out what is happening at CFPB. There is zero argument to be made here that this is being done to provide taxpayer value. The agency's budget is minuscule, averaging like $600 million/year, yet it has obtained $20 billion in payments from corporations to Americans

submitted 21 days ago • 29 comments

so i don’t know if susan collins knows this but she belongs to a body that has the constitutionally designated power to tell HHS to stop making these cuts because they do not have the authority to unilaterally refuse to spend congressional appropriations.

submitted 21 days ago • 440 comments

Someone at the American Bar Association ate their Wheaties this morning.

submitted 21 days ago • 486 comments

The negative externalities of GenAI never seem to end.

submitted 21 days ago • 10 comments

I had a lot of fun talking with @frankiegraziano.bsky.social of The Wheelhouse on Connecticut Public Radio about AI and DC: www.ctpublic.org/show/the-whe...

submitted 21 days ago • 2 comments

if you were an unreconstructed segregationist from jim crow alabama, what would you do differently than this administration with regard to civil rights enforcement?

submitted 26 days ago • 542 comments

For law, criminology, data nerds, or anyone interested: mark your calendars for 11 am ET on Feb. 21, when I'll give a nontechnical talk entitled "Quantitative Approaches to Social Justice: Race and the Criminal Legal System" at Georgetown and on Zoom. Abstract is below in this thread.

submitted 25 days ago • 1 comment