Ryan Hendrickson
@imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
1.6K followers 5.5K following 580 posts
"You ever feel like nothin' good was ever gonna happen to you?" "Yeah, and nothing did. So what?" Archivist at Boston University for ~25 years, he/they https://www.imaginaryhistories.com
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Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
veryimportant.lawyer
everyone needs to internalize that this is just how all republicans are and when nancy pelosi said "the country needs a strong republican party" she meant that more people like this should be powerful. they are all like this! they all think just like this and like trump and they love it and it's fun
carlquintanilla.bsky.social
POLITICO: “.. They referred to Black people as monkeys and ‘the watermelon people’ and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies .. and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

@politico.com
www.politico.com/news/2025/10...
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
katelynburns.com
"All it took was an international terror campaign run by the government to prove it's natural to be cis"
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
drewharwell.com
Sam Altman went from “AI will cure cancer" to "ChatGPT porn" in less than a month
ChatGPT boss predicts when AI could cure cancer We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. We realize this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue we wanted to get this right.

Now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases.

In a few weeks, we plan to put out a new version of ChatGPT that allows people to have a personality that behaves more like what people liked about 4o (we hope it will be better!). If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human-like way, or use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it (but only if you want it, not because we are usage-maxxing).

In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our “treat adult users like adults” principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.
12:02 PM · Oct 14, 2025
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imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
This explains 'the manosphere'
paris.nyc
my latest investigation for @consumerreports.org is based on months of reporting and 60+ lab tests of leading protein supplements

we found that most protein powders and shakes have more lead in one serving than our experts say is safe to have in a day (🧵)

www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein...
Protein Powders and Shakes Contain High Levels of Lead - Consumer Reports
CR tests of 23 popular protein powders and shakes found that most contain high levels of lead.
www.consumerreports.org
imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
I had to abandon it pretty early b/c (1) scientifically it was horseshit (2) was clearly written to be an audiobook listened to at 2x speed by a guy in "tech" while working out/commuting
michaelhobbes.bsky.social
"Sapiens" is so normal for the first 70,000 years of human history but then goes absolutely buckwild as soon as it gets to colonialism
Had the Aztecs and Incas shown a bit more interest in the world surrounding them - and had they known what the Spaniards had done to their neighbours - they might have resisted the Spanish conquest more keenly and successfully.
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
chelseanh.bsky.social
Came across the term "petro-masculinity":

"In these spaces, fossil fuels can serve as potent conservative symbols that represent masculinity, autonomy, and self-sufficiency, even when they are not real economic interests for most of the public."

autonomy.work/portfolio/pe...
Petro-masculinity and the politics of climate refusal
Writer in Residence Cara Daggett explores how 'climate refusal' is being created by new violent forms of petro-masculinity.
autonomy.work
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
iid.bsky.social
This is a multi level problem btw, part of it has to do with the stochastic nature of the model, but the deeper issue is that negation in natural language is not the same as logical negation, and can never be, because natural language is inherently flexible in a way axiomatic logic is not.
spavel.bsky.social
As an example: AI doesn't understand "no." Because the statements "no ketchup on my burger" and "ketchup on my burger" are almost identical to a machine that does not and cannot actually reason. It's only a 2 letter difference.
AI doesn't know 'no' – and that's a huge problem for medical bots
Many AI models fail to recognise negation words such as “no” and “not”, which means they can’t easily distinguish between medical images labelled as showing a disease and images labelled as not showin...
www.newscientist.com
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
epicciuto.bsky.social
“It may look confusing to outsiders, but what we’re trying to do is avoid making precedents that a Democratic government could also use.”
atrupar.com
Amy Coney Barrett defends heavy use of the shadow docket: "If we wrote a long opinion, it might give the impression that we have finally resolved the issue, and in none of these cases have we finally resolved the issue."
imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
Of course you could look to the role of the AMA, carving out ethics exceptions for medics overseeing CIA torture sessions, for a more modern example
imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
If it was 1930, ICE would be sterilizing every person they detained.
imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
In the pre-Nuremberg laws era, mass sterilizations, euthanasia, and human experimentation without consent, all with state support, were commonplace to a degree that would shock even a lot of modern fascists
imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
There’s a substantial literature about the enthusiasm the German, British, and US medical establishments had for fascism b/c it (1) embraced applied eugenics and (2) forced Jews out of the profession, opening up jobs
eric-reinhart.com
New article out this month on how doctors become fascists.

50% of German physicians joined the Nazi Party––twice the proportion of any other profession. US doctors today are arguably the most conservative in the world, and we're heading along a similar path.
drive.google.com/file/d/1CAk9...
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
jacksapoch.bsky.social
I started working on this research in my spare time with a small group of fellow journos/artists — Nicole Vögele, @jakecharlesrees.bsky.social , & Robin Kötzle — after noticing recurring patterns in IDF 3D videos last year

The Ferret (via @billybriggs24.bsky.social): theferret.scot/idf-scottish...
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
jacksapoch.bsky.social
The TikTok outlines that a specific goal of these animations is to multiply their reach by cultivating secondary coverage

And indeed, dozens of major outlets like BBC, CNN and Sky News have aired them, in part or in full, often without context
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
jacksapoch.bsky.social
These videos are produced in-house by a small animation cell in the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, working mainly in After Effects + Blender

In a TikTok posted after Israel's June attacks on Iran, soldiers describe working weeks under “prime-minister-level secrecy” to prepare visuals
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
jacksapoch.bsky.social
One of the earlier and most-viewed examples was an animation of Al Shifa Hospital, published in October 2023.

The “underground command room” was recycled from a 2022 IDF animation of an UNRWA school in Tel Al-Hawa; the street above was built from prefab @kb-3d.bsky.social storefronts
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
jacksapoch.bsky.social
These assets have been used in IDF videos as recently as September 5, in an animation of the Mushtaha Tower in Gaza City, which was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes the same day

In this video the ground itself is a patch-work quilt of third-party scans of pavement & parking lots
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
jacksapoch.bsky.social
Others assets came from scans made by the Scottish Maritime Museum of their boat-building workshop which was downloaded (via @sketchfab.bsky.social) and reimagined by the IDF adornments for underground missile factories.
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
jacksapoch.bsky.social
Hubert's assets, created as decorations for cyberpunk cityscapes, are used especially widely in animations that the IDF released during their strikes on Iran in June.

Ripped assets from Hubert are shown here in stills from IDF animations, with blue highlights:
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
jacksapoch.bsky.social
We traced over 30 unique assets to Washington-based 3D creator Ian Hubert, who makes bespoke models created for his sci-fi project Dynamo Dream, available to his Patreon subscribers.

Scans of parking lots, antennas, and pipes were repurposed as Hamas and Iranian military sites
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
jacksapoch.bsky.social
NEW: Since October 2023, the IDF Spokesperson's Unit has released dozens of 3D animations illustrating alleged Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iranian sites

The style is now unmistakable: satellite zoom-ins, black & white wireframes, and red-textured houses - a new visual language of war
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
jacksapoch.bsky.social
Many of these “illustrations” aren’t based on verified intelligence at all.

Our analysis of 43 official IDF videos found recycled 3D environments, spatial inaccuracies, and assets lifted from unrelated artists and institutions.
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
thomaszimmer.bsky.social
The Daily’s credulous/willfully ignorant/deliberately misleading portrait of Vought matters because it is indicative of a much broader tendency to normalize the assault on the constitutional order - to sanitize those who are responsible for it and the extremist ideas that are animating them.
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
thomaszimmer.bsky.social
Vought is at war with large swaths of the population, with the very idea of a society defined by democratic pluralism. If you have correctly identified that this guy is now in a really powerful position, that people like him are in control of the government, how is that not the main story?