Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

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Just a chimp @pmihc.bsky.social · 9h

It is easy to forget how amazing most tech services are, the levels of availability we get today are still high. But when things go wrong, even in smaller orgs, it is harder to restore due to poor management decisions sidelining or booting out experience staff. We might be annoying but we know stuff

The Register @theregister.com · 9h

Today is when the Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout

When your best engineers log off for good, don’t be surprised when the cloud forgets how DNS works column "It's always DNS" is a long-standing sysadmin saw, and with good reason: a disproportionate number of outages are at their heart DNS issues. And so today, as AWS is still repairing its downed cloud as this article goes to press, it becomes clear that the culprit is once again DNS. But if you or I know this, AWS certainly does.…

dlvr.it

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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 4d

"I have a decent fluency in LLMs, and they have utility, but the absurd degree of over-hype, the way they're being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value."

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edifiedlistener.bsky.social @edifiedlistener.bsky.social · 4d

That idea that culture eats strategy for breakfast rears its ugly head again. With Altmann, Zuck, Thiel, Bezos, M*sk, etc. leading the culture in tech, so much of what may be useful is made poisonous to society at large thanks to unbridled greed.

Anil Dash @anildash.com · 4d

I don't think there's any argument there. I expect it's not visible to those outside the industry, but there's real despair for engineers & the like inside tech because those CEOs control the culture of the industry and everyone worries about how to find a job if they don't conform to that culture.

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Sexy CHOAM Nomsky costume @samthielman.com · 4d

"ending remote work" is such a terrible, hostile, anti-worker thing that so many organizations have decided they need to do in order to subjugate their workforce further, and I pray it marks the beginning of a new and robust labor movement. senseless cruelty

Tim Dickinson @timdickinson.bsky.social · 4d

2. Rolling Stone is owned by a large media conglomerate, which is ending remote work across its brands.

My home is Portland, Oregon, ~1,000 miles from the nearest office, so this marks the end of the line for me at RS.

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Natalie Cainaru @tinyredflowers.bsky.social · 5d

Listen up, @pantheon.io: if you still host the websites of Heritage Foundation & their cursèd Project 2025 cuz of contractual BS, the least you can do is donate *100% of Heritage Foundation payments* to organizations that are working to protect communities targeted by Project 2025. And publicize it.

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DrupalChix @drupalchix.bsky.social · 7d

This is the ADF that Pantheon defended hosting a few years ago. There's a difference between platforming ideas you don't agree with, and enabling right wing terror and the dismantling of democracy.

Still not sure Pantheon decision-makers know the difference. Or maybe they don't care?

Sam Levin @samtlevin.bsky.social · 14d

NEW: Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom "deceived" the Supreme Court + "profoundly misrepresented" LGBTQ+ research, according to scholars cited by ADF.

Quoted experts speak out about ADF's "distortions" + "false evidence" in major case, on deck tomorrow, to revive "conversion therapy"

Christian group ‘deceived’ supreme court about LGBTQ+ research, cited scholars say

Exclusive: Experts say Alliance Defending Freedom, arguing to revive conversion therapy, ‘profoundly misrepresented’ their work in case threatening trans and queer youth

www.theguardian.com

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🇬🇾🗽Sydette The Dreaded Gorgon🗽🇬🇾 @blackamazon.bsky.social · 7d

Being scared of being vulnerable is real

Constantly maneuvering to make sure the other person is always at a disadvantage is predatory

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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 9d

Would be a good time to shut down Dreamforce. If I have friends who are still speaking there, this is a good reason to cancel.

Ryan Mac 🙃 @rmac.bsky.social · 10d

Marc Benioff went full Tom Cotton to @heatherknightsf.bsky.social: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/u...

Marc Benioff Says Trump Should Send Guard Troops to San Francisco

www.nytimes.com

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Dr. Damien P. Williams Wants A Better Sociotechnical Paradigm @wolvendamien.bsky.social · 17d

These techbro douches are shit terrible at their jobs, & at being nerds. They misunderstand the media they claim to love, & they're terrible at building things— because they are, at base, incurious, & lazy. They should be snubbed every time they enter a room & anyone who fêtes them, viciously mocked

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 17d

“‘We cannot control who sees what, we cannot see what users are doing, and we cannot verify that the software itself is secure,’ the memo says.”

Anduril and Palantir battlefield communication system has deep flaws, Army memo says

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The much-needed modernization of the U.S. Army's battlefield communications network being undertaken by Anduril, Palantir and others is rife with "fundamental security" problems ...

www.yahoo.com

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The Nation Magazine @thenation.com · 19d

Tech workers in the most corporate, nerdy, non-union, Northface-wearing-ass environment you can imagine have been putting their jobs, safety, and even immigration status on the line to try to stop a genocide, writes @maximillianalvarez.bsky.social. www.thenation.com/article/acti...

How Microsoft Workers Helped Halt a Major Contract With the Israeli Military

A grassroots campaign successfully pressured the tech monopoly to take an unprecedented step toward suspending its complicity in the Gaza genocide.

www.thenation.com

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DrupalChix @drupalchix.bsky.social · 27d

Did they forget garbage in garbage out?

Techmeme @techmeme.com · 27d

Research: low productivity gains from AI may stem from employees using AI to produce "workslop", or low-effort, passable work that creates more work for others (Harvard Business Review)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

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Katie Drummond @katie-drummond.bsky.social · 27d

I loved talking to Signal's @meredithmeredith.bsky.social, who is such a consistent, clear voice of sanity (and always a great interview).

We talked about (of course) SignalGate, what AI means for Signal, why tech bros continue to be such a disappointment, and much more. Read, listen, etc!

How Signal’s Meredith Whittaker Remembers SignalGate: ‘No Fucking Way’

The Signal Foundation president recalls where she was when she heard Trump cabinet officials had added a journalist to a highly sensitive group chat.

www.wired.com

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DrupalChix @drupalchix.bsky.social · 28d

Tech profiteers keep acting like we don't all know this

Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 28d

Yet again, machine learning — even gussied up via the transformer architecture — encodes and reinforces societal biases.

This study reveals that LLM-based peer review relies heavily on author institution in its decisions.

arxiv.org/abs/2509.15122

Prestige over merit: An adapted audit of LLM bias in peer review

Large language models (LLMs) are playing an increasingly integral, though largely informal, role in scholarly peer review. Yet it remains unclear whether LLMs reproduce the biases observed in human de...

arxiv.org

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Alex Wild @alexwild.bsky.social · Sep 19

Don’t waste much time thinking about any ideology or policy reason for the H-1B visa change.

This is so tech companies will have to pay Trump for exemptions. Same as they paid him for tariff exemptions. It’s just a standard mob shakedown.

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Blayne Haggart @bhaggart.bsky.social · Sep 19

Who could’ve predicted this, other than every single critical data studies scholar, who’ve been highlighting data bias issues for years and years?
Given this previous knowledge, it’s criminal that this technology has been deployed at scale. A triumph of willful ignorance and wishful thinking.

Steve Senior @stevensenior.bsky.social · Sep 19

AI medical tools downplay symptoms in women and ethnic minorities - on.ft.com/3IuZ5qz via @FT

AI medical tools downplay symptoms in women and ethnic minorities

Large language models reflect biases that can lead to inferior healthcare advice to female, Black and Asian patients

on.ft.com

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Jon Bois @jonbois.bsky.social · Sep 17

i’m a believer in ineffective altruism. i think that everyone in america should be issued a vga to s-video cable adapter and a bale of hay

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Gil Durán @gilduran.com · Sep 16

What’s up with Peter Thiel’s secret Antichrist lectures?

Let us pierce the veil.

For the @newrepublic.com I studied his past Antichrist speeches to decode his message—a chilling fusion of Nazi political theory and scripture.

Consider this an urgent warning:

newrepublic.com/article/2004...

What’s Up With Peter Thiel’s Obsession With the Antichrist?

The tech mogul is amping up his apocalyptic rhetoric—and adding a dangerous dose of extremism into the already-fraught culture war.

newrepublic.com

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The Real News Network @therealnews.com · Sep 11

We speak with five tech workers who have all been fired by Microsoft for protesting Big Tech’s complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. “The only way to stop our movement… is to end their complicity in the genocide.”

The biggest labor story in the US right now is happening at Microsoft

We speak with five tech workers who have all been fired by Microsoft for protesting Big Tech’s complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. “The only way to stop our movement… is to end their comp...

therealnews.com

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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DrupalChix @drupalchix.bsky.social · Sep 8

OK, Google

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Judd Legum @juddlegum.bsky.social · Sep 5

Unfortunately, they have not created an AI model that can replace your dignity

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Merriam-Webster @merriam-webster.com · Sep 3

enshittification | noun | when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits

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Drupal CWG @drupal-cwg.bsky.social · Sep 3

Sign up for the #Drupal Code of Conduct training workshop happening next Wednesday! You can give back to the community without knowing how to code. buff.ly/Ahg3ttP

A coffee mug on a table that reads: What good shall I do this day?

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Richmond Eustis @reustis.bsky.social · Aug 31

Please hold conferences of international interest outside of the US for the time being.

Nathan Kalman-Lamb @nkalamb.bsky.social · Aug 31

FYI

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Sociologist Nathan Kalman-Lamb, based in Fredericton, said he was required to hand over his phone during a recent trip to a conference in South Carolina.

"He claimed that it was just going to be a very cursory search," Kalman-Lamb said, explaining the officer's actions are legal.

"But the document that he gave me said they reserve the right to copy all the contents of your phone and distribute them to every American military and intelligence agency."

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DrupalChix @drupalchix.bsky.social · Aug 29

What happens when we don't hold leaders accountable to the community...

Ingrid Burrington @lifewinning.com · Aug 29

Holy shit, found a blog post about the Web 2.0 conference in 2004 and Marc Andreessen apparently said this on a panel: "There are APIs and they let you do certain things, but it's all very carefully controlled and sort of a plantation owner/ sharecropper kind of relationship"

BIG YIKES

The First Web 2.0 Conference in 2004: A New Bubble Begins

I tune into the 2004 Web 2.0 Conference and learn about network effects and data sharecroppers. Meanwhile I conduct my first major interview as a tech blogger, with a former multimedia star.

cybercultural.com