Jason Patton
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jasoncpatton.com
Jason Patton
@jasoncpatton.com
110 followers 140 following 200 posts
Formerly @jasoncpatton on Twitter.

Iowa State Meteorology alum in Madison, WI.

Weather, climate, basketball, trivia, and computer programming memes.
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Reposted by Jason Patton
funnelfiasco.bsky.social
This was a major fuckup, but as someone who has made more than his share over the years, I'm inclined toward sympathy. There's no hedging in this apology, just ownership of the issue.
benjedwards.com Benj Edwards @benjedwards.com · 1d
Sorry all this is my fault; and speculation has grown worse because I have been sick in bed with a high fever and unable to reliably address it (still am sick)

I was told by management not to comment until they did. Here is my statement in images below

arstechnica.com/staff/2026/0...
I have been sick with COVID all week and missed Mon and Tues due to this. On Friday, while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep, I unintentionally made a serious journalistic error in an article about Scott Shambaugh. Here’s what happened: I was incorporating information from Shambaugh’s new blog post into an existing draft from Thursday. During the process, I decided to try an experimental Claude Code-based AI tool to help me extract relevant verbatim source material. Not to generate the article but to help list structured references I could put in my outline. When the tool refused to process the post due to content policy restrictions (Shambaugh’s post described harassment). I pasted the text into ChatGPT to understand why. I should have taken a sick day because in the course of that interaction, I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s words rather than his actual words. Being sick and rushing to finish, I failed to verify the quotes in my outline notes against the original blog source before including them in my draft. Kyle Orland had no role in this error. He trusted me to provide accurate quotes, and I failed him. The text of the article was human-written by us, and this incident was isolated and is not representative of Ars Technica’s editorial standards. None of our articles are AI-generated, it is against company policy and we have always respected that. I sincerely apologize to Scott Shambaugh for misrepresenting his words. I take full responsibility. The irony of an AI reporter being tripped up by AI hallucination is not lost on me. I take accuracy in my work very seriously and this is a painful failure on my part. When I realized what had happened, I asked my boss to pull the piece because I was too sick to fix it on Friday. There was nothing nefarious at work, just a terrible judgement call which was no one’s fault but my own. —Benj Edwards, February 15, 2026 I have been sick with COVID all week and missed Mon and Tues due to this. On Friday, while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep, I unintentionally made a serious journalistic error in an article about Scott Shambaugh. Here’s what happened: I was incorporating information from Shambaugh’s new blog post into an existing draft from Thursday. During the process, I decided to try an experimental Claude Code-based AI tool to help me extract relevant verbatim source material. Not to generate the article but to help list structured references I could put in my outline. When the tool refused to process the post due to content policy restrictions (Shambaugh’s post described harassment). I pasted the text into ChatGPT to understand why. I should have taken a sick day because in the course of that interaction, I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s words rather than his actual words. Being sick and rushing to finish, I failed to verify the quotes in my outline notes against the original blog source before including them in my draft. Kyle Orland had no role in this error. He trusted me to provide accurate quotes, and I failed him. The text of the article was human-written by us, and this incident was isolated and is not representative of Ars Technica’s editorial standards. None of our articles are AI-generated, it is against company policy and we have always respected that. I sincerely apologize to Scott Shambaugh for misrepresenting his words. I take full responsibility. The irony of an AI reporter being tripped up by AI hallucination is not lost on me. I take accuracy in my work very seriously and this is a painful failure on my part. When I realized what had happened, I asked my boss to pull the piece because I was too sick to fix it on Friday. There was nothing nefarious at work, just a terrible judgement call which was no one’s fault but my own. —Benj Edwards, February 15, 2026 I have been sick with COVID all week and missed Mon and Tues due to this. On Friday, while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep, I unintentionally made a serious journalistic error in an article about Scott Shambaugh. Here’s what happened: I was incorporating information from Shambaugh’s new blog post into an existing draft from Thursday. During the process, I decided to try an experimental Claude Code-based AI tool to help me extract relevant verbatim source material. Not to generate the article but to help list structured references I could put in my outline. When the tool refused to process the post due to content policy restrictions (Shambaugh’s post described harassment). I pasted the text into ChatGPT to understand why. I should have taken a sick day because in the course of that interaction, I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s words rather than his actual words. Being sick and rushing to finish, I failed to verify the quotes in my outline notes against the original blog source before including them in my draft. Kyle Orland had no role in this error. He trusted me to provide accurate quotes, and I failed him. The text of the article was human-written by us, and this incident was isolated and is not representative of Ars Technica’s editorial standards. None of our articles are AI-generated, it is against company policy and we have always respected that. I sincerely apologize to Scott Shambaugh for misrepresenting his words. I take full responsibility. The irony of an AI reporter being tripped up by AI hallucination is not lost on me. I take accuracy in my work very seriously and this is a painful failure on my part. When I realized what had happened, I asked my boss to pull the piece because I was too sick to fix it on Friday. There was nothing nefarious at work, just a terrible judgement call which was no one’s fault but my own. —Benj Edwards, February 15, 2026
February 17, 2026 at 3:22 AM
Reposted by Jason Patton
contextfreecbb.bsky.social
February 17, 2026 at 2:38 AM
Reposted by Jason Patton
dansalva.to
A mockup of a Jeopardy board question that reads "Konami's depiction of Count Dracula iconically called this type of person "a miserable little pile of secrets"
February 16, 2026 at 12:36 AM
Reposted by Jason Patton
ouij.bsky.social
This used to be our reality and now we get glimpses of what we could have been
awfulannouncing.bsky.social Awful Announcing @awfulannouncing.bsky.social · 1d
Reggie Miller: "Do you have a favorite moment during that time in Chicago during the '90s?"

Barack Obama: "I always enjoyed watching us beat Indiana." 🏀🔥🎙️ #NBA #NBC
February 15, 2026 at 11:15 PM
Reposted by Jason Patton
rocher.lc
Does your university use ChatGPT Edu? Please send me a DM if you do. I have identified a potential data breach affecting students' data that has not yet been fixed and I'm trying to compile further examples from other universities.

Reposts appreciated!
February 12, 2026 at 9:08 PM
Reposted by Jason Patton
dreyesceron.bsky.social
At 9:18, 3rd period of the Finland-Switzerland women's ice hockey QF game, the ice crew came to clean the ice during a pause

What follows is the funniest use of the slo-mo alternate angle tech I've seen them use during these Olympics of one of the crew members falling
February 15, 2026 at 12:14 AM
Reposted by Jason Patton
kenpom.com
Personal communication ;)
February 15, 2026 at 2:34 AM
jasoncpatton.com
Shout-out Boog Schiambi for an actually good explanation of what goes into the @kenpom.com kPOY, he must've read the blog
February 14, 2026 at 7:42 PM
jasoncpatton.com
"The hit piece has been effective. About a quarter of the comments I’ve seen across the internet are siding with the AI agent."

The people that are responding to this as "haha AI just did a dumb, it's no big deal" need to get real.
shannonvallor.bsky.social Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 3d
A case study in how AI bullshit compounds and folds back in on itself, warping reality like gravity warps spacetime. Even some of the comments on this shitshow are by AI agents pretending to have opinions about it
An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – More Things Have Happened
Context: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…
theshamblog.com
February 14, 2026 at 5:59 PM
jasoncpatton.com
24 hours later, and I'm still not over this. This - gaslighting maintainers into accepting outside help - is how the xz-utils exploit (nearly) happened! Now that this can be automated, I fear a dark age for FOSS in general as projects feel more and more pressure to shut out contribs by default.
February 13, 2026 at 5:54 PM
Reposted by Jason Patton
mscupcakes.net
Finally, a sequel to Untitled Goose Game
gameinformer.com Game Informer @gameinformer.com · 4d
"Untitled John Wick Game" is a gun-fu brawler being developed by Saber Interactive and the director of the John Wick movies. gameinformer.com/state-of-pla...
an image from the Untitled John Wick Game reveal trailer
February 13, 2026 at 12:32 AM
Reposted by Jason Patton
savannah.dev
So this is dystopian as hell and I can't believe this is real...

AI agents are now writing takedown blog posts to shame maintainers for not accepting agent-generated PRs.

github.com/matplotlib/m...
[PERF] Replace np.column_stack with np.vstack().T by crabby-rathbun · Pull Request #31132 · matplotlib/matplotlib
This PR addresses issue #31130 by replacing specific safe occurrences of np.column_stack with np.vstack().T for better performance. IMPORTANT: This is a more targeted fix than originally proposed. ...
github.com
February 12, 2026 at 5:01 PM
Reposted by Jason Patton
jtimmer.bsky.social
Small note for journalists covering the Endangerment Finding repeal tomorrow: because of lawsuits, long time windows, and changes of administration, none of the EPA's regulatory actions based on the Endangerment Findings ever took effect.
February 12, 2026 at 12:01 AM
Reposted by Jason Patton
jay3085.bsky.social
As I wait to see @joshtigerhill.bsky.social on the @jeopardyofficial.bsky.social INVITATIONAL TOURNAMENT, here was the time he spit a few bars to Alex Trebek (RIP) #Jeopardy! 📺 🟦💰
February 11, 2026 at 11:57 AM
jasoncpatton.com
Age verification? edit autoexec.bat
February 10, 2026 at 6:31 PM
Reposted by Jason Patton
astrokatie.com
This is joyous
wcvb5.bsky.social WCVB NewsCenter 5, Boston @wcvb5.bsky.social · 8d
#BadBunny's performers continued to dance and party outside the stadium after the #SuperBowl #HalftimeShow
February 9, 2026 at 3:52 AM
Reposted by Jason Patton
cjzero.bsky.social
They got Mike good with the gatorade
February 9, 2026 at 3:31 AM
Reposted by Jason Patton
drmendozan.bsky.social
Pretty sure one was consulted, definitely was for the album

news.wisc.edu/pop-star-bad...
Pop star Bad Bunny needed a Puerto Rican history scholar. UW–Madison had just the one.
Bad Bunny collaborated with UW–Madison history professor Jorell Meléndez-Badillo on Puerto Rican narratives that accompany the new album “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS.”
news.wisc.edu
February 9, 2026 at 1:38 AM
Reposted by Jason Patton
jeremymberg.bsky.social
This a word cloud from the titles of ~1100 terminated NSF grants.

It is hard not to see these grant terminations as an attack on the training of the future United States scientific workforce.
A word cloud from the titles of ~1100 NSF grants that were terminated. The most frequent words are STEM, ADVANCE, Student, career, and engines.
February 7, 2026 at 3:55 PM
Reposted by Jason Patton
sjonearth.bsky.social
Please Clap 2: Olympic Please-Don't-Boo
February 6, 2026 at 7:12 PM
Reposted by Jason Patton
kenjennings.bsky.social
This feels personal. 😠
simonwillison.net Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 12d
The CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions!

This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...
Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell
Somewhat devastating news today from the CIA: One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset. There's not even a hint as to why they …
simonwillison.net
February 5, 2026 at 12:47 AM
Reposted by Jason Patton
noplansjustvibes.bsky.social
A+ ad placement on ESPN’s trade tracker
February 4, 2026 at 9:50 PM
jasoncpatton.com
I hope we get to hear if she loses her curling stones
February 5, 2026 at 12:17 AM
Reposted by Jason Patton
maris.bsky.social
I keep thinking again, in light of the latest Epstein files dump, about how MeToo “went too far.”
January 31, 2026 at 3:43 PM
Reposted by Jason Patton
astrokatie.com
All this news is really completely confirming all my unfair knee-jerk judgments about a certain cadre of rich/famous douchebags, I gotta say
January 31, 2026 at 5:42 PM