Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Thomas P @tpshea.bsky.social · 13h

Fast approaching "burn it all down" levels of AI anti-sociality.

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 17h

Solipsism as a service. www.wsj.com/tech/persona...

With Sora, you can do exactly that, in 10-second increments. Soon, your phone might be filled with hundreds of fond memories of things that never happened and places you never went, moments you can sit back and “relive” when there’s nobody else around except your AI pals.

Generative AI already has the power to put us in little boxes, isolated from one another. Why wait for a friend to answer your text when ChatGPT will cheerfully answer right away? Why go through the trouble of making a new friend when you can turn to digital companions embedded in apps like Instagram or X?
These new forms of entertainment are becoming the lake to our Narcissus: You can gaze into your phone and see yourself staring back, having all kinds of thrills, spills and chills.

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Thomas P @tpshea.bsky.social · 15h

Purchased. Thank you sharing! (Also, please tour Canada soon!)

Thomas P @tpshea.bsky.social · 15h

And I cannot overstate this: knowing there were absolute weirdos in the world doing absolute weirdo things AND BEING FETED FOR IT made suburbia not just bearable but escapable. Dr Demento was not just a DJ; he was a vector of liberation. www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn73...

Barnes & Barnes - Fish Heads

YouTube video by eenik

www.youtube.com

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Thomas P @tpshea.bsky.social · 15h

"I wish I didn't have a head like a ping pong ball" is a lyric that guides me through the night.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtTS...

Ping Pong Ball Head

YouTube video by Wild Man Fischer - Topic

www.youtube.com

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Thomas P @tpshea.bsky.social · 15h

youtu.be/sMzV2VNN2sg?...

youtu.be

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Thomas P @tpshea.bsky.social · 15h

Dr. Demento was, among other things, the first place I heard Frank Zappa and the only place I heard Larry "Wild Man" Fischer. It was a badge of (weird) honor in my middle school to know all the words to T-Bone Stankus's "Existential Blues"...and I still know them all.

End of an era. Rest, legend.

the Mountain Goats @themountaingoats.bsky.social · 16h

so, this weekend the great Dr. Demento did his final show. I could write a lot about the importance of his show to me & my friends when we were 12 and 13. there's more to it than "he played funny stuff" and "his show is where @alyankovic.bsky.social got his start." 1/3

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Thomas P @tpshea.bsky.social · 19h

Dumbest science fiction story of 2025, and that's saying a lot.

Andrew Kurjata @akurjata.ca · 20h

We're doing what? www.cbc.ca/news/science...

Canada eyes putting nuclear reactors on the moon | CBC News

In order to maintain a presence on the moon, there’s going to be a need for energy. How do you maintain a colony of people in a place that has roughly 14 days of sunlight followed by 14 days of darkne...

www.cbc.ca

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Thomas P @tpshea.bsky.social · 19h

My family has a tradition of "Taco Tuesday on a Wednesday' but we understand that the 'Tuesday' part is non-negotiable.

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Reposted by Thomas P

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 3d

important on LLMs for academics:

1️⃣ LLMs are usefully seen as lossy content-addressable systems

2️⃣ we can't automatically detect plagiarism

3️⃣ LLMs automate plagiarism & paper mills

4️⃣ we must protect literature from pollution

5️⃣ LLM use is a CoI

6️⃣ prompts do not cause output in authorial sense

5 Ghostwriter in the Machine
A unique selling point of these systems is conversing and writing in a human-like way. This is imminently understandable, although wrong-headed, when one realises these are systems that
essentially function as lossy2
content-addressable memory: when
input is given, the output generated by the model is text that
stochastically matches the input text. The reason text at the output looks novel is because by design the AI product performs
an automated version of what is known as mosaic or patchwork
plagiarism (Baždarić, 2013) — due to the nature of input masking and next token prediction, the output essentially uses similar words in similar orders to what it has been exposed to. This
makes the automated flagging of plagiarism unlikely, which is
also true when students or colleagues perform this type of copypaste and then thesaurus trick, and true when so-called AI plagiarism detectors falsely claim to detect AI-produced text (Edwards, 2023a). This aspect of LLM-based AI products can be
seen as an automation of plagiarism and especially of the research paper mill (Guest, 2025; Guest, Suarez, et al., 2025; van
Rooij, 2022): the “churn[ing] out [of] fake or poor-quality journal papers” (Sanderson, 2024; Committee on Publication Ethics,

Either way, even if
the courts decide in the favour of companies, we should not allow
these companies with vested interests to write our papers (Fisher
et al., 2025), or to filter what we include in our papers. Because
it is not the case that we only operate based on legal precedents,
but also on our own ethical values and scientific integrity codes
(ALLEA, 2023; KNAW et al., 2018), and we have a direct duty to
protect, as with previous crises and in general, the literature from
pollution. In other words, the same issues as in previous sections
play out here, where essentially now every paper produced using
chatbot output must declare a conflict of interest, since the output text can be biased in subtle or direct ways by the company
who owns the bot (see Table 2).
Seen in the right light — AI products understood as contentaddressable systems — we see that framing the user, the academic
in this case, as the creator of the bot’s output is misplaced. The
input does not cause the output in an authorial sense, much like
input to a library search engine does not cause relevant articles
and books to be written (Guest, 2025). The respective authors
wrote those, not the search query!

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Thomas P @tpshea.bsky.social · 23h

Dude got mad at me this week because I wouldn't ship a vintage ES-335 to Florida.

You're welcome, angry Florida man.

derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 1d

About a month ago, the Trump administration got rid of the de minimis exemption, whereby packages valued under $800 could slide in without import duties. Now there's a backlog as the government can't process all of this paperwork, leading to UPS just destroying packages

Business Insider headline reads: UPS is telling customers that their packages coming to the US are marked for destruction.

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Thomas P @tpshea.bsky.social · 1d

Maybe just don't repost AI-generated content?

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Thomas P @tpshea.bsky.social · 1d

"incentivized to satisfy the AI system" is going to be engraved on the tombstone of western civilization 💀

Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 2d

Here's a rule of thumb: If "AI" seems like a good solution, you are probably both misjudging what the "AI" can do and misframing the problem.

>>

Comment by Tom Diettrich on a linkedin post reading:

"You can't "test-in quality" in engineering; you can't "review-in quality" in research. We need incentives for people to do better research. Our system today assumes that 75% of submitted papers are low quality, and it is probably right (I'll bet it is higher). If this were a manufacturing organization, an 75% defect rate would result in bankruptcy.

Imagine a world in which you could have an AI system check the correctness/quality of your paper. If your paper passed that bar, then it could be published (say, on arXiv). Subsequent human review could assess its importance to the field.

In such a system, authors would be incentivized to satisfy the AI system. This will lead to searching for exploits in the AI system. A possible solution is to select the AI evaluator at random from a large pool and limit the number of permitted submissions. I imagine our colleagues in mechanism design can improve on this idea."

Original:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7381685800549257216/?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A(activity%3A7381685800549257216%2C7382628060044599296)&dashCommentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_comment%3A(7382628060044599296%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7381685800549257216)

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Thomas P @tpshea.bsky.social · 1d

"If the children are sad because the phones are bad, not because their entire world is fucked, then [we can still] operate by the rule book.... A more pragmatic approach — which would probably be more radical — is disqualified, and we can continue pretending it’s the twentieth century still."

Neil Selwyn @neilselwyn.bsky.social · 1d

Aidan Walker on why "now is *not* the time to ban phones ...
why Jonathan Haidt sucks"

howtodothingswithmemes.substack.com/p/now-is-not...

If you take Haidt’s premise that phones and social media are hurting children as true, then you should question whether the right policy remedy is an intervention in the way teachers run their classrooms and what children are allowed to see and do online

Why not fine the companies for endangering kids or create new rules they have to follow? Why not introduce competition into a monopolized market space, so that parents and kids have more choice in how to spend their time online? Why not put consumer safety standards on the algorithms, the software, the devices themselves?

Why is the preferred tool to save a generation from anguish and our democracy from decline a patchwork of laws governing the decisions consumers can make, instead of a strategy to hold bad actors and industry to account?

Thomas P @tpshea.bsky.social · 1d

Hey #hps:

www.thespec.com/news/crime/s...

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Reposted by Thomas P

Jeff Doctor @jeff.doctor · 1d

I am once again asking Canadian journalists to ask the most basic-ass question of "on whose land will these be built?" How is it that every other major industry must consider Indigenous rights but with tech it's like "meh".
www.cbc.ca/news/busines...

ANALYSIS | Why OpenAI wants to help Canada build homegrown artificial intelligence | CBC News

OpenAI wants to help Canada build a sovereign digital infrastructure for artificial intelligence, putting the country in a tough spot as it tries to distance itself from overreliance on U.S. tech comp...

www.cbc.ca

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Thomas P @tpshea.bsky.social · 1d

Point is, people--even just regular ordinary mostly off-line mostly comfortable people--are getting radicalized. One day soon it's all going to suddenly have been too much.

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Thomas P @tpshea.bsky.social · 1d

Didn't expect my dad to go full "God must smite Gomorrah" on billionaires but here we are.

Reminds me of that old Bible story where God is talking to one of the prophets, asking him not to destroy the city and he eventually works his way down to if you can find me one billionaire who is a good guy I will not destroy the city That’s just the modern version

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Thomas P @tpshea.bsky.social · 1d

I don't know if the ground is shifting under the billionaire-class's feet _everywhere_, but I'll tell you my 83 year old father is disgusted with this asshole and I'm loving him for it. Eat the rich, dad.

Gil Durán @gilduran.com · 2d

We can have democracy or we can have billionaires.
We cannot have both.

NYT: Marc Benioff Says Trump Should Send Guard Troops to San Francisco (gift link)

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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Thomas P @tpshea.bsky.social · 1d

Cowboy Junkies

Quintessa Knight @quietblkgrl.blacksky.app · 1d

What would be the wildest concert for a fight to break out at?

Thomas P @tpshea.bsky.social · 1d

Continually baffled by colleagues who ask ChatGPT for advice creating ChatGPT-proof lesson plans and assignments.

If you know it's toxic for learners why are you fucking with it as a teacher?

✪ Jonathan H. Gray: “Professor of Halloweenery” ✪ @jongraywb.bsky.social · 1d

People I used to respect plus family members who fell for okeedokes casually talking about how they use AI an wondering why I have a disgusted look every time even after why I explain its threat to other ppl as well as my own career is honestly exhausting

Thomas P @tpshea.bsky.social · 2d

wow. very wow. www.hardyboys.us/hbultrathril...

The Hardy Boys Ultra Thriller Series

The Hardy Boys-Tom Swift Ultra Thriller book series. Title List, Plot Summaries, Cover Art, Author, Artists, Sales.

www.hardyboys.us

Thomas P @tpshea.bsky.social · 2d

No..?! I mean, they'd be disastrous, but sometimes I do love a good cultural train wreck. Had no idea this existed.

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Reposted by Thomas P

Juno Rylee Schultz @junoryleejournalism.com · 4d

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

SHAPIRO: OK, so you've spent your career creating television without Al, and I could imagine today you thinking, boy, I wish I had had that tool to solve those thorny problems...
SIMON: What?
SHAPIRO: ...Or saying...
SIMON: You imagine that?
SHAPIRO: ...Boy, if that had existed, it would have screwed me over.
SIMON: I don't think Al can remotely challenge what writers do at a fundamentally creative level.
SHAPIRO: But if you're trying to transition from scene five to scene six, and you're stuck with that transition, you could imagine plugging that portion of the script into an Al and say, give me 10 ideas for how to transition this.
SIMON: I'd rather put a gun in my mouth.

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Reposted by Thomas P

Pride Was A Riot, Sacramento @pridewasariot.bsky.social · 2d

Now with #AltText

A black background has white text at the top that says “amphifa.” Two flags over each other, common antifa flags, have a black flag and a green one. An image of a green frog facing left with a blue ascot sits on the black flag. Circling the flags is the text, “amphibians against fascism.”

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Reposted by Thomas P

daily dose of estragon @craigburley.com · 2d

I have been rewarded for my loyalty by the McDonalds Corporation. I have been awarded a biscuit, it is amazingly heavy in my hands. The air between me and the biscuit seems to swim with strange energies. The cameras click amidst total silence as i raise it to my open mouth.

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