OT: Lurasidone is neat stuff.
this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
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Ben Williamson, editor of the journal Learning, Media and Technology:
Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird... So this was the non-existent paper I searched for:
Williamson, B. (2021). Education governance and datafication. European Educational Research Journal, 20(3), 279–296.
But the search result I got was a bit different...
Here's the paper I found online:
Williamson, B. and Piattoeva, N. (2022) Education Governance and Datafication. Education and Information Technologies, 27, 3515-3531.
Same title but now with a coauthor and in a different journal! Nelli Piattoeva and I have written together before but not this...
And so checked out Google Scholar. Now on my profile it doesn't appear, but somwhow on Nelli's it does and ... and ... omg, IT'S BEEN CITED 42 TIMES almost exlusively in papers about AI in education from this year alone...
Which makes it especially weird that in the paper I was reviewing today the precise same, totally blandified title is credited in a different journal and strips out the coauthor. Is a new fake reference being generated from the last?...
I know the proliferation of references to non-existent papers, powered by genAI, is getting less surprising and shocking but it doesn't make it any less potentially corrosive to the scholarly knowledge environment.
For more lighthearted gaming-related news, Capcom fired off a quick sneer, whilst (indirectly) promoting their their latest Mega Man game:
(alt text: "As a reminder for those entering the Mega Man: Dual Override Boss Design Art Contest, please remember the rules posted at bit.ly/MMDORobotMaster. Entrants must follow this account, and please leave the AI to the robots: generative AI is prohibited for this contest.")
Today, in fascists not understanding art, a suckless fascist praised Mozilla's 1998 branding:
This is real art; in stark contrast to the brutalist, generic mess that the Mozilla logo has become. Open source projects should be more daring with their visual communications.
Quoting from a 2016 explainer:
[T]he branding strategy I chose for our project was based on propaganda-themed art in a Constructivist / Futurist style highly reminiscent of Soviet propaganda posters. And then when people complained about that, I explained in detail that Futurism was a popular style of propaganda art on all sides of the early 20th century conflicts… Yes, I absolutely branded Mozilla.org that way for the subtext of "these free software people are all a bunch of commies." I was trolling. I trolled them so hard.
The irony of a suckless developer complaining about brutalism is truly remarkable; these fuckwits don't actually have a sense of art history, only what looks cool to them. Big lizard, hard-to-read font, edgy angular corners, and red-and-black palette are all cool symbols to the teenage boy's mind, and the fascist never really grows out of that mindset.
It irks me to see people use the term "brutalist" when what they really mean is "modern architecture that I don't like". It really irks me to see people apply the term brutalist to something that has nothing to do with.erm;!
ModRetro, retro gaming company infamous for being helmed by terrible person Palmer Luckey, has put out a version of their handheld made with "the same magnesium aluminum alloy as Anduril’s attack drones" (bluesky commentary, the linked news article is basically an ad and way too forgiving).
So uhh... they're not beating those guilt by association accusations any time soon.
Obviously, if they've got magnesium alloy to divert into Game Boy ripoffs, the attack drone contract must not be going particularly well
a version of [the ModRetro Chromatic] made with “the same magnesium aluminum alloy as Anduril’s attack drones”
Obvious moral issues aside, is that even an effective marketing point? Linking yourself to Anduril, whose name is synonymous with war crimes and dead civs, seems like an easy way to drive away customers.
yeah, I dunno how large the union of retro game handheld enthusiasts and techfash lickspittles is.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/can-ucla-replace-teaching-assistants-ai
Miller’s team also recently used software from startup StackAI to develop an AI-powered app that writes letters of recommendation, saving faculty members time. Faculty type basic details about a student who has requested a letter, such as their grades and accomplishments, and the app writes a draft of the full letter.
AI is “one of those things that you might worry could dehumanize the process of writing recommendation letters, but faculty also say that process [of manually writing the letters] is very labor intensive,” Miller said. “So far they’ve gotten a lot out of” the new app.
Anyone using this thing should be required to serve on the admissions committee. LoRs aren't for generic B+ students that you don't even remember, just say no.
I googled stackai, saw their screenshots and had ptsd flashbacks of mid 2000s alteryx. why do we keep reinventing no-code drag-and-drop box-and-arrow crap.
A rare W for the Tennessee General Assembly:
https://www.wkrn.com/news/tennessee-politics/bill-targets-ai-hurt-manipulate/
Orange site mods retitled a post about a16z funding AI slop farms to remove the a16z part.
The mod tried to pretend the reason was that the title was just too damn long and clickbaity. His new title was 1 character shorter than the original.
I don’t love the title but it’s the best I could come up with to fit within the 80 character limit.
A half dozen people might still be reading hackernews on punchcards so they ha-
ve no choice but to argue about how to shorten "long" titles every day.
80 character limit
Lot of roguelike development in the past was still obsessed with that. Was a bit amusing, think even they have dropped this now.
I went down a punch-card history rabbit hole today on the empirical software engineering discord. TIL:
- IBM leased machines, didn't sell them
- Lease required using IBM branded punchcard (Razor and Blade Model)
- Until "The Consent Decree of 1956" forced them to unbundle https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/09/business/ibm-and-the-limits-of-a-consent-decree.html
- The competing punch card standard of the time had 90 columns
We have been living in a world 10 columns too short. Think of all the HN headlines we could have had instead...
I imagine it was like VHS vs Beta only with pocket protectors.
Razor and Blade Model
HACK THE PLANET
Good to know that Orange Website is being considerate of us VT220 users. I knew there was a reason why mine has the amber phosphorus.
Ryanair now makes you install their app instead of allowing you to just print and scan your ticket at the airport, claiming it's "better for our environment (gets rid of 300 tonnes of paper annually)." Then you log in into the app and you see there's an update about your flight, but you don't see what it's about. You need to open an update video, which, of course, is a generated video of an avatar reading it out for you. I bet that's better for the environment than using some of these weird symbols that I was putting into a box and that have now magically appeared on your screen and are making you feel annoyed (in the future for me, but present for you).
chat is this kafkaesque
New conspiracy theory: Posadist aliens have developed a virus that targets CEOs and makes them hate money.
….this made me twitch
Lol talk about mixed messages.
[Firefox] will evolve into a modern AI browser
Firefox's social media account today:
Firefox is not becoming an AI browser.
What the fuck would an "AI browser" even be, let alone a modern one. I know what a web browser is, basically a combined HTTP client and HTML renderer. An AI browser is not something that has a commonly understood meaning, so to claim Firefox or anything else will be one without elaboration is just wankery.
I can't help but do their dirty work for them and try to imagine what the hell an AI browser would be. Maybe you develop a standard protocol for prompting chatbots and a markup format for displaying responses and an AI browser is a client for that? Or maybe you just put an LLM in the search bar so Mozilla's bullshit machine can give you wrong answers before pressing the return key and having Google's bullshit machine give you wrong answers. Maybe there's an about:chatbot page. I think all of these are bad bullshit ideas, but at least they're ideas and not just "what if we added into ".
AI Browsers. Metaverse fast food. Blockchain sneakers. Gigwork apartments. Cloud toilets. Big Data headphones. AR chairs. Military grade pianos. 3D books. App drugs. Dotcom condoms. Cyberspace bicycles. Wireless jump ropes. Video silverware. WYSIWYG carpets. Transistor fanny packs. Electromechanical ladders. Atomic flooring. Radio saunas. Horseless glue. Steam pens. Water powered masturbation.
I assume some mesolithic asshole said shit like "we are transforming our hunter-gatherer settlement to a 'cave painting first' society" and neighboring community leaders gave that guy like a hundred animal skins each for his insight.
I became a member this year! and then immediately got to notice how it’s oozing out every pore
what’s kinda wild for me is that there’s also an ethics pledge involved, and I do not understand how they square that with the mass theft all LLM services and progress are/is based on
them automatically fucking with authors’ papers….ew
ACM is now showing an AI “summary” of a recent paper of mine on the DL instead of the abstract. As an author, I have not granted ACM the right to process my papers in this way, and will not. They should either roll back this (mis)feature or remove my papers from the DL.
Relatedly:
As is typical for educators these days, Heiss was following up on citations in papers to make sure that they led to real sources — and weren’t fake references supplied by an AI chatbot. Naturally, he caught some of his pupils using generative artificial intelligence to cheat: not only can the bots help write the text, they can supply alleged supporting evidence if asked to back up claims, attributing findings to previously published articles. [...] That in itself wasn’t unusual, however. What Heiss came to realize in the course of vetting these papers was that AI-generated citations have now infested the world of professional scholarship, too. Each time he attempted to track down a bogus source in Google Scholar, he saw that dozens of other published articles had relied on findings from slight variations of the same made-up studies and journals. [...] That’s because articles which include references to nonexistent research material — the papers that don’t get flagged and retracted for this use of AI, that is — are themselves being cited in other papers, which effectively launders their erroneous citations.
a16z funds 1000+ strong phone farm and uses it for mass manufacturing tiktok ai influencers, security turns out to be not good enough https://www.404media.co/hack-reveals-the-a16z-backed-phone-farm-flooding-tiktok-with-ai-influencers/
the usecase is spam:
The hacker also shared a list with me of more than 400 TikTok accounts Doublespeed operates. Around 200 of those were actively promoting products on TikTok, mostly without disclosing the posts were ads, according to 404 Media’s review of them. It’s not clear if the other 200 accounts ever promoted products or were being “warmed up,” as Doublespeed describes the process of making the accounts appear authentic before it starts promoting in order to avoid a ban.
I’ve seen TikTok accounts operated by Doublespeed promote language learning apps, dating apps, a Bible app, supplements, and a massager.
article in large part about our friends
https://bayareacurrent.com/meet-the-new-right-wing-tech-intelligentsia/
some of the people involved with kernel are pretty unhappy about this and claim the piece is in bad faith/factually wrong (see the replies to https://bsky.app/profile/kellypendergrast.bsky.social/post/3ma55xfq7d22y )
Shit like Palladium is going to be absolutely hilarious to dig up in the back of a used bookstore 20 years from now
Reminder Tivy was the guy behind Phalanx (back in his polyamory microblogging days)~
That link can't be viewed without a bluesky account, btw.
Thanks.
I love the fact that this "decentralized billionaire-proof open network" needs a nitter clone.
i'll cut the coiners some slack on this one because requiring a login to view is an account level privacy option. i don't know what the option is supposed to accomplish. but that's what it is
It might help to know that Paul Frazee, one of the BlueSky developers, doesn't understand capability theory or how hackers approach a computer. They believe that anything hidden by the porcelain/high-level UI is hidden for good. This was a problem on their Beaker project, too; they thought that a page was deleted if it didn't show up in the browser. They fundamentally aren't prepared for the fact that their AT protocol doesn't have a way to destroy or hide data and is embedded into a network that treats censorship as reparable damage.
maybe it's a good thing that it's so fucking hard/expensive to selfhost bsky
you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them"
if bsky is supposed to be federated, then it does nothing, but as it is today with 99%+ of users on main instance, it only works as a recruitment tool for bsky
Larian Studios founder/CEO Swen Vincke is posting through it on Twitter, after the studio's use of plagiarism machines caused significant backlash (to the shock of everyone except Swen).
This is probably Pivot to AI material.
Ah yes, I love the smell of burning bridges in the evening. Fuck. And I was getting excited about Divinity! Well, guess that means more money to spend on other things.
Rewatched Dr. Geoff Lindsey's video about deaccenting in English language and how "AI" speech synthesizers and youtubers tend to get it wrong. In the case of latter, it's usually due to reading from a script or being an L2 English speaker whose native language doesn't use destressing.
It reminded me of a particular line in Portal
spoilers for Portal (2007 puzzle game)
GLaDOS: (with a deeper, more seductive, slightly less monotone voice than unti now) "Good news: I figured out what that thing you just incinerated did. It was a morality core they installed after I flooded the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin to make me stop flooding the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin."
The words "the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin" are spoken with the exact same intonation both times, which helps maintain the robotic affect in GLaDOS's voice even after it shifts to be slightly more expressive.
Now I'm wondering if people whose native language lacks deaccenting even find the line funny. To me it's hilarious to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress because in English and Finnish it's unusual to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress.
It is not lost on me that the fictional evil AI was written with a quirk in its speech to make it sound more alien and unsettling, and real life computer speech has the same quirk, which makes it sound more alien and unsettling.
To me it’s hilarious to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress because in English and Finnish it’s unusual to repeat a part of a sentence without changing its stress.
Not a native speaker of either language but I read this in my mind without changing its stress in the part where it repeated "without changing its stress".
That's interesting. If I weren't going for a comical effect I'd try and rephrase the sentence, probably with a relative pronoun or something similar, but if unable to do so* I'd probably deemphasize the whole phrase the second time I say it. Though in terms of multi-word phrased, I think intonation would be the more accurate word to use than stress per se.
*"To do so" would be another way to avoid repetition
A bunch of big hollywood people have started “creator’s coalition on AI”. A snarky summary of their mission: “let’s figure out how we can work with the fascists!”
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