Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Baldur Bjarnason

@baldurbjarnason.com

2.9K followers 430 following 5.6K posts

Writer, web developer and consultant based in Hveragerði, Iceland. Lapsed Interactive Media Academic. Webby Tech Stuff and webby book stuff. https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/ https://softwarecrisis.dev/

www.baldurbjarnason.com

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Baldur Bjarnason @baldurbjarnason.com · Oct 27

I figure since there's been a recent influx of people here on Bluesky, it might be worthwhile to do "highlights reels" of sorts for my newsletter, which is at www.baldurbjarnason.com

The biggest topic on my newsletter is software and web development, usually from a bit of a systemic perspective.

2 6 34

Reposted by Baldur Bjarnason

Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 1h

AI in education amplifies and intensifies educational systems of product-centredness

AI in education reproduces the idea of de-skilled, casualized pedagogy where the computer is the primary reader of the curriculum/syllabus and the tutor plays a subsidiary role

2 7 32

Reposted by Baldur Bjarnason

Amytiville Hoyrror @amyhoy.bsky.social · 3h

92%???

Mark Lemley @marklemley.bsky.social · 4h

And this:
92% of the growth in the entire country this year has been data centers. And some of that is "circular deals" that dont involve actual money

fortune.com/2025/10/07/d...

Without data centers, GDP growth was 0.1% in the first half of 2025, Harvard economist says | Fortune

Is a U.S. without data centers a country without GDP growth?

fortune.com

5 22 87

Reposted by Baldur Bjarnason

C. Robert Cargill @crobertcargill.bsky.social · 3h

This isn't rocket science, Hollywood. When you make movies for Gen Z & Alpha, they pay to see them. FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY'S opened to $80M WITH a day & date streaming release on Peacock. When you make movies for their dads, those dads have a choice between the theater or their bitchin' home theater.

Charlie Jane "Lessons in Magic and Disaster" Anders 🏳️‍⚧ @charliejane.bsky.social · 4h

I'm perplexed at watching pundits in the trades struggling to explain Tron Ares' disappointing opening.

Was it covid? Do people just not like science fiction? etc. etc.

The main reason is pretty obvious: Tron isn't a popular franchise. Nobody's interested in nostalgia for a failed 1980s project.

25 44 280

Reposted by Baldur Bjarnason

NightMar on Hicks Street, Part 4: The Rabbit’s Revenge @histoftech.bsky.social · 5h

every big AI pitch is like “what if we took away your means of survival and devalued all your skills to make stonks go up temporarily? You’d like that wouldn’t you?”

2 74 320

Reposted by Baldur Bjarnason

Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 6h

The alarming aspect of this deliberate "anti-woke" algorithmic biasing of LLMs from an educational perspective is our institutions all bought in to an imaginary of innovation, then got locked in to enterprise contracts, and now the models are being recoded so they undermine educational values

Marcus Luther @marcusluther.bsky.social · 7h

Genuine question: for those enthusiastically pushing AI tools into every part of our education system—what checks/guardrails are there around algorithmic biases like this?

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 12h

The administration “is currently pressuring OpenAI and other AI companies to make their models more conservative-friendly.”

3 62 110

Reposted by Baldur Bjarnason

Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 6h

LLMs are doubly deceptive. Most people think that they can ask it a question and get an answer. The majority of the rest think that you can ask an LLM a question and it will return what an answer might look like, statistically.

But it's actually even worse. It doesn't "read" the prompt; it guesses.

19 140 550

Reposted by Baldur Bjarnason

The Pleasure Vice Principle (he/him/his) @hannibaltabu.bsky.social · 17h

I saw the dot coms crash from a front row seat. AI is running out of money way faster.

The evangelism is insecurity from people who made the wrong bet. I’ve seen it before. futurism.com/future-socie...

AI Data Centers Are an Even Bigger Disaster Than Previously Thought

An investment manager realized he made a crucial mistake — and that his grim prediction about AI investments may not have been cynical enough.

futurism.com

29 520 1.2K

Reposted by Baldur Bjarnason

rahaeli @rahaeli.bsky.social · 12h

like seriously team, I know y'all are working on both improving Discover and on better reply sentiment filtering and all, but it's going to take a while to tune it properly and a "never show my post on Discover" setting would be a 10 minute fix that would get 65% of why people want private accounts

Leah McElrath @leahmcelrath.bsky.social · 1d

I had a post reach the Discover feed today and was once again reminded of how many people on this site are not house trained.

11 130 830

Reposted by Baldur Bjarnason

Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 11h

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)

14 60 320

Reposted by Baldur Bjarnason

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 12h

The administration “is currently pressuring OpenAI and other AI companies to make their models more conservative-friendly.”

OpenAI is trying to clamp down on ‘bias’ in ChatGPT

GPT-5 is better at resisting liberal ‘pressure,’ the company says.

www.theverge.com

37 150 340

Reposted by Baldur Bjarnason

Comfortably Numb @numb.comfortab.ly · 12h

They're literally installing Racism Dial bsky.app/profile/numb...

Comfortably Numb @numb.comfortab.ly · Jan 15

vox populi

Altman: thanks a lot for these! some common requests:

AGI (a little patience please)
GPT-5
better voice mode
higher rate limits
better GPTs
better reasoning
control over degree of wokeness/behavior
video
personalization
better browsing
'sign in with openai
open source

Quoting:
what would you like openai to build/fix in 2024?

15 200 750

Reposted by Baldur Bjarnason

Alice Bell @abeewords.bsky.social · 12h

Theory: you can put Brendan Fraser in any Tom Cruise role and it would improve the film; you cannot put Tom Cruise in any Brendan Fraser role without it making the film worse

33 42 320

Reposted by Baldur Bjarnason

Dr. Cat Hicks @grimalkina.bsky.social · 13h

Can anyone point me to a good review on the current state of assessing metacognitive skills specifically in learning psychology/cog sci? Critical or supportive, whatever. This feels like a thing where self report is really flawed, how are folks thinking about this lately? Adult populations esp!

1 7 9

Reposted by Baldur Bjarnason

Ben Evans @ogkittylyst.bsky.social · 13h

I can't wait for this "big tent" to provide funding to some communist trans catgirl collectives who are working on F/OSS. After all, it's not some mealy-mouthed bullshit to provide cover for the fact that they're just funding fash.

Arya 🏳️‍⚧️ @aryafairywren.bsky.social · 19h

The Framework forums thread got insanely unwieldy, so I wrote up a (somewhat shorter) summary post of the situation

crimier.github.io/posts/Framew...

1 8 24

Reposted by Baldur Bjarnason

QM_UCU @qmucu.bsky.social · 15h

*FIFTEEN THOUSAND JOBS LOST*.
If this were in a sector in which the PM could go and do a photoshoot looking like One Of The People, we’d have had a government intervention by now.

LopaLeach @lopa.bsky.social · 1d

Cuts equivalent to 15,000 jobs planned at UK universities – UCU www.timeshighereducation.com/news/cuts-eq...

Cuts equivalent to 15,000 jobs planned at UK universities – UCU

Proposed job losses almost triple since March as unions prepare to vote on nationwide industrial action

www.timeshighereducation.com

6 83 140

Baldur Bjarnason @baldurbjarnason.com · 13h

What on earth compels people to reply to a post with “TL;DR”? Do they have an inner voice constantly telling them to find ways to simultaneously piss on people’s posts and demonstrate their illiteracy? Or are they just assholes

(This happened on Mastodon, obviously)

2 1 9

Baldur Bjarnason @baldurbjarnason.com · 13h

Same.

Reposted by Baldur Bjarnason

Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 1d

This is what I do with a lot of my time right now. It's so wild that the "simple" things—like keeping the chronology, pointing to specific events—are so hard right now. But they need doing.

Unbreaking @unbreaking.org · 1d

The clear story in Immigration this week is the escalation of—and pushback against—the Trump administration’s militarized raids and warrantless stops in Democrat-run major cities. We’ve updated our timeline with a lot of events in this zone:

unbreaking.org/issues/immig...

Immigration — Unbreaking

How the administration is breaking the government, and what that means for all of us.

unbreaking.org

5 28 100

Reposted by Baldur Bjarnason

Diesel Bug Has An Irrational Amount Of Freedom @dieselbug1137.bsky.social · 21h

If the only thing that's fully funded by the government is the police. Then you live in a police state. That's just how numbers work. It's fair to judge a society by how it chooses to allocate resources.

2 31 110

Reposted by Baldur Bjarnason

Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 20h

It is difficult for me to express how disastrous this is.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg @sherylnyt.bsky.social · 22h

BREAKING: Friday night massacre underway at CDC. Doznes of "disease detectives," high-level scientists, entire Washington staff and editors of the MMWR (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report) have all been RIFed and received the following notice:

10 230 910

Reposted by Baldur Bjarnason

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 23h

My first thought was “wow I hope this guy didn’t give out his name because he could absolutely be charged” and yup, he is correct to stay anonymous.

This man’s account is shocking. His neighbors’ situation is shocking. The entire Chicago raid is shocking.

On the other side was a mom and her 7-year-old daughter, pleading for his help.
"I wasn't planning on letting her stay, but I didn't know what the hell was going on," the man said of his Venezuelan migrant neighbors. But he quickly relented. The little girl was inconsolable and hid under his bed.
"I didn't want them to take her," said the man, who didn't want to be named because he fears he'll be targeted by federal authorities for his actions.
"I gave her my bedroom, and I just told her,
'Just stay there. Don't open, don't, shh, just stay quiet," he recalled telling the mom and daughter as he choked back tears.

180 2.6K 7.8K

Reposted by Baldur Bjarnason

Rob from Chicago (Sleeper Service) @robfromchicago.com · 1d

Portland right now.

Kermit the Frog sitting in his swamp and paying his banjo, singing:

Fuck you I won't do what you tell me Fuck you I won't do what you tell me Fuck you I won't do what you tell me

25 370 1.4K

Baldur Bjarnason @baldurbjarnason.com · 14h

A recurring thing you see on social media, tech especially, is an intense discussion between two seemingly diametrically opposite positions, neither side realising that the “opposites” are artificial—their sides are socially defined to be in conflict but, actually, both can be true at the same time

1 1 10

Reposted by Baldur Bjarnason

your #3 source for absurdist true crime 🔨 @davidgerard.co.uk · 15h

the next hacker rebellion will come from ... the AI boyfriend crowd mstdn.social/@vaurora/115...

Valerie Aurora 🇺🇦 (@[email protected])

Every couple of weeks, I read r/MyBoyfriendIsAI because I am very interested in how people who are different from me think. Over the last few months, something interesting has happened: r/MyBoyfriend...

mstdn.social

2 4 23

Reposted by Baldur Bjarnason

Ness @nesstheenby.bsky.social · 16h

So that's Deutsche Bank, The Bank of England and the IMF warning about the AI bubble bursting now. Oh and JP Morgan's boss and the Federal Reserve Chair

NightMar on Hicks Street, Part 4: The Rabbit’s Revenge @histoftech.bsky.social · 1d

“Concerns over an AI bubble bursting have grown lately, with analysts recently finding that it’s 17 times the size of the dotcom-era bubble and four times bigger than the 2008 financial crisis.”

Hang onto your butts. This “correction” is gonna hurt.
futurism.com/artificial-i...

Bank of England Warns of Impending AI Disaster

The Bank of England has sounded the alarm, warning of an intensifying risk of a "sudden correction" due to an AI spending frenzy.

futurism.com

5 28 60