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imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
Ryan Hendrickson
@imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
1.6K followers 5.5K following 580 posts
"You ever feel like nothin' good was ever gonna happen to you?" "Yeah, and nothing did. So what?" Archivist at Boston University for ~25 years, he/they https://www.imaginaryhistories.com
www.imaginaryhistories.com
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Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
bakoon.bsky.social
bakoon @bakoon.bsky.social · 15h
bsky.app/profile/mike...
mikestabile.bsky.social
Mike Stabile @mikestabile.bsky.social · 15h
JFC. Ron DeHaas, founder of the Christian antiporn app Covenant Eyes, has stepped down from NCOSE after his 38-year old son was charged with sexual abuse of a child.

Covenant Eyes is the app used by House Speaker Mike Johnson and his son to monitor each other's internet behavior.
Covenant Eyes Cofounder Helps Post Bond for Adult Stepson, Who Is Charged With Felony Child Sex Abuse
In August, Thomas Wideman, an adult stepson of Covenant Eyes cofounder Ron DeHaas, was arrested during a CSAM sting operation.
churchleaders.com
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imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
Ryan Hendrickson @imaginaryhistories.bsky.social · 15h
Bubbles are made to pop
Text describing how Nvidia chips are dependent on rare earth metals refined at one single location in China
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
slimyswampghost.bsky.social
Trevor Henderson 🍉(commissions closed) @slimyswampghost.bsky.social · 19h
love to be uncovering a long hidden child's drawing or fresco portraying a mysterious atrocity in a decrepit and abandoned manor by candlelight while furtive sounds of movement get closer and closer to my position
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unavaleable.bsky.social
Reconstructionist @unavaleable.bsky.social · 19h
construction is getting spit roasted on input tariffs and deportation raids too
1 9 130
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unavaleable.bsky.social
Reconstructionist @unavaleable.bsky.social · 19h
oh yeah manufacturing is also getting punched in the nuts, and there's the energy crisis too
1 11 160
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unavaleable.bsky.social
Reconstructionist @unavaleable.bsky.social · 19h
I do think it's unclear if anything load-bearing snaps, but I do think we're looking at a multi-faceted national healthcare crisis, an AI bubble correction, and a farm crisis
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imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
Ryan Hendrickson @imaginaryhistories.bsky.social · 20h
What actual cyberpunk looks like
caitlinmoriah.bsky.social
dr. caitlin m. green @caitlinmoriah.bsky.social · 1d
there are SO many more inflatable costumes tonight. clearly we have settled on a motif
Wide shot of many people in inflatable costumes
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imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
Ryan Hendrickson @imaginaryhistories.bsky.social · 20h
One of the funniest things about the mascot costumes in protests is that it utterly foils the ultra-networked, drone-driven, bleeding edge-AI hyper-surveillance infrastructure that law enforcement & ICE et al are so dependent on now
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jwherrman.bsky.social
John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 22d
it did lots of other things, too, but the positives tend to accrue in the form of individual success or satisfaction: these are fundamentally grimy marketplaces masquerading as communities, just a total disaster
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jwherrman.bsky.social
John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 22d
strong agree, from 2017: opaque commercial social platforms becoming the most vivid, accessible representation of discourse, democracy, the public sphere, the media, etc was a massive accelerant for cynicism/resentment/despair www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/m...
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imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
Ryan Hendrickson @imaginaryhistories.bsky.social · 21h
This is an interesting case of Brian Eno's thing about the limitations of the technology becoming the defining aesthetic of that technology; as the renders get better maybe it's less "guys check out my witty slop" and more uncanny valley/unfun dehumanization. Will probably end in lots of CSAM
jwherrman.bsky.social
John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 4d
it's only been a week but I'd bet a lot of early users are having experiences like this with Sora: manic, exploratory onboarding followed by something like a hangover. it's a pattern! nymag.com/intelligence...
Sora is presumably extremely expensive to run, hence OpenAl's use of a chained invite program to roll it out. In its early form, it brings to mind the early days of image generators like Midjourney, the video model for which Meta is now borrowing for Vibes. Like Sora, Midjourney in 2022, was a fascinating demo that was, for a few days, really fun to mess with for a lot of the same reasons: A vast majority of the images I've generated have been jokes — most for friends, others between me and the bot. It's fun, for a while, to interrupt a chat about which mousetrap to buy by asking a supercomputer for a horrific rendering of a man stuck in a bed of glue or to respond to a shared Zillow link with a rendering of a "McMansion Pyramid of Giza..? ...I still use Midjourney this way, but the novelty has worn off, in no small part because the renderings have just gotten better — less "strange and beautiful" than "competent and plausible." The bit has also gotten stale, and I've mapped the narrow boundaries of my artistic imagination. Playing with Sora is a similar experience: a destabilizing encounter with a strange and uncomfortable technology that will soon become ubiquitous but also rapidly and surprisingly banal. It also produces similar results: a bunch of generations that are interesting to you and your friends but look like slop to anyone else. The abundant glitches, like my avatar's tendency to include counting in all dialogue, help make the generations interesting. Many of the videos that are compelling beyond the context of their creation are interesting largely as specimens or artifacts — that is, as examples of how a prompt ("sam altman mounted to the wall like a big mouth Billy bass, full body") gets translated into ... something. (As one friend noted, many of these videos become unwatchable if you can't see what the prompt was.)
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jwherrman.bsky.social
John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 23h
implied agentic ai pitch: we will lure users with unrealistic promises, and in the process turn them into spammers that destroy the entire existing marketplace. then... profit?
The bet by investors like Y Combinator, in other words, is on a broadly familiar form of disruption but with a couple of twists. Generative AI may expose some incumbent firms to outpricing, outselling, and outmaneuvering by start-ups that embrace it, while more and more people acclimate to strange, new, chatcentric modes of computing. In the meantime, it may also help glut, jam, and temporarily destroy the entire markets in which they're operating. It's a version of creative destruction in which the destruction is preemptive, indiscriminate, and maybe looks a bit like sabotage — with a little bit of help from all of us, of course.
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jwherrman.bsky.social
John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 23h
trying to think through what's unusual about so many AI startups, and about the gaps between their pitches, the real world, and what they would actually need to succeed nymag.com/intelligence...
This attitude toward externalities — not my problem, and in any case worth it in exchange for a small advantage — follows the approximate logic of a spammer and often comes wrapped in the language of AI hustle culture. It's also understandable from the perspective of a job seeker who feels constantly thwarted by automated systems employers use that seem to treat seekers with similar indifference or contempt, or by platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed that, while nominally intended to connect two parties with shared interests (one needing specific services, the other offering them), can feel more like social-media-style black holes for engagement. It's an escalation that will likely be met with more escalation: countermeasures by job-listings platforms and hirers to prevent access by AI agents; more aggressive automated filtering; different hiring routines altogether, making it even harder to get through the door to a coveted interview. Mercenary (and slightly deceptive) automation tools like this, which are being pitched all over right now and already wreaking havoc in, for example, online dating, depend on two temporary circumstances to work, if they ever actually do: (1) that most other people don't have access to them, giving the user an edge and (2) that the people and parties on which they're used will tolerate and take no action against them. In other words, if you take their pitches at face value, they're pretty obviously doomed in the medium term, in the sense that they'll either be rejected by the systems they operate in or simply ruin them for everyone. Taking stock of the first few years of mainstream AI deployment, though, raises an important question. What if that's sort of the point? Or at least a world worth thinking about in a more thorough, long-term way? Generative image and video tools, for example, have significantly degraded social-media platforms, allowing bad actors and regular people to fill them with slop, intensifying existing problems with spam and deceptive content while thwarting old solutions. And, hey, look at that: Suddenly, OpenAI and Meta are launching new social networks based on AI, on which posting generated content is the point, not a problem to be solved. Generative AI may be placing immense stress on educational institutions and worsening the already strained relationships between teachers and students, but wait — every AI company is selling ed tech now.
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Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
vortexegg.com
𝕍∃, Cyber closed shell syndrome relief fund coordinator @vortexegg.com · 22h
AI companies are actually AI gap arbitrage companies
jwherrman.bsky.social
John Herrman @jwherrman.bsky.social · 23h
trying to think through what's unusual about so many AI startups, and about the gaps between their pitches, the real world, and what they would actually need to succeed nymag.com/intelligence...
This attitude toward externalities — not my problem, and in any case worth it in exchange for a small advantage — follows the approximate logic of a spammer and often comes wrapped in the language of AI hustle culture. It's also understandable from the perspective of a job seeker who feels constantly thwarted by automated systems employers use that seem to treat seekers with similar indifference or contempt, or by platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed that, while nominally intended to connect two parties with shared interests (one needing specific services, the other offering them), can feel more like social-media-style black holes for engagement. It's an escalation that will likely be met with more escalation: countermeasures by job-listings platforms and hirers to prevent access by AI agents; more aggressive automated filtering; different hiring routines altogether, making it even harder to get through the door to a coveted interview. Mercenary (and slightly deceptive) automation tools like this, which are being pitched all over right now and already wreaking havoc in, for example, online dating, depend on two temporary circumstances to work, if they ever actually do: (1) that most other people don't have access to them, giving the user an edge and (2) that the people and parties on which they're used will tolerate and take no action against them. In other words, if you take their pitches at face value, they're pretty obviously doomed in the medium term, in the sense that they'll either be rejected by the systems they operate in or simply ruin them for everyone. Taking stock of the first few years of mainstream AI deployment, though, raises an important question. What if that's sort of the point? Or at least a world worth thinking about in a more thorough, long-term way? Generative image and video tools, for example, have significantly degraded social-media platforms, allowing bad actors and regular people to fill them with slop, intensifying existing problems with spam and deceptive content while thwarting old solutions. And, hey, look at that: Suddenly, OpenAI and Meta are launching new social networks based on AI, on which posting generated content is the point, not a problem to be solved. Generative AI may be placing immense stress on educational institutions and worsening the already strained relationships between teachers and students, but wait — every AI company is selling ed tech now.
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Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
mormonpartyboat.bsky.social
Catfisher of Men @mormonpartyboat.bsky.social · 23h
she's a brave fighter for democracy!!!!!!!!!!!!!! in that she explicitly asked netanyahu to bring about regime change in venezuela lmao

x.com/MariaCorinaY...
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byjoshmoody.bsky.social
Josh Moody @byjoshmoody.bsky.social · 23h
MIT rejects "compact" proposed by the Trump administration.
MIT prez wrote: it "would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution" and "is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone."
orgchart.mit.edu/letters/rega...
Regarding the Compact | MIT Organization Chart
orgchart.mit.edu
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belthazzar.bsky.social
🥮Video Game Tax Credit man🥮 @belthazzar.bsky.social · 23h
BTW she asked Trump to blow up the fishing boats
A screencap from a news Venezuela's 'Iron Lady' Pleads With Trump to Save Her Country's Democracy In a series of rare in-depth interviews, Venezuela's opposition leader called life in hiding "a difficult test" and asserted that Mr. Trump could gain an early "foreign policy victory" by pushing Nicolás Maduro from office.
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imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
Ryan Hendrickson @imaginaryhistories.bsky.social · 1d
Reducing power supply while building massive power-sucking data centers is what the kids call a masterful gambit
costasamaras.com
Costa Samaras @costasamaras.com · 1d
Picture how big the Hoover Dam is. An absolute unit. The Hoover Dam has a power capacity of 2 gigawatts (GW).

The solar farm that the Admin just cancelled could have produces 6.2 GW of power. That's more than 3 Hoover Dams.
jael.bsky.social
jael holzman @jael.bsky.social · 1d
SCOOP: The Bureau of Land Management says the largest solar project in Nevada — the Esmeralda 7 mega-farm — has been canceled

The news was quietly dropped via a sudden website update with no public word from any of the companies involved or a statement from the agency

@heatmap.news
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imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
Ryan Hendrickson @imaginaryhistories.bsky.social · 1d
Trump and Miller’s attempt to turn the Texas National Guard into the American einsatzgruppen isn’t actually going so well is it
djbyrnes1.bsky.social
Dave Byrnes @djbyrnes1.bsky.social · 1d
Perry asks the govt's counsel if they would potentially seek to send other state's national guard to Illinois if she used narrower language for the restraining order.

Counsel says yes.

"Ok, then I'm gonna go with the broader language," Perry says.
1
imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
Ryan Hendrickson @imaginaryhistories.bsky.social · 1d
I feel like Gremlins hits this sweet spot, funny and menacing without being bloody or too dark
Reposted by Ryan Hendrickson
piperformissouri.bsky.social
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social · 1d
I bet no one told you that the Missouri Farm Bureau endorsed the Republican politicians who support Trump’s tariffs and trade war…the two things decimating Missouri soybean farmers.

Did you know that the Farm Bureau sends out a list of “farmer-friendly” politicians to each Farm Bureau member?
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escapedexplorer.bsky.social
escapedexplorer.bsky.social @escapedexplorer.bsky.social · 2d
WWII "Friend" poster series from the Allied Forces, originally demonstrating the various Allied forces (British, Australian, Chinese, French, Dutch, etc.) and their appearances It reads: "This man is your FRIEND He fights for FREEDOM" The image is a sepia/black and white toned image of the Portland Frog protester, simply labelled FROG
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imaginaryhistories.bsky.social
Ryan Hendrickson @imaginaryhistories.bsky.social · 1d
Feels like the system is fundamentally incapable of sustaining an essentially lawless Presidency unchecked by Congress/SCOTUS, & SCOTUS deciding Trump was untouchable and could run again looks a lot more momentous now
joshtpm.bsky.social
Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social · 1d
invocation of the insurrection act will be the key moment for everyone. the white house, any state where it's invoked, especially the supreme court. all public officials are ultimately responsible for acting in line with the constitution. a false invocation of the insurrection act, itself a ...
radleybalko.bsky.social
Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 1d
Nothing remotely resembling an insurrection is happening anywhere in the country. Any violence associated with protest has been isolated, mild, and, in nearly every case, instigated by federal law enforcement. If we let Trump get away with calling dissent an insurrection, our republic is over.
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tznkai.bsky.social
K. Chen @tznkai.bsky.social · 2d
This is a combination of an enormous public service and yet another proof of the utter rolling disaster the parasociality-industrial complex is.
polygon.com
Polygon @polygon.com · 2d
Twitch streamer Fandy gave a live birth in front of thousands of viewers who witnessed everything from contractions to the head crowning.
Twitch streamer gives birth in front 29,000 viewers, and chat was unhinged
Twitch streamer Fandy gave a live birth in front of thousands of viewers who witnessed everything from contractions to the head crowning.
www.polygon.com
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radleybalko.bsky.social
Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 2d
No clearer indication of the right’s moral rot than the swift evolution from angrily denying any association with buffoonish bigots like like Posobiec and Fuentes, to “there’s no harm in having a conversation,” to openly praising and promoting them.
radleybalko.bsky.social
Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 2d
Not the least surprised by this. I’d hope it might finally wake up some mainstream libertarians to what Smith is really about. But it probably won’t.
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