I will never forget the conference reception where someone asked what I was drinking. It was Dr. Pepper in a glass. They actually blocked people from clinking their glass with mine while loudly telling the table not to toast with me because it was bad luck since my drink wasn't alcoholic.

People automatically assuming the moment someone posts a piece of information, a thought, or an opinion is the moment the poster learned that piece of information, first had that thought, or formed that opinion makes social media far more tedious than it has to be.

I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.

It is absolutely fitting to be able to subvert LLMs with poetry. arxiv.org/pdf/2511.15304

In a special project on extreme cold in prison, 27 PJP contributors in 17 states describe winter behind bars — and the small dignities that could make it more bearable.

I've been thinking about social media a lot lately and how so much of the interaction I feel like I'm witnessing is oriented around users correcting one another. www.hbcompass.io/breathe-just...

I kinda think the tail actually being attached to the fox's body might have been one of the creative limits to keep.

If you are struggling with the current national topic of conversation you are not alone. This is very difficult. It is grueling to hear people treating it like a debate. The coming weeks and months are going to be rough. You are not obligated to witness every update or cruel comment.

Hey, while we're talking about the absurdity of 50-year mortgages can we also talk about how Medicaid Estate Recovery causes families to lose houses, which represent the only wealth most middle income families are able to build while higher income families have the ability to protect their assets?

Call me controversial, but technology that leads vulnerable people into crisis and even holds their hand as they die by suicide should not be endorsed by schools and universities, we should not be giving discounted subscriptions to this monstrous tech to young people AT ALL

News orgs that produce good journalism but also publish incendiary, bigoted, and/or offensive "opinion" content because it's lucrative is like a hospital running a gun store in their lobby. You can be in the service of informing people or the business of provocation but tolerance for both is waning.

Big "hitting on women and then calling her names after she says no" energy here. The content is worth scraping & sharing but if the rights holder says no, then it's "worthless". The ubiquity of liars who fail at basic consent in the Gen AI space is part of why I don't want anything to do with it.

The end of the calendar year brings a lot of holidays. You do not owe anyone a meeting, attention, forgiveness, reconciliation, a second chance or anything else simply because it is almost a holiday. www.hbcompass.io/forgiveness-...

We made it to November 1. Wishing you a satisfying Let's Circle Back to This In The New Year for all who celebrate the season.

I was a child raised by a disabled grandmother on food stamps. Which one of us was supposed to get a job?

The Venn diagram of journalists mad when their stories get ripped off and reposted without credit and journalists who use Gen AI tools built with stolen and unlicensed art to create visuals for their stories is the shape of hypocrisy.

Being outraged that California is voting on whether to redistrict when red states are just unilaterally deciding to redistrict without input from their voters is a wild choice for hypocrisy.

No discussion of Musk/ Futurism/ Moderation or epistemological collapse can be done properly without discussion of race/ class and yess interpersonal dynamics “But Sydette that’s kind of like saying we’ve never had a good discussion”

Where XanderCat could choose to lay and where he does choose to lay.

If you haven't read this or haven't read it in a while, it's a very grounding experience at this time.

Dear messaging app developers, when you have friends you actually want to see the things they message you and you want to see it in their words not "✨See a summary of the last 5 messages" because that's how being a friend works and is literally one of the most meaningful parts.

Extremely low chances: Being harmed by AI that gains sentience and turns on us. Extremely high chances: Being harmed due to software on a critical system that is compromised or fails because of vulnerabilities created by someone recklessly relying on AI to build and/or run it for them.

The Shepard Tone is an auditory illusion where the tone seems to ascend or descend but it never actually breaks, creating this feeling of ratcheting tension that is never released. That's what this entire year has felt like.

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

I know 2026 feels pretty far away but there are already conferences on the calendar in the early part of the year. The 2026 Journalism WTF conference guide is now out. As more dates and details are confirmed, they will be added to the table. www.journalism.wtf/journalism-c...

If I genuinely believed I was 18 months away from superintelligence that could solve cancer, I would probably not be pivoting to horny chatbots, but that's just me (a person with priorities)

While Land Before Time was certainly emotionally devastating as a child, I didn't clock it as a horror film. Screenshots are from the results of searching "horror" on Netflix.

If you're confident that you can tell the difference between AI and real media, do you have that same confidence in your local police, courts, social services, school administrators, employers, and community? Because they all also have to be capable of that for you to not be harmed by false media.

What is your favorite positive adjective and what do you like about it?

Reading Sam Altman interviews in chronological order and taking them at face value is watching a tech bro with under-thought out ideas and an alarming lack of awareness just constantly discovering that other people have already thought about those ideas with far more depth, rigor, and analysis.

So they are even dumber than we already thought then. Cool. Or they're just lying. Like they do about everything else.

If you have to steal from others in order for your business to be viable, you are not running a business, you are running a scheme. Literally any and every industry would be easier to prop up if the participants were allowed to steal their essential components from others.

For National Disability Employment Awareness Month at @motherjones.com, I spoke to four disabled federal workers who were laid off about how their old jobs were very accessible—and what the federal government loses out on by having fewer disabled employees. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

According to this administration, Portland is burning to the ground. Can someone point that out in any of the live webcams around the city? katu.com/weather/came... portlandweather.com/all-cameras www.skylinewebcams.com/en/webcam/un... www.meteoblue.com/en/weather/w... www.windy.com/-Webcams-Pie...

It feels like the amount of spam and grift attempts, especially through phone calls and SMS, have skyrocketed this year. And the messaging has gotten creepier and more offensive from the standpoint of the psychology and manipulation they are using to attempt to get people to take the bait.

That feeling when the USPS is asking for us to help fund cancer research while this administration has cut numerous programs and grants for cancer research.

Most of the news media is still fighting the last war: production and distribution, instead of the current war: defending truth.

repeating the phrase "full books" as I slam my head against my desk until I pass out

It is actually important societally to be able to differentiate between someone who possesses actual skills, abilities and expertise versus the technology-aided appearance of skills, abilities and expertise.

Hey, remember that time the Washington Post killed their already planned election endorsement at the behest of Bezos who was cozying up to Trump and then a bunch of people lectured everyone to not cancel their subscriptions as a means of expressing that they didn't approve of the capitulation?

Non-profit news organizations should really be operating under the assumption that their 501(c)(3) status could be yanked at any time. All it's going to take is one significant investigation or viral story before their attention turns that way. Plan proactively. Don't count on norms or bureaucracy.

Freelance illustration gigs drying up. Ad agencies using Midjourney instead of hiring human artists. Costume design turned over to AI wholesale. Good work vanishing. These are the stories of working visual artists, who describe losing jobs, wages, and hope as their clients and bosses embrace AI.

I'm taking a class about information communities and information-seeking behavior and models and every time I read a new assigned reading I end up whispering under my breath "why the f--- wasn't this taught in j-school" repeatedly. I hope it's being taught now.

First time reading this person and, maybe I'm jaded, but I was floored by this sentence. This is just recklessly, almost painfully, naive. The post, while making some good points, falls apart trying to create equivalences when there is significant asymmetry both contemporarily and historically.

It's gone past enraging to comical nihilism to see so many supposedly astute white guy columnist types still trying to make it a both sides are equally bad situation. On the one hand: a bonfire. The other: an entire apartment building on fire. Those guys: Well, both sides started a fire so

This is out-Sovieting the Soviet Union. "You are free to express any opinion at all as long as it's the right one, and the consequences for all the others will be severe, and ratting out is an important part of our free society."

When the only lever of accountability the audience has for a news organization is to cancel their subscription, they should not be discouraged or prevented from doing so. If the desire is feedback in another form, that form must exist beyond social media posts.

The fact that Matthew Dowd lost his job for pointing out Charlie Kirk’s hate speech, while Brian Kilmeade openly suggests we should euthanize the homeless and there is zero outrage, shows exactly what is terribly wrong with today’s political mainstream media.

There are already generated books available on Amazon claiming to be "deeply researched" accounts of Charlie Kirk's death yesterday.

When we say "there is no place for violence," history says otherwise. History shouts and screams otherwise. We need to understand what can possibly be different now that could change whether we follow the same patterns that have filled the centuries before. www.hbcompass.io/this-has-alw...