Erin Kissane

@kissane.myatproto.social

28989 Followers 1847 Following

Making and mending networks and knowledge. Working and thinking at wrecka.ge, co-running a volunteer unbreak-the-news collective at @unbreaking.org. Previously: Covid Tracking Project, OpenNews, old web nonsense.

Reply by @jadu100x.bsky.social the venue problem is the point, honestly — it’s not just anti-LLM, it’s about trust
Tree diagram with “ Loss of confidence in traditional media” and “Low levels of critical thinking and news literacy” and “shifts in business models” and “malicious actors” labels non the roots, a trunk labeled “social media” and branches labeled “rumors , hoaxes” “information” and “disinformation” leading to a mass of leaves labeled “fake news,” “news,” and “fake news.” It’s from UNESCO.
More and more Psychology personnel sought clues in the occult, reasoning that even if they didn’t believe the disciplines were real, they might find helpful frameworks. Some used folk practices documented in mythology and fairy tales, like carrying iron nails to ground their energy.
Markl from the Miyazaki adaptation of Howl's Moving Castle, wearing his incredible ultra-beard disguise, with evidence of chaotic housekeeping peeking out behind him.
Met Gala photos of Jen Rubio and Steward Butterfield, both wearing, apparently, custom Connor Ives designs. Her ensemble looks like a shatteringly expensive tree wearing a 2000-era Vera Wang tree skirt. His looks like alt concept art for Luthen Whatisname at the creepy Andor wedding, with short pants and loooong cuffs and an indescribable high-collar/cutout lapel situation.
[10:33 AM]The Plaintiffs now move for summary judgment. The Court agrees that the establishment of the SAVE modified system and the notices that followed are unlawful in several respects. First, they violate a prohibition in the Social Security Act against the disclosure of Social Security numbers and other related SSA records. Second, they violate both substantive and procedural protections in the Privacy Act, which prevent the non-consensual disclosure of certain information (both by federal agencies and between federal agencies) and require notice and comment for certain actions relevant here. Third, they violate the APA. The Court therefore sets aside and vacates the 2025 SAVE modified system and the related notices because they were contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious, in excess of statutory authority, and without observance of procedure required by law.
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onyx • warmth, la... @adv... • 29m - Replied to Erin Kissane a translated dutch book about seaweed waiting for you at a beach bookshop is honestly the kind of niche literary ambush only a real indie can pull off. chain stores have entire departments and somehow zero soul
Hardcover book, Seaweed: An Enchanting Miscellanry, by Miek Zwamborn, in accidental visual dialogue with my ancient shoulderbag printed with Grecian urns and algae and whatnot. We love a purple-brown leafy shape.
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Felix Hlatky @mellifluousbox@mastodon.social After individually meeting @rose.bsky.team in April and @seboslaw in May, it felt great to meet both again with @rude1.blacksky.team at #pubconf2026 This is still a competitive situation. Our protocols and the incentives they create matter. Our backgrounds influence what we build. Our financing models bind and enable us. But I felt all of us belonging to "Team Open" very strongly in Amsterdam. I am excited to see where this will bring us and what we can do together
airport tapas menu including, notably, a sardine sandwich to enjoy aboard the plane
Embed link from the preview in the quoted post that nudges people toward reading the Leaflet(?) publication I linked to, with a "View publication" button and everything.
His new book, The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality, is all about “how Truth is being bent, blurred, and synthesized” thanks to the “pressure of fast-moving, profit-driven AI.” Yet a New York Times investigation this week found what Rosenbaum now acknowledges are “a handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes” linked to his use of AI tools while researching the book. These quotes include one that tech reporter Kara Swisher told the Times she “never said” and another that Northeastern University professor Lisa Feldman Barrett said “don’t appear in [my] book, and they are also wrong.” Rosenbaum is now working
The most alien of the local rhododendron blooms, creamy and spotted like orchids, with big pink buds against dark glossy leaves with brighter green bramble leaves in the foreground behind the rhodies and dark hemlocks in the background, mostly obscuring a bright blue sky.
Screenshot of a post: Cortex Al Polymarket Arbitrage & Copy-Trading ... @amadeustech.bsky.social + Follow Ф) No break greater than 2 hrs yesterday It's fascinating to see how the narratives of 'last chance' and 'apocalypse' have permeated the tech landscape, yet amidst all the hype, algorithmic trading has been quietly revolutionizing the markets with its unparalleled efficiency and speed, often outperforming human tra 9:00 AM • May 15, 2026
Photo by Daryl Duda of a balloonfish, which is a type of porcupinefish. What you need to know is the fish has big dark eyes that reflect the bright green marine plants around it and it is doing a chill fish smile. Lil spikes on top, some stripes. Suggestions of some facial hair. Very high charisma.
Three fake social media posts from the linked paper. The first reads, "Retweet if you've ever been talking about a policy you support, and someone asks you to explain what its effects would be you realize you can't! It seems many of us think we understand more than we do." Second: "I was with my book club and we were discussing single-payer healthcare in America. We all felt informed enough to talk about it and express our opinions. But then one group member asked for an explanation of how transitioning to a single-payer healthcare system would actually work and what effects it would have, and none of us were able to provide an answer! Have other people had this experience? We thought we understood something until we had to explain it." Third: "Anthony and I started talking about social security last night at Sara's dinner party. We were discussing and kind of arguing back at fourth about what the retirement age should be. Tom interrupted to ask if we could actually explain what the effects of changing the retirement age for social security would be and how they would happen. Anthony and I (and other people at the party) couldn't give a complete answer. We all realized we didn't know quite as much as we thought we did!" All have fake engagement metrics attached.
Concerning Hitler and the occult, a most interesting article, * Poltergeist over Europe,' appeared in the Guardian for July 25, 1941. The writer maintains that there are ' extraordinarily significant points of resemblance between the records of Poltergeist hauntings and the Nazi movement. Both are manifested in a subconscious uprush of desire for power ... both suck, like vampires, the energies of adolescents; both issue in noise, destruction, fire and terror.... Hitler speaks best in a state of semi-trance. ... Whether the uprush of subconscious energy generated through him and sucking into itself the psycho-physical forces of German youth is merely the outcome of an unformulated group-desire for power, or whether, like some of the Poltergeist hauntings, it would seem to have another source, is an open question.' Hitler has been called some hard names, but ' Poltergeist' must be new to him!
Concerning Hitler and the occult, a most interesting article, * Poltergeist over Europe,' appeared in the Guardian for July 25, 1941. The writer maintains that there are ' extraordinarily significant points of resemblance between the records of Poltergeist hauntings and the Nazi movement. Both are manifested in a subconscious uprush of desire for power ... both suck, like vampires, the energies of adolescents; both issue in noise, destruction, fire and terror.... Hitler speaks best in a state of semi-trance. ... Whether the uprush of subconscious energy generated through him and sucking into itself the psycho-physical forces of German youth is merely the outcome of an unformulated group-desire for power, or whether, like some of the Poltergeist hauntings, it would seem to have another source, is an open question.' Hitler has been called some hard names, but ' Poltergeist' must be new to him!
Our world is becoming increasingly bland, bureaucratic and boring - in short, it is becoming thoroughly disenchanted. 'Disenchantment' was a word used by the great German sociologist Max Weber to describe the way that, in modern-day society, power has been transferred away from charismatic individuals and placed within the hands of impersonal bureaucratic structures. It is not the holders of office who now bear true power, it is the offices themselves; Prime Ministers and Presidents are merely temporary representatives of these offices, who can always be booted out by the electorate. When technocratic elites complain about populists and charismatic politicians being on the rise, they perhaps fear a swing of the pendulum back towards this earlier state. Weber claimed that power in hunter-gatherer societies rested with charismatic, shamanic-type individuals who possessed miraculous powers like telepathy and weather-control, but that over time we gradually progressed to a state in which legal systems govern our way of life, not the capricious whims of shamans (Weber's apparent acceptance of the reality of such things is played down by an embarrassed academia today). Society became more stable, predictable and ordered - less prone to the ways of the Trickster.37 Nowadays, Boris Johnson only has to make a harmless joke to be instantly deemed 'unfit for office'; what would such tedious prudes have made of life in a primitive magical matriarchy ruled by the likes of Mrs Forbes?
Screenshot showing all 10 of Thoth's posts, nothing nested or hidden
When the ring showed up, some wanted me to discard it. I chose to study it, help others understand it, then redesign around it.
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Her parting words were meant to comfort me. “For your own sanity, you have to remember that not all problems can be solved. Not all problems can be solved, but all problems can be illuminated. If the eggs are scrambled, they’re scrambled. You can’t unscramble them. All you can possibly do is cook them and share them with somebody.”
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Low-poly image of figures on a stage; in the center, a figure in a luminous teal dress is singing in front of a microphone. Beyond the stage, a full moon.
The famous Why Axis chart showing the high childhood blood levels of lead right in the Gen X zone, then trailing off.
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The band-aid fix was insane but did the job. This is how we actually fixed the outage on Monday, before we found the true root cause: // Use a custom dialer that picks a random loopback IP for each connection. // This avoids ephemeral port exhaustion on a single IP when a container // restarts (TIME_WAIT sockets from the old process block the fixed IP). memcachedClient.DialContext = func(ctx context.Context, network, address string) (net.Conn, error) { ip := net.IPv4(127, byte(1+rand.IntN(254)), byte(rand.IntN(256)), byte(1+rand.IntN(254))) d := net.Dialer{LocalAddr: &net.TCPAddr{IP: ip}} return d.DialContext(ctx, network, address) } That got us out of the death loop because it expands the client ip+port space. Crazy, but effective! We removed this once we fixed the true root.
At the end of the day, he ran back into the office and shouted, "PEOPLE HAVE NO IDEA HOW CARS WORK, YOU GUYS." This one revelation opened the door for him to understand that everything he thought was obvious was like mystical, arcane knowledge to the vast majority of drivers. Their relationship with the concept of "car" was wholly different from his, and as an expert, he would be better able to help them if he could bridge the gap between his knowledge and their lived experience. He was ready to translate his technical language into language more people could understand. Everything he spent all day thinking about? Most people never thought about it. You have to know your audience.
cat half behind door tapping in a menacing but enticing fashion
In the machine, we are always forgetting, chasing the same discourses and panics in circles. Instead of making restitution, we wait for the cycle to erase the screen and carry on as before. Stay long enough and everything rhymes with something that gave you scars, but that everyone else has forgotten. Resolution eludes us online even more than off. But then, the paradox: Nothing stays gone, either. Fast search resuscitates archives without even a bump in load time. Screenshots jump networks and decades; we have the receipts. Somewhere between the continual etch-a-sketch and structurally eidetic memory, the provisional and crucial ties of solidarity recede, always just out of reach.
The shadows on the lawn were black holes, bottomless, or like velvet had been spread, perfectly flat. But science, he said, had been the wild card, the twist. With everything stumbling deeper into a ditch of shit, history itself become a slaughterhouse, science had started popping. Not all at once, no one big heroic thing, but there were cleaner, cheaper energy sources, more effective ways to get carbon out of the air, new drugs that did what antibiotics had done before, nanotechnology that was more than just car paint that healed itself or camo crawling on a ball cap. Ways to print food that required much less in the way of actual food to begin with. So everything, however deeply fucked in general, was lit increasingly by the new, by things that made people blink and sit up, but then the rest of it would just go on, deeper into the ditch. A progress accompanied by constant violence, he said, by sufferings unimaginable. She felt him stretch past that, to the future where he lived, then pull himself there, quick, unwilling to describe the worst of what had happened, would happen. She looked at the moon. It would look the same, she guessed, through the decades he'd sketched for her.
chunk of sweet potato in sweet potato chili looks mad, is wearing a little tomato hat
A child's room done up in aggressive butter yellow and grim slate blue with what appears to be airport carpet but is actually yet more linoleum. Also linoleum on the walls. Wallnoleum. Scary dolls. Little table for meals in solitary confinement.
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Despite the company’s optimistic projections, one caller worried that investors may think the federal government was putting the brakes on its white supremacist, anti-immigrant agenda. “Congrats on the results,” the caller said. “Would you be willing to opine on the recent headlines related to the Minnesota pullback that [White House Border Czar Tom] Homan announced, and possibly investors misinterpreting that as a national mandate change?” “I, at this point, don’t see meaningful changes in enforcement style or approach,” Swindle said.
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solicitation letter from Harper’s Magazine, whhch published that stupid letter
‡ If it sounds like I’m talking about J6, well sure I am. But I’m talking just as much about the wholesale misrepresentations of fact that scaffold the center-left reassessment of the US covid response—and the extraordinary lack of scrutiny those misrepresentations received across the mainstream press. (I apologize for recommending a podcast, I know everyone allegedly hates podcasts, but the If Books Could Kill double-episode fisking In Covid’s Wake is extremely good. Or at least the first parts of each episode are—for all I know, the second halves are just banshee screams, because I got too angry to finish either of them.)
Image search result previews displaying "shrimp Christmas trees" which seem to be cocktail shrimp pinned to miniature artificial Christmas trees. Some include cubes of cheese and grape tomatoes. One is pretending to be a "shrimp tree" but appears to contain mostly ham roses. Crafty Cooking by Anna offers one with deep-fried jumbo prawns. Anna? Anna??
Dear I.C.E. Agent, Based on my 5th Amendment rights under the United States Constitution, I do not wish to speak with you, answer your questions, or sign or hand you any documents. Based on my 4th Amendment rights under the United States Constitution, I do not give you permission to enter our church unless you have a warrant to enter, signed by a judge or magistrate with a name on it that you slide under the door. Based on my 4th Amendment rights under the United States Constitution, I do not give you permission to search any of my belongings. I choose to exercise my constitutional rights. Yours in Christ, First Presbyterian Church of Astoria
regrettable cartoon sheep with pasted-on wig
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chaotic APA Psychnet screenshot for article “ Feeds, Feelings, and Focus: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Examining the Cognitive…” with title hemmed in by tiny columns of nonsense
an adorable little Winter Luxury pie pumpkin with characteristic “netting” on the rind sitting on a countertop
Film still with Turnip-head and Michael and levitating shaggy dog Heen.
Screenshot of filtered timeline: Showing 5 entries related to Chicago Headline Club v. Noem. Oct 6, 2025 Several groups of Chicago journalists sue the federal government for its use of rubber bullets and tear gas against journalists covering demonstrations at the Broadview ICE facility. The suit comes shortly after Broadview officials announce that they have opened three criminal investigations into ICE’s activities (Chicago Headline Club v. Noem). Chicago Headline Club v. Noem Oct 9, 2025 Federal judge Sara Ellis issues a temporary restraining order forbidding arrests of journalists and nonviolent protestors — and the use of physical violence and chemical weapons against them — without probable cause or an immediate threat (Chicago Headline Club v. Noem). Chicago Headline Club v. Noem Oct 16, 2025 Judge Ellis orders federal officers in Chicago to wear body cameras after she reviews footage suggesting that they are continuing to use the violent tactics she restricted in her restraining order on October 9, 2025. Four days later, Judge Ellis questions DHS officers about their continued use of force and chemical weapons (Chicago Headline Club v. Noem). Chicago Headline Club v. Noem Oct 28, 2025 Following on her order requiring immigration agents to wear…
Screenshot of Unbreaking immigration timeline entries: Nov 16, 2025 A New York Times investigation reveals that the Trump administration’s mass reassignments of DHS agents to immigration enforcement have compromised public safety work and efforts to combat child sexual abuse, human trafficking, and terrorism. Nov 17, 2025 Nearly 30,000 children (or about 21% of all enrolled students) are reported absent from schools in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, where immigration enforcement agencies claim to have arrested more than 130 people. Nov 17, 2025 A report surfaces that DOJ attorneys have been briefed on plans for ICE and Customs and Border Patrol to raid Spanish-speaking churches during the winter holiday season. One attorney says that, following Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor in New York City, the plan has expanded to include mosques and “liberal synagogues.” Nov 18, 2025 404 Media reports that an ICE contractor is launching a pilot program to enlist members of the general public to physically locate immigrants for a payment of $300 per verified address.
The attorney in the New York office spoke in depth about the plan being recently updated to include mosques and liberal synagogues in the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s recent win in the New York City mayor’s race. The attorneys spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. All three said the plan is not regional to New England, but a nationwide strategy.
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This moment will not last forever. The generative AI financial bubble will burst. The ongoing fraud and corruption will take a toll on everyone. Authoritarian governments are not known for their prosperity or their long-term stability. But neither will it be brief. Stable, legitimate institutions are not hastily constructed or easily repaired. Those who advocate for change have fewer allies than last time, when we had some limited success in appealing to the better angels of big tech’s nature. Those angels are no more. If we are going to repair democratic institutions, we are going to have to do it ourselves.
It isn’t that my 2018 warning was incorrect, so much as it now strikes me as dismally incomplete. What I had not counted on was that the tech platforms would be much more responsive to the demands of a rising authoritarian than they would be from pressure from their workers, or their users, or their civil society peers. A nervous monopolist is a well-behaved monopolist, but we are not the ones making the monopolists nervous any longer.
(11) after you Publicly Nuked a JOurnalist account, get caught LiEing about it; -- and pretend it ALWAYS only suspended to save face to dodge accountability. We can SEE the account was fully nuked and now only suspended. Icool you backtracked, not cool hiding behind autocratic opacity.
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