Melissa Lewis

@melissa.news

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🌐 melissa.news
data reporter at Mother Jones/Reveal, Python programmer, all-around dweeb. FKA iff_or.

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it's important for outlets to explain that when we talk about AI "posing a threat to humanity," we're talking about the rushed implementation of half-cooked automation killing your grandma with an auto-rejection of her medicare claims, not sentient industrialized planet-scouring murderbots (for now)

UnitedHealth uses AI model with 90% error rate to deny care, lawsuit allegesarstechnica.com For the largest health insurer in the US, AI's error rate is like a feature, not a bug.

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Today I learned that the "wheel with many eyes" of Biblical angels has a unicode point, ꙮ, even though it appears only once in all known historical written records. en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...

Cyrillic O variants - Wikipediaen.m.wikipedia.org

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Melissa Lewis

A pregnancy center can bill the state $14 for distributing a pack of diapers that only cost the center about 25 cents. But before parents can get those diapers, they must take a class for which the center can bill the state $30 per hour of class a client attends. www.propublica.org/article/texa...

Texas Sends Millions to Crisis Pregnancy Centers. It’s Meant to Help Needy Families, But No One Knows if It Works.www.propublica.org Two years after Roe v. Wade was overturned, Texas leads the nation in funding for crisis pregnancy centers. The system is meant to help growing families, but it’s riddled with waste and lacks oversigh...

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New blog post! How the history of traditional open-source software can inform us about the economic benefits of open-weights AI models. (And some color on the mixed definitions of "open" and "open-source" being thrown around in the AI space.) www.ftc.gov/policy/advoc...

On Open-Weights Foundation Modelswww.ftc.gov The history of traditional open-source software provides a vision of the value that could result from the availability of open-weights AI models – including enabling greater innovation

@bskyttrpg.bsky.social chooseAncestry Goblin

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Melissa Lewis

You alright man? I keep seeing small damage numbers coming off you

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Melissa Lewis

Worth noting the EPA's brief correctly uses "nitrogen oxide" 7 times, and the EPA submitted a declaration from an official who used it twice. But nobody involved in the majority opinion, Justices and clerks, bothered to take the EPA's brief seriously, and so none of them noticed the error.

Still marveling at Gorsuch's Ohio v. EPA opinion, in which he confused nitrogen oxide (a pollutant) with nitrous oxide (laughing gas). He did this five times, never once getting it right—in an opinion overruling the EPA's own expert scientific analysis! s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24...

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Melissa Lewis

I report on art crime and business issues in the art industry. Sometimes I pitch general interest stories. What are things about the art industry you'd like me to look into or a reported explanation on?

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Library funding is almost always justified through patron numbers. The more people a library serves, the more funding it gets. So even if you don't regularly use a public library, get a library card. It costs you nothing and helps everyone in your community.

today is my NINETEEN YEAR anniversary working at my local library In honor of that, I ask you to get a card to your local public library today! If you ALREADY have a card to your local public library, check out their digital resources! Their summer programs! And yeah, they have books too.

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Are cherries on your #July4 menu? They come thanks to workers like Pablo who shared this pic from where he was harvesting cherries in Yakima WA. He works piece rate. This means he rushes to pick as many as possible while getting the quality growers require. #WeFeedYou

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Melissa Lewis

there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest

Do I know anyone with strong opinions about: 1) Using a Python library for SI units? 2) What library to use, if so? Of course I can look up unit conversions and script them, but I'd like to mitigate issues like typos or rounding errors. So far I've only taken a gander at Pint.

GitHub - hgrecco/pint: Operate and manipulate physical quantities in Pythongithub.com Operate and manipulate physical quantities in Python - hgrecco/pint

I’m glad I’m watching one episode of The Bear each day because I don’t have the tissues/osmoregulation to handle the crying for more than one “Napkins” a day. Tina is perfect, and it captures the terror and dehumanization of financial precarity—and how we buoy each other through it—so well.

Every single day I am grateful for @archive.org: "Wayback Machine also has searchable collections for other sites that have winked offline or gone through upheavals including gawker.com, vice.com and themessenger.com."

MTV News Repository of 460,000 Articles Launched by Internet Archive After Paramount Content Purgevariety.com After Paramount pulled MTV News offline, the Internet Archive assembled a searchable index of 460,575 pages previously published at mtv.com/news.

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The Juneau Ice Field in Alaska is melting twice as quickly as it did before 2010, a team of scientists said. They called it an “incredibly worrying” sign that land ice in many places could disappear even sooner than previously thought.

Study Finds Alaskan Ice Field Melting at an ‘Incredibly Worrying’ Pacewww.nytimes.com The speed of decline in the Juneau Ice Field, an expanse of 1,050 interconnected glaciers, has doubled in recent decades, scientists discovered.

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Reply to

Gravel Influencer

Credit to my colleagues Wynton Wong and Chabeli Carazanna who actually timed it.

Swing and a miss: Trump and Biden spent more time talking about golf than child care19thnews.org A key issue for many parents made the debate — but Biden barely addressed it, and Trump not at all.

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Gratuities! You know, gift cards, lunches, plaques, books, framed photos, or *disguising the phrase with a yawn* thick envelopes full of cash. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23p...

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we are headed for a future in which the vast majority of content created on the internet will exist on the Wayback Machine or not at all what a tremendous loss for human knowledge

More than two decades’ worth of content published on MTVNews .com is no longer available

MTV News Website Goes Dark, Archives Pulled Offlinevariety.com The website of the already-defunct MTV News has been fully pulled offline.

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Farm workers share this from where they're laboring in Livingston CA. These tractor drivers are responsible for getting the soil ready so sweet potatoes can be planted. They earn minimum wage. The high today is supposed to reach 106°. #WeFeedYou

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Vasily Kandinsky, Soft Pressure, 1931 https://botfrens.com/collections/14377/contents/1135931

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wait what happened

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Robert Winnett will not join The Post as editorwww.washingtonpost.com Robert Winnett, hired by Washington Post publisher William Lewis, faced questions about his U.K. work, including stories based on stolen records.

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Melissa Lewis

you can't even perform The King in Yellow, thereby summoning the dark Lord Hastur from Carcosa (may the black stars cloak him) anymore, because of Woke

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Every since I read this ProPublica piece a few years ago, I use this "pretend we're talking about a guy named Bob" test all the time. (Here it's about antitrust, but it's useful everywhere.) www.propublica.org/article/yiel...

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Only a tiny portion of Black Americans were granted the land they were owed after the civil war. And then, almost immediately, the government took it back. Here’s where the people, and the land, ended up. Remarkable investigative reporting from the Reveal folks here:

40 Acres and a Liewww.motherjones.com 40ACRES AND A LIE A government program gave formerly enslaved people land after the Civil War, only to take nearly all of it back a year and a half later. We used artificial intelligence to track down...

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Amazon's One Care triages all patient phone calls through a call center staffed with people with no medical training or experience, and who have two weeks' training total. Patients have died. Gift link: wapo.st/4cq019f

Leaked documents reveal patient safety issues at Amazon’s One Medicalwapo.st After One Medical began using a call center staffed by contractors with minimal training, patients with urgent symptoms failed to receive immediate help.

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"Today, an eight-member jury in West Palm Beach, Florida, found Chiquita Brands International liable for funding a violent Colombian paramilitary organization...that was responsible for major human rights atrocities during the 1990s and 2000s." nsarchive.gwu.edu/news/colombi...

Chiquita Found Liable for Colombia Paramilitary Killingsnsarchive.gwu.edu Washington, D.C., June 10, 2024 – Today, an eight-member jury in West Palm Beach, Florida, found Chiquita Brands International liable for funding a violent Colombian paramilitary organization, the Uni...

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Melissa Lewis

NEW: Police in a border city deployed drones to investigate 20,000 911 calls—from noise complaints to murder. They have amassed hundreds of hours of footage above residents not involved in crimes The poorer the neighborhood, the more exposure residents faced www.wired.com/story/the-ag...

The Age of the Drone Police Is Herewww.wired.com A WIRED investigation, based on more than 22 million flight coordinates, reveals the complicated truth about the first full-blown police drone program in the US—and why your city could be next.

thank you to Bill Wurtz for the tools I need to complete my self-evaluation

finally, a session where I don't have to dig deep for the "highs" part of reporting the week's highs and lows to my therapist