Patrick Blanchenay

@pblanchenay.bsky.social

Posts

Global Evaluations and Research Advisor at Norwegian Church Aid (Oslo). Making our impact better documented, and our work more evidence -based. Previously instructor at U. Toronto; OECD. PhD Economics.

Posts Replies Media

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Patrick Blanchenay

Just found out about a massive data leak at Twitter/X. I don't use it anymore but I keep my account alive so no one else can claim my username. I just changed my password and suggest others do too. Also use 2FA whenever you can. More: cyberpress.org/9-4gb-twitte...

9.4GB Twitter(X) Data Leaked - Over 200 Million Records Exposed Onlinecyberpress.org The Cyberpress Research Team made a significant discovery with the Massive 9.4 GB of X (Formerly the Twitter) Database.

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Patrick Blanchenay

This fucking guy voted in the last two elections voteref.com/voters/MI/vi...

How many times does Matthew Walther get to publish his essay about why he doesn't vote in a prominent outlet? Because two seems like too many bsky.app/profile/greg...

Voter Referencevoteref.com VoteRef.com is dedicated to ensuring transparent, accurate and fair elections in the United States of America.

Ça s'annonce bien la coalition.

François Ruffin affirme que Jean-Luc Mélenchon est un « boulet » et un « obstacle au vote »

François Ruffin affirme que Jean-Luc Mélenchon est un « boulet » et un « obstacle au vote »www.lemonde.fr Le député sortant de la 1ʳᵉ circonscription de la Somme, en campagne pour sa réélection, a également assuré jeudi qu’il ne siégerait plus dans le groupe LFI à l’Assemblée s’il était réélu dimanche face au RN.

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Patrick Blanchenay

That “Black jobs” seems to be the main thing from the debate to go actually viral on social media should give certain columnists some pause about their pulse on the campaign.

Black Americans demand to know what ‘Black jobs’ are after Trump debate commentwww.wate.com Black Americans are demanding to know what “Black jobs” are after former President Trump used the phrase in Thursday’s debate with President Biden in Atlanta. In response to the first 2…

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Patrick Blanchenay

There are MUCH more important implications for the overturning of the Chevron doctrine. But in my aviation world it's gonna be nuts. You have any idea how many hair brained homebuilt aircraft/spacecraft the FAA is keeping grounded? Cuz you're about to find out.

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Patrick Blanchenay

doorway of the French Institut Océanographique in Paris

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Patrick Blanchenay

LLMs are working exactly as intended. That Google's CEO thinks there's some "unsolved problem" here that isn't simply "we picked the wrong tool" (which is super-solvable) is funny, sad, and a sign the company is very much deeply boned. LLMs are a plagiarism tool, not a knowledge retrieval tool.

Well then it sounds like the CEO of google has fucked up real bad and isn't fit for the job

CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Informationfuturism.com Google CEO Sundar Pichai says problems with its AI can't be solved because hallucinations are an inherent problem in these AI tools.

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Patrick Blanchenay

billions being spent on AI to answer only common questions

@NBCNews: Social media has been buzzing with examples of Google’s new, “experimental” AI tool going awry. A Google spokesperson said the company believes users are deliberately attempting to trip up the technology with uncommon questions. https://t.co/Wj9iuKzzHk

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Patrick Blanchenay

a tech guy saying something like "A bottleneck of writing is sentence generation" and then looking to a VC for investment bucks like a dog begging for a treat

“A bottleneck of writing is sentence generation—getting ideas into sentences…That is a big task. That part is really costly in terms of cognitive load.”

How can students use AI to improve your writing?- Fast Companywww.fastcompany.com The professors call their approach “restrained generative AI,” and they’ve already built a prototype software tool that is being piloted in 10 courses at the university this semester.

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Patrick Blanchenay

Reply to

lanyardigan

(Gift link) www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/u...

Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Planswww.nytimes.com If he regains power, Donald Trump wants not only to revive some of the immigration policies criticized as draconian during his presidency, but expand and toughen them.

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Patrick Blanchenay

"Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET) are subjective measures of student satisfaction that are often used to assess teaching quality. In this paper, we show that heterogeneity in students’ reporting styles challenges SET validity." www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

If (my) 6 was (your) 9. Reporting Heterogeneity in Student Evaluations of Teachingwww.sciencedirect.com Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET) are subjective measures of student satisfaction that are often used to assess teaching quality. In this paper, w…

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Patrick Blanchenay

Perfectly Organized Desk Allows Total Focus on Work Deadline That Passed Hours Ago hard-drive.net/hd/technolog...

Perfectly Organized Desk Allows Total Focus on Work Deadline That Passed Hours Agohard-drive.net Home Office – A perfectly organized, hyper-optimized personal work space inside Tommy Garner’s apartment will allow him to totally focus on a work deadline which…

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Patrick Blanchenay

If you own a Tesla, your car is covered in cameras that take images reviewed by Tesla employees, who share them with each other, joke about them, and make them into memes. www.reuters.com/technology/t...

www.reuters.com

YES. And if meeting is necessary, it should have a written element, either to prepare, or to summarize what's been discussed. If you're going to take people's time, the least you can do is to invest a bit of yours to make it more efficient. And meetings without agenda? Straight to jail.

This is super important at work: for people who don’t process information well via audio, the vast majority of trainings, presentations, meetings etc. are literal wastes of time. Massive efficiency gains if you just give people the option to read (which, I might add, is frequently faster)

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Patrick Blanchenay

Let's just cut out the middle man and cut education costs by not doing education.

Is AI finally a way to reduce higher ed costs? (opinion)www.insidehighered.com AI could free up faculty time to focus on the teaching and relationship-building that matter most, José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson write.

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Patrick Blanchenay

Reply to

Funranium (AKA Phil Broughton)

"What is the mechanism?" is a super boring question while speculation is a super fun trip to Imagination Land. No one likes trips to Karl Popper land, it's like visiting a frozen spinach factory.

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Patrick Blanchenay

Twitter's AI is incredible.

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Patrick Blanchenay

So Grok is now doing a Twitter trending news section "powered by grok" that has now made up two different news stories because it's based on tweets, exactly as I predicted it would late last year www.wheresyoured.at/elons-gordia...

Ah. Twitter’s AI, Grok, JUST FUCKING MADE UP that Iran is attacking Tel Aviv. It was first seen in the trending column. Bluechecks are running with the story

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Patrick Blanchenay

Erich Angenendt, Jena Bridge Paris, 1960.

Global #Whatsapp outages www.theverge.com/2024/4/3/241...

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Patrick Blanchenay

I always sound like “Old Man on the Internet” when I try to explain to the youth how wonderful RSS is. I’ve used Feedly for years. If you want to read a wide array of sources, with no ads, with complete control and little algorithmic weighting, and stay well informed, then RSS is what you want.

Subscriber RSS feeds for news sites should be a thing, but they haven’t been. @404media.co is working on it, and their work should benefit other Ghost sites. Such a cool solution. (A shoutout to FeedPress which has long made me stop missing FeedBurner.) www.404media.co/404-media-no...

404 Media Now Has a Full Text RSS Feedwww.404media.co We paid for the development of full text RSS feeds for Ghost-based publishers. Now we can offer them to our paid subscribers, and other Ghost sites can use the service too.

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Patrick Blanchenay

this is genuinely some of the best security advice you can get first pet? whatever you named the dog in Dragon Age city you were born? pick a favorite fictional country or something as long as you remember it and an attacker can’t look it up anywhere you’re good

i am here to tell you that there is no reason you have to answer security questions honestly, you only need to answer them memorably!

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Patrick Blanchenay

Reply to

Richard Brooks

i am here to tell you that there is no reason you have to answer security questions honestly, you only need to answer them memorably!

The prophetic style is really what does it for me.

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Patrick Blanchenay

Every time. UBI works. AI doesn’t. But which one is getting billions in hot dumb money thrown at it.

Fresh results from another basic income pilot. This one took place in San Antonio, Texas where 1,000 people got a $1,908 payment in Dec 2020, followed by 8 quarterly $400 payments between Apr 2021 and Jan 2023. What happened? Incomes from work went up. That's a commonly observed impact BTW.

San Antonio experimented with giving people $5,108 no-strings-attached. They spent it on housing and school supplies for their kids.www.businessinsider.com San Antonio, Texas is one of several US cities piloting basic income programs to assist low-income residents with housing and combat poverty rates.

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Patrick Blanchenay

biannual warning: the US clocks change a couple of weeks before the rest of the world. during the interregnum, double check all international meeting times in case it's an hour earlier or later than you think

*SIGH* www.timeanddate.com/news/time/us...

DST 2024 Starts in the USAwww.timeanddate.com The US set the clocks forward 1 hour for Daylight Saving Time (DST) on March 10, 2024.

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Patrick Blanchenay

Quick thread on the need to fully account for the climate effects of agricultural land use. This paper, like many food LCAs, looks only at food-related GHG emissions from the farm (fertilizers, livestock, etc.) & energy use & waste across the supply chain. It does *not* account for land use. 1/

according to this paper, which I’d love @waiterich.bsky.social’s expert $0.02 on, emissions for typical US diet is about 2.5 tons CO2e a year, vegan diet is ~1.5 tons my propane furnace and woodstove put out about 2.7 tons and 7.5 tons a year respectively, before I did the heat pump switch

A comprehensive review on carbon footprint of regular diet and ways to improving lowered emissionswww.sciencedirect.com In light of the SDG goals, carbon emissions from different food and food-related products have been under serious scrutiny in recent years. Despite th…

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Patrick Blanchenay

Among other things, LLMs create so much extra work for professors who now have to deal with machine-generated bullshit in the classes they're already overstretched teaching