Category: Random

Google, a search engine which does not have human emotions, assumed that I had been spurned by a man in my life named Dario and decided what I wanted was an empathetic digital friend. What I wanted was some links, but that’s not what Google does in 2026.
— Read on sancho.bearblog.dev/google-weird/

I don’t think posting always felt so damn corny and useless. There was a time online when posting could lead to stuff: people looking at your work, opportunities, real conversations in the comments. But now that the dead internet and ai bots have basically ruined what was a pretty sick hang out spot, I don’t even know how much longer it feels worthwhile. This is, notably, in contrast to posting on Patreon. The people who want to see it see it, and the people who don’t, don’t. And I feel zero pressure to post about only one topic for my “niche” or “brand” or whatever. In effect, I get all of the jollies of 2010s blogging and none of the embarrassment of “not having gone viral.”

— Read on www.patreon.com/thespitestack/posts/posting-is-168529790

Dan Sinker asks a good question about today’s social media: What if we just stopped?

And it makes me wonder, what kind of internet would we have if social media went away? Especially since so many ways of staying connected from before (AIM, forums, etc) are gone?

I used to tell myself that I had to stay engaged because social was where news broke, but I’m not sure what news I’ve seen break on social in ages. It’s all just people reacting to news that’s already broken. Or, worse, making shit up in the hopes of getting likes.

Mostly, it seems, we yell. We yell about the world, we yell about the other social sites, we yell about news stories we didn’t read, we yell about whatever sucker was unlucky enough to be that day’s main character, and we yell, mostly, at each other. We yell because we are mad at all of this. And we yell because we’re all trapped in a machine that was built, in part, to keep us yelling.

I’m not sure what keeps me there, what keeps any of us there, beyond inertia. We’re in the Looney Tunes stage of the end of social, where we’ve glided well past the edge of the cliff and it’s slowing dawning on us that the only way left is down. Fast.

What if we just stopped?

— Read on dansinker.com/posts/2026-09-23-stopped/

The accounts posting these messages aren’t run by celebrity influencers with massive engagement, legions of fans and lucrative product endorsement deals. Most have only a smattering of followers and, often, the people behind them aren’t even based in the United States.

Functioning more like birdshot than a single bullet, these high-volume social media campaigns represent the new vanguard of modern political influence, saturating the internet with a topic until it is all but unavoidable. That can help game social media network algorithms so that they treat coordinated content as organic, spreading the message even wider. Built from dozens or hundreds of posts from accounts you’ve never heard of, they amount to an echo chamber on a budget.

“This is digital astroturfing, plain and simple,” said Samuel Woolley, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies how new technologies can be used to manipulate public opinion on the web. “The more people see an idea online, the more inured to it they become and the more commonplace and acceptable it becomes.”

— Read on www.nytimes.com/2026/09/22/us/politics/influencers-midterms-echo-chamber.html

You may have so far ignored cards as a collectibles craze that will turn out to be a house of cards. But Levin continues to be enthusiastic about them, both from collectors’ and investors’ perspectives. After all, even The Wall Street Journal touted Pokémon cards as a “hot investment with a 3,000 percent return” a year ago, as their value gains beat the benchmark S&P 500 stock index. And a Cyberpunk trading card game, based on the popular video game of the same name, earlier this year set a Kickstarter record by raising $28 million, becoming the most-funded game and the No. 4 most successful campaign ever on the crowdfunding platform. Some analysts have estimated that the trading card market is worth $50 billion annually – with further growth ahead. 

Trading Cards Growth, Pokémon Apocalypse: A Chat With Peter Levin

Dan Ariely, professor of business administration in the Fuqua School of Business, is once again under scrutiny after an article released Monday found evidence that he likely tampered with or fabricated data in an influential 2002 research paper on procrastination.

The findings — published in Data Colada, a blog run by three esteemed behavioral science professors that investigates and replicates academic research — identified four key “red flags” in the study’s data, which suggested the results were not possible without interference.

“We are unable to generate a benign explanation for all of the anomalies presented here,” the professors wrote. “Based on this evidence, we believe the data for Study 2 of Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) were severely tampered with or fabricated to produce the desired results.”

‘Insane data’: Duke professor Dan Ariely accused of additional research fraud – The Duke Chronicle

Throughout the trial, Sanft poked holes in prosecutors’ narrative. He said investigators did not back up the claims made by his client, and he repeatedly pointed out a lack of physical evidence, such as phone records, that showed Davis was the shot caller.

“They have nothing in this case that says that man was here in Las Vegas on Sept. 7, 1996,” Sanft said during his closing argument.

In a rebuttal argument, prosecutor Marc DiGiacomo pointed to a scrapbook Davis kept containing articles about Shakur.

“This guy’s scrapbooking his murder, for God’s sake,” DiGiacomo told jurors.

Man convicted of first-degree murder for the killing of Tupac Shakur : NPR

When people have strong moral identities, they view unethical behavior as a violation — not just of the rules but also of their own values. They anticipate more guilt at the thought of wrongdoing and more pride at the prospect of doing the right thing. They believe their choices reflect their character. It’s powerful. And the best way to instill it is to get students to consistently think about the ethical consequences of their actions. The younger they start, the better.

Opinion | There’s Really Only One Way to Stop Students From Cheating – The New York Times

As detailed in a new paper in the journal AI & Society, designed to build out a new framework and start a discussion, an international team of researchers suggested that the use of AI chatbots, specifically in customer service settings, could be making humans act more robotic even as bots become more like us.

“As generative systems and socially responsive service agents enter everyday consumption, human-AI interaction increasingly resembles a quasi-social encounter rather than a utilitarian interface,” they wrote.

The researchers introduced a new concept called “robotoid humanness” to put a name to the “emergent drift in which consumers come to experience themselves as most fluent, correct, or socially viable when they become compatible with machine legibility, machine pacing, and machine logic.”

Alarming Study Suggests That Using AI Is Turning Humans More Robotic

A new paper in Psychological Science (.htm) reports a failure to replicate Study 2 of Ariely and Wertenbroch’s influential article entitled, “Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment.” The original study, published in Psychological Science in 2002 (.htm), found that people performed better on a set of tasks when each task had its own externally imposed deadline than when people set their own deadlines or faced a single last-day deadline for all tasks. The paper has had a lasting influence. It has been assigned reading in many economics and psychology courses, and has more than 2,100 citations on Google Scholar.

Because this paper has been so influential, it is worthwhile to take a close look at the original study to try to understand why it did not replicate. We did that. This post – and the next one – is about what we found.

[138] Artificial Deadlines (Part 1): Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination – Data Colada