For Scream Fortress this year, Valve should ask ChatGPT to fix everything it identifies as a problem in the TF2 codebase, and then just push it without any testing and let us deal with whatever it does.
Postdoc at UC San Diego studying cancer. Academic unionist and transit enthusiast. Trying to make buses less invisible. Medic main in TF2. he/him
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For Scream Fortress this year, Valve should ask ChatGPT to fix everything it identifies as a problem in the TF2 codebase, and then just push it without any testing and let us deal with whatever it does.
It looks like they’re frying it in soap.
🧪 And House appropriators say: no cuts to NIH budget! House subcommittee version just came out (link below). Holds NIH flat at $48 billion. To be clear: this is far from over. But a good sign that science still matters across both sides of aisle. YOUR VOICE MATTERS!!
This is the kind of propaganda that we need to watch for very closely. They know that they can’t write one article and convince a liberal to support RFK Jr. The goal here is to let the reader keep disliking RFK Jr, but over time, internalize the idea that he’s not that bad.
Footnote: "Preventable accident" has a more stringent definition than "at fault", it means that there was something the operator should've done to prevent it. The number of crashes where the bus operator was at fault is presumably much lower.
In 2024 there was about 1 "preventable accident" per 100,000 miles driven by buses, most of those very minor. The most severe I can remember in the last few years was a wrong way driver (either drunk or medical episode) hitting the front of a bus at 30-40 mph. No major injuries on the bus. (2/2)
In San Diego, the number of kids taking transit (mostly buses) to school has gone up massively since MTS started free rides for anyone under 18. It's cheaper, working parents don't have to worry about the schedule coordination, and it's almost certainly far safer too. (1/2)
“This is the type of law enforcement border residents and migrants have endured for generations. This is what current Chief Scott is bringing to a town near you.”
Nine former CDC directors, from Bill Foege onward, speak out about the incalculable harm that RFK, Jr. is doing to public health in the US and around the world. Gift link.
Happy Labor Day.
This ‘blue states closed schools too long’ narrative is becoming increasingly entrenched in the Polite Center but it’s arguable at best. Republican states had far more deaths during COVID and their students have roughly comparable learning loss.
We really will live our whole lives like this just because car manufacturers say we have to.
If a lifted truck where the driver can’t see my 5’7” head walking in front of it is street legal, I don’t care about any two-wheeled device any kids are riding. They can steal F35 engines from Miramar and strap them to the back for all I care.
That’d be my guess.
The federal govt's extortion of UCLA has numerous problems. One is that it is ostensibly based on some factual allegations that are so exaggerated that they are actually false. I wrote about this today in a long blog post reflecting on what I saw at UCLA and how lawyers later mischaracterized it:
Got bus 1705 for route 41, which is unusual. Pantograph history shows every bus within 1701-1714 that ran today was on Kearny Mesa trips. Maybe to make room for more new buses! Regardless, North SD’s ongoing heist of Central SD buses continues (we also stole the 1400s and made them Rapid).
These ads are an attempt to funnel users to supplement companies and online-only pharmacies that use extremely unethical prescribing practices. Google knows this.
Google believes it has correctly diagnosed me with a specific condition, presumably via contextless web activity inferences, and every time I open an article from within the Bluesky app without Adblock, I get ads designed to manipulate insecurities it thinks people with that condition have.
This is what happens when you take something that not even the most dedicated libertarians claim works as a free market and let people arbitrarily profit from it anyway. bsky.app/profile/alex...
Keep pushing for deregulation and privatizing services, and those newly empowered entities will keep taking as much as they can. SDGE is doing it right now, it's almost single-handedly pushing MTS off a financial cliff.
Meanwhile, in the real world, not the weird permanent hallucination that Ronald Reagan trapped these people in, we find that hollowing out state and municipal engineering capacity, the kind of privatization that UT champions, created a perfect void for predators. www.latimes.com/local/califo...
The @sandiegouniontribune.com editorial board didn't bother trying to explain how unions caused the HSR delays, because they can't. www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/08/29/s...
Glad to hear that the Midwest is basically as far away from here as the UK when it comes to those family questions. Though it may be more that wildfires aren't a thing in the Midwest so people don't really know how to react to the news that there's one somewhere in a 100 mile radius of me.
I'm not sure where I got 300 from actually, I thought I saw that number associated with this earlier. bsky.app/profile/chri...
All these planes make it seem like they were going to move more than 300 children. Or maybe ICE has rules about how many children you can keep in handcuffs per adult on a plane, or maybe some other reason that is also a justification for every person employed by ICE belonging in prison.
Probably going to mention something to the applicant, not because it's his fault in any way obviously, but because I'd want to know what kind of HR I was dealing with if it were me.
Need a law in CA that if an office building close to a transit station has low occupancy for a certain amount of time, current or future owners should automatically be allowed to convert or build new housing. Thinking mostly of Executive Drive Station on SD Blue Line.
MTS operators are good at pulling up fast and stopping just short while laying on their horn, and it is a little fun to watch.
Does seem to be more about the messenger than the message, or maybe it’s that the messenger wants those policies to be applied more universally than they were originally.
There is nothing stopping us from making it so, in any city in America, you can go outside, walk around the corner, get on a comfortable train, and be in any other city by the end of the day, other than politicians and the airlines who pay them to lie about what is possible.
And of course the former student emailed me beforehand because he is much more professional than , but nothing in the emails or survey itself says anything about the job or where it is, just that he's "seeking an opportunity."
Oh it also sent me another reminder this morning so I've now received three emails about this between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning.
It has 30 questions and wants me to give *3* areas of improvement. Requiring an entire paragraph at minimum of reasons they may not want to hire someone I'm providing a reference for is bizarre. If I had paragraphs' worth of concerns about someone, I would tell them not to list me as a reference.
I think it's implicit in every statement our academic locals make, but an explicit call to fire RFK Jr from @uaw.org would also be nice.
wow
On the one hand, I did start carrying pepper spray and considered applying to emergency university housing after accidentally interrupting a DV situation and getting threats from my neighbor, so this can happen. On the other hand, this is Rudy Giuliani, so I don't believe any of it.
This should be a bigger story. A government official had the YouTube channel of a private citizen shut down bc he didn’t like what that citizen was saying. This administration’s version of free speech is a joke.
I thought the lawyer's name might just be a coincidence, but no, same guy. web.archive.org/web/20250309...
All of these buzzwords and euphemisms are to obfuscate this concept, in which there are no guiding societal structures beyond the current desires of the richest person living there. theweek.com/tech/network...
Turning Gaza into a blank state to serve as the public debut of the network state is quite possibly the worst thing I’ve ever heard.
You should give the Republicans a second look, I think you’d like Christian Nationalism more than you think.
If every public HTML webpage disappeared tomorrow except for government website and the Internet Archive, that would not be a loss at all.
Been spending time using web browsers in completely fresh operating systems (long story) and I didn’t realize how much worse things are now. From out-of-the-box Edge, every single website looks (and performs) like the sketchiest p/rn or pirated content site in the world.
1. Don't build the safe protected bike infrastructure we ask for. 2. Ban kids on ebikes. 3. Complain about parking near kid's activities. 🙄
Took me 7 minutes to walk from the 40th St route 10 drop off to the route 235 northbound stop, which is just across the street. That’s ok because 235 picked up its usual 5-7 minute delay driving from Santa Fe Depot to City College. It’s not hard to understand why people avoid transit if they can.
Almost said (nondisabled) scientists too, but that’s wrong. We knew about him, but I don’t know anyone professionally who thought this would happen. We were too comfortable. We didn’t expect society to suddenly start kicking us in the teeth because we didn’t listen to people who it already had.
I have not seen one line of code from this (that's a different problem) but I can guarantee it's not anonymous. Apple knows who installs it and where they live, and they won't fight DHS or DOJ if asked for that data. Build organic community networks, not single points of failure.
www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/08/30/s...
Every time I hear about a North County local government issue, it's either: 1. The relevant city council trying to block any project that would let fewer people drive. 2. The relevant city council trying to get people to do fewer fun things because there isn't room for them to all have cars.
Taking at least one day a week to only work on side projects is great because I can spend a much time type hinting or being really obnoxious in comments as I want.
Absolutely infuriating. These are the "criminals" these cowards are pursuing. A wildland firefighter on track for legal status who has been here for 19 years (since age 4). 😠
Got an automated reference letter request for a former student on Friday afternoon and then an impatiently worded automated reminder today (Saturday morning). Universities/companies: Please configure your systems to not do that.
I still don’t understand what goes on in RFK Jr’s mind, but I understand Prasad and Bhattacharya, every academic union is always fighting mini versions of them on every unionized campus in the country.
RFK Jr is the glue that holds MAHA together. Push him out and you have a combination of people who will consume each other trying to fill the power vacuum and people like Makary, Prasad, and Bhattacharya who can’t take the heat that RFK Jr takes for them and will fall apart immediately.
The people I shouldn’t have been in IRC channels with when I was 16 are probably so depressed. They’ll never top what the DOGE kids got invited in to do.
Also, I’m not going to continue replying, only because Bluesky has labeled you as “rude” (very silly feature in my opinion) which means I need to manually click through every post to get here and that’s getting really annoying to do.
There is nothing you can say that will convince me that we shouldn’t make an effort at the state level to backfill all hospital operational funds lost due to Medicaid cuts.
From an electoral perspective, I believe that doing everything we can to offer better material conditions is the only way to counter the propaganda machine. From a personal perspective, I will never voluntarily accept living in a system where closing hospitals is the only option available.
A collection of random trivia and incorrect assumptions that have proven incorrect such as that Chavez-DeRemer would be pro-labor (she was not and is not). If you have data that contradicts the study I posted, I’ll consider it.
That is incorrect. clje.law.harvard.edu/the-varied-v...
If that doesn’t motivate you as an ideal, consider that propaganda requires fuel. UFOs were in the news last year, but still mostly as a joke. In contrast, healthcare conspiracies helped drive Trump’s popularity because they create an emotional hook by explaining a source of pain.
This does not mean being friends with fascists, it doing whatever is _necessary_ to make sure everyone everywhere has their basic needs met.
One thing you learn in a union is that if you aren’t willing to go to *extraordinary lengths* (define that in a situationally appropriate manner) and make immense personal sacrifices for people who don’t care about you or actually despise you for what you’re doing, you will never win anything.
There isn’t really any worse data security compromise than that. That’s kind of like, the final hack. However many SSNs your employer or hospital loses in an incident, it’s never *all* of them.
ICE, DC Police, Park Police, DHS, and HSI brutally arrested a man who refused to provide identification after being stopped for eating in public. Goons attempted to stop community members from recording his injuries during the incident.
The resignation letter that the government does not want you to see
If you aren’t familiar with Alex Jones’s early career, go back through @knowledgefight.bsky.social’s catalogue to when they covered 2003 episodes of Infowars. It’s difficult to believe he’s the same person.
this should be a scandal. jonathan is one of vinay prasad’s most incisive & vocal critics. prasad is actively censoring his non-government scientific critics. and his position of power means youtube will do whatever he says
The bar is low. But yet somehow it still boggles my mind that the people whose entire personal story on their rise to power was based on the claim they were supposedly censored when people disagreed with them *immediately* started doing actual government censorship of social media.
Dr. Dmitri Daskalakis, who resigned from the CDC says that RFKJr said he believes that Avian flu should be allowed to "burn through" the chickens and then children and others, so we can propagate a "stronger species". RFKJr believes in eugenics. RFKJr needs to resign or be fired.
Here in Oregon, this is the solitary confinement cell we put children in. Yes, children. www.oregonlive.com/crime/2025/0...
Whoever has been blowing things up every weekend in Clairemont for the last couple months needs to stop.
I still haven’t seen any major news outlets report that this letter directly (and correctly) accuses RFK Jr of enacting eugenic policies.
The judge is not describing a hypothetical situation. As far as I’m aware, ICE still maintains that this citizen turned himself in and asked to be deported. sourcenm.com/briefs/arizo...
Right wing weirdo, NIMBY voice, and anti-car safety guy elected to Encinitas City Council last year did an assault and hit and run with his car.
The biggest obstacle to widespread resistance in academia is that it's considered more responsible and professional to act like research and politics are two separate things. If the last 6 months didn't completely dislodge that bit of academic culture, I'm not sure what will.
The main differentiating factor between people in support of and opposed to the settlement is that the latter framed their opposition in a broader social context and the former don't seem to consider any effects on themselves or society generally beyond "I got my grant back and can work again."
It's certainly not out of any sense of compassion on NIH's part, but I am glad that some of my colleagues won't be receiving their second layoff notice of the summer.
An Encinitas councilmember has been charged with felony assault and two misdemeanors connected to an alleged hit-and-run. voiceofsandiego.org/2025/08/28/e...
It is always unethical, and already illegal, to perform procedures that a patient or research subject does not want, or that have a high likelihood of harm with no possible benefit.
There are alarming claims in here that I was not aware of. There are NO circumstances under which researchers can solicit people to terminate their pregnancies specifically to provide tissue for research. This is an extremely dangerous lie.
Just to be clear here: This is an FDA official using false pretenses to prohibit the speech of a private citizen.
This is never going to stop as long as Silicon Valley continues to puppeteer the government. They bought the election in part to stop regulations aimed at preventing exactly this:
Considering the numerous examples we have now of interactions with LLM-based chatbots leading to or exacerbating extreme delusions and violent behavior, this is a great way to get these women killed.
there is no question in my mind that rfk jr is the most dangerous person in this administration and that his eugenicist ideology threatens the lives of millions of people www.advocate.com/politics/dem...
What shelters? Almost everyone who asks for a bed in San Diego on any given day is rejected because they're full.
Every health scientist in the country has an obligation to respond this way. We cannot continue to allow anyone's access to standard of care, let alone their existence, to become legally or politically negotiable.
I need to remember not to eat while reading a "some recently deployed public-facing AI is awful" story, I almost choked laughing at this.
My YouTube channel has like 300 followers and 99% of it is just videos of our medical establishment. Today, I learned they are trying to censor me, instead of doing their job.
Congrats, according to Jay Bhattacharya’s logic, this entitles you to conduct a hostile takeover of the NIH.
San Diego’s homeless population also skews older. That might seem like a paradox with respect to this headline, but it’s what happens when there’s no social safety net for decades: home value is everything. It’s musical chairs, but with a lot fewer than n-1 chairs.
Yeah something’s up over there. Hopefully not a hard fix.
My last couple trips on the Green Line (I assume you meant) we’ve gone really slow or stopped/started a lot between Linda Vista and Old Town. Wondering if they’re having some mechanical issues with it. That’s not going to be a fun bus bridge.
Her brother has been going around assaulting Latino people in San Diego. Entire family is trash. www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/a...
In my postdoc union experience, respectful workplace and health & safety tend to go together. Harm from mistakes can be amplified in a culture of self preservation. Never had a grievant from the Magic Department though. Do I file with health system labor relations if they study healing potions?
Bricking a PC while installing Windows 11 to wipe out a Windows 10 installation that had unremovable malware because I was too stupid to wonder why Windows on the used PC never asked me for an activation key is probably a sign that I should find a new career. I shouldn’t be allowed to own computers.
If you see him tomorrow ask him what he’s driving after the service change on Sunday. Important logistical (and small talk opportunity) question.
This explains the CDC resignations.
To be clear, he is in the middle of executing a coup – removing a senate-confirmed CDC director, who can only be fired by the president and STILL HAS NOT BEEN, and putting one of his cronies in charge. A wild overreach for a cabinet secretary. He must be forced to resign.
"Pediatric Brain Cancer Trial Group to Be Phased Out" "A network of hospitals and cancer centers dedicated to early phase trials of novel treatments will no longer receive federal funding." 🎁🔗 Nina Agrawal for @nytimes.com