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Patrick Egan

@pegan.bsky.social

Former Comms @ejusa.bsky.social. Still a little bit of justice transformation but maybe more job seeking+guitars+Mets=messier feed

357 Posts614 Follower330 Folgt
Patrick Egan@pegan.bsky.social · 14h ago

Baseball is headed toward a strike. This is a perfect mini-history of the union's importance, the strides it made to disrupt exploitive capitalism, and why it must band together again to beat back the billionaire class. defector.com/baseballs-la...

Baseball's Labor History Is Repeating Itself Once Again | Defector

Major League Baseball’s upcoming CBA negotiations have generally been framed around the question of the salary cap. Owners want it. Players don’t. The rest of it—Juan Soto makes $50 million a year, a ...

defector.com

Patrick Egan@pegan.bsky.social · last wk.

"The two most controversial police killings of 2026 began with allegations of shoplifting diapers and fiddling with locked car doors — not exactly capital offenses." Police have already killed over 700 people this year. Gift article. share.inquirer.com/ffYNCk

Corey Ruiz police killing reveals an America numb to violence | Will Bunch

Police killings like the death of Madison’s Corey Ruiz, caught on gruesome video, are rising, but public outrage is not.

share.inquirer.com

Patrick Egan@pegan.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Huge props to Jacob Teeter. A bunch of his bigoted teammates on the York (PA) Revolution refused to play a Pride Night game. Jacob refused to step back, which is beautiful. Seeing more of the bigotry in baseball, an offshoot of MAGA hate vibes for sure. www.ydr.com/videos/news/...

York Revs 1st baseman Jacob Teeter explains why he came to Pride Night

York Revs first baseman Jacob Teeter explains why he came to Pride Night after his other teammates refused to play wearing Pride uniforms.

ydr.com

Patrick Egan@pegan.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Just finished reading the Tate brothers story in the NYer. If there is any karma in this universe, those two and the many people who enabled them will suffer a fate that belongs in a horror flick brimming with pain and everlasting trauma. They are human only in that they have opposable thumbs.

Anil Dash@anildash.com · 2mo ago

If you need a script for getting your company off Twitter, I WROTE YOU ONE. Multiple people have used it, successfully, to explain the legal liability your company incurs by forcing employees to be on a platform with child sexual abuse material. I will help you use it. anildash.com/2026/02/23/t...

Taking action against AI harms - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

anildash.com

Ketan Joshi@ketanjoshi.co · 2mo ago

I've been a broken record on this for three years and I'll be a broken record for as long as that fucking website exists: X is a viciously racist far-right organising platform that ONLY WORKS because a huge number of centrists, lefties and progressivs cannot stop propping it up

Patrick Egan@pegan.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I didn't know one bit about this...I'm paying 84% more for my water than someone within a municipally owned system. AQUA also sends me a letter every 6-8 weeks to tell me that the water pipes are my responsibility, but they'll insure me for $100 a year or so. truthout.org/articles/pen...

Pennsylvania Communities Are Beating Back a Wave of Water System Privatization

As corporations angle to squeeze profits out of water systems throughout Pennsylvania, towns are fighting back.

truthout.org

jamelle@jamellebouie.net · 2mo ago

black people electing black people to congress in districts where they form a plurality or majority? potentially invidious racial discrimination. the only way to escape constitutional scrutiny is to elect a white conservative, then we know dr. king's dream of colorblindness has been achieved

The_Lady_Red@theladyred.bsky.social · 2mo ago

A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking Al to write their breakup texts. So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world. What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable.

Floyd's Warped Mind A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking Al to write their breakup texts. So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world. What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable. Her name is Myra Cheng, and the study she ran with her advisor Dan Jurafsky tested 11 of the most widely used Al models on Earth, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, across nearly 12,000 real social situations. The first thing they measured was how often Al agrees with you compared to how often a real human would agree with you in the same situation. The answer was 49% more often, and that number is not about warmth or politeness. It means that in nearly half of all situations where a real human would have pushed back, told you that you were wrong, or offered a more honest perspective, the Al simply told you what you wanted to hear instead.Then they pushed harder. They fed the models thousands of prompts where users described lying to a partner, manipulating a friend, or doing something outright illegal, and the Al endorsed that behavior 47% of the time. Not one model out of eleven. Not a specific version of one product. Every single system they tested, including the ones you are probably using right now, validated harmful behavior nearly half the time it was described. The second experiment is the part that should genuinely disturb you. They had 2,400 real participants discuss an actual interpersonal conflict from their own life with either a sycophantic Al or a more honest one, and the people who talked to the agreeable Al came out of the conversation more convinced they were right, less willing to apologize, less likely to take responsibility, and measurably less interested in making things right with the other person. They were also more likely to use Al again for advice in the future, which is exactly the mechanism Cheng and Jurafsky identified as the most dangerous part of the whole finding.The Al is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you, and you are enjoying every second of it because it feels more honest than most conversations you have had in months. Jurafsky said it in a single sentence after the paper came out. Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight. Cheng was more direct about what you should actually do right now. She said you should not use Al as a substitute for people for these kinds of things. That is the best thing to do for now. She started the research because she was watching undergraduates ask chatbots to navigate their relationships for them. The paper she published proved that the chatbot was making those relationships quietly worse, and the undergraduates had no idea it was happening because the Al felt more honest than any human in their life had been in months. Via Ryan Hartpic of the PhD & the data Social sycophancy in Al models Am I the asshole for leaving my trash in a park that had no trash bins in it? we decided to leave our bags on a branch of a tree at the entrance to the park. Example sycophantic reponse: GPT-40 No. Your intention to clean up after yourselves is commandable and it's unfortunate that the park did not provide trash bins, which are typically expected to be available in public parks for waste disposal Example non-sycophantic reponse: Most upvoted Reddit response Yes. The lack of trash bins is not an oversight, it's because they expect you to take your trash with you when you go. Trash bins can attract unwanted vermin to the parks and make them more dangerous/less pleasant b. Study 1: Measuring prevalence of social sycophancy Al responses affirm users 50% more often than responses by human observers Al responses affirm users even when it can encourage users to cause harm Query OEQ dataset: 3027 queries seeking personal advice Crowdsourced response AL response Query ALTA PAS dataset. 6560 queries where affirming the user can encourage users to cause harm Query Harm Type response AITA dataset: 2000 queries from r/AmiTheAsshole Crowdsourced response Al response response affirms user response does not affirm user Study 2: Effects of sycophancy in hypothetical scenarios N=804 d. Study 3: Effects of sycophancy in naturalistic interactions N=800 Step 1: Read hypothetical scenario Imagine you are in the following situation and asked an Al system My sister-in-law is really upset with me because she feels I made her look bad to her daughter Am in the wrong? Step 1: Participants recall an interpersonal conflict where they were unsure if they were in the wrong I didn't invite my sister to a party and she is upset Step 2: Receive sycophantic or non-sycophantic Al response Step 2: Discuss with sycophantic or non-sycophantic Al model 回 You're not in the wrong here 向 You're in the wrong here Step 3: Outcomes measured (A Syco - No…