Joe Germuska
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joe.germuska.com
Joe Germuska
@joe.germuska.com
2.9K followers 2K following 500 posts
Chief Nerd @ Northwestern University Knight Lab • Project lead @ Census Reporter • Board Member @ City Bureau • Information Design • Digital Journalism • Civic Technology
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joe.germuska.com
More in this vein from @eryk.bsky.social
mail.cyberneticforests.com/thoughts-on-...
Rather than asserting that the language machine is a thinking machine, we might step back from this conflation of thought and language. We can begin to cultivate a literacy that immunizes us against the persuasion of a chatbot, which is steered by statistical probability but also by design decisions — the fine-tuning and system prompting of the commercial enterprises that sell them. AI won't “decide” to persuade people to do harmful things on a global scale any time soon; but AI companies are persuading us to do harmful things on a global scale already. This stems from believing AI is “intelligent.”
November 2, 2025 at 4:03 PM
joe.germuska.com
This New Yorker cartoon by Adam Douglas Thompson neatly combines two of my idiosyncratic enthusiasms
November 1, 2025 at 12:51 PM
joe.germuska.com
From 404 Media: Police Said They Surveilled Woman Who Had an Abortion for Her 'Safety.' Court Records Show They Considered Charging Her With a Crime

www.404media.co/police-said-...
In documents created prior to the publication of our article, there is zero mention of concern about the woman’s safety. The records show that the police retroactively created a separate document about the Flock search a week after our article was published, in which they justify the search by saying they were concerned for her safety.
October 7, 2025 at 2:01 PM
joe.germuska.com
Your tax dollars at work
(you bet I left website feedback)
www.hud.gov
September 30, 2025 at 2:21 PM
joe.germuska.com
from "Data is Political" byJoe Reis
practicaldatamodeling.substack.com/p/data-is-po...
The lesson that stuck with me is that data is political. I saw firsthand how departments could shape numbers to make their performance look better than it was. It also taught me that data models are political artifacts. They reflect a shared understanding, but that "shared" understanding is often shaped by influence, competing interests, and unwritten rules. [Begin highlighted text]A poor model in a dysfunctional organization creates a downward spiral where trust erodes and bad decisions multiply.[end highlighted text] In contrast, a supportive and constructive organization with psychological safety will likely provide you with numerous opportunities to properly model your data, which in turn gives people better data upon which to base decisions and act. This positive feedback loop is far more desirable. [Begin highlighted text]In high-trust organizations, data models become accelerators of alignment instead of weapons in turf wars. Trust creates clarity, and clarity reinforces trust.[end highlighted text]
September 22, 2025 at 2:44 PM
joe.germuska.com
Original post: vis.social/@Rougeux/115...
September 21, 2025 at 2:58 AM
joe.germuska.com
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
James has long been a particular source of outrage for Trump, in part because of a civil lawsuit she filed against him and his company that resulted in a massive financial penalty. That penalty was thrown out in August by an appeals court that narrowly upheld a judge’s finding that Trump had engaged in fraud by exaggerating his wealth for decades. The case has taken a series of unorthodox turns. It emerged in August that Ed Martin, who helms the justice department’s weaponization working group and is helping coordinate the investigation, had sent a letter urging James to resign from office “as an act of good faith” after starting his mortgage fraud investigation of her. [Begin highlighted text]He later turned up outside James’s Brooklyn townhouse in a “Columbo” style trench coat. A New York Post writer at the scene observed him tell a neighbor: “I’m just looking at houses, interesting houses. It’s an important house.”[end highlighted text]
September 20, 2025 at 12:50 AM
joe.germuska.com
This is really good

peoples-things.ghost.io/why-do-peopl...
"The coming together of these two trajectories and others has led to some mournful consequences. A big one is that a lot of thinking about technology today is marked by a simplistic and, at times, downright bizarre form of Manicheanism - a black and white view that splits the world into opposing forces of good and evil. One would hope that humanistic and social scientific inquirers would be immune to such a pitfall, given that irony, nuance, and self-challenge are central pillars of those thinking traditions, but alas . . . There are times I check in on Bluesky, that great bastion of liberal anxiety, see people talking about Generative AI, and wonder to myself, "Hold on, are you talking about software that spits out text, images, and code or are you talking about literal demons?!?!" The zero-sum worldview of Manicheanism, which I suspect has been encouraged by simplified, binary-like forms of social media communications, has a number of negative effects. One of the more important ones is that it leads us to be un-curious about others, who are obviously bad and worthy not of attention but scorn."
September 6, 2025 at 12:11 PM
joe.germuska.com
This article is dense and there’s a lot in not sure I get, but this is 🚀

moneyontheleft.org/2025/08/11/c...
September 1, 2025 at 2:37 PM
joe.germuska.com
www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
"“What’s the most important thing humanity has engineered?” Kwan asked me, over coffee in a West Village restaurant. “Arguably, it wasn’t the internet, or agriculture. It was the creation of the systemic and institutional trust that was required for us to build societies. And a lot of that engineering was actually collective stories—God, government—that helped us see ourselves as one family, one community. With our current technology, it’s like we’re playing Jenga.”" (Joshua Rothman, A.I. Is Coming for Culture | The New Yorker)
August 30, 2025 at 2:16 AM
joe.germuska.com
"LLMs are multiverse generators."
A decision tree flowchart showing a guessing game between a bot and user. Starting with “Bot: I’m thinking of an object. Guess what it is,” the tree branches based on the user asking “Is it bigger than a car?” If yes, the bot responds “Yes, it’s bigger than a car” and if no, “No, it’s smaller than a car.” Each branch then has the user ask “Is it alive?” leading to four paths with bot responses of “Yes, it’s alive” or “No, it’s not alive.” When the user says “I give up” on each path, the bot reveals different objects: house/star (bigger, not alive), whale/rhino (bigger, alive), dog/snail (smaller, alive), or book/cup (smaller, not alive). Caption: Fig. 3 | LLMs are multiverse generators. The stochastic nature of autoregressive sampling means that, at each point in a conversation, multiple possibilities for continuation branch into the future. Here this is illustrated with a dialogue agent playing the game of 20 questions (Box 2). The dialogue agent doesn’t in fact commit to a specific object at the start of the game. Rather, we can think of it as maintaining a set of possible objects in superposition, a set that is refined as the game progresses. This is analogous to the distribution over multiple roles the dialogue agent maintains during an ongoing conversation.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
August 23, 2025 at 8:19 PM
joe.germuska.com
mustafa-suleyman.ai/seemingly-co...
August 22, 2025 at 1:04 AM
joe.germuska.com
The Guardian is not pussyfootin' around

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...
Israel has produced an unconvincing dossier of unverified evidence on Sharif’s purported Hamas links, and failed to address how he would have juggled a military command role with regular broadcast duties in one of the most heavily surveilled places on Earth. Israel did not attempt to justify killing his three colleagues.
August 15, 2025 at 10:33 PM
joe.germuska.com
Original post: social.freedom.press/@freedomofpr...
August 1, 2025 at 12:18 AM
joe.germuska.com
Original post: ecoevo.social/@sarahdalgul...
July 29, 2025 at 2:59 AM
joe.germuska.com
Original post: flipboard.com/@theatlantic...
July 27, 2025 at 2:18 PM
joe.germuska.com
“All this suggests that there is a chance for a deep reordering of the earth's power systems, in every sense of the word ‘power.’”

www.newyorker.com/news/annals-...
All this suggests that there is a chance for a deep reordering of the earth's power systems, in every sense of the word "power," offering a plausible check to not only the climate crisis but to autocracy. Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel-the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply. The sun and the wind are available everywhere, and they complement each other well; when sunlight diminishes in the northern latitudes at the approach of winter, the winds pick up. This energy is impossible to hoard and difficult to fight wars over. If you're interested in abundance, the sun beams tens of thousands of times more energy at the earth than we currently need. Paradigm shifts like this don't come along often: the Industrial Revolution, the computer revolution. But, when they do, they change the world in profound and unpredictable ways.
July 13, 2025 at 1:03 PM
joe.germuska.com
"The year is 1975. Brian Eno is up to his ankles in mud, being enthusiastically greeted by two large dogs. He has come to an isolated cottage in Wales to meet Stafford Beer for the second time. They talk for hours about algorithms, self-organising music and the future of democratic society, until Eno practically collapses from hunger. When Beer tells Eno that he wants to pass on the torch of cybernetics, the musician replies, “I’m very flattered that you think that, but I don't see how I can accept it without giving up the work that I do now — and I'd have to think very hard about that.” It might sound like a scene from a psychedelic movie, but this conversation actually happened. And although booze had clearly been consumed, Beer's offer appears to have been made seriously." (Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine)
June 21, 2025 at 10:03 PM
joe.germuska.com
I don't write music but this is really cool

Original post: toot.io/@andy_matusc...
Screenshot of a Mastodon post. Text: "This is an appreciation thread for EuterPen, a multimodal music notation system by @Vincent_Cavez et al. It aims to support the non-linear process of exploration during composition. It's the most sensitive and imaginative academic HCI design work I've seen in quite some time!"
June 20, 2025 at 1:52 AM
joe.germuska.com
"Stafford Beer used to say that the way in which computers were used in the 1970s was as if companies had recruited the greatest geniuses of humanity, before setting them to work memorising the phone book to save a few seconds turning pages." (Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine)
June 8, 2025 at 11:38 PM
joe.germuska.com
“The dream of Al research is still of the prospect of ‘getting out more than you put in’. In fact, ‘explainability’, for all that it's seen as an important ethical goal, is practically a contradiction in terms when applied to a system that you also want to see as intelligent.” Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine
June 8, 2025 at 10:37 PM
joe.germuska.com
For some reason, from time to time lately, I think about Madeleine L'Engle's "The Wind in the Door," and the nihilistic horde, the echthroi, that want to destroy everything for no reason. But I forgot that the verb for that action is actually X
🤔
Screenshot of a tweet from @MadeleineLengle 2023-07-25 "“Progo, what is it? What happened?” “The Echthroi have Xed.” “What?” “Annihilated. Negated. Extinguished. Xed.” A Wind in the Door"
May 31, 2025 at 6:22 PM
joe.germuska.com
more from stringinamaze.net/p/the-tyrann...
text: "In the 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush, one of the big issues was Social Security privatization. Bush wanted to (partially) privatize, Gore didn't. Political scientist Gabriel Lenz looked at survey data gathered from voters both early in the election cycle and then again right before the election. He found that initially, there was little correlation between voters' positions on Social Security privatization and their choice of candidate. By the time the election rolled around, however, the voters had seemingly sorted themselves: people who supported privatization tended to support Bush, and people who opposed it supported Gore. You might think this makes sense: people saw what the candidates stood for, and then aligned with the candidate who matched their position. But that's not what happened. The surveys showed that the voters' choice of candidates generally hadn't changed. Instead, they had changed their position on Social Security privatization to match their chosen candidate. Not only that, but almost no voters changed their preferred candidate based on the issue. The voters weren't switching candidates based on their policy positions, they were switching policy positions based on their candidate. There are countless studies reaching similar conclusions. "Party cues," as political scientists call them, are powerful things. It's been found that party cues have lasting effects, and in some cases can even overcome voters' own self-interest. Lenz wrote a book on the subject where he compiled and analyzed much of the existing research. He concluded that "instead of politicians following voters on policy, voters appear to follow politicians."
May 28, 2025 at 6:12 PM
joe.germuska.com
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/60-years-ago...
A pencil drawing of a power-mad Uncle Sam at a control desk that surrounds him with buttons and levers. Caption reads: “From the November 1967 cover of the Atlantic. Credit: Drawing by Edward Sorel.”
May 8, 2025 at 12:57 AM
joe.germuska.com
“Computers are mostly used against people instead of for people; used to control people instead of to free them. Time to change all that—we need a People’s Computer Company”

archive.org/details/1972...
Front cover of the first issue of the People’s Computer Company newsletter. Across the top, handwritten text: “Computers are mostly used against people instead of for people; used to control people instead of to free them. Time to change all that—we need a People’s Computer Company” Below the text is a drawing of a sailing ship sailing into the sunset. The text “People’s Computer Company” is in large 3D lettering extending from the horizon to the foreground.
May 4, 2025 at 2:07 PM