Rene Beekman
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renebeekman.bsky.social
Rene Beekman
@renebeekman.bsky.social
65 followers 390 following 5 posts
Artist, gallerist, product manager, former teacher, perpetual student
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Reposted by Rene Beekman
lindsaybussau.bsky.social
“Constant lying is not about making people believe a lie, but about ensuring that no one believes anything. A people who no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between good and evil: a people deprived of the power to think,”
Hannah Arendt.

Are we there yet?
November 25, 2025 at 2:06 AM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
wbm312.bsky.social
It's my favorite day! It's the 38th anniversary of the Max Headroom signal broadcast intrusion!

1st incident lasted 25s during the 9PM news on WGN-TV in Chicago; The 2nd, 2hrs later, lasted ~90s on PBS affiliate WTTW during Dr. Who.

You can watch it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqge...
Max Headroom 1987 Broadcast Signal Intrusion Incident
YouTube video by andrew867
www.youtube.com
November 22, 2025 at 6:37 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
us.theconversation.com
Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other.

Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq
November 21, 2025 at 11:48 AM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
bcmerchant.bsky.social
So these two trends—AI as smokescreen for management's ulterior motives/misplaced belief in its hype, and AI as an automation system for producing cheap knockoff art and writing (at the expense of artists and writers)—are what I think are the biggest impacts of AI on jobs so far.

More in the piece:
What’s really going on with AI and jobs?
Record-breaking layoff reports, Amazon's mass firings, and a slump in entry level employment. Is AI behind it all?
www.bloodinthemachine.com
November 13, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
hagenblix.bsky.social
I do, of course, have a paragraph from "Why We Fear AI" for this
An LLM is an abstraction over the status quo (or rather, the text of the status quo) that has, at its core, no other aim than producing more text that is just like the text already in existence. One result is that the dominant ideas, the dominant textual patterns of our time, are recast as “intelligence” per se. We might call the complex mass of concepts and ideas, the channels into which ideas flow often and easily, or the boundaries of what is reasonable to debate in so-called “polite society”—the dominant ideology of an age. An age’s dominant ideology tends to presuppose that the power of that age is natural; the hallmark of ideology, in this sense, is that it is easy to recognize only when it’s past its time. We may no longer think that an almighty god appointed a king to rule us, that women are naturally unfit to vote, or that sex outside of a heterosexual marriage is immoral. But at various times, to think otherwise (to think of replacing the monarchy with a republic, to affirm that women are people, or being in favor of sexual or gay liberation) was the far more difficult, even dangerous thought—if not to have, then at the very least to put in writing. Ideology, of course, is never complete, other thoughts are always possible. But ideology is easy to think, it’s what our thoughts are already marinated in. And hence, ideology will be dominant in the textual patterns of an age. Seen in this light, what is called “intelligence” in a language model, is really that—ideology as a thing that can pretend to be a person.
November 11, 2025 at 8:36 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
randomfactor.bsky.social
"6-7"?! Boy I say boy you gen alpha kids cant be doin' that! Your signifiers need signs boy! You've laid a rhetorical claim to an empty space son! You're creatin' a nihilistic dialectic! Your broccoli hairs obfuscatin' some much needed communication! Find some MEANIN', kid!
November 8, 2025 at 6:22 PM
renebeekman.bsky.social
It's rude to show AI output to people | Alex Martsinovich
Feeding slop is an act of war
distantprovince.by
November 2, 2025 at 10:26 AM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
slugnoodle.com
For anyone interested in Projeckt B00KM4RK: THE ROAMING LIBRARY and building their own, instructions and files can be found here:

github.com/TheSlugNoodl...
GitHub - TheSlugNoodle/ProjectBookmark
Contribute to TheSlugNoodle/ProjectBookmark development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
July 30, 2025 at 6:24 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
dosnostalgic.bsky.social
I'm definitely a Prompt Engineer.
January 14, 2025 at 11:51 PM
renebeekman.bsky.social
Gentle reminder…
The Day My Smart Vacuum Turned Against Me
Would you allow a stranger to drive a camera-equipped computer around your living room? You might have already done so without even realizing it. The Beginning: A Curious Experiment It all started ...
codetiger.github.io
October 26, 2025 at 3:14 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
info-activism.bsky.social
We face a climate+info crisis. What to do? Get “The RePlaybook: A Field Guide to the Climate & Information Crisis” by Tactical Tech. In this guide, 30+ experts share strategies to decode disinfo, challenge tech & counter division in climate info. Download: tacticaltech.org/replaybook/
October 20, 2025 at 8:04 AM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
anildash.com
Okay, for the folks who asked: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful view on AI that the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. anildash.com/2025/10/17/t... Please share!
The Majority AI View - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
anildash.com
October 17, 2025 at 7:29 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
olivia.science
really nice piece on this btw from @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social sonjadrimmer.com/blog-1/2025/...
"The Printing Press Democratized Knowledge": When Slogans Masquerade as History — Sonja Drimmer
The phrase is said so frequently it seems, like the mechanism it celebrates, to mechanically replicate itself.  It's become a favorite catchphrase among tech boosters of any sort (see my post on...
sonjadrimmer.com
October 10, 2025 at 1:19 PM
renebeekman.bsky.social
The comments to this make a great readinglist
loriemerson.net Lori Emerson @loriemerson.net · Oct 8
if you were to teach a class on the pre/history of AI in terms of key concepts ideas, what would they be? the mind/body problem? abstraction vs materialism? history of the database? automation?
October 8, 2025 at 11:26 AM
renebeekman.bsky.social
Meredith Whittaker’s brilliant takedown on how agentic AI is ultimately a backdoor.
How Signal’s Meredith Whittaker Remembers SignalGate: ‘No Fucking Way’
The Signal Foundation president recalls where she was when she heard Trump cabinet officials had added a journalist to a highly sensitive group chat.
www.wired.com
September 26, 2025 at 10:14 AM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
gilduran.com
1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it).

But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that
photo of paulina borsook
September 24, 2025 at 6:36 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
carlbergstrom.com
For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper
Joseph Fasano

Now I let it fall back
in the grasses.
I hear you. I know
this life is hard now...
For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper
Now I let it fall back in the grasses. I hear you. I know this life is hard now. I know your days are precious on this earth. But what are you trying to be free of? The living? The miraculous task of ...
poets.org
September 22, 2025 at 6:39 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
mikeyearworth.bsky.social
"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits."

www.computerworld.com/article/4059...
OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws
In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limi...
www.computerworld.com
September 21, 2025 at 12:50 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
olivia.science
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues. Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe. Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
September 6, 2025 at 8:13 AM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
baybayfriend.bsky.social
the dailup sound was a protection spell the computer said for us every time we went online but we thought we were too good for it. we wanted to be on the phone and the computer at the same time. we wanted to be on the phone and the computer at the same time and now we’re fucked
September 4, 2025 at 9:44 AM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
heirakka.bsky.social
ARTISTS! if you have an old drawing tablet that doesn't have any drivers available anymore or is just unsupported now, i HIGHLY recommend checking out opentabletdriver.net

my old wacom bamboo is now unsupported and you can't even get old drivers anymore, works perfectly (even in windows 11).
April 1, 2025 at 4:48 PM
renebeekman.bsky.social
This
August 4, 2025 at 4:47 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
alienmelon.bsky.social
i just published...
"Why making art matters: We no longer have a type of industry where we can chase financial success. We can only sustainably fail."
www.nathalielawhead.com/candybox/mak...
about sustainable alternatives to existing in the game industry, and the positive impact of failure.
#GameDev
Why making art matters: We no longer have a type of industry where we can chase financial success. We can only sustainably fail. – The Candybox Blog
www.nathalielawhead.com
March 28, 2025 at 12:14 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
flushes.app
have you flushed today?
im.flushing
The world's first decentralized social media app for sharing the most universal human experience. Post your flushes and connect with other bathroom enjoyers.
flushing.im
March 8, 2025 at 7:22 PM
Reposted by Rene Beekman
elsenor.bsky.social
Watch the #sxsw keynote on personal online security and tell me you are not a fan of @meredithmeredith.bsky.social – I won't believe you.

www.youtube.com/live/AyH7zoP...
The State of Personal Online Security and Confidentiality | SXSW LIVE
YouTube video by SXSW
www.youtube.com
March 7, 2025 at 8:40 PM