Al Shaw
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shaw.al
Al Shaw
@shaw.al
16K followers 690 following 230 posts
developer / reporter / map maker at ProPublica • dm me on signal: ashaw.01 • also at: @a_l@mastodon.social • he/him

🔗 https://shaw.al
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shaw.al
October 3, 2025 at 10:27 PM
shaw.al
Miss her so much
photoshop 7 loading screen with the eye over a lens ring
September 20, 2025 at 12:46 PM
shaw.al
We're really in the sawdust-and-lead-in-food era of regulation with this stuff aren't we
404 Media headline: "Guy Gives Himself 19th Century Psychiatric Illness After Consulting With ChatGPT" NYT headline: "Over 21 days of talking with ChatGPT, an otherwise perfectly sane man became convinced that he was a real-life superhero. We analyzed the conversation."
August 8, 2025 at 4:53 PM
shaw.al
Now even the software is doing the zoomer space before the exclamation point. Does anyone else hear sentences with these in a very specific tone in their minds?
Command line output in a terminal that says, "Done in 155.54 ms !"
August 7, 2025 at 8:22 PM
shaw.al
Just don’t suspend your disbelief and it’ll be fine!
Futurism headline: A Prominent OpenAl Investor Appears to Be Suffering a ChatGPT-Related Mental Health Crisis, His Peers Say "I find it kind of disturbing even to watch it." NYT headline: What Would a Real Friendship With A.I. Look Like? Maybe Like Hers. Chatbots can get scary if you suspend your disbelief. But MJ Cocking didn't — and wound up in a relationship that was strangely, helpfully real.
July 20, 2025 at 3:51 PM
shaw.al
Zoom and enhance...... is that olive oil in the bottle cage?
Zoomed in section of the photo showing a corked bottle in the bike's water bottle cage marked "olive"
July 7, 2025 at 4:09 PM
shaw.al
“Now add the eggs.” @feldsky.bsky.social snapped this one a couple weeks ago cc: @joshuajfriedman.com
July 7, 2025 at 1:01 PM
shaw.al
Edited Onion headline reading, "Why do all these [Politicians] Keep [Opening My Wallet]?"
June 27, 2025 at 5:45 PM
shaw.al
This is one of the most horrifying things I've ever read.

"Our form of communication is gunfire."

www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...
Screenshotted excerpt from Ha'aretz story: "It's a killing field," one soldier said. "Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They're treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire." The soldier added, "We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there's no danger to the forces." According to him, "I'm not aware of a single instance of return fire. There's no enemy, no weapons." He also said the activity in his area of service is referred to as Operation Salted Fish – the name of the Israeli version of the children's game "Red light, green light".
June 27, 2025 at 1:39 PM
shaw.al
I love the Wayne's World-meets-CNN energy of the Hell Gate live stream

hellgatenyc.com/primary-live...
June 25, 2025 at 1:02 AM
shaw.al
Rank the candidates in the order you like them, fill up all 5 slots and don’t rank anyone you can’t stand. There’s no other “strategy” to it.
Sticker saying, “I voted early in the city of New York.”
June 16, 2025 at 1:19 PM
shaw.al
So far, we've collected 22 DOGE financial disclosures. There's some interesting not-yet-reported stuff in the filings, like the fact that Nikhil Rajpal still held a position at X dot com as of filing.

Dig through them yourself here: www.documentcloud.org/projects/220...
Line from Nikhil Rajpal disclosure showing continued employment at X Corp.
June 10, 2025 at 8:18 PM
shaw.al
> “603,000 El Paso residents, about 90 percent of the city’s population, are exposed to a cancer risk above 1 in 1 million just from Cardinal Health’s two warehouses.” Great work from @naveenasadasivam.bsky.social and Lylla Younes

grist.org/health/ethyl...
April 19, 2025 at 3:17 PM
shaw.al
Our DOGE tracker is updated with a whole slew of new names, and now you can filter by agency to see which of the DOGErs have been where. Great work by @williamturton.bsky.social, @chrisbing.bsky.social, @kirstenberg.bsky.social and others!

projects.propublica.org/elon-musk-do...
Screenshot of ProPublica DOGE tracker with agency filter dropdown menu.
April 17, 2025 at 6:02 PM
shaw.al
DOGE said last week there are potentially ~58,000 documents responsive to @crew.bsky.social's FOIAs, but that they're sticking with the argument that USDS isn't an agency subject to FOIA and won't release them:

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
NOTICE AS TO DEFENDANT USDS CONCERNING ESTIMATE OF VOLUME OF RESPONSIVE RECORDS Pursuant to the Court’s Orders dated March 10, 2025 and March 19, 2025, Defendant United States DOGE Service (USDS) provides this estimate of the volume of records responsive to the Freedom of Information Act Request directed to it, as narrowed in Attachment A to Plaintiff’s reply brief in support of their motion for a preliminary injunction. USDS cautions that this estimate is preliminary, and that USDS has not yet been able to conduct a review for responsiveness, and deduplication; and USDS maintains its position that no records are subject to release under FOIA because USDS is not an agency subject to FOIA. With those caveats, USDS provides the following preliminary volume estimate: approximately 58,000 documents.
April 2, 2025 at 4:47 PM
shaw.al
Yet another thing that mirrors what happened at Twitter HQ post-Musk, according to @kateconger.com and @rmac.bsky.social's CHARACTER LIMIT:
Book excerpt 1: "As trash cans went unemptied, carpets unvacuumed, and bathrooms uncleaned, workers gritted their teeth. The restrooms became a particular problem, as Musk's piling of people onto fewer floors caused the toilets to..." book excerpt 2: "constantly be in use. In New York, the stench of the bathrooms overwhelmed some parts of the office, while some employees complained about cockroaches flitting in and out of drains. In San Francisco, some employees got used to avoiding the bathrooms by running to nearby coffee shops or restaurants, while others had to bring their own toilet paper from home. In one bathroom, someone rigged a metal coat hanger to a stall handlebar to use as a makeshift spool for a toilet roll, a luxurious gift for their colleagues."
March 13, 2025 at 2:07 PM
shaw.al
Some eye-popping allegations in this USADF complaint about what happened when DOGE came through
Excerpt from complaint: The U.S. DOGE Service representatives asked for contact information for each of the members of the Board. UADE management responded that this contact information was personal and that therefore she would first need to obtain permission from the Board members to share it. The U.S. DOGE Service representatives then left the meeting and never followed up to request contact information for the Board. 44. On Saturday, February 22, 2025, U.S. DOGE Service representatives did reach one member of the Board, John Agwunobi. They stated to Agwunobi, incorrectly, that all the other members of the Board had been terminated, and asked Agwunobi to implement the U.S. DOGE Service's vision of the minimum statutory functions of USADF.
March 7, 2025 at 8:14 PM
shaw.al
Everything going fine at the OPM FOIA office. It may be Just Another Tuesday, but it's also #foiafriday.
OPM website says, "Therefore, to the extent feasible, FOIA requests for agency records should be submitted by email to FOIA@opm.gov during this period to ensure a more timely response." When you email in a FOIA to OPM, you get a response saying, "Thank you for contacting OPM’s FOIA Requester Service Center. To better manage current resource limitations, record requests submitted via email are no longer accepted. Instead, all FOIA requests to OPM may now be submitted online via OPM’s Public Access Link or the National FOIA Portal."
March 4, 2025 at 4:46 PM
shaw.al
"EPA’s [EJScreen], which functions similarly to the CEJST, was still available as of this writing, though who knows how long that will last."

Trump's 1/21 EO revoking the Clinton-era EJ EO seems directly targeted at taking down EJScreen and data supporting it.
Text from Trump Executive Order: Sec. 3. Terminating Illegal Discrimination in the Federal Government. (a) The following executive actions are hereby revoked: (i) Executive Order 12898 of February 11, 1994 (Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations);
January 31, 2025 at 5:20 PM
shaw.al
Hope this helps
Screenshot of Zeit Online headline: "Ein Hitlergruß ist ein Hitlergruß ist ein Hitlergruß."
January 21, 2025 at 2:37 PM
shaw.al
Feature suggestion for NYTCooking (get outta here with that instacart bs!)
Edited NYTCooking screenshot with button that says, "Shop ingredients at the Park Slope Food Coop." Under that, text says, "Your first shop still requires you to do a shift." Under that, in smaller gray text, it says, "Just use the intercom if you can't find something."
January 19, 2025 at 8:24 PM
shaw.al
TIL!
Pop up message from a shopping website saying: PFAS Restricted Item: Cannot Ship to NY or CA Starting 1/1/2025, New York and California prohibit the sale of new products that are not PFAS-compliant.
December 31, 2024 at 6:14 PM
shaw.al
Our lookup tool shows you how high the cancer risk from formaldehyde is on your block, where it comes from and how your block compares to the rest of the country.
Chart showing distribution of census blocks by formaldehyde cancer risk with a large cluster around the 1 in 100k mark and a single highlighted block in blue near the center of the distribution.
December 3, 2024 at 1:19 PM
shaw.al
Tony Judt in 2003. Feels like it could have been written yesterday.
The time has come to think the unthinkable. The two-state solution- the core of the Oslo process and the present "road map"- is probably already doomed. With every passing year we are postponing an inevitable, harder choice that only the far right and far left have so far acknowledged, each for its own reasons. The true alternative facing the Middle East in coming years will be between an ethnically cleansed Greater Israel and a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians. That is indeed how the hard-liners in Sharon's cabinet see the choice; and that is why they anticipate the removal of the Arabs as the ineluctable condition for the survival of a Jewish state.
November 23, 2024 at 11:11 PM
shaw.al
Thoughts on the new PA wayfinding style? I kinda miss the old Frutiger on yellow signs but these have a very classic Vignelli MTA feel.
Port Authority airport sign in Helvetica on black with yellow backgrounds for arrows and flight icons
November 22, 2024 at 5:09 PM