Damus
Clive Thompson profile picture
Clive Thompson
@Clive Thompson

Writer, musician/songwriter, hobbyist coder. Contributing writer to New York Times Magazine and Wired. Author of "Coders". Blogging at clivethompson.medium.com, archive of writing at www.authory.com/clivethompson -- email: [email protected]; Signal: @clivethompson.98 -- #science #technology #coding #software #writing #literature #poetry [email protected]

Relays (1)
  • wss://relay.ditto.pub – read & write

Recent Notes

Clive Thompson profile picture
Researchers have found that it seems very easy to poison the output of "deep research" AI tools ...

... by poisoning the inputs: Go to Reddit, Wikipedia, Medium (or other "user-generated sites" and write a couple of short lines promoting your product or your idea ...

... and deep-research AI is liable to pick it up and start parroting it

Excellent story on this by @nprofile1q... https://www.404media.co/it-is-trivially-easy-to-use-reddit-to-manipulate-ai-search-research-suggests/

unpaywalled just in case: https://archive.is/OqOXX

1/4

Clive Thompson profile picture
back in the beforetimes when I was on Twitter, for years I ran a poetry bot

it'd take a huge corpus of lines I'd written -- *very* loosely in emulation of Basho and several lyric poets of antiquity -- and pick three at random, publishing four times a day

after I left Twitter in 2022, I turned it off

but now I just relaunched the bot ...

... on mastodon!

le voila: @nprofile1q...

Clive Thompson profile picture
The Trump administration is dismantling the country’s network of probes that help monitor conditions in the ocean …

… which, among other things, are critical to understanding how the ocean is absorbing CO2

Gift link https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/01/climate/ocean-observatories-initiative.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nFA.yCRy.FdvoFFZs78ki&smid=nytcore-ios-share

The shuttering — and shrinking — of major scientific projects is going to cause years/decades of damage to American science