Krishnan Viswanathan @matungawalla@transportation.social

Critical government communications can’t depend on walled gardens.

National Weather Service needs to join the #fediverse.

https://mashable.com/article/twitter-exemptions-nws-public-service-safety-weather-accounts

$44 billion to run the site like a 7th grader would.

Miami Herald pulls no punches taking on thin-skinned DeSantis' authoritarianism.

"The possibilities indeed are endless for Florida’s supreme governor, who will abuse the power of his office to practice the petty politics of revenge."

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/editorials/article274408115.html#storylink=cpy

My semi-spicy take is that computer science depends on analogy, metaphor, and subtext just as much as the humanities or the arts. But because so many people in tech are willfully oblivious to this, they're especially prone to the kinds of cognitive distortions that people in the humanities and the arts are trained to recognize and understand.

What makes a neural network "neural"? What assumptions does that analogy carry? What does that encourage us to see? What does that prevent us from seeing?

Globally restricting speech based on local legal demands (in this case, from India) is exactly as terrifying as @mmasnick makes it sound in this post. https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/11/free-speech-twitter-is-now-globally-blocking-posts-critical-of-the-modi-government/

This was EXCEEDINGLY rare in the Twitter 1.0 days — I can think of a vanishingly small number of examples, all of which involved extensive litigation and pushback to avoid having to comply.

A dark day for free speech indeed.

Before being judgemental, who among us hasn't received free luxury travel on private planes and yachts and gifts from right-wing billionaires hoping to influence national Supreme Court decisions?

Do Americans realise that gofundme is the starkest, bleakest, most horrifying anti-American propaganda anyone could ever imagine?

Asked for examples of sexual harassment at law schools, ChatGPT named a GW law prof accused of touching a student on a class trip to Alaska, citing a 2018 Washington Post story.

The law prof is real. The rest was made up.

We wrote about what happens when AIs lie about you: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/05/chatgpt-lies/

Happy #TrumpArraignment Day. May there be many more.

Drink responsibly. (Or not)

Glad to see more debate happening about the tradeoff between better transit service and bus electrification mandates. It really is a tradeoff, and not just in terms of dividing transit management’s attention. 1/
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RT @DavidZipper
Boston’s MBTA is bending over backwards to meet a self-imposed mandate that 30% of buses be electric by 2028.

For US transit, this is a dangerously misguided priority – for riders as well as for the enviro…
https://twitter.com/DavidZipper/status/1643261155106799616

In 2019, trains in the US traveled 777 million train-kilometers and experienced 1,338 derailments.

The same year trains in the EU traveled 4.5 billion train-kilometers and experienced 73 derailments.

Japan: 2 billion train-kilometers and 9 derailments.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/30/us/raymond-minnesota-train-derailment/index.html

my wife's company is trying to convince people to return to the office because one of their executives thinks its embarrassing when clients come by and the offices are empty, anyways, theatre students always need some pocket money and if someone wants to join my exciting new "potemkin village as a service" startup

IPCC lead author at live presser: It's a given that we'll top 1.5 C early next decade. The question is whether the brakes are applied or we blast through to much higher temperatures. Streaming:
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RT @RBratspies
"risks are increasing with every increment of warming" #ClimateChange #IPCC2023 #ClimateEmergency Thank you @revkin for covering this on #SustainWhat https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=notif&v=232006092630282&notif_id=1…
https://twitter.com/RBratspies/status/1637805451449360384

The same people who cry “politicization” over charges around a porn star hush money cover-up designed to swing a national election brought perjury and obstruction articles against another president for lying about a blowjob.

Spare me the sanctimony and hypocrisy.