Joe Germuska

@joe

Chief Nerd @ Northwestern University Knight Lab • Project lead @ Census Reporter • Board Member @ City Bureau • Information Design • Digital Journalism • Civic Technology

2,465 Following3,446 Followers839 Posts

Website Bluesky

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Joe Germuska@joe· 1d

From June but new to me... bestfitmusic.substack.com/p/the-monday...

So, no: we are not living in a time where the algorithm has rotted creativity and culture has come to a standstill. We weren't in 2001, we weren't in 2010, and we're not now. Not even close. But we are suffering from a lack of tools within large sections of journalism and academia who still haven't learned the lessons of Napster, more than a quarter of a century later. Revolutions in who gets to be heard, how they reach their audiences, the way we curate, the very way we hear - and radical, brilliant albums, shows, festivals, online rabbit holes, experiences that couldn't exist were those revolutions not taking place
- have been happening right in front of our eyes. These are revolutions that affect orders of magnitude more people, and involve more music and lived experience, than punk or acid house ever did at their crux moments. They are what define the current moment, and yet they don't generate headlines or critical excitement... and THAT is a problem.

Joe Germuska@joe· 7d

"Thinking about care could also make us think about Al in new ways." humanistreview.ai/issue-1/gopn...

Thinking about care could also make us think about Al in new ways.
One of the deep dilemmas of artificial intelligence is the alignment problem. Suppose we did create an autonomous, exploratory robot, a kind of digient, that acted in the world to accomplish its goals? How could we make sure that it would want the same things we do?

The obvious idea is to train the computer to recognize human goals, and to make sure that they help humans to accomplish those goals.
But humans are often not very good at recognizing our own goals, and those goals are often contradictory. How could a computer figure out what we really want when we don't know ourselves?

Joe Germuska@joe· 7d

more from humanistreview.ai/issue-1/gopn...

If so much of what we know is the result of cultural transmission, doesn't something like a large model have all the intelligence we need?
Don't those billions of words encapsulate all human knowledge?
What's missing?

[begin highlighting] Cultural transmission has two sides-imitation and innovation. Each generation can use imitation to take advantage of the discoveries of previous ones, and large models are incredibly powerful imitation engines; they infer and reproduce the statistical patterns in texts and pictures. But there would be no point to imitation if each new generation didn't also innovate. [end highlighting] We go beyond the words of others and the wisdom of the past to observe a changing world and make new discoveries about it. We explore and experiment to discover new things about the world, we use imagination to conceive new models of the world and test whether they are true-and we combine both these abilities with cultural transmission.

Joe Germuska@joe· 10d

I'm trying the BlackSky app and for a second I thought you'd solved this! then realized I was actually on the "For You" feed and the same UX spot for my Smart Mix shows the "ot:" feed ID. Understandable if you assumed no one would ever see that!

Screenshot of the bottom part of a post in a feed, with typical controls like"reply" and "repost". At the bottom left corner in small type is a string of text: "ot:ded1ae12-6ab8-…."

Joe Germuska@joe· 10d

TIL among the popular lexicon that inspired college mascots like Ohio Buckeyes, Indiana Hoosiers and Wisconsin Badgers we had Illinois Suckers and Missouri Pukes h/t @barrypopik.bsky.social barrypopik.com/blog/puke_st... www.northernpublicradio.org/illinois/202... www.loc.gov/pictures/res...

Detail of a printed map of the US from the 19th century showing Midwestern states. Each state has a nickname and an illustration of an animal, almost all pigs.

The states shown, with their nicknames:
Minnesota gopher
Wisconsin badger
Michigan wolverine
Iowa hawkeye
Illinois sucker
Indiana hoosier
Ohio buckeye
Missouri puke
Kentucky corn cracker

Joe Germuska@joe· 23d

a classic example of the alt-weekly style in "Disaster rehearsal: Bartering for scars and faking death at O’Hare’s triennial airplane crash simulator." chicagoreader.com/city-life/di...

I was assigned the character of Tonya Lighthorse at the sign-in table. According to my lanyard, I was a 65-year-old woman with deep lesions on her right leg and a lower-than-average heart rate—satisfyingly dramatic, I thought, though others were disappointed by the mildness of their conditions. They haggled for more wounds from staff and volunteers. One woman pressed a small, intimidated teenager to trade assignments so that she could have her own head done up in blood. Later, in the staging area, the same woman asked the moulage artists if she could have propeller blades stuck into her head.

Joe Germuska@joe· 24d

Love you @semble.so but this design has got to go. This does not signal "click me to edit" especially the checkmark!

Joe Germuska@joe· 25d

Well, Bluesky did not come through but /r/chicagofood did! We set out today to run down some suggestions. Delightful Pastries and Montrose Deli did not have jagodzianki but Deli 4 You in Niles did! The real winner was the rose pączek from Montrose Deli (far left).

A pink plate with several pieces of pastry, including a half of a rose pączek, a piece of a pistachio stuffed croissant with some chocolate coating and a sprinkle of crushed pistachios; half of a "sweet pretzel", and half of a jagodzianka (polish blueberry bun)

Joe Germuska@joe· Jun 28

Meta always serving the best interests of its users apple.news/Ab-AsnenpSfe...

MOST OF THE PEOPLE I SPOKE WITH said they wouldn't bother subscribing to Instagram Plus. But a number of them said that they would feel differently if they'd
recently gone through a breakup. Both Tracy and Begg worried about the app preying on vulnerable people in exactly that situation, as well as those who struggle with attachment disorders, OCD, or sensitivity to rejection.
It's not good for anyone, Tracy said, to "know where people are, what they're doing, who they're with; it can create these obsessive tendencies where it's just a lot healthier to have some blank canvas in your mind." She predicted the features would "increase anxiety, stalking behaviors, and time on social media, which is obviously what the platforms are going for."

Joe Germuska@joe· Jun 19

Does there need to be a PR?

Screenshot from the Slingshot documentation reading:

Current status
A Slingshot is currently in a v.0, pre-release state. There is one production instance and you can use it!
Expect short downtimes for restarts as development progresses and lower cache hit-rates as the internal storage caches are adjusted and reset.

Joe Germuska@joe· Jun 13

Atmosphere curiosity: sifa.id counts over 60M accounts while Jaz's stats bsky.jazco.dev/stats say fewer than 45M. Why such a large difference? Is it possible that Jaz is only counting Bsky PDSes? Even if so, seems like a much larger number of independent accounts than I'd have guessed.

Do you already have a Bluesky or other Atmosphere account, like 61,807, 379 others?
New profiles every minute. Real people, real activity.

Bluesky Post Count and Author
Stats
Aggregate stats for all posts in Jaz's Bluesky index.
44,808,621 Users
3.701B Total Follows
2.886B Total Posts
15.940B Total Likes

Joe Germuska@joe· Jun 7

A Peanuts illustration: the kite-eating tree has its teeth need and a kite is dangling out of its mouth. Charlie Brown stands under the tree, one hand holding the kite string, a dismayed expression on his face. Nearby, Linus stands, holding his hand up to his face with a shocked expression.

Joe Germuska@joe· Jun 5

Check out this cool virtual workshop series from @citybureau.bsky.social "Documenting as Power: Media Literacy for Civic Life" www.citybureau.org/events/found...

Joe Germuska@joe· May 5

To say that spontaneous thought is "unproductive" isn't quite right; rather, whether it is or not depends on how you define productivity. Capitalism may have little patience for mind-wandering workers, yet spontaneous thought is surely one of the mothers of creativity.

Michael Pollan in A World Appears

Joe Germuska@joe· May 4

Cool soundsystem at the Land School for a screening of "Happy Today", a concert film of Jeff Parker's ETA IVtet

Joe Germuska@joe· May 2

Maybe the neighborhood coyote dropped by this afternoon because we have a "wildlife habitat" sign in the front yard?

A coyote sits in a suburban front yard, next to a young oak tree and with its head and shoulders visible from behind a yard sign. The sign reads "All we can do is take care of each other." In the background is a small set of wind chimes, the front door of the house, a small sign reading "wildlife habitat" and the edge of a US flag.

Joe Germuska@joe· May 1

Ebook screenshot from Michael Pollan's
A World Appears

I asked Levin if the Xenobots can reproduce.
"They've developed a mode of reproduction never before seen in evolution that I call kinematic replication," he told me. If some tadpole skin cells are sprinkled into the water, the older Xenobots will round them up and clump them together, forming
"offspring"—a new generation of Xenobots. And lest you think there is something special about tadpole skin cells that allows for this radical developmental flexibility, Levin's lab has made Xenobots from human tracheal cells as well. He calls them Anthrobots.

Joe Germuska@joe· May 1

Michael Pollan is blowing my mind with these xenobots (describing the work of Michael Levin)

Ebook screenshot:

He has demonstrated that by simply messing with the bioelectric field, he can overturn that division of labor to create all sorts of freak crea-tures: planaria with two heads and no tails, or two tails and no heads; tadpoles with eyes on the tips of their tails (which can see nonetheless!); and a creature never before seen in evolution that he calls a Xenobot.

The recipe for a Xenobot is simple: Scrape some cells from the skin of a tadpole, and put them in a solution with nutrients. Freed from their "boring day job as 2-D skin cells" (the role assigned to them by the frog's bioelectric field), the cells will clump together, forming a tiny round proto-organism; a new bioelec-tric field will then emerge, linking the cells and allowing them to cooperate.

Why do cells left to their own devices spontaneously get together? There is safety and predictability in numbers, Levin explained, as well as the added benefit of "collective intelligence," which arises when the boundary of self expands from the individual cell membrane to the collective's outermost edge. A multicellular creature can do all sorts of things that a unicellular one cannot. It can step up from the simple "metabolic space" in which cells operate to the three-dimensional space of animals, allowing it to form more ambitious goals. For example, tadpole skin cells have cilia to protect the animal from infection; the Xenobots "repurpose" the cilia to function as a mode of locomotion, allowing them to swim around and even navigate mazes.

Joe Germuska@joe· Apr 16

fo[puzz]mo Loop Set?

Screenshot from the Puzzmo "social news" feed with the text "S____ played Loop Set for the first time"

Joe Germuska@joe· Apr 8

In this week’s @sayswhopodcast.com @dansinker.com truly nails the voice of that particular type of BlueSky scold who jumps on posters for suggesting that democrats should visibly act as an opposition party. (Slightly truncated because of Overcast’s clip limit)

Joe Germuska@joe· Apr 6

lazyweb remind me to look for public traces of the upcoming Frictional Design in Hybrid Human-AI Systems conference sites.google.com/view/frictio...

"In its third edition, this workshop builds on and expands its exploration of friction-in-design in AI systems, hosting a full-day event that challenges the pursuit of seamless, rapid interactions. In contrast to the conventional narrative that human over-reliance on AI stems solely from cognitive biases, we emphasize the critical role of designers and developers in fostering user empowerment, skill retention, and ethical responsibility.

This approach advocates for a balanced perspective on Human-AI interaction: one that harmonizes operational efficiency with the demands of meaningful, mindful, and effective human knowledge work.

Central to our discussion is the concept of friction-in-design or frictional protocols in AI systems, which are deliberate design choices that introduce moments of reflection and cognitive engagement, even at the expense of speed. The main aim of these protocols is reducing risks of overreliance on AI."

Joe Germuska@joe· Apr 3

"So, what does sociology teach that so incenses fascists? For one thing, that we share a common humanity with others whose beliefs and ways of living are different. Most people, everywhere, struggle to get through life safely, in reasonable material comfort, while caring for those around them. They are fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, romantic partners, workers of all kinds. If their culture or social organization is different from ours, sociology teaches us to study these differences as adaptations to history and circumstance. Sociology makes human variation, built atop our species kinship, fascinating, not threatening." from "Why Fascists Hate Sociology" by Michael Schwalbe

https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2026/04/02/why-fascists-hate-sociology-opinion

Joe Germuska@joe· Apr 1

"Each panic uses identical rhetoric: addiction metaphors, moral corruption, passive victimhood, apocalyptic predictions. Each time, the research eventually shows complex effects mediated by content, context and individual differences. And, each time, when the disaster fails to materialise, attention simply shifts to the next technology."

From "Your inability to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time " by Carlo Iacono in Aeon

https://aeon.co/essays/what-we-think-is-a-decline-in-literacy-is-a-design-problem

Joe Germuska@joe· Mar 20

A classic Memorex dBS 90 cassette tape. The shell is transparent plastic, with yellow internal gears. There is a yellow bar across the top with the letter A at the left and checkboxes on the right to note if noise reduction was used when the recording was made. Blue and hot pink accents liven up the transparent casing.

Joe Germuska@joe· Mar 16

There's these weird little guys drawn by Nell Irvin Painter based on medieval transcriptions of Pliny the Elder but to the original topic of the thread, Painter's "The History of White People" is 90% colonial era and later

Photo of page 26 of "The History of White People". The caption reads "Figs. 2.1-4. Monstrous people: Cyclops, Dog-Head, Sciopod, drawn by Nell Painter from Thomas de Cantimpré; Panotii, drawn by Nell Painter, after the Cotton Tiberius MS of the British Library." The top-left image, Cyclops, is a tall, skinny humanoid figure holding its right hand over its groin. It has a single large eye in the center of its face and shaggy hair and beard. The top-right image, sciopod: a humanoid lying on its back. From the waist down, it has a single leg and large foot, aloft and casting a shadow over the torso. Bottom left: Dog-Head, a creature with human arms and legs on "all-fours", with a very furry torso and a sort of dog-shaped head. Bottom right: panotii, a humanoid figure with long tentacle-like features which I guess are supposed to be ears dangling and wrapping around its arms; if they were free-hanging, they would probably be as long as the figure.

Joe Germuska@joe· Mar 14

Except from Margaret Mitchell's ‘No, "Al" is not a Stochastic Parrot’ (linked in quoted post):
“…the relevant concepts in our human experience - thought, understanding - were all developed to describe other kinds of things. Applying them to a fundamentally different kind of system is both an entirely natural human impulse, and a serious obstacle to understanding what is actually going on. These terms do not illuminate Al systems so much as they project onto them.”

Joe Germuska@joe· Mar 13

Apt timeline pair from @patrickwyman.bsky.social and @kissane.myatproto.social

Screenshot of two BlueSky posts:

Patrick Wyman: Something I've been trying to do lately is formulate my principles and beliefs in positive rather than negative terms - "I believe X" rather than "I'm not like those fucking guys" - and it's been a useful and (I think) healthy little reorientation

Erin Kissane: A year or so into my experiment to swap contempt out for other approaches, I...think spending a lot of time being contemptuous is kind of a major cognitive vuln

Joe Germuska@joe· Mar 1

dunno how much this = that but: Shukongojin "Known also as the Thunderbolt Deity, this fierce protector of the Law of Buddhism brandishes a vajra that symbolizes the power of wisdom to penetrate ignorance and destroy evil." I always stop and pay my respects when I go to Art institute of Chicago

Photo of a bronze sculpture of Shukongojin, a muscular humanoid form with a fierce facial expression and a third eye in the middle of the forehead. It brandishes a short rod, the vajra, in one raised hand. The hair is flames standing upright.

Joe Germuska@joe· Feb 28

Starting my morning catching up on the overnight attacks.

Screenshot of a news aggregator app. The three headlines are:

Reuters: US-Israeli attack triggers fear and panic in Iran

ABC News: Iran live updates: Trump announces 'major combat operations,' could last for days

Business Insider: US forces are locked in air-defense battles, fending off attacks on American bases amid the fighting with Iran, official says

Above the headlines is an advertisement for We the People 250th Anniversary whiskey. There is no text, just a bottle shown next to a gift box. The bottle top is a tiny Liberty Bell.

At the bottom of the label is an image of the US Capitol. At either end of the wings is an array of revolutionary soldiers around a cannon with an American flag. On the either side of the Capitol dome is the text "E Pluribus Unum". (This full text is repeated on each side.)

At the bottom left off the images is a clip art American flag.

Joe Germuska@joe· Feb 15

www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...