Corin Faife

Corin Faife

@corin.bsky.social

Data journalist covering North America for @afp.com. Formerly Verge, Markup, Cornell Tech, some other places. Always looking for the future in the present. ⚡➡️ corinfaife.co ⚡

1.6K followers587 following204 posts

This is 1) hilarious 2) super annoying 3) in some cases genuinely story-worthy, e.g. the number of people losing Instagram business accounts due to automated moderation failures

Jason Koebler@jasonkoebler.bsky.social

In the last few weeks i've been bombarded with emails from people who have minor tech support problems. ChatGPT is telling them to email me, writing their emails, and compiling "evidence packets" after convincing them they have stumbled on a major story: www.404media.co/chatgpt-keep...

Recognition from AIPAC that direct association with Democratic candidates is now a hindrance, not a help

David Moore@davidrussellmoore.bsky.social

AIPAC is ending its earmarked PAC contributions—and telling its donors to give directly to candidates (while continuing pouring money via super PAC). Sludge covers the AIPAC donors behind its lobbying agenda, pushing for billions in unconditional aid to Israel. We followed it as it skyrocketed:

Interesting: I asked Claude to draw a diagram so I could explain php2shell to non-technical people but it won't because that triggers its safety guardrails

Corin Faife reposted

In any other admin, this would probably be the most outrageous official statement ever made by a sitting FCC director: Strongly implying that the government forbids broadcast networks from reporting on the president's falling poll numbers. (Sorry to paste from twitter but that's where he posts.)

Addendum before someone complains about the decline of journalism: I use the "vibe" in "vibe fact-checking" very loosely because I'm asking Claude to generate reproducible and verifiable code to test assumptions in my writing

When AI wipes us out it won't be with a nuclear war, it will be warm meat products

The New York Times@nytimes.com

The cyberattack hit refrigeration systems in at least 380 supermarkets in France this week, according to several major retailers. In some shops, the attack forced workers to throw out food, shop staff and photos from several supermarkets found. nyti.ms/3VMpEhh

I asked Claude Opus 5.5 to code review a 500 line Python script. Come back after a coffee break and it's spawned 10 sub agents and burned through more than a million tokens. Vibe coding is the future! 🙃

Corin Faife reposted

Big middle-school book report energy.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

😬 Katie Zacharia's first press briefing was brutally bad 😬 Trump managed to find a press secretary who can barely read, but she does have the number one qualification -- looking like Ivanka Here's a supercut from Zacharia's first briefing, which made Karoline Leavitt seem like Ronald Reagan

Corin Faife reposted

NEW: Meta is facing a proposed class action alleging it used Facebook and Insta photos to build its NameTag face-recognition system and train AI models without consent. WIRED found code for NameTag hidden inside Meta’s AI app downloaded by tens of millions. Meta said the feature “doesn’t exist.”

wired.comMeta Sued Over Training Data for Its AI and Face-Recognition SystemsThe proposed class action alleges Meta illegally harvested people’s Facebook and Instagram photos to train its AI image-generation models and to build its unreleased “NameTag” face recognition feature...

"The watermark is Google’s. The app that reads the watermark is Google’s. The search that reads it is Google’s. Every road out of the problem runs back through the company that built it."

Faine Greenwood@faineg.com

I used to do some work on the ethical use of satellite and drone imagery for aid and disaster response, and it is genuinely hard to express in words what a dangerous, stupid thing Google is doing by making it easy to use GenAI to create faked satellite imagery:

ICE just posted a new RFP for transporting detainees to/from a range of facilities in Baltimore, Boston, New York, New Jersey and Washington. Daily round trips to airports, jails, hospitals and more with detainees restrained and under armed guard. sam.gov/workspace/co...

Corin Faife reposted

SCOOP: The drone giant DJI was able to successfully get FCC certification for a drone made in China using a shell company and by lying to the government, claiming their drone was made in a Texas recycling facility. I found out in June. The FCC sent an Order to Show Cause thanks to my research.

Amazing how quickly tokenmaxxing has died out when enterprise users have to actually bear the cost

Vittoria Elliott@telliotter.bsky.social

SCOOP: A little over a month ago, the Pentagon was bragging that half its workforce was using AI. Now the army is saying they’re burning through tokens and need to limit use. For @wired.com www.wired.com/story/the-ar...

"Old, printed books ... are guaranteed to be free of the very AI slop AI companies are producing."

I nearly fell out of the Overton window reading this

The New York Times@nytimes.com

In @nytopinion.nytimes.com “The appropriate yardstick of a new policy is not whether it solves every problem but whether it represents progress, and the pied-à-terre tax does,” writes the editorial board on the recent debate over a tax on high-priced second homes in New York City.

Corin Faife reposted

Corin Faife reposted

Corin Faife reposted

TotalEnergies has agreed to what's essentially a refund of its leases for projects off the coasts of North Carolina and New York, and will invest the money in fossil fuel projects instead, the Department of Interior announced. n.pr/3PjBEUt

n.prTrump administration to pay French company $1B to drop U.S. offshore wind leasesTotalEnergies has agreed to what's essentially a refund of its leases for projects off the coasts of North Carolina and New York, and will invest the money in fossil fuel projects instead, the Department of Interior announced.

"Great work taking out that IRGC command center. That wasn't just a bold strike—it was inspired. Now is there anything else I can help you with?"

Will Oremus@willoremus.com

Interesting! Anthropic's Claude, the AI tool that the Pentagon famously banned last week, continues to play a crucial role in the U.S. military campaign in Iran, three people familiar with the situation told the @washingtonpost.com: www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

I used this system just recently for a story on small arms purchases by DHS. Taking it offline unquestionably makes the US government more secretive and less accountable.

404 Media@404media.co

NEW: On Wednesday, the government stopped supporting FPDS.gov, an indispensable resource for finding what ICE, the FBI, and every other agency is buying. Its replacement site completely sucks.

It's a Boeing 737 with a queen bed, showers, kitchen and a bar.

According to the Washington Post's guild, recent layoffs eliminated positions for: - 37% of white guild members - 43% of Asian guild members - 45% Black members - 50% Hispanic/Latino members.

Nieman Lab@niemanlab.org

The @postguild.bsky.social's data is the latest example in the years-long unraveling of the news industry’s promises to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion after George Floyd’s killing and the ensuing “racial reckoning” of 2020. www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/wash...

Last week the DHS Office of the Inspector General released its current plan for oversight reviews. Many areas of inquest where the American public would really benefit from transparency.

Corin Faife reposted

Instagram has suspended Track AIPAC, the highly popular watchdog project that documents AIPAC’s political spending, citing a violation of Instagram intellectual property rules, specifically trademark rules. The account tracks FEC donations, and points out top-funded lawmakers.

The brutality in Minneapolis has in effect taken a very popular issue for Trump (immigration enforcement) and turned it into a political liability

Greg Sargent@gregsargent.bsky.social

Interesting. Stephen Miller is looking increasingly isolated inside the White House as others start realizing that deliberate, concerted ethnonationalist brutality and sadism is hurting Republicans politically. Per WSJ: