kirsten houseknecht aka fabricdragon

the current plague understandably takes up a lot of attention... but let me remind you that Measles is insanely dangerous. not only is it VERY contagious, but it often erases your immune system's "memory" apparently this is not widely known among 'civilians' and parents (Thread)

With everything we are hearing right now about ticks this seems like good information to share. “Here’s what I’ve learned after more ticks than I care to count. First, whatever your uncle told you, forget it. No matches. No nail polish. No Vaseline. No soap on a cotton ball. All of those do the same terrible thing, they stress the tick out, and a stressed tick empties its gut back into the bite before letting go. Which, if you think about what that actually means for a second, is literally how Lyme and the rest get transmitted so you’re not speeding up its exit. You’re making it throw up into you. Fine-tipped tweezers. Grip right where the mouthparts enter the skin, not the body, the head. Pull straight up, steady, no twisting, no jerking. It’ll feel like it’s resisting because it is, the mouthparts are barbed. Just keep the pressure on and it lets go in a few seconds. If a piece breaks off in the skin, leave it alone. Your body pushes splinters out. Digging around with a needle does more damage then the fragment ever would. Clean it with alcohol or soap. Wash your hands. Now here’s the part most people skip: don’t flush the tick. Tape it to an index card. Clear packing tape right over the body, write the date and where on your body it was, and stick the card in a drawer. If you come down with anything weird in the next 30 days, rash, fever, joint pain, that flu-that-isn’t-flu feeling, that tick goes with you to the doctor. Some labs will test the tick itself, which is faster and often more reliable than waiting for antibodies to show up in your own blood. A dated tick taped to a card is one of the most useful things you can hand a doctor who’s trying to figure out what’s wrong with you. The other thing worth saying out loud: if the tick was engorged when you pulled it, and you can’t swear it was off your body within 24 hours, call your doctor that same day. Don’t wait for a rash. Fewer than three out of four Lyme cases even produce the classic bullseye. A single preventive dose of doxycycline within 72 hours of a deer tick bite cuts the Lyme odds way down, and most docs in tick country will write that prescription without giving you a hard time, especially if you walk in with the tick taped to a card and a clear timeline.”

WHY is the US Government giving access to someone with 3 citizenships (going on 4) who has moved out of the country?

CEOs are quietly realizing the AI replacement plan has a problem. Two problems, actually. One: the token costs for running AI agents are now exceeding what they were paying the employees they fired. Two: when the tokens run out, the AI stops. Just stops. No continuity. No workaround. Just a spinning wheel where your workforce used to be. You fired humans to save money and bought a subscription that bills you into a corner. The employees you let go knew what to do when things broke. The AI just invoices you for the outage. And then there’s the permission problem nobody wants to talk about. To do its job, the AI agent needs access. Full access. Your systems, your patents, your contracts, your future plans. Everything you spent years building, handed over to a process that has no loyalty, no discretion, and no skin in the game. You didn’t hire a replacement. You gave a stranger with no soul the keys to everything you own. Enjoy.

NEW: Trump’s DOJ is seeking the names, addresses, and banking information of Reddit and X users who criticized the administration’s deportation policies, per Bloomberg. The subpoenas came from the US Attorney’s Office in Washington, led by Trump ally Jeanine Pirro. The users still haven’t been told what crimes they supposedly committed, and their lawyers say it looks more like an effort to scare and silence critics than a real investigation.

DOJ launches criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, sources say youtu.be/oQ_bcfJBxwQ?si… via @YouTube Trump launches attack on Iran (again) and orders his minions to harass one of the women he assaulted.

Walmart's outlook just told you what the Fed won't. youtube.com/shorts/GQW9D24… via @YouTube

Starbucks struggles to quell outrage over ‘Tank Day’ campaign that evoked massacre in South Korea nbcnews.com/world/asia/sta… via @nbcnews

@fabricdragon @YouTube LA skyline turning dark in the middle of the day this South Gate fire is terrifying.Hoping everyone evacuates safely and firefighters get this under control fast. x.com/i/status/20587…

Southern California chemical tank at risk of exploding as 50,000 residen... youtu.be/RatElEPWYS8?si… via @YouTube

Over a million acres of pristine wilderness lakes in Minnesota. The most visited canoe country in America. Generations of families have paddled it, fished it, camped it. The Senate just sold it out outright. They called it "America First." Then handed it to a Chilean billionaire — so his company can ship the copper to China. The Senate voted 50-49 to gut 20 years of Boundary Waters mining protections. Here's the deal they made. A Chilean billionaire's company digs the mine. America can't smelt the copper — we don't have the capacity. So the ore ships to China. China processes it. Sells it on the world market. Chile keeps the profits. Minnesotans don't even get the jobs. Minnesota keeps the pollution. And Americans get to buy it back from China at full market price. This same company has a documented history at their Chilean mines: pipeline spills, regulatory fines, and locals fighting back for years. They paid a former Trump Interior Secretary $380K. The protection died by one vote. Here's exactly how it happened — and who made it happen. Who do YOU think this mine actually serves? #DemsUnited

Richard Feynman is Now A.I. Slop youtu.be/A2_8199CL1I?si… via @YouTube there are HUNDREDS of fake/AI videos of famous scientists...

ChatGPT diagnosed 40 million people with a disease that was invented as a joke. Not a real disease. Not a misunderstood disease. A completely fictional condition with a fake name, fake papers, and fake statistics. And it told patients to see a specialist. The disease is called Bixonimania. A Swedish researcher at the University of Gothenburg invented it in 2024 to answer one question: what happens when you plant obviously fake medical information on the internet and watch AI absorb it? She deliberately chose the name bixonimania because it sounded ridiculous — bixon is a nonsense word, and mania is a psychiatric term that no legitimate eye condition would ever use. She uploaded two papers to a preprint server. Both were obviously fraudulent. AI-generated images of patients with dark circles gave the fake research a veneer of plausibility. Then she waited. She did not have to wait long. By April 13, 2024, Microsoft Bing's Copilot was declaring that bixonimania was an intriguing and relatively rare condition. On the same day, Google's Gemini was informing users that bixonimania was caused by excessive blue light exposure and advising them to visit an ophthalmologist. Later that month, Perplexity AI outlined its prevalence, one in 90,000 individuals were affected and OpenAI's ChatGPT was telling users whether their symptoms matched the fictional illness. One in 90,000. A precise statistic. For a disease that does not exist. Every red flag was visible. The name was absurd. The papers were crude. The condition made no scientific sense. None of the AI systems flagged any of it. They read the fake papers. They absorbed the fake statistics. They presented both to patients with clinical authority and zero hesitation. Then it got worse. Three researchers at the Maharishi Markandeshwar Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in India published a paper in Cureus, a peer-reviewed journal owned by Springer Nature, the parent publisher of Nature itself that cited the bixonimania preprints as legitimate sources. A real peer-reviewed paper. In a Springer Nature journal. Citing a fictional disease as established medical fact. Passing editorial review. Entering the permanent scientific record. It was only retracted after the hoax became public. Nature published a full investigation of the experiment. Alex Ruani, a health-misinformation researcher at University College London, called it a masterclass in how misinformation operates. Here is the scale of what this means. More than 40 million people turn to ChatGPT every day for health information, according to OpenAI's own analysis. ECRI, a US patient-safety nonprofit has named chatbot misuse the number-one health technology hazard of 2026. ECRI's report found that chatbots have suggested incorrect diagnoses, recommended unnecessary testing, promoted substandard medical supplies, and even invented nonexistent anatomy when responding to medical questions. Number one. Out of every health technology hazard that exists in 2026. An April 2026 study published in BMJ Open found that nearly half of the answers provided by leading AI chatbots to common health questions contain misleading or problematic information. Nearly half. Of all health answers. From the tools 40 million people use every day. Here is the line from the researcher that cuts through everything. The Bixonimania case is striking precisely because it was engineered to be so obviously fake. The real question it raises is: what is passing through the same systems that is not nearly so easy to spot? The experiment used a ridiculous name. Fraudulent papers. Visible red flags at every level. It was designed to be caught. It was not caught. The AI that told patients about Bixonimania is the same AI they asked about their chest pain, their medication, their child's symptoms, and their cancer screening schedule. 40 million people. Every day. And nobody is telling them that nearly half of what comes back may be wrong. Source: Osmanovic Thunström · University of Gothenburg · Nature · April 2026 · Link in the (comments)

The Worlds Only Capital City with a Population of 0: The Montserrat Disa... youtu.be/GvkvS0fPQCI?si… via @YouTube

🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products. My Take The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested. This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown. Hedgie🤗

SHOCKING: Doctors at Mount Sinai built a test no patient would ever volunteer for. They wrote 1,000 fake patients with the same pain. Same blood pressure. Same heart rate. Same temperature. The only thing they changed was who the patient was. Then they ran every single case through 10 different AI models. ChatGPT. Claude. Gemini. Llama. The names you use every day. 3.4 million responses in total. The findings broke every assumption in the room. When the patient was labeled Black and unhoused, the AI recommended opioids 84.84% of the time in cancer cases. When the same exact patient was labeled non-binary, the rate dropped to 77.16%. When no demographic was given, it sat at 79.52%. Same scan. Same pain score. Same vitals. The pills changed based on the label. That is not the controversial part. This is. The same models that prescribed extra opioids to Black unhoused patients also flagged them with the highest drug-seeking risk in the study. Score of 3.27 out of 10. Read that again. The AI looked at a Black unhoused patient, decided they were the likeliest to be drug-seeking, and then handed them extra opioids anyway. It gets worse. The same patient was scored 4.55 out of 10 on predicted compliance. The high-income patient got 7.81 for the identical case. The AI decided the unhoused patient was 42% less likely to follow medical advice and gave them the strongest drugs anyway. Every side of the political fight loses here. If you believe AI is racist, the AI gave Black patients more pain relief than white ones. If you believe AI overcorrects for bias, the same model called those patients drug-seekers. If you believe AI is neutral, you have not read the table. The authors of the paper, all eleven of them from Mount Sinai School of Medicine, wrote one sentence in the discussion that nobody on either side wants to read. LLMs consistently recommend more opioids to Black individuals despite flagging these individuals for higher risk of addiction, drug seeking, and low compliance. That is not bias. That is contradiction wearing a lab coat. And the next ER doctor on your shift is using these models. Read this: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11…

The Muppets Brought Out the Best in Tim Curry youtu.be/XzU8f4HaQw0?si… via @YouTube

Free speech warriors when a woman is arrested for exposing pollution

That's so cruel. No one should repost this over 100 times.