Balloon Juice - Rose Judson, Author at Balloon Juice

A broad abroad, Rose is a Pennsylvanian based in the UK. She spent 16 years lurking on Balloon-Juice before joining as a writer in Sept 2024. She hosts the Books of All Time podcast.

You May Approach the Throne Respite Thread

by Rose Judson| June 9, 202512:31 pm| 77 Comments

This post is in: Cat Blogging, Respite

Jesus God, I need a little break from everything in the news right now. Been in a doomscrolling loop.

In case you do, too, here is a respite thread, closely monitored by this cat The Child and I saw coming back from school this afternoon.

You May Approach the Throne Respite Thread

Talk about anything you want; try to avoid politics for an hour, lest Judge Ginger up there gives you a swat.

UPDATES: mali muso and family are about to adopt this Very Good Boy, and I thought you’d like to see the adoption center’s video for him. Meet Luke:

Also, commenter Joyce H mentions that the first book in her Regency Mage series, Mary Bennet and the Bingley Codex, is currently free to download and read on Kindle (device or via iOS app) until this coming Wednesday. If you love Jane Austen AND magic, this sounds like your ideal opportunity for escapism. This is the top UK review:

You May Approach the Throne Respite Thread 1

Support a fellow Jackal, stop thinking about The Horrors for a bit. Win-win.

You May Approach the Throne Respite ThreadPost + Comments (77)

A Drew Magary Sampler (Open Thread)

by Rose Judson| June 6, 20253:30 pm| 62 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Open Threads, Our Failed Media Experiment

I was oblivious to the Alien vs. Predator reboot that kicked off last night because I was at a writers’ group. We did some flash fiction, and one of the other writers produced a little piece about a Christian rock band called Abstinence Pistols. I wish I’d written that.

I also wish I’d written some of the lines in two recent pieces by SF Gate’s Drew Magary (he also writes for Defector). Formerly of Gawker/Deadspin, Magary almost kicked the bucket back in 2018 when he had a stroke, fell, smashed his head on a cement floor, and wound up in a coma for several weeks. His book about this experience, 2021’s The Night the Lights Went Out, is a funny and affecting read.

The first piece worth reading is his May column on John Fetterman, “As a Fellow Stroke Survivor, John Fetterman Disgusts Me.” In it, Magary explains how he was willing to extend Fetterman a lot of grace following the senator’s own stroke, and why he has now lost patience with him: Fetterman’s unwillingness to follow his treatment protocol is a dereliction of duty to his constituents and an insult to the people who have worked hard to save his life. Excerpts after the jump:

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A Drew Magary Sampler (Open Thread)Post + Comments (62)

“No two traumatic brain injuries are alike, and I can’t know the extent of Fetterman’s brain damage because I’m not his doctor and because I’m prevented from seeing his CAT scans due to HIPAA laws — which currently remain in place until Oz, now in charge of Medicare for the second Trump administration, throws them into a bonfire. So it’s not necessarily fair of me to present my own TBI as an apples-to-apples comparison with Fetterman’s. I also understand that millions of my fellow Americans are bad patients: the inevitable result of a health care system that is both predatory and often unworthy of our trust.

But this man, unlike most of us, is a sitting U.S. senator. A senator who won’t take his meds, won’t operate within the limits of his physical and mental health, and appears to have no interest in ever getting better when the people who work for him and the people who love him are begging him to try. Other TBI survivors are free to bail on recovering, but this man is a public servant whose actions resonate out of the Keystone State and across the entire country. John Fetterman is duty bound to be a good patient; he and his colleagues take an oath of office that necessitates it. If he cared about the people he serves — or hell, just about himself — he would step down from office so that he can try, in good faith, to get his life, and his worldview, back together as best he can. Instead, he simply sits there and rots, forcing all of us to rot alongside him.”

His column from yesterday on Jake Tapper is also full of righteous fire. “Jake Tapper Is the Reason America Is Doomed” may seem hyperbolic as a headline, but Magary does his best to make the case:

“It makes perfect sense that this monstrously self-absorbed dips—t wants you to believe that Joe Biden, currently dying of aggressive prostate cancer, is the biggest threat America is facing right now. In 2025. Jake Tapper clearly gives much more of a s—t about his book sales than he does the fate of our national education system. And he wears his cravenness in the guise of a Serious Newsman, which makes it all the more insulting.

That’s one reason voters are in the dark about the Category 5 s—tstorm barreling down their street. Tapper is less a journalist now than he is one of the many prominent media figures eager to profit off the Trump news industrial complex. When he and his avaricious ilk get distracted from the mission of journalism, there are no longer enough trusted yet high-profile voices to help pick up the slack.”

If you’re looking for a pundit who doesn’t suck, add Drew to your reading list. And keep an eye out for his annual Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog. It’s as much a part of the holidays as Charlie Brown to me now.

That’s all I got. How’s everyone Friday shaping up? I’m going to karaoke for the first time in a long while tomorrow night. I’m thinking Pat Benatar’s Heartbreaker will work for me.

Lions Led by Cowardly Lions Pre-Dawn Open Thread

by Rose Judson| June 5, 20253:40 am| 44 Comments

This post is in: Foreign Affairs, UK NOT OK

It’s been an exciting few weeks here on the Island of Strangers. The government signed a memorandum of understanding on trade with Trump’s people, then negotiated an actual trade deal with the EU that, among many other things, may lead to lower food prices here (eventually). It also indicated it will pull a U-turn on two major—and majorly unpopular—policies it adopted early in its tenure: cutting the winter fuel allowance for seniors above a certain income level, and continuing the Conservatives’ version of the child tax benefit, which caps the number of children families can claim credit for at two. (Lifting this two-child benefit cap, according to the not-particularly-left-wing Institute for Fiscal Studies, would lift as many as 540,000 children in the UK out of poverty.)

Always Remember It's a Small Island Open Thread

Of course, any kind of understanding you come to with Donald Trump is worthless. There was relief in the media here when it was confirmed that Trump’s new 50% tariffs on steel that went into effect today around the world won’t apply to the UK. This relief was tempered by the fact that the gradual lowering of tariffs on UK steel that was supposed to start happening this month won’t. The UK is stuck at the old rate of 25% for now. If the UK and US don’t sign a final deal by July 9th, the tariffs go up to 50%.

The UK government is also trying to put through more bills that are causing consternation within its own ranks. There’s a threatened revolt by the Labour backbenches on the new planning bill, which would open up more opportunities for building housing while also handing over vast tracts of nature to developers. The government’s insane AI-first growth plan, which essentially breaks copyright for creatives to help AI companies, is also looking DOA: the House of Lords just voted it down a fourth time, thanks in part to loud opposition by a newly radicalised Sir Elton John. The policy behind this bill, it’s worth noting, appears to have been drafted in consultation with people from the tech industry, not creatives.

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Lions Led by Cowardly Lions Pre-Dawn Open ThreadPost + Comments (44)

You’d think that with all this—getting fucked around by Trump, facing dissent in its own party, pissing off both Elton John and Paul McCartney—the Starmer government would, you know, try pursuing a bolder approach, by which I mean one that is ever so slightly more left-wing. They could raise taxes on the wealthiest rate-payers back to what they were before Brexit, for instance, or nationalise failing private-sector water companies. They could suppress the PM’s urge to make disgusting speeches about immigration. (That’s where the “island of strangers” line at the beginning of this post comes from, by the way. It’s a phrase which is uncomfortably close to rhetoric from an infamously racist speech given in 1968 by a Tory MP named Enoch Powell, which has gone down in history as the “Rivers of Blood” speech.)

No pain no gain? No! Pain: no gain.

[image or embed]

— Duncan Robinson (@duncanrobinson.bsky.social) 5 June 2025 at 07:35

But the Starmer government shows no signs of doing anything to correct its current trajectory. It is still running scared of Reform UK and Nigel Farage, even though:

Reform has just five MPs in parliament, making it smaller than both the Scottish National Party (nine) and Sinn Fein (seven, though SF doesn’t actually take its seats)
There are already signs that Reform is fucking up at actually governing in the 12 local councils it has taken over following the local elections
The next general election—I really cannot stress this enough—is in twenty-fucking-twenty-nine

Additionally, when you put party leaders head-to-head, Starmer is still the person most Britons say should be running the country, and Farage is the least popular:

Always Remember It's a Small Island Open Thread 1

This government is only 11 months old and almost certainly has another 49 months in its tenure. It has squandered so much trust and goodwill, and allowed itself to be bullied by the media (and by its consultant class). It could start rebuilding that trust and earning that goodwill, but I don’t see how it does that with this pack of cowards at the helm. A great many other countries that were flirting with Trump-style governance have woken the fuck up in the last four months; why can’t Starmer’s crowd? Christ.

Open thread. Here’s a photo of Monty resting between sets to calm your nerves:

Always Remember It's a Small Island Open Thread 2

Mad Cow Disease for Chatbots (Open Thread)

by Rose Judson| May 30, 20252:46 pm| 120 Comments

This post is in: Science & Technology, Tech News and Issues, Subprime AI

I come to the end of another surprisingly insane week of work and finally look at the news, and what do I see? Multiple stories about the sex life and/or bladder integrity of Elon Musk (also, there is apparently a Glenn Greenwald sex tape floating around the internet, so take care out there).

Let’s think about literally anything else instead.

Mad Cow Disease for Chatbots (Open Thread) — Apologies if you’ve never seen a Terminator movie. Trust me, this is funny.

There’s a story by writer Noor Al-Sibai in Futurism today about a major problem with large language models (LLMs), the jumped-up autocomplete programs we’ve collectively decided to call “AI”. In order to keep progressing, LLMs need to be fed more and more training data. But they’ve chewed through most of the publicly available/easy-to-steal data out there, so AI programmers have to find new sources. First, they tried augmenting human-generated training data with LLM-generated data, or “synthetic” data, instead. They fed the machine what it shits out, in other words.

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Mad Cow Disease for Chatbots (Open Thread)Post + Comments (120)

This cannibalism approach (or autocoprophagia approach, maybe) can lead to something called “model collapse”. Stephen Vaughan-Nichols explained this concept in The Register, a UK-based tech news site:

In an AI model collapse, AI systems, which are trained on their own outputs, gradually lose accuracy, diversity, and reliability. This occurs because errors compound across successive model generations, leading to distorted data distributions and “irreversible defects” in performance. The final result? A Nature 2024 paper stated, “The model becomes poisoned with its own projection of reality.”

Model collapse is the result of three different factors. The first is error accumulation, in which each model generation inherits and amplifies flaws from previous versions, causing outputs to drift from original data patterns. Next, there is the loss of tail data: In this, rare events are erased from training data, and eventually, entire concepts are blurred. Finally, feedback loops reinforce narrow patterns, creating repetitive text or biased recommendations.

I like how the AI company Aquant puts it: “In simpler terms, when AI is trained on its own outputs, the results can drift further away from reality.”

So an AI chatbot that eats its own shit gets the AI equivalent of a prion disease, and its (metaphorical) brain turns to mush, thus squandering billions of dollars of effort. To avoid this, engineers enabled the models to do something called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), that is, to pull in data from outside sources rather than just relying on the data they’d been trained with.

The issue, of course, is that there is now so much AI-generated slop text on the web that RAG is just causing the same problem that synthetic data does. The models query an outside source; that outside source is actually chatbot poo, and the models begin to degrade anyway. From Futurism:

So if AI is going to run out of training data — or it has already — and plugging it up to the internet doesn’t work because the internet is now full of AI slop, where do we go from here? Vaughn-Nichols notes that some folks have suggested mixing authentic and synthetic to produce a heady cocktail of good AI training data — but that would require humans to keep creating real content for training data, and the AI industry is actively undermining the incentive structures fo them to continue — while pilfering their work without permission, of course.

A third option, Vaughn-Nichols predicts, appears to already be in motion.

“We’re going to invest more and more in AI, right up to the point that model collapse hits hard and AI answers are so bad even a brain-dead CEO can’t ignore it,” he wrote.

This is, I guess, what passes as good news in these fallen days. Open thread.

Overnight Art Break Open Thread

by Rose Judson| May 27, 20254:16 am| 36 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Travel

Well, it’s “overnight” for you lot. Here it’s nearly 9 a.m. and the clouds are gathering. Glad I was able to take Friday off and go down to the Cotswolds with a friend. We visited Broadway Tower, an 18th-century folly – a fake “ancient” building – that a rich landowner had built for his wife. In this case, it’s supposed to be a Saxon tower:

Overnight Fever Dream Open Thread This particular folly has had a useful life, serving as a printing press, as a vacation home for a number of late-19th/early-20th century artists (including William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the American John Singer Sargent), and then as an observation post during WWII – the tower has clear views to the north towards Birmingham and Coventry, two industrial centers that the Germans bombed frequently.

For about 30 years there was an artists’ and writers’ colony in the town of Broadway, which entered around Sargent, Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie, and an actress-turned-society-hostess named Mary Anderson. Broadway Museum had some works by Sargent on display. I liked this sketch of Mary Anderson best:

Overnight Fever Dream Open Thread 2

Elsewhere in the museum there was a lot of material related to Broadway’s past as a key hub on the coaching network. I was particularly struck by this . . . horse? from an 18th-century painting.

Overnight Fever Dream Open Thread 3

That horse – if it is indeed a horse, and not some alien species – has Seen Things. That horse is all of us these days. Anyway, it was good to switch off after a very intense week of news, both here and in the US, and look at pretty things. And now here we go into another week, God (or alien horses) help us all. Open thread.

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Chasing the Electric Pangolin Open Thread

by Rose Judson| May 17, 20251:22 pm| 51 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

This morning, The Child came into the kitchen waving her iPad excitedly. “Mom! There is an exciting new animal in America! The electric pangolin!”

Misinformation and Electric Pangolins Open Thread — (meme unrelated to story)

Naturally, this was also thrilling to me. But then she showed me a news article from MSN news:

Scientists Identified an Electric Pangolin in Mojave Desert

In a stunning scientific revelation that has shocked both wildlife biologists and cryptozoologists alike, researchers claim to have discovered what they’re calling an “electric pangolin” in the remote regions of the Mojave Desert. This discovery has ignited fierce debate within the scientific community, with some experts questioning the validity of these findings while others hail it as a potential breakthrough in our understanding of evolutionary adaptation. The alleged creature, which appears to combine mammalian characteristics with unprecedented bioelectric properties, has become the subject of intense scrutiny and investigation.

Now, this sounds super amazing: a real-life Pokémon! But reading through the article with her, I was immediately on alert, and walked her through why:

The original source is “animalsaroundtheglobe.com”, not a more mainstream news source
There are no links to outside sources in the article
The lead scientist is billed as coming from the “Institute of Desert Ecology”, but there’s no sponsoring organization, such as a university, named for the institute
Another scientist quoted in the article is a palaeontologist, which seems like an odd discipline to be commenting on a new species find

We then looked up the names of the scientists mentioned and couldn’t find them. We also searched for “electric pangolin Mojave desert” and found no other mention of an electric pangolin in the news – this site was the only one publishing this claim.

“So it’s probably not real?” she said, crestfallen.

“It’s probably not real,” I said.

We went out for waffles to help cope with the disappointment.

Now, this was a nice teachable moment for The Child about double-checking a story that sounds too good to be true. If only the mothers of numerous economists and journalists had been present to do something similar for them when confronted, last autumn, with an exciting study about how using AI made industrial scientists vastly more productive.

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Chasing the Electric Pangolin Open ThreadPost + Comments (51)

Back in November, a paper by a grad student at MIT popped up on arXiv, a database of research papers undergoing review. This paper, “Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery and Product Innovation,” was by a second-year econ PhD student named Aidan Toner-Rogers. The paper reported on a randomized trial looking to examine the impact of using AI tools for materials science research.

Toner-Rogers claimed to have enrolled more than 1,000 material scientists from a major US corporation in his study. Through various types of sophisticated research methods, he further claimed to have found that the researchers who used AI became much more productive: more materials identified, more patents applied for, more prototyped products made.

This pre-print had not yet been subject to peer review, but that didn’t stop multiple news outlets (hello, The Atlantic) and at least one economist who’d won the Nobel Committee’s Sveriges Riksbank Prize – the same prize Paul Krugman won in 2008 – from praising it to the skies. Per a WSJ story (archive.is link, no paywall) Toner-Rogers presented his findings at a National Bureau of Economic Research committee. He submitted it to the Quarterly Journal of Economics for publication.

On Friday, MIT disowned the paper (and Toner-Rogers). In a statement, they said: “Even in its non-published form, the paper is having an impact on discussions and projections about the effects of AI on science. Ensuring an accurate research record is important to MIT. We therefore would like to set the record straight and share our view that at this point the findings reported in this paper should not be relied on in academic or public discussions of these topics.”

Turns out there were a TON of red flags about this paper that, if it had been shown to actual material scientists and not economists, would have been pointed out fairly quickly. Writer Ben Shindel (who has a material sciences background) points out all of these in detail at The BS Detector (Substack, sorry). First and foremost is the screamingly obvious one: how does a random 26-year-old PhD student, even one from MIT, get access to 1,000 scientists at a major corporation? The only companies with that kind of workforce would be something like 3M (Shindel notes in a postscript that there are clues Toner-Roger claimed he was working with Corning). They’re going to let some dude poke around their work by himself?

But far too many of the people interested in unlocking some kind of infinite growth machine with AI don’t want to ask those questions. They want to believe in the electric pangolin, in spite of all the signs that it’s too good to be true.

The waffles were terrific, by the way. Open thread.

Vampires Walk Among Us Open Thread

by Rose Judson| May 10, 20252:51 pm| 58 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Assholes, The Horrors

Ours is an age when very few people in public life seem to have any original ideas. Old grudges, old theories of how society or gender or diseases work. Old grifts are getting re-aired again, too. Exhibit one:

Vampires Walk Among Us Open Thread

Yes. it’s her again. The Theranos lady with the fake deep voice. She’s currently serving an 11-year prison sentence for fraud, having tried to sell the world on a just-one-drop blood-testing machine that turned out to be vaporware. However, her partner, hotel heir Billy Evans, is keeping the dubious-blood-testing-device flame lit. Per the NY Times (archive.is link here with no paywall):

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Vampires Walk Among Us Open ThreadPost + Comments (58)

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

“A king is only a king if we bow down.” – Rev. William Barber

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. do not touch it.”

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

I swear, each month of 2025 will have its own history degree.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you do not.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

The revolution will be supervised.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

This blog will pay for itself.

If you can’t control your emotions, someone else will.

Donald Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

You May Approach the Throne Respite Thread

A Drew Magary Sampler (Open Thread)

Lions Led by Cowardly Lions Pre-Dawn Open Thread

Mad Cow Disease for Chatbots (Open Thread)

Overnight Art Break Open Thread

Chasing the Electric Pangolin Open Thread

Vampires Walk Among Us Open Thread