#cto blogs

[jcmarchi]

Patrick Leung, CTO of Faro Health – Interview Series

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/patrick-leung-cto-of-faro-health-interview-series/

Patrick Leung, CTO of Faro Health – Interview Series

Patrick Leung, CTO of Faro Health, drives the company’s AI-enabled platform, which simplifies and speeds up clinical trial protocol design. Faro Health’s tools enhance efficiency, standardization, and accuracy in trial planning, integrating data-driven insights and streamlined processes to reduce trial risks, costs, and patient burden.

Faro Health empowers clinical research teams to develop optimized, standardized trial protocols faster, advancing innovation in clinical research.

You spent many years building AI at Google. What were some of the most exciting projects you worked on during your time at Google, and how did those experiences shape your approach to AI?

I was on the team that built Google Duplex, a conversational AI system that called restaurants and other businesses on the user’s behalf. This was a top secret project that was full of extremely talented people. The team was fast-moving, constantly trying out new ideas, and there were cool demos of the latest things people were working on every week. It was very inspiring to be on a team like that.

One of the many things I learned on this team is that even when you’re working with the latest AI models, sometimes you still just have to be scrappy to get the user experience and value you want. In order to generate hyper-realistic verbal conversations, the team stitched together recordings interspersed with temporizers like “um” to make the conversation sound more natural. It was so much fun reading what the press had to say about why those “ums” were there after we launched!

Both you and the CEO of Faro come from large tech companies. How has your past experience influenced the development and strategy of Faro?

Several times in my career I’ve built companies that sell various products and services to large companies. Faro too is targeting the world’s largest pharma companies so there is a lot of experience around what it takes to win over and partner with large enterprises that is highly relevant here. Working at Two Sigma, a large algorithmic hedge fund based in New York City, really shaped how I approach data science. They have a rigorous hypothesis-driven process whereby all new ideas go into a research plan and are tested thoroughly. They also have a very well-developed data engineering organization for onboarding new data sets and performing feature engineering. As Faro deepens its AI capabilities to tackle more problems in clinical trial development, this approach will be highly relevant and applicable to what we’re doing.

Faro Health is built around simplifying the complexity of clinical trial design with AI. Coming from a non-clinical background, what was the “aha moment” that led you to understand the specific pain points in protocol design that needed to be addressed?

My first “aha moment” happened when I encountered the concept of “Eroom’s Law”. Eroom isn’t a person, it’s just “Moore” spelt backwards. This tongue-in-cheek name is a reference to the fact that over the past 50 years, inflation adjusted clinical drug development costs and timelines have roughly doubled every 9 years. This flies in the face of the entire information technology revolution, and just boggled my mind. It really sold me on the fact there is an enormous problem to solve here!

As I got deeper into this domain and started understanding the underlying problems more fully, there were many more insights like this. A fundamental and very obvious one is that Word docs are not a good format to design and store highly complex clinical trials! This is a key observation, borne of our CEO Scott’s clinical experience, that Faro was built upon. There is also the observation that over time, trials tend to get more and more complex, as clinical study teams literally copy and paste past protocols, and then add new assessments in order to gather more data. Providing users with as many valuable insights as possible, as early as possible, in the study design process is a key value proposition for Faro.

What role does AI play in Faro’s platform to ensure faster and more accurate clinical trial protocol design? How does Faro’s “AI Co-Author” tool differentiate from other generative AI solutions?

It might sound obvious, but you can’t just ask ChatGPT to generate a clinical trial protocol document. First of all, you need to have highly specific, structured trial information such as the Schedule of Activities represented in detail in order to surface the right information in the highly technical sections of the protocol document. Second, there are many details and specific clauses that need to be present in the documentation for certain types of trials, and a certain style and level of detail that is expected by medical writers and reviewers. At Faro, we built a proprietary protocol evaluation system to ensure the content that the large language model (LLM) was coming up with will meet users’ and regulators’ exacting standards.

As trials for rare diseases and immuno-oncology become more complex, how does Faro ensure that AI can meet these specialized demands without sacrificing accuracy or quality?

A model is only as good as the data it’s trained on. So as the frontier of modern medicine advances, we need to keep pace by training and testing our models with the latest clinical trials. This requires that we continually expand our library of digitized clinical protocols  – we are extremely proud of the volume of clinical trial protocols that we have already brought into our data library at Faro, and we’re always prioritizing the growth of this dataset. It also requires us to lean heavily on our in-house team of clinical experts, who constantly evaluate the output of our model and provide any necessary changes to the “evaluation checklists” we use to ensure its accuracy and quality.

Faro’s partnership with Veeva and other leading companies integrates your platform into the wider clinical trial ecosystem. How do these collaborations help streamline the entire trial process, from protocol design to execution?

The heart of a clinical trial is the protocol, which Faro’s Study Designer helps our customers design and optimize. The protocol informs everything downstream about the trial, but traditionally, protocols are designed and stored in Word documents. Thus, one of the big challenges in operationalizing clinical development today is the constant transcription or “translation” of data from the protocol or other document-based sources to other systems or even other documents. As you can imagine, having humans manually translate document-based information into various systems by hand is incredibly inefficient, and introduces many opportunities for errors along the way.

Faro’s vision is a unified platform where the “definition” or elements of a clinical trial can flow from the design system where they are first conceived, downstream to various systems or needed during the operational phase of the trial. When this kind of seamless information flow is in place, there’s a significant opportunity for automation and improved quality, meaning we can dramatically reduce the time and cost to design and implement a clinical trial. Our partnership with Veeva to connect our Study Designer to Veeva Vault EDC is just one step in this direction, with a lot more to come.

What are some of the key challenges AI faces in simplifying clinical trials, and how does Faro overcome them, particularly around ensuring transparency and avoiding issues like bias or hallucination in AI outputs?

There is a much higher bar for clinical trial documents than in most other domains. These documents affect the lives of real people, and thus pass through a highly-exacting regulatory review process. When we first started generating clinical documents using an LLM, it was clear that with off-the-shelf models, the output was nowhere close to meeting expectations. Unsurprisingly, the tone, level of detail, formatting – everything – was way off, and was much more oriented to general-purpose business communications, rather than expert clinical grade documents. For sure hallucination and also straight up omission of necessary details were major challenges. In order to develop a generative AI solution that could meet the high standard for domain specificity and quality that our users expect, we had to spend a lot of time collaborating with clinical experts to devise guidelines and evaluation checklists that ensured our output wasn’t hallucinating or simply omitting key details, and had the right tone. We also needed to provide the capacity for end users to provide their own guidance and corrections to the output, as different customers have differing templates and standards that guide their document authoring process.

There’s also the challenge that the detailed clinical data needed to fully generate the trial protocol documentation may not be readily available, often stored deep in other complex documents such as the investigational brochure. We are looking at using AI to help extract such information and make it available for use in generating clinical protocol document sections.

Looking forward, how do you see AI evolving in the context of clinical trials? What role will Faro play in the digital transformation of this space over the next decade?

As time goes on, AI will help improve and optimize more and more decisions and processes throughout the clinical development process. We will be able to predict key outcomes based on protocol design inputs, like whether the study team can expect enrollment challenges, or whether the study will require an amendment due to operational challenges. With that kind of predictive insight, we will be able to help optimize the downstream operations of the trial, ensuring both sites and patients have the best experience, and that the trial’s likelihood of operational success is as high as possible. In addition to exploring these possibilities, Faro also plans to continue generating a range of different clinical documentation so that all of the filing and paperwork processes of the trial are efficient and much less error-prone. And we foresee a world where AI enables our platform to become a true design partner, engaging clinical scientists in a generative dialog to help them design trials that make the right tradeoffs between patient burden, site burden, time, cost, and complexity.

How does Faro’s focus on patient-centric design impact the efficiency and success of clinical trials, particularly in terms of reducing patient burden and improving study accessibility?

Clinical trials are often caught between the competing needs of collecting more participant data – which means more assessments or tests for the patient – and managing a trial’s operational feasibility, such as its ability to enroll and retain participants. But patient recruitment and retention are some of the most significant challenges to the successful completion of a clinical trial today – by some estimates, as many as 20-30% of patients who elect to participate in a clinical trial will ultimately drop out due to the burden of participation, including frequent visits, invasive procedures and complex protocols. Although clinical research teams are aware of the impact of high burden trials on patients, actually doing anything concrete to reduce burden can be hard in practice. We believe one of the barriers to reducing patient burden is often the inability to readily quantify it – it’s hard to measure the impact to patients when your design is in a Word document or a pdf.

Using Faro’s Study Designer, clinical development teams can get real-time insights into the impact of their specific protocol on patient burden during the protocol planning process itself. By structuring trials and providing analytical insights into their cost, patient burden, complexity early during the trials’ design stage, Faro provides clinical research teams with a very effective way to optimize their trial designs by balancing these factors against scientific needs to collect more data. Our customers love the fact we give them visibility into patient burden and related metrics at a point in development where changes are easy to make, and they can make informed tradeoffs where necessary. Ultimately, we have seen our customers save thousands of hours of collective patient time, which we know will have an immediate positive impact for study participants, while also helping ensure clinical trials can both initiate and complete on time.

What advice would you give to startups or companies looking to integrate AI into their clinical trial processes, based on your experiences at both Google and Faro?

Here are the main takeaways I’d offer so far from our experience applying AI to this domain:

Divide and evaluate your AI prompts. Large language models like GPT are not designed to output clinical grade documentation. So if you’re planning to use gen AI to automate clinical trial document authoring, you need to have an evaluation framework that ensures the generated output is accurate, complete, has the right level of detail and tone, and so on. This requires a lot of careful testing of the model guided by clinical experts.

Use a structured representation of a trial. There is no way you can generate the required data analytics in order to design an optimal clinical trial without a structured repository. Many companies today use Word docs – not even Excel! – to model clinical trials. This must be done with a structured domain model that accurately represents the complexity of a trial – its schema, objectives and endpoints, schedule of assessments, and so on. This requires a lot of input and feedback from clinical experts.

Clinical experts are crucial for quality. As seen in the previous two points, having clinical experts directly involved in the design and testing of any AI based clinical development system is absolutely critical. This is much more so than any other domain I’ve worked in, simply because the knowledge required is so specialized, detailed, and pervades any product you attempt to build in this space.

We are constantly trying new things and regularly share our findings to our blog to help companies navigate this space.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Faro Health.

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

Petard, Part III

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/01/miskatonic-networks/#landlord-telco-industrial-complex

Last week, Trump's FCC chair Brendan Carr reversed a rule that banned your landlord from taking kickbacks in exchange for forcing you to use whatever ISP was willing to pay the biggest bribe for the right to screw you over:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/fcc-chair-nixes-plan-to-boost-broadband-competition-in-apartment-buildings/

Corporate fascists and their captured regulators are, of course, that most despicable of creatures: they are plagiarists. Like so many of our tech overlords, they have mistaken dystopian sf as a suggestion, rather than as a warning. I take this personally, because I actually wrote this as an sf story in 2013, and it was published in 2014 in MIT Tech Review's Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling and published in 2014:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535595/twelve-tomorrows-2014/

I adapted it for my podcast, in four installments:

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_278

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_292

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_293

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_294_-_Petard_04

And, given the new currency of this old story, I thought it was only fitting that I serialize it here, on my blog, also in four parts.

Here's part one:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/30/landlord-telco-industrial-complex/#part-one

Here's part two:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/31/the-blood-speech/#part-two

And now, onto part three:

One of the early Ftp code contributors was now CTO for an ISP, and they'd gotten their start as a dorm co-op at Brown that had metastasized across New England. Sanjay had been pretty important to the early days of Ftp, helping us get the virtualization right so that it could run on pretty much any cloud without a lot of jiggery and/or pokery. Within a day of emailing Sanjay, I was having coffee with the vice-president of business development for Miskatonic Networks, who was also Sanjay's boyfriend's girlfriend, because apparently ISPs in New England are hotbeds of Lovecraft-fandom polyamory. Her name was Kadijah and she had a southie accent so thick it was like an amateur theater production of Good Will Hunting.

"The Termite Mound?" She laughed. "Shit yeah, I know that place. It's still standing? I went to some super sketchy parties there when I was a kid, I mean sooooper sketchy, like sketch-a-roony. I can't believe no one's torched the place yet."

"Not yet," I said. "And seeing as all my stuff's there right now, I'm hoping that no one does for the time being."

"Yeah, I can see that." I could not get over her accent. It was the most Bostonian thing I'd encountered since I got off the train. "OK, so you want to know what we'd charge to provide service to someone at the Termite Mound?"

"Uh, no. I want to know what you'd charge per person if we could get you the whole Mound — every unit in the residence. All 250 of them."

"Oh." She paused a second. "This is an Ftp thing, right?"

"Yeah," I said. "That's how I know Sanjay. I, uh, I started Ftp." I don't like to brag, but sometimes it makes sense in the context of the conversation, right?

"That was you? Wicked! So you're seriously gonna get the whole dorm to sign up with us?"

"I will if you can get me a price that I can sell to them," I said.

"Oh," she said. Then "Oh! Right. Hmm. Leave it with me. You say you can get them all signed up?"

"I think so. If the price is right. And I think that if the Termite Mound goes with you that there'll be other dorms that'll follow. Maybe a lab or two," I said. I was talking out of my ass at this point, but seriously, net-censorship in the labs at MIT? It was disgusting. It could not stand.

"Damn," she said. "Sounds like you're majoring in Ftp. Don't you have classes or something?"

"No," I said. "This is basically exactly what I figured college would be like. A cross between summer camp and an Stanford obedience experiment. If all I wanted to do was cram a bunch of knowledge into my head, I could have stayed home and mooced it. I came here because I wanted to level up and fight something tough and even dangerous. I want to spend four years getting into the right kind of trouble. Going to classes too, but seriously, classes? Whatever. Everyone knows the good conversations happen in the hallway between the formal presentations. Classes are just an excuse to have hallways."

She looked skeptical and ate banana bread.

"It's your deal," she said.

I could hear the but hanging in the air between us. She went and got more coffees and brought them back along with toasted banana bread dripping with butter for me. She wouldn't let me pay, and told me it was on Miskatonic. We were a potential big account. She didn't want to say "But" because she might offend me. I wanted to hear the "but."

"But?"

"But what?"

"It's my deal but…?"

"But, well, you know, you don't look after your grades, MIT'll put you out on your ass. That's how it works in college. I've seen it."

I chewed my banana bread.

"Hey," she said. "Hey. Are you OK, Lukasz?"

"I'm fine," I said.

She smiled at me. She was pretty. "But?"

I told her about my talk with AA, and about Juanca, and about how I felt like nobody was giving me my propers, and she looked very sympathetic, in a way that made me feel much younger. Like toddler younger.

"MIT is all about pranks, right? I think if I could come up with something really epic, they'd –" And as I said it, I realized how dumb it was. They laughed at me in Vienna, I'll show them! "You know what? Forget about it. I got more important things to do than screw around with those knob-ends. Work to do, right? Get the network opened up around here, you and me, Kadijah!"

"Don't let it get to you, you'll give yourself an aneurism. I'll get back to you soon, OK?"

#

I fished a bead out of my pocket and wedged it into my ear.

"Who is this?"

"Lukasz?" The voice was choked with tears.

"Who is this?" I said again.

"It's Bryan." I couldn't place the voice or the name.

"Bryan who?"

"From the Termite Mound's customer service desk." Then I recognized the voice. It was the elf, and he was having hysterics. Part of me wanted to say, Oh, diddums! and hang up. Because elves, AMR? But I'm not good at tough love.

"What's wrong?"

"They've fired me," he said. "I got called into my boss's office an hour ago and he told me to start drawing up a list of people to kick out of the dorm — he wanted the names of people who supported you. I was supposed to go through the EULAs for the dorm and find some violations for all of them –"

"What if they didn't have any violations?"

He made a sound between a sob and a laugh. "Are you kidding? You're always in violation! Have you read the EULA for the Mound? It's like sixty pages long."

"OK, gotcha. So you refused and you got fired?"

There was a pause. It drew out. "No," he said, his voice barely a whisper. "I gave them a bunch of names, and then they fired me."

Again, I was torn between the impulse to hang up on him and to hear more. Nosiness won (nosiness always wins; bets on nosiness are a sure thing). "Nicely done. Sounds like just deserts to me. What do you expect me to do about it?" But I knew. There were only two reasons to call me after something like this: to confess his sins or to get revenge. And no one would ever mistake me for a priest.

"I've got the names they pulled. Not just this time. Every time there's been any kind of trouble in the Termite Mound, MIT Residence has turfed out the troublemakers on some bogus EULA violation. They know that no one cares about student complaints, and there's always a waiting list for rooms at the Termite Mound, it's so central and all. I kept records."

"What kind of records?"

"Hardcopies of emails. They used disappearing ink for all the dirty stuff, but I just took pictures of my screen with my drop and saved it to personal storage. It's ugly. They went after pregnant girls, kids with disabilities. Any time there was a chance they'd have to do an air quality audit or fix a ramp, I'd have to find some reason to violate the tenant out of residence." He paused a moment. "They used some pretty bad language when they talked about these people, too."

The Termite Mound should've been called the Roach Motel: turn on the lights and you'd find a million scurrying bottom-feeders running for the baseboards.

I was going to turn on the lights.

"You've got all that, huh?

"Tons of it," he said. "Going back three years. I knew that if it ever got out that they'd try and blame it on me. I wanted records."

"OK," I said. "Meet me in Harvard Square, by the T entrance. How soon can you get there?"

"I'm at the Coop right now," he said. "Using a study-booth."

"Perfect," I said. "Five minutes then?"

"I'm on my way."

The Coop's study booths had big signs warning you that everything you did there was recorded — sound, video, infrared, data — and filtered for illicit behavior. The signs explained that there was no human being looking at the records unless you did something to trip the algorithm, like that made it better. If a tree falls in the forest, it sure as shit makes a sound; and if your conversation is bugged, it's bugged — whether or not a human being listens in right then or at some time in the infinite future of that data.

I beat him to the T entrance, and looked around for a place to talk. It wasn't good. From where I stood, I could see dozens of cameras, the little button-sized dots discretely placed all around the square, each with a little scannable code you could use to find out who got the footage and what it's policy was. No one ever, ever, ever bothered to do this. Ever. EULAs were not written for human consumption: a EULA's message could always be boiled down to seven words: "ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE." Or, more succinctly: "YOU LOSE."

I felt bad about Bryan's job. It was his own deal, of course. He'd stayed even after he knew how evil they were. And I hadn't held a gun to his head and made him put himself in the firing line. But of course, I had convinced him to. I had led him to. I felt bad.

Bryan turned up just as I was scouting a spot at an outdoor table by an ice-cream parlor. They had a bunch of big blowing heaters that'd do pretty good white-noise masking, a good light/dark contrast between the high-noon sun and the shade of the awning that would screw up cameras' white-balance, and the heaters would wreak havoc on the infra-red range of the CCTVs, or so I hoped. I grabbed Bryan, clamping down on his skinny arm through the rough weave of his forest-green cloak and dragged him into my chosen spot.

"You got it?" I said, once we were both seated and nursing hot chocolates. I got caffeinated marshmallows; he got Thai ghost pepper-flavored — though that was mostly marketing, no way those marshmallows were over a couple thousand Scovilles.

"I encrypted it with your public key," he said, handing me a folded up paper. I unfolded it and saw that it had been printed with a stegoed QR code, hidden in a Victorian woodcut. That kind of spycraft was pretty weaksauce — the two-dee-barcode-in-a-public-domain-image thing was a staple of shitty student clickbait thrillers — but if he'd really managed to get my public key and verify it and then encrypt the blob with it, I was impressed. That was about ten million times more secure than the average fumbledick ever managed. The fact that he'd handed me a hardcopy of the URL instead of emailing it to me, well, that was pretty sweet frosting. Bryan had potential.

I folded the paper away. "What should I be looking for?"

"It's all organized and tagged. You'll see." He looked nervous. "What are you going to do with it?"

"Well, for starters, I'm going to call them up and tell them I have it."

"What?" He looked like he was going to cry.

"Come on," I said. "I'm not going to tell them where I got it. The way you tell it, I'm about to get evicted, right?"

"Technically, you are evicted. There's a process-server waiting at every entrance to the Termite Mound doing face-recognition on the whole list. Soon as you go home, bam. 48 hours to clear out."

"Right," I said. "I don't want to have to go look for a place to live while I'm also destroying these shitbirds and fixing everyone's Internet connection. Get serious. So I'm going to go and talk to Messrs Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral and explain that I have a giant dump of compromising messages from them that I'm going public with, and it'll look really, really bad for them if they turf me out now."

It's time for a true confession. I am not nearly as brave as I front. All this spycraft stuff, all the bluster about beating these guys on their home turf, yeah, in part I'm into it — I like it better than riding through life like a foil chip-bag being swept down a polluted stream on a current of raw sewage during a climate-change-driven superstorm.

But the reality is that I can't really help myself. There's some kind of rot-fungus that infects the world. Things that are good when they're small and personal grow, and as they grow, their attack-surface grows with them, and they get more and more colonized by the fungus, making up stupid policies, doing awful stuff to the people who rely on them and the people who work for them, one particle of fungus at a time, each one just a tiny and totally defensible atomic-sized spoor of rot that piles up and gloms onto all the other bits of rot until you're a walking, suppurating lesion.

No one ever set out to create the kind of organization that needs to post a "MIT RESIDENCY LLC OPERATES A ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICY TOWARD EMPLOYEE ABUSE. YOU CAN BE FINED UP TO $2000 AND/OR IMPRISONED FOR SIX MONTHS FOR ASSAULTING A CAMPUS RESIDENCE WORKER" sign. You start out trying to do something good, then your realize you can get a little richer by making it a little worse. Your thermostat for shittiness gets reset to the new level, so it doesn't seem like much of a change to turn it a notch further towards the rock-bottom, irredeemably shitty end of the scale.

The truth is that you can get really rich and huge by playing host organism to the rot-fungus. The rot-fungus diffuses its harms and concentrates its rewards. That means that healthy organisms that haven't succumbed to the rot-fungus are liable to being devoured by giant, well-funded vectors for it — think of the great local business that gets devoured by an awful hedge-fund in a leveraged takeover, looted and left as a revolting husk to shamble on until it collapses under its own weight.

I am terrified of the rot-fungus, because it seems like I'm the only person who notices it most of the time. Think of all those places where the town council falls all over itself to lure some giant corporation to open a local factory. Don't they notice that everyone who works at places like that hates every single moment of every single day? Haven't they ever tried to converse with the customer-service bots run by one of those lumbering dinos?

I mean, sure, the bigs have giant budgets and they'll take politicians out for nice lunches and throw a lot of money at their campaigns, but don't these guardians of the public trust ever try to get their cars fixed under warranty? Don't they ever buy a train ticket? Don't they ever eat at a fast food joint? Can't they smell the rot-fungus? Am I the only one? I've figured out how to fight it in my own way. Everyone else who's fighting seems to be fighting against something else — injustice or inequality or whatever, without understanding that the fungus's rot is what causes all of those things.

I'm convinced that no normal human being ever woke up one morning and said, "Dammit, my life doesn't have enough petty bureaucratic rules, zero-tolerance policies, censorship and fear in it. How do I fix that?" Instead, they let this stuff pile up, one compromise at a time, building up huge sores suppurating with spore-loaded fluids that eventually burst free and beslime everything around them. It gets normal to them, one dribble at a time.

"Lukasz, you're don't know what you're doing. These guys, they're –"

"What?" I said. "Are they the mafia or something? Are they going to have me dropped off a bridge with cement overshoes?"

He shook his head, making the twigs and beads woven into the downy fluff of his hair clatter together. "No, but they're ruthless. I mean, totally ruthless. They're not normal."

The way he said it twinged something in my hindbrain, some little squiggle of fear, but I pushed it away. "Yeah, that's OK. I'm used to abnormal." I am the most abnormal person I know.

"Be careful, seriously," he said.

"Thanks, Bryan," I said. "Don't worry about me. You want me to try and get your room back, too?"

He chewed his lip. "Don't," he said. "They'll know it was me if you do that."

I resisted the urge to shout at him to grow a spine. These assholes had cost him his home and his job (OK, I'd helped) and he was going to couch-surf it until he could find the rarest of treasures: an affordable place to live in Cambridge, Mass? Even if he was being tortured by his conscience for all his deplorable selloutism, he was still being a total wuss. But that was his deal. I mean, he was an elf, for chrissakes. Who knew what he was thinking?

"Suit yourself," I said, and went and made some preparations.

#

Messers Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral had an office over the river in Boston, in a shabby office-block that only had ten floors, but whose company directory listed over 800 businesses. I knew the kind of place, because they showed up whenever some hairy scam unravelled and they showed you the office-of-convenience used by the con-artists who'd destroyed something that lots of people cared about and loved in order to make a small number of bad people a little richer. A kind of breeding pit for rot-fungus, in other words.

At first I thought I was going to have to go and sleuth their real locations, but I saw that Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral had the entire third floor registered to them, while everyone else had crazy-ass, heavily qualified suite numbers like 401c(1)K, indicating some kind of internal routing code for the use of the army of rot-fungus-infected spores who ensured that correspondence was handled in a way that preserved the illusion that each of the multifarious, blandly named shell companies (I swear to Cthulhu that there was one called "International Holdings (Holdings), Ltd") was a real going concern and not a transparent ruse intended to allow the rot-fungus to spread with maximal diffusion of culpability for the carriers who did its bidding.

I punched # # #300# # # on the ancient touchscreen intercom, its surface begrimed with a glossy coat of hardened DNA, Burger King residue and sifted-down dust of the ages. It blatted like an angry sheep, once, twice, three times, then disconnected. I punched again. Again. On the fourth try, an exasperated, wheezing voice emerged: "What?"

"I'm here to speak to someone from MIT Residences LLC."

"Send an email."

"I'm a tenant. My name is Lukasz Romero." I let that sink in. "I've got some documents I'd like to discuss with a responsible individual at MIT Residences LLC." I put a bit of heavy English on documents. "Please." I put even more English on "Please." I've seen the same tough-guy videos that you have, and I can do al-pacinoid overwound Dangerous Dude as well as anyone. "Please," I said again, meaning "Right. Now."

There was an elongated and ominous pause, punctuated by muffled rustling and grumbling, and what may have been typing on an old-fashioned, mechanical keyboard. "Come up," a different voice said. The elevator to my left ground as the car began to lower itself.

#

I'd expected something sinister — a peeling dungeon of a room where old men with armpit-stains gnawed haunches of meat and barked obscenities at each other. Instead, I found myself in an airy, high-ceilinged place that was straight out of the publicity shots for MIT's best labs, the ones that had been set-dressed by experts who'd ensured that no actual students had come in to mess things up before the photographer could get a beautifully lit shot of the platonic perfection.

The room took up the whole floor, dotted with conversation pits with worn, comfortable sofas whose end-tables sported inconspicuous charge-plates for power-hungry gadgets. The rest of the space was made up of new-looking worksurfaces and sanded-down antique wooden desks that emitted the honeyed glow of a thousand coats of wax buffed by decades of continuous use. The light came from tall windows and full-spectrum spotlights that were reflected and diffused off the ceiling, which was bare concrete and mazed with cable-trays and conduit. I smelled good coffee and toasting bread and saw a perfectly kept little kitchenette to my left.

There were perhaps a dozen people working in the room, standing at the worksurfaces, mousing away at the antique desks, or chatting intensely in the conversation pits. It was a kind of perfect tableau of industrious tech-company life, something out of a recruiting video. The people were young and either beautiful, handsome or both. I had the intense, unexpected desire to work here, or a place like this. It had good vibes.

One of the young, handsome people stood up from his conversation nook and smoothed out the herringbone wool hoodie he was wearing, an artfully cut thing that managed to make him look like both a young professor and an undergraduate at the same time. It helped that he was so fresh-faced, with apple cheeks and a shock of curly brown hair.

"Lukasz, right?" He held out a hand. He was wearing a dumbwatch, a wind-up thing in a steel casing that was fogged with a century of scratches. I coveted it instantly, though I knew nothing about its particulars, I was nevertheless certain that it was expensive, beautifully engineered, and extremely rare.

The door closed behind me and the magnet audibly reengaged. The rest of the people in the room studiously ignored us.

"I'm Sergey. Can I get you a cup of coffee? Tea? Some water?"

The coffee smelled good. "No thank you," I said. "I don't think I'll be here for long."

"Of course. Come and sit."

The other participants in his meeting had already vacated the sofas and left us with a conversation pit all to ourselves. I sank into the sofa and smelled the spicy cologne of a thousand eager, well-washed people who'd sat on it before me, impregnating the upholstery with the spoor of their good perfumes.

He picked up a small red enamel teapot and poured a delicious-smelling stream of yellow-green steaming liquid into a chunky diner-style coffee-cup. He sipped it. My stomach growled. "You told the receptionist you wanted to talk about some documents?"

"Yeah," I said, pulling myself together. "I've got documentary evidence of this company illegally evicting tenants — students — who got pregnant, complained about substandard living conditions and maintenance issues, and, in my case, complained about the network filters at the Termite Mound."

He cocked his head for a moment like he was listening for something in the hum and murmur of the office around him. I found myself listening, too, but try as I might, I couldn't pick out a single individual voice from the buzz, not even a lone intelligble word. It was as though they were all going "murmurmurmurmur," though I could see their lips moving and shaping what must have been words.

"Ah," he said at last. "Well, that's very unfortunate. Can you give me a set and I'll escalate them up our chain to ensure that they're properly dealt with?"

"I can give you a set," I said. "But I'll also be giving a set to the MIT ombudsman and the The Tech and the local Wikileaks Party rep. Sergey, forgive me, but you don't seem to be taking this very seriously. The material in my possession is the sort of thing that could get you and your colleagues here sued into a smoking crater."

"Oh, I appreciate that there's a lot of potential liability in the situation you describe, but it wouldn't be rational for me to freak out now, would it? I haven't seen your documents, and if I had, I can neither authenticate them nor evaluate the risk they represent. So I'll take a set from you and ensure that the people within our organization who have the expertise to manage this sort of thing get to them quickly."

It's funny. I'd anticipated that he'd answer like a chatbot, vomiting up Markov-chained nothings from the lexicon of the rot-fungus: "we take this very seriously," "we cannot comment on ongoing investigations," "we are actioning this with a thorough inquiry and post-mortem" and other similar crapola. Instead, he was talking like a hacker on a mailing list defending the severity he'd assigned to a bug he owned.

"Sergey, that's not much of an answer."

He sipped that delicious tea some more. "Is there something in particular you wanted to hear from me? I mean, this isn't the sort of thing that you find out about then everything stops until you've figured out what to do next."

I was off-balance. "I wanted –" I waved my hands. "I wanted an explanation. How the hell did this systematic abuse come about?"

He shrugged. He really didn't seem very worried "Hard to say, really. Maybe it was something out of the labs."

"What do you mean, 'the labs'?"

He gestured vaguely at one cluster of particularly engrossed young men and women who were bent over screens and worksurfaces, arranged in pairs or threesomes, collaborating with fierce intensity, reaching over to touch each others' screens and keyboards in a way I found instantly and deeply unsettling. "We've got a little R&D lab that works on some of our holdings. We're really dedicated to disrupting the rental market. There's so much money in it, you know, but mostly it's run by these entitled jerks who think that they're geniuses for having the brilliant idea of buying a building and then sitting around and charging rent on it. A real old boys' club." For the first time since we started talking, he really seemed to be alive and present and paying attention.

"Oh, they did some bits and pieces that gave them the superficial appearance of having a brain, but there's a lot of difference between A/B splitting your acquisition strategy and really deep-diving into the stuff that matters."

At this stage, I experienced a weird dissonance. I mean, I was there because these people were doing something genuinely villainous, real rot-fungus stuff. On the other hand, well, this sounded cool. I can't lie. I found it interesting. I mean, catnip-interesting.

"I mean, chewy questions. Like, if the median fine for a second citation for substandard plumbing is $400, and month-on-month cost for plumbing maintenance in a given building is $2,000 a month, and the long-term costs of failure to maintain are $20,000 for full re-plumbing on a 8-10 year basis with a 75 percent probability of having to do the big job in year nine, what are the tenancy parameters that maximize your return over that period?"

"Tenancy parameters?"

He looked at me. I was being stupid. I don't like that look. I suck at it. It's an ego thing. I just find it super-hard to deal with other people thinking that I'm dumb. I would probably get more done in this world if I didn't mind it so much. But I do. It's an imperfect world, and I am imperfect.

"Tenancy parameters. What are the parameters of a given tenant that predict whether he or she will call the city inspectors given some variable setpoint of substandard plumbing, set on a scale that has been validated through a rigorous regression through the data that establishes quantifiable inflection points relating to differential and discrete maintenance issues, including leaks, plugs, pressure, hot water temperature and volume, and so on. It's basically just a solve-for-x question, but it's one with a lot of details in the model that are arrived at through processes with a lot of room for error, so the model needs a lot of refinement and continuous iteration.

"And of course, it's all highly sensitive to external conditions — there's a whole game-theoretical set of questions about what other large-scale renters do in response to our own actions, and there's a information-theory dimension to this that's, well, it's amazing. Like, which elements of our strategy are telegraphed when we take certain actions as opposed to others, and how can those be steganographed through other apparent strategies.

"Now, most of these questions we can answer through pretty straightforward business processes, stuff that Amazon figured out twenty years ago. But there's a real risk of getting stuck in local maxima, just you know, overoptimizing inside of one particular paradigm with some easy returns. That's just reinventing the problem, though, making us into tomorrow's dinosaurs.

"If we're going to operate a culture of continuous improvement, we need to be internally disrupted to at least the same extent that we're disrupting those fat, stupid incumbents. That's why we have the labs. They're our chaos monkeys. They do all kinds of stuff that keeps our own models sharp. For example, they might incorporate a separate business and use our proprietary IP to try to compete with us — without telling us about it. Or give a set of autonomous agents privileges to communicate eviction notices in a way that causes a certain number of lawsuits to be filed, just to validate our assumptions about the pain-point at which an action or inaction on our side will trigger a suit from a tenant, especially for certain profiles of tenants.

"So there's not really any way that I can explain specifically what happened to the people mentioned in your correspondence. It's possible no one will ever be able to say with total certainty. I don't really know why anyone would expect it to be otherwise. We're not a deterministic state-machine, after all. If all we did was respond in set routines to set inputs, it'd be trivial to innovate around us and put us out of business. Our objective is to be strategically nonlinear and anti-deterministic within a range of continuously validated actions that map and remap a chaotic terrain of profitable activities in relation to property and rental. We're not rentiers, you understand. We don't own assets for a living. We do things with them. We're doing commercial science that advances the state of the art. We're discovering deep truths lurking in potentia in the shape of markets and harnessing them — putting them to work."

His eyes glittered. "Lukasz, you come in here with your handful of memos and you ask me to explain how they came about, as though this whole enterprise was a state-machine that we control. We do not control the enterprise. An enterprise is an artificial life-form built up from people and systems in order to minimize transaction costs so that it can be nimble and responsive, so that it can move into niches, dominate them, fully explore them. The human species has spent millennia recombining its institutions to uncover the deep, profound mathematics of power and efficiency.

"It's a terrain with a lot of cul-de-sacs and blind alleys. There are local maxima: maybe a three-move lookahead shows a good outcome from evicting someone who's pregnant and behind on the rent, but the six-move picture is different, because someone like you comes along and makes us look like total assholes. That's fine. All that means is that we have to prune that branch of the tree, try a new direction. Hell, ideally, you'd be in there so early, and give us such a thoroughgoing kicking, that we'd be able to discover and abort the misfire before the payload had fully deployed. You'd be saving us opportunity cost. You'd be part of our chaos-monkey.

"Lukasz, you come in here with your whistleblower memos. But I'm not participating in a short-term exercise. Our mission here is to quantize, systematize, harness and perfect interactions.

"You come in here and you want me to explain, right now, what we're going to do about your piece of information. Here's your answer, Lukasz: we will integrate it. We will create models that incorporate disprovable hypotheses about it, we will test those models, and we will refine them. We will make your documents part of our inventory of clues about the underlying nature of deep reality. Does that answer satisfy you, Lukasz?"

I stood up. Through the whole monologue, Sergey's eyes had not moved from mine, nor had his body-language shifted, nor had he demonstrated one glimmer of excitement or passion. Instead, he'd been matter-of-fact, like he'd been explaining the best way to make an omelet or the optimal public transit route to a distant suburb. I was used to people geeking out about the stuff they did. I'd never experienced this before, though: it was the opposite of geeking out, or maybe a geeking out that went so deep that it went through passion and came out the other side.

It scared me. I'd encountered many different versions of hidebound authoritarianism, fought the rot-fungus in many guises, but this was not like anything I'd ever seen. It had a purity that was almost… seductive.

But beautiful was not the opposite of terrible. The two could easily co-exist.

"I hear that I'm going to get evicted when I get back to the Termite Mound — you've got a process-server waiting for me. That's what I hear."

Sergey shrugged. "And?"

"And? And what use is your deep truth to me if I'm out on the street?"

"What's your point?"

He was as mild and calm as a recorded airport safety announcement. There was something inhuman — transhuman? — in that dispassionate mein.

"Don't kick me out of my place."

"Ah. Excuse me a second."

He finished his tea, set the cup down and headed over to the lab. He chatted with them, touched their screens. The murmur drowned out any words. I didn't try to disguise the fact that I was watching them. There was a long period during which they said nothing, did not touch anything, just stared at the screens with their heads so close together they were almost touching. It was a kind of pantomime of psychic communications.

He came back. "Done," he said. "Is there anything else? We're pretty busy around here."

"Thank you," I said. "No, that's about it."

"All right then," he said. "Are you going to leave me your documents?"

"Yes," I said, and passed him a stack of hardcopies. He looked at the paper for a moment, folded the stack carefully at the middle and put it in one of the wide side-pockets of his beautifully tailored cardigan.

I found my way back down to the ground floor and was amazed to see that the sun was still up. It had felt like hours had passed while Sergey had talked to me, and I could have sworn that the light had faded in those tall windows. But, checking my drop, I saw that it was only three o'clock. I had to be getting home.

There was a process-server waiting ostentatiously in the walkway when I got home, but he looked at me and then down at his screen and then let me pass.

It was only once I was in my room that I realized I hadn't done anything about Bryan's eviction.

[scoonsalicious]

Unwanted: Chapter 16, Unaccompanied - Pt. 4

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Avenger!Fem!Reader

Summary: When your FWB relationship with your best friend Bucky Barnes turns into something more, you couldn’t be happier. That is, however, until a new Avenger sets her sights on your super soldier and he inadvertently breaks your heart. You take on a mission you might not be prepared for to put some distance between the two of you and open yourself up to past traumas. Too bad the only one who can help you heal is the one person you can no longer trust.

Warnings: (For this part only; see Story Masterlist for general Warnings) Language, allusions to sexy stuff, a long overdue conversation with Steve.

Word Count: 2.4k

Previously On...: You went to Tony for answers about how Carthage ended up on the Quinjet; he asks you to attend his annual shareholder gala on Saturday. You, vomiting, + a bunch of stuffy rich people. What could go wrong?

A/N: Quick note about how text messages are written herein: Outgoing messages (in this instance, from Pocket to Bucky) will be indicated by ">>" in front of them. Incoming messages are labeled with the contact name the phone owner has for that person in their phone. In this instance, Pocket has Bucky saved in her phone as "Magic Dick🍆🦾" lol

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Banner By: The absolutely amazing @mrsbuckybarnes1917!

Thank you to all those who have been reading; if you like what you've read, likes, comments, and reblogs give me life, and I truly appreciate them, and you!

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The gala had barely begun and you were already exhausted. Your stomach bug hadn’t let up, and you’d been vomiting for the last two days. Fortunately, you were able to get an injection of an anti-nausea medication from one of the interns down in the med bay, so even though you didn’t currently have to worry about puking your guts out on some obscenely wealthy financier, you just had to deal with the constant exhaustion you’d been feeling from your illness. 

Just a few more hours, you told yourself as you brushed off the advances of yet another man old enough to be your father. Not once had anyone actually wanted to discuss the Crisis Prediction Algorithm System. It seemed you were being viewed more as potential arm candy than Stark Industries’ CTO. That alone was enough to leave you longing for an early night in your bed. 

You did look amazing, though, you had to admit, even if you’d had to go a little heavy on the makeup to mask your pallor. When you asked Tony for a new dress, you’d anticipated taking the girls on a shopping trip. Tony, however, had other ideas and had sent a designer from one of the city’s top fashion houses to the Tower to collect your measurements, and then, the following day, a garment bag appeared in your room containing a striking dress in shimmering Iron Man-red. The bodice was form fitting and strapless, with an asymmetric neckline, and the skirt was full and came down to just below your ankles. 

It was gorgeous, and when your hair and makeup had been completed, you looked like a princess straight out of a fairy tale. You’d sent a picture to Bucky and he’d immediately sent you back a series of panting emojis that had you laughing. The following string of text that described exactly what he wanted to do to you in the dress then had you panting, yourself. Fuck your parameters, apparently.

But now, you couldn’t wait to get out of it for an entirely different reason. The call of your pajamas was so alluring. Not only were you physically tired, but you were bored out of your mind. As this was a Stark Industries party, and not an official Avengers gathering, most of your friends had opted not to come. Rhodey was here, now almost fully recovered from his gunshot wounds, but Tony wouldn’t leave his side, so he was constantly being surrounded by people and you couldn’t really find an opening to go talk to him.

When you’d asked Nat and Wanda if they wanted to come with you, Wanda had politely declined, letting you know that she and Vision already had plans to go out of town for the weekend, while Nat just scoffed at you. “I would literally rather swallow broken glass, Pocket,” she’d said. “Those things are boring as fuck and there is not enough money you could possibly pay me to go to one, sorry.” She’d ended up going bar hopping with Clint and Sam, instead.

So, there you were, all by yourself, not even able to distract yourself with the elaborate spread of food that Tony had provided, as the thought of eating still turned your stomach, when you felt a hand at your elbow.

“Hey,” Steve said softly. His presence took you by surprise– you couldn’t even remember the last time you’d truly spoken to one another, aside from clipped conversations about work and missions. “That’s a lovely dress.” A slight blush tinted his cheeks. “How are you feeling, by the way?”

“Steve, hi. Um, I’m good, thank you. Just really tired. Not quite in the right headspace to schmooze, you know?” you asked him, trying to fight off the awkwardness you were feeling at speaking to him again after so long. “You look very dashing tonight.” And he did, with his dark navy suit and cream button-up. 

He smiled, then held out a hand. “Would you care to dance?” he asked. You thought about it for a second. You didn’t want to lead him on, let him think you had any interest beyond the platonic relationship you’d always shared, but you were so fucking bored. One dance couldn’t hurt.

“I’d love to,” you said, taking his hand and letting him lead you to the dance floor.

He was surprisingly light on his feet, given his hulking frame, and he led you through the steps with ease. You somehow managed to only step on his toes twice, which gave you both a good laugh.

“I must have forgotten all my finishing school lessons,” you teased.

“Nah, you’re doing great.” Steve sent you out for a spin, but as he twirled you back into his arms, you were overcome with a wave of dizziness and stumbled. You felt your knees give out and your body begin to collapse in its exhaustion.

“Whoa,” said Steve, using his super soldier reflexes to grab you before you could fall and hold you steady. “I got you. You wanna sit down? Rest a bit?”

You nodded and he led you over to a quiet corner where some couches had been arranged for that very purpose. He guided you down to sit, then placed himself next to you, concern clouding his features.

“Are you alright?” he asked.

“Yeah,” you said. “Just, you know, between the nausea and the vomiting, I haven’t really been able to keep a lot of food down over the last two days. It’s got me so tired. I think I overdid it with a dance number.”

Steve chuckled, then stood up. “Let me go get you something to drink,” he said. “It’s important that you stay hydrated.” You nodded, and he was off.

With a sigh, you reached into your clutch and pulled out your phone, sending a quick text to Bucky, but knowing that, due to the time difference, he was probably sleeping.

>> I miss you.

You were quite surprised, then, when you saw the three dots appear almost immediately.

Magic Dick🍆🦾: Not that I don’t miss you too, because I desperately do.

Magic Dick🍆🦾: But aren’t you supposed to be livin' it up like Cinderella at the ball?

You chuckled at that before responding.

>> This Cinderella is tired and bored and would much rather be snuggled up in bed with her metal-armed Prince Charming watching a movie or literally any other activity aside from being at this ball unaccompanied. 

Magic Dick🍆🦾: You better be talking ‘bout me, doll. 

>> How many other metal-armed men do I have in my life, dipshit? 

>> Why are you even awake, anyway?

Magic Dick🍆🦾: I’m just teasin’ you, smart ass ;) 

Magic Dick🍆🦾: I’d much rather be curled up in bed with you doin any variety of bedly activities, too >:) 

Magic Dick🍆🦾: And I’m up because we’re getting ready to act on our intel and raid the communications office we were sent to find. 

Magic Dick🍆🦾: Hit 'em at dawn when they’re least suspectin’ it, ya know?

>> Jesus Christ, baby! Be careful! 

Maybe it wasn’t a good thing you hadn’t gone on the mission– you didn’t even have the energy to imagine yourself having the energy to conduct a raid in your current state.

Magic Dick🍆🦾: Always, doll. Gotta get back to my best girl, don’t I?

>> You absolutely do. Cause if I found out you died, I will kill you.

Magic Dick🍆🦾: I have no doubt that if someone were to find a way to murder me from beyond my grave, it would be you.

Magic Dick🍆🦾: Shit. Sorry sweets, I gotta go.

Magic Dick🍆🦾: Try to have fun. I love you.

>> I love you too, Buckaroo.

You stared at the screen for a moment longer, but there was no further reply. Wonderful. Now you would be spending what little energy you absolutely did not have to spare worrying about Bucky’s safety.

Steve returned then, handing you a cold glass dripping with condensation. “It’s lemonade,” he said as you took a sip. “I know how much you like lemons.”

You smiled in thanks, but it came out more like a grimace. Steve noticed immediately.

“Are you alright? Does it not taste good? I could go get you something else…”

You put a reassuring hand on his arm. “No, Steve, the lemonade’s fine. Thank you for getting it for me; that was very thoughtful. It’s just,” you sighed, “I was texting Bucky. He and Carthage are running a raid on a communications office as we speak, and now I’m just nervous and worried about him.”

Steve’s brow creased. “Oh,” he said, though you could tell there was more behind the word than the single syllable would imply. “I didn’t realize the two of you had gotten back together.”

Fuck. You were by far too tired to be having this conversation. Squeezing your eyes shut for a moment, you decided it was time to confront the giant elephant that had been sitting between you and the Captain for far too long. “We haven’t, not officially, anyway, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t still love each other, in spite of everything that’s happened. We’re just working on building trust. Or rather, he’s working on building trust, and I’m working on determining if I can trust him again. It’s a process.”

Steve’s shoulders sagged, the movement so minute you would have missed it if you hadn’t been watching him so closely in the moment. You took a deep breath before you continued.

“Look, Steve,” you began, “I know about your feelings for me.” His eyes shot up to meet yours, and he opened his mouth to protest, but you gently held a hand up to stop him from speaking. You needed to get everything you had to say out while you still had the energy to do so. “I’ve known for a bit, and while I’m truly flattered, and honored, that you care for me, I’m also so sorry that I don’t feel the same way about you. You’re a good man. A wonderful man, and I know most people would tell me I’m an idiot for not reciprocating, but I just don’t share those feelings.”

“It’s because of Berlin, isn’t it?” he asked softly, not meeting your gaze, and for a moment, you could see the small, shy boy Bucky had told you about from his youth.

“Berlin altered our relationship, it’s true,” you told him, “but the nature of my feelings for you were cemented long before that. You’re my family, and do I love you, but I love you as a member of that family. The way I love Tony, and Nat, and Thor, but maybe a little better than I love Clint.” Steve chuckled softly at that, and you smiled, glad you could make him laugh even a little. “I’m sorry this isn’t the answer you want to hear, and I’m sorry that you’ve had to watch me be with your best friend. None of it was ever done with the intention of deliberately causing you pain, but at the same time, I need to do what’s going to make me happy, and I hope you can accept that, as my friend and a member of my family.”

Steve looked like he was going to argue with you for a moment, but he kept his mouth shut and just nodded. “Yeah,” he said eventually. “I can accept that. It hurts,” he chuckled humorously, “but I want both you and Bucky to be happy.”

“Thanks, Stevie,” you said, suppressing a yawn. “Holy shit, I’m tired. I think I’m going to call it a night. I put in enough time to fulfill my obligation to Tony.” You stood, but immediately stumbled, the motion of standing enough to make you dizzy.

Steve was instantly on his feet, an arm out to steady you. “I got you,” he said. He put a hand to your forehead, checking your temperature. “You don’t seem to have a fever, but I’m getting worried about you, Pocket. I should escort you down to med bay.”

You waved the suggestion off. “No, it’s fine. The last thing I want is a bunch of doctors poking and prodding at me all night. I’ll be fine, I just need to sleep.”

“You can barely even stand up on your own,” Steve protested. “Let me at least walk you back to your room. Make sure you get there without falling over.” You were going to tell him you’d be fine on your own when a wave of nausea overtook you.

“Yeah, okay,” you said, clutching tightly to his arm for support. You had planned on going over to Tony and Pepper to say a proper goodbye, but given the way you were currently feeling, an Irish one was going to have to do, instead. 

Steve put a hand to your back and led you out of the banquet hall. You had to stop more than once to steady yourself, and you were grateful for Steve’s assistance. By the time he’d walked you to your door, you were running on fumes.

“Do you need help getting inside?” he asked, looking worried.

“No,” you assured him. “I’ll be okay. I am literally just going to collapse into my bed. Might not even bother taking the dress off, to be honest.”

Steve blushed, and you regretted putting the idea of you getting out of your clothes into his head. “Well, if you’re sure,” he said, running a hand behind his neck, the movement so similar to Bucky that it threw you for a moment. “If there’s anything you need in the night, anything at all, don’t hesitate to call me, alright?”

“Sure, Steve,” you said as he placed a gentle kiss to the crown of your head. You were grateful for his help, but you knew that, even if you were suddenly dying, you would not, in fact, be calling him. “Thanks for your help.”

You wished each other a goodnight, and soon you were once again within the sanctuary of your room. Managing to summon the will from somewhere, you shimmied out of the dress, draping it over your vanity chair; it was, after all, probably far too expensive to either sleep in or leave in a puddle on the floor overnight. You debated whether or not to take the time to remove your face full of makeup but, God, your bed was just so inviting, you’d deal with the consequences in the morning.

<- Previous Part / Next Chapter ->

[tabe4]

Picrew~

I made a Picrew~ I ill probably add more options over time but for now it has all the basic items I wanted from the base game, plus a few additional options~

If you want a pawpad colour separate from the paw lines, select the final paw lines option and head over to the body markings 2 section to select from a few different pad types.

Please note that because of Picrew's limitations, body/ear/hair markings have to be manually selected for the corresponding base choice you have made. If you find your markings are outside of the lines and didn't mean for this to happen, please double check the body base type (paws, mouse, or bunny)

The second set of face markings has the tears on an additional layer so they appear on top of the eyes.

For now, certain colours are linked to each other to simulate the game's limitations (while some options remain unlinked due to picrew limitations or otherwise). I might unlink them later~

Please feel free to inform me of any errors! And you're always free to submit your creations to this blog! I have added a Picrew tag (#picrew posts) to the submissions page for you to use (and for others to block~). I will always be happy to see them! You can submit or post to your blog and tag @tabe4 if you wish~

Terms of Use:

You can use the Picrew to make OCs for Tabe4 or in general

You cannot make monetary profit off of images made using the maker. This includes virtual currency that can be exchanged for money.

You can use the maker to inspire you for adopts, but DO NOT sell characters made with the maker without redesigning them in some way as others can easily recreate your character, even by accident.

You may edit, crop, or manipulate the images made with this maker for personal use, roleplay, or references, as long as you don't claim the art as your own, or "unknown"/"CTO"/etc.

---

[mariacallous]

Several of the most prominent alt-weekly newspapers in the United States are running search-engine-optimized listicles about porn performers, which appear to be AI-generated, alongside their editorial content.

If you pull up the homepage for the Village Voice on your phone, for example, you’ll see reporting from freelancers—longtime columnist Michael Musto still files occasionally—as well as archival work from big-name former writers such as Greg Tate, the Pulitzer Prize–winning music critic. You’ll also see a tab on its drop-down menu labeled “OnlyFans.” Clicking on it pulls up a catalog of listicles ranking different types of pornographic performers by demographic, from “Turkish” to “incest” to “granny.” These blog posts link out to hundreds of different OnlyFans accounts and are presented as editorial work, without labels indicating they are advertisements or sponsored.

Similar content appears on the websites of LA Weekly, which is owned by Street Media, the same parent company as the Village Voice, as well as the St. Louis–based alt-weekly the Riverfront Times. Although there is a chance some of these posts could be written by human freelancers, the writing bears markers of AI slop.

According to AI detection startup Reality Defender, which scanned a sampling of these posts, the content in the articles registers as having a “high probability” of containing AI-generated text. One scanned example, a Riverfront Times story titled “19 Best Free Asian OnlyFans Featuring OnlyFans Asian Free in 2024,” concludes with the following sentence, exemplary in its generic horny platitudes: “You explore, savor, and discover your next favorite addiction, and we’ll be back with more insane talent in the future!”

“We’re seeing an ever-increasing part of old media be reborn as AI-generated new media,” says Reality Defender cofounder and CTO Ali Shahriyari. “Unfortunately, this means way less informational and newsworthy content and more SEO-focused ‘slop’ that really just wastes people’s time and attention. Tracking these kinds of publications isn’t even part of our day to day, yet we’re seeing them pop up more and more.”

LA Weekly laid off or offered buyouts to the majority of its staff in March 2024, while the Riverfront Times laid off its entire staff in May 2024 after it was sold by parent company Big Lou Media to an unnamed buyer.

The Village Voice’s sole remaining editorial staffer, R.C. Baker, says he is not involved with the OnlyFans posts, although it appears on the site as editorial content. “I handle only news and cultural reporting out of New York City. I have nothing to do with OnlyFans. That content is handled by a separate team that is based, I believe, in LA,” he told WIRED.

Likewise, former LA Weekly editor in chief Darrick Rainey says he, too, had nothing to do with the OnlyFans listicles when he worked there. Neither did his colleagues in editorial. “We weren’t happy about it at all, and we were absolutely not involved in putting it up,” he says.

Former employees are disturbed to see their archival work comingling with SEO porn slop. “It’s wrenching in so many ways,” says former Riverfront Times writer Danny Wicentowski. “Like watching a loved home get devoured by vines, or left to rot.”

This is a new twist in the grim growing world of AI slop. WIRED has reported on a variety of defunct news and media outlets that have been resurrected by new owners and stuffed with AI-generated clickbait, from a small-town Iowa newspaper to the beloved feminist blog the Hairpin. In the case of the alt-weeklies and OnlyFans listicles, the clickbait is appearing alongside actual editorial content, both archival and new.

It is unclear how this effort has been coordinated between the sites, or whether there are several parallel efforts ongoing to produce OnlyFans-centric listicles. LA Weekly and the Village Voice are both owned by the same parent company, Street Media, and some of their OnlyFans content is identical. Meanwhile, the Riverfront Times publishes its OnlyFans blogs under the byline “RFT staff.”

Street Media owner Brian Calle did not respond to WIRED’s requests for comment. Chris Keating, the Riverfront Times’ former owner, says he is bound by a confidentiality agreement and cannot name the new buyer, but that he “does not believe” Calle is part of the purchasing company controlling the new Riverfront Times.

Daniela LaFave, an Austin-based SEO expert who is bylined on the majority of the Village Voice OnlyFans blog posts as well as some of the LA Weekly posts, confirmed to WIRED that she is the same person named as the author. She declined to answer whether she used AI tools to create the posts.

Another frequent byline on the Village Voice and LA Weekly posts, “Jasmine Ramer,” has published 910 articles primarily for these two outlets in the past year, according to the public relations platform Muck Rack. (Sample headlines: “Top OnlyFans Sluts 2024” and “Top 10 Finnish OnlyFans & Hottest Finnish OnlyFans 2023.”) There is a profile on LinkedIn listed as a senior staff writer at LA Weekly for an Austria-based woman named Jasmine Ramer, but there is little other digital footprint for the writer. When Reality Defender analyzed the profile photo on Ramer’s LinkedIn account, it found it was likely AI-generated. There is also at least one other account using the same photo claiming to be a digital marketing executive in the UK. (WIRED did not receive a response when it asked Ramer for comment via LinkedIn.)

OnlyFans is an online porn behemoth, one which has spawned numerous cottage industries, like professional proxy chatters who impersonate the platform’s stars. There are marketing agencies devoted to promoting OnlyFans creators, and many social platforms from Reddit to X are swarmed with bots trying to entice potential customers. These efforts are known as “OnlyFans funnels.”

Risqué sex ads have played a major role in the rise and fall of some alt-weeklies. The founders of Village Voice Media, which once owned the Village Voice, LA Weekly, and the Riverfront Times as well as other US-based alt-weeklies, created the classified website Backpage.com in 2004 to compete with Craigslist. It created a lucrative revenue stream, buoying many titles for years, but ginned up major controversy for hosting sex ads.

Vice President Kamala Harris, serving as California attorney general at the time, dubbed the company “the world’s top online brothel” in 2016 and arrested its founders and CEO for facilitating prostitution. With this recent history in mind, the decision to lean into sexual advertorial is especially brash.

It may be that these alt-weeklies are creating these blog posts in an effort to drum up web traffic to their sites, which could in turn help boost digital ad sales. They may also be accepting money from the accounts or from representatives of the accounts promoted, which would mean the posts were unlabeled advertorial. “Online ads, print ads, they all dried up,” Rainey says. “But this OnlyFans stuff is there.”

“OnlyFans has no financial arrangement with these outlets,” an OnlyFans spokesperson who identified herself only as “Brixie” told WIRED via email.

“I think the creators are paying,” says Luka Sek, SEO manager for an OnlyFans promotion company called SocialRise. “An agency that handles multiple models, or someone doing the marketing for such agencies.”

Whatever the reason, it marks a grim new pit stop for declining media publications, one in which blatant SEO bait sits side by side with culturally valuable archival journalistic work and, in the case of the Village Voice, ongoing contemporary reportage.

Tricia Romano, a former Village Voice writer who recently published an oral history of the newspaper, The Freaks Came Out to Write, sees the arrival of AI slop as keeping with the recent deterioration of alt-weeklies. “This is the logical dystopian conclusion,” she says. “But who’s reading it?”

[burnishedrebel]

Starter Call - Round Un

Do you want a thread with me?

Have you been following me for a while but unsure how to make the first move?

Do we have a thread or two already, but you'd like more?

Do we have a million threads but you'd like a million and one?

Have we written before but you're keen to get back in the saddle?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, here's an idea for you! xD

I've looked through my open starters since I launched this blog two months ago, and I've found over a dozen which have either not had any replies so far, or whose threads have gone cold.

I'd love to start threads from any of these, so I'm advertising them here for any current or new followers to consider!

Cassandra Burnwood - 37, bisexual, heist crew leader

Esme Kennedy - 35, bisexual, actress

James Bond - 36, heterosexual, 00 agent

Jasper Breeland - 32, bisexual, photojournalist

Killian Taylor - 27, pansexual, dock worker

Leo Christ - 40, heterosexual, consulting detective

Javier Cuevas - 29, pansexual, criminal fixer

John Marston - 34, pansexual, rancher / bounty hunter

Alexei Calvet - 35, heterosexual, ballerino

Kyle Davenport - 47, pansexual, President

Lyndon Hamilton - 35, bisexual, tech CTO

Truman Rutherford - 33, heterosexual, archaeology professor

Daniel Walden - 44, bisexual, political consultant

Feel free to ask me any questions before replying, and please read my 'core rules' and styling rules here too.

I hope these starters can spark some inspiration so we can get writing together soon!

[jcmarchi]

Vivek Desai, Chief Technology Officer, North America at RLDatix – Interview Series

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/vivek-desai-chief-technology-officer-north-america-at-rldatix-interview-series/

Vivek Desai, Chief Technology Officer, North America at RLDatix – Interview Series

Vivek Desai is the Chief Technology Officer of North America at RLDatix, a connected healthcare operations software and services company. RLDatix is on a mission to change healthcare. They help organizations drive safer, more efficient care by providing governance, risk and compliance tools that drive overall improvement and safety.

What initially attracted you to computer science and cybersecurity?

I was drawn to the complexities of what computer science and cybersecurity are trying to solve – there is always an emerging challenge to explore. A great example of this is when the cloud first started gaining traction. It held great promise, but also raised some questions around workload security. It was very clear early on that traditional methods were a stopgap, and that organizations across the board would need to develop new processes to effectively secure workloads in the cloud. Navigating these new methods was a particularly exciting journey for me and a lot of others working in this field. It’s a dynamic and evolving industry, so each day brings something new and exciting.

Could you share some of the current responsibilities that you have as CTO of RLDatix? ��

Currently, I’m focused on leading our data strategy and finding ways to create synergies between our products and the data they hold, to better understand trends. Many of our products house similar types of data, so my job is to find ways to break those silos down and make it easier for our customers, both hospitals and health systems, to access the data. With this, I’m also working on our global artificial intelligence (AI) strategy to inform this data access and utilization across the ecosystem.

Staying current on emerging trends in various industries is another crucial aspect of my role, to ensure we are heading in the right strategic direction. I’m currently keeping a close eye on large language models (LLMs). As a company, we are working to find ways to integrate LLMs into our technology, to empower and enhance humans, specifically healthcare providers, reduce their cognitive load and enable them to focus on taking care of patients.

In your LinkedIn blog post titled “A Reflection on My 1st Year as a CTO,” you wrote, “CTOs don’t work alone. They’re part of a team.” Could you elaborate on some of the challenges you’ve faced and how you’ve tackled delegation and teamwork on projects that are inherently technically challenging?

The role of a CTO has fundamentally changed over the last decade. Gone are the days of working in a server room. Now, the job is much more collaborative. Together, across business units, we align on organizational priorities and turn those aspirations into technical requirements that drive us forward. Hospitals and health systems currently navigate so many daily challenges, from workforce management to financial constraints, and the adoption of new technology may not always be a top priority. Our biggest goal is to showcase how technology can help mitigate these challenges, rather than add to them, and the overall value it brings to their business, employees and patients at large. This effort cannot be done alone or even within my team, so the collaboration spans across multidisciplinary units to develop a cohesive strategy that will showcase that value, whether that stems from giving customers access to unlocked data insights or activating processes they are currently unable to perform.

What is the role of artificial intelligence in the future of connected healthcare operations?

As integrated data becomes more available with AI, it can be utilized to connect disparate systems and improve safety and accuracy across the continuum of care. This concept of connected healthcare operations is a category we’re focused on at RLDatix as it unlocks actionable data and insights for healthcare decision makers – and AI is integral to making that a reality.

A non-negotiable aspect of this integration is ensuring that the data usage is secure and compliant, and risks are understood. We are the market leader in policy, risk and safety, which means we have an ample amount of data to train foundational LLMs with more accuracy and reliability. To achieve true connected healthcare operations, the first step is merging the disparate solutions, and the second is extracting data and normalizing it across those solutions. Hospitals will benefit greatly from a group of interconnected solutions that can combine data sets and provide actionable value to users, rather than maintaining separate data sets from individual point solutions.

In a recent keynote, Chief Product Officer Barbara Staruk shared how RLDatix is leveraging generative AI and large language models to streamline and automate patient safety incident reporting. Could you elaborate on how this works?

This is a really significant initiative for RLDatix and a great example of how we’re maximizing the potential of LLMs. When hospitals and health systems complete incident reports, there are currently three standard formats for determining the level of harm indicated in the report: the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Common Formats, the National Coordinating Council for Medication Error Reporting and Prevention and the Healthcare Performance Improvement (HPI) Safety Event Classification (SEC). Right now, we can easily train a LLM to read through text in an incident report. If a patient passes away, for example, the LLM can seamlessly pick out that information. The challenge, however, lies in training the LLM to determine context and distinguish between more complex categories, such as severe permanent harm, a taxonomy included in the HPI SEC for example, versus severe temporary harm. If the person reporting does not include enough context, the LLM won’t be able to determine the appropriate category level of harm for that particular patient safety incident.

RLDatix is aiming to implement a simpler taxonomy, globally, across our portfolio, with concrete categories that can be easily distinguished by the LLM. Over time, users will be able to simply write what occurred and the LLM will handle it from there by extracting all the important information and prepopulating incident forms. Not only is this a significant time-saver for an already-strained workforce, but as the model becomes even more advanced, we’ll also be able to identify critical trends that will enable healthcare organizations to make safer decisions across the board.

What are some other ways that RLDatix has begun to incorporate LLMs into its operations?

Another way we’re leveraging LLMs internally is to streamline the credentialing process. Each provider’s credentials are formatted differently and contain unique information. To put it into perspective, think of how everyone’s resume looks different – from fonts, to work experience, to education and overall formatting. Credentialing is similar. Where did the provider attend college? What’s their certification? What articles are they published in? Every healthcare professional is going to provide that information in their own way.

At RLDatix, LLMs enable us to read through these credentials and extract all that data into a standardized format so that those working in data entry don’t have to search extensively for it, enabling them to spend less time on the administrative component and focus their time on meaningful tasks that add value.

Cybersecurity has always been challenging, especially with the shift to cloud-based technologies, could you discuss some of these challenges?

Cybersecurity is challenging, which is why it’s important to work with the right partner. Ensuring LLMs remain secure and compliant is the most important consideration when leveraging this technology. If your organization doesn’t have the dedicated staff in-house to do this, it can be incredibly challenging and time-consuming. This is why we work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on most of our cybersecurity initiatives. AWS helps us instill security and compliance as core principles within our technology so that RLDatix can focus on what we really do well – which is building great products for our customers in all our respective verticals.

What are some of the new security threats that you have seen with the recent rapid adoption of LLMs?

From an RLDatix perspective, there are several considerations we’re working through as we’re developing and training LLMs. An important focus for us is mitigating bias and unfairness. LLMs are only as good as the data they are trained on. Factors such as gender, race and other demographics can include many inherent biases because the dataset itself is biased. For example, think of how the southeastern United States uses the word “y’all” in everyday language. This is a unique language bias inherent to a specific patient population that researchers must consider when training the LLM to accurately distinguish language nuances compared to other regions. These types of biases must be dealt with at scale when it comes to leveraging LLMS within healthcare, as training a model within one patient population does not necessarily mean that model will work in another.

Maintaining security, transparency and accountability are also big focus points for our organization, as well as mitigating any opportunities for hallucinations and misinformation. Ensuring that we’re actively addressing any privacy concerns, that we understand how a model reached a certain answer and that we have a secure development cycle in place are all important components of effective implementation and maintenance.

What are some other machine learning algorithms that are used at RLDatix?

Using machine learning (ML) to uncover critical scheduling insights has been an interesting use case for our organization. In the UK specifically, we’ve been exploring how to leverage ML to better understand how rostering, or the scheduling of nurses and doctors, occurs. RLDatix has access to a massive amount of scheduling data from the past decade, but what can we do with all of that information? That’s where ML comes in. We’re utilizing an ML model to analyze that historical data and provide insight into how a staffing situation may look two weeks from now, in a specific hospital or a certain region.

That specific use case is a very achievable ML model, but we’re pushing the needle even further by connecting it to real-life events. For example, what if we looked at every soccer schedule within the area? We know firsthand that sporting events typically lead to more injuries and that a local hospital will likely have more inpatients on the day of an event compared to a typical day. We’re working with AWS and other partners to explore what public data sets we can seed to make scheduling even more streamlined. We already have data that suggests we’re going to see an uptick of patients around major sporting events or even inclement weather, but the ML model can take it a step further by taking that data and identifying critical trends that will help ensure hospitals are adequately staffed, ultimately reducing the strain on our workforce and taking our industry a step further in achieving safer care for all.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit RLDatix.

[simsouthflorida]

[worldlibertytv]

See 35th Annual Caribbean Tourism Organization’s Caribbean Week in New York events- 2024 in our World Liberty TV, Travel Channels @ https://www.worldlibertytv.org/35th-annual-caribbean-tourism-organizations-caribbean-week-in-new-york-events-2024/

[calpioninc]

How AI & Deep Learning are helping the Healthcare Industry to Resolve Their Major Challenges

Did you know that the impact of AI in the Healthcare industry is immense, with 42% of companies exploring AI for its implementation in the future?

To fully comprehend the significance of the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on these advancements, it is crucial to understand the scale at which AI in Healthcare is utilizing data to analyze, predict, and provide the appropriate recommendations to generate revenue and maintain health practice-patient relationships.

Are you facing similar challenges?

Read our latest blog on how AI and Deep Learning are resolving the major challenges in the healthcare industry and transforming it for future growth.

[flapjacs]

New Firefox update (version 128) enables adtracking

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1e45mih/firefox_enables_adtracking_for_all_users/

The wording is a little strange, but the general consensus is to opt out. One of their devs had the absolute nerve to say

"Opt-in is only meaningful if users can make an informed decision. I think explaining a system like PPA would be a difficult task. And most users complain a lot about these types of interruption. In my opinion an easily discoverable opt-out option + blog posts and such were the right decision." [x]

"You're too stupid to make this decision, so we'll make it for you." Wow, thanks! They neither explain it clearly (and admit that) nor told anyone (they said it was announced in emails, but then acknowledge that their average user doesn't look at stuff like that) ofc we cant make an informed decision. I'm still trying to figure out if this means they put a filter between the tracker and us that's already grabbing this info -or- if they're doing the trackers work for them by sending the info before the tracker even asks for it.

Based on how overly worded everything is and they can't be bothered to make it simple to understand, and that a lot of people don't keep up on these things, the assumption would be that more people will leave this unchecked than not, so they might not get all of us but better more than not, therefore, you want to uncheck it. As always, take my analysis with a grain of salt, and look into it yourself. But the way it's worded just seems like they've fucked us either way. Their CTO said none of this matters if you have adblock, which is bullshit for a number of reasons, but that isn't foolproof. Companies/websites are doing their damnedest to circumvent adblockers all the time. cough tumblr cough

TO OPT OUT:

go to settings>privacy & security -or- type "about:preferences#privacy" in your search bar

scroll down to "website advertising preferences"

uncheck box marked "allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement

If you do not see it, you might have an older version of firefox. It doesn't seem to be on mobile yet.

WELL SHIT. WHILE YOU'RE AT IT: There's a "Firefox Data Collection and Use" section, make sure to uncheck all that too. Amazing.

[sigery]

tf Travelers/Lords/Etc

Lord Night (True Ending?)

Blacky (multi familial, bad ending # 1 'gem')

Nee Nee (is there a name for this verse?, traveler)

Mad King (lonely bean, non canon)

'Baby Traveler' (tf Bloodmoon family, baby mishaps)

Hazard (rle, traveler)

Kitten (rle, s-traveler)

Ghosty (rle, bad ending #2 'dead but not gone')

Void (rle, bad ending #3 'dungeon')

NB (rle, bad ending # 1.5 'early release gem' non canon?)

Mer Night (rle, non canon?)

Mer Blacky (rle, non canon?)

'Baby Traveler' (rle, baby mishaps, canon?)

Erebus (lg, s-traveler)

Static ("horror" au, traveler?)

Void (Inferno, bad ending #3 'dungeon')

Void (Saturn, bad ending #3 'dungeon')

That pre-trapped Lunar (Inferno, 'Eclipse is scared')

Refracted Glow (RBB, traveler?)

Void (CC, bad ending #3 'dungeon')

ctos!Traveler (Lord Jeopardy, traveler)

There are almost definitely more but this is off the top of my head.

@madcatdaderpydrawer-blog, @synthcoyote, Inferno Anon*, @amphiptere-art, @artoutoftheblue)

*not sure if I'm supposed to tag your actual account since you still use anon mostly?