Very important piece. "Whether or not OpenAI leaders intend to muddy the waters of science, grantwashing hinders technology safety ... It adds uncertainty and debate in areas where companies want to avoid liability and that uncertainty gives the appearance of science."

“it’s reasonable to ask questions about trans girls in sports” was always intended to mainstream transphobia. It’s absurd that people fell for it. Democrats are constantly letting oppressors set the terms of debate instead of just saying “no, fuck you.”

hey @propublica.org I love the work your reporters do, like, a lot. I have donated. But your bargaining stance on AI is unacceptable and offensive. You simply cannot replace real journalist labor with a technology that is purpose-built for fabricating text.I I support your workers.

sheesh, the only thing worse than getting kicked out of the polycule is finding out via jira ticket 😣

What would be great is if Dem members in multiple states showed up at multiple ICE facilities at 10 a.m. tomorrow armed with this injunction.

Accessibility without verifiability isn’t clarity—it’s risk transfer. AI summaries don’t simplify truth; they abstract accountability. If readers can’t validate claims, the output degrades from aid to liability.

"I didn’t have the courage to come out until I was 21, and that means 21 years of pain, 21 years of unwavering homesickness that only went away when I was able to get the care that I needed. And my biggest regret in life is that I never had a childhood without that pain.”

"The psychologist and cognitive scientist Iris van Rooij has argued that the emergence of AI “slop” across scholarly resources portends nothing less than “the destruction of knowledge” www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

A PERSONAL APPEAL TO MY AMERICAN JEWISH FAMILY Written by Dean, IfNotNow BIJOCSM (Black, Indigenous, Jews of Color, Sephardi, and Mizrahi) & Israeli-American Organizer 🧵

I attended a meeting of the brookline select board last night. trying to locate the agenda today I instead found a website thelocallens dot org supposedly "democratizing local democracy" by summarizing meetings via AI. As someone who attended the meeting, I can assure you this summary sucked.

"Every mass shooting is a moment to stand in solidarity with the queer and trans folks murdered at Pulse, the Muslim victims of the Christchurch Mosque shootings, the Jewish victims of attacks in Pittsburgh and Bondi..." - @katemanne.bsky.social katemanne.substack.com/p/this-one-h...

i like this description of the challenges EVERYONE faces when trying to write clearly and well about their subject.

"Cuomo isn't Jewish, Adams isn't Jewish, Trump isn't Jewish. But they all are delighted to weaponize antisemitism, to weaponize Jewish fear, against Muslims especially." Jewish Democratic Congressional candidate Brad Lander. My full interview with him: zeteo.com/p/meet-the-p...

I hate LLMs with a fiery passion but this thread from a therapist on how she talks about chatbots with her clients seems like practical, useful advice for therapists. Which I am not, so I can just yell DONT USE CHATGPT it'll make all your crazy worse.

not sure how I got here but apparently the smithsonian now has a children's area called Wegman's Wonderplace, sponsored by Wegmans. americanhistory.si.edu/events/calen...

are there even any queers in brookline? inquiring minds want to know! (the answer is yes! there are queer people in brookline! we exist!)

the thing I use to stay off my phone is called a Brick, it actually works, dramatically, and I love it. It's on sale. No, I do not get anything from this link as I am too lazy/busy to ever do the work to get an affiliate link so I can hawk stuff to my meager # of followers. getbrick.app

I noticed this neat little illustration of pick-up truck bloat on my dog walk this morning. These are both Ford Rangers.

Their position is that antisemitism, which they love, is caused by Muslim immigrants, whom they hate

Let me understand you correctly, governments can care that people are being murdered?

I appreciate @massgovernor.bsky.social at least sending a sternly worded letter, but ... "Massport said it cannot legally prohibit the flights"? Loosely translated, this means "we'll probably lose so it's not worth fighting." Block the flights & make a judge force you to allow them!

To the extent journalists have a ~moral~ obligation, it is to provide accurate information to the public in accessible formats. It is not our job to structure data so that computer models can obfuscate its origins and repackage it with introduced errors. That is… literally insane.

meanwhile every left-wing thinker I know will tell you that race isn't real but racism sure as hell is. "race essentialism" my ass.

🚨 THE BATTLE BEGINS 🚨 Your favorite year-end contest is back. It’s time to choose who will be this year’s Worst Person In Tech for 2025! Each day of this week new matchups will drop until we choose the winner on Friday. 🗳️ Cast your ballot: twsu.forms.app/worst-person...

"ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien,” he said."

There’s a specific mechanism in authoritarian movements that we’re seeing play out in real-time across American media and tech. It’s a simple rule: "If we cannot co-opt it, we must destroy it." It is the logic of "scorched earth." It's the logic of the Nero Decree and it's happening right now. 🧵

The ACA isn't just "health care for people who don't have a conventional employer." It also disallows something that was incredibly common 20 years ago, which I fear is getting lost to generational memory: insurance companies could deny you health care for essentially any previous health problem.

1. Private equity profiteers everything, ruining it 2. People mad, want to burn everything down 3. Private equity funds Republican candidates blaming immigrants 4. Dems say we must not demonize their wealthy friends in private equity & they also hate immigrants 5. 2024 happens

We library folk do a good job talking about all the free services we offer, but I don’t see many of us talking about how libraries are one or the only places where you can use services without being advertised to.

One argument I used to make to my students about why it was important to learn history (and historical thinking) is that someone was always going to be trying to tell you things were natural or had always been this way and that you needed to be able to see that as an exercise of power.

"Forgive me, but I can’t imagine being excited that this technology which is rapidly accelerating inequality is also helping me save a little time on writing code." joshcollinsworth.com/blog/sloptim...

Armed ICE agents trapped US citizens in a restaurant and demanded their papers. Federal agents walked into East African restaurants in Cedar-Riverside, MN. They closed and blocked the doors. Then they demanded to see everyone’s papers. Every person present was a US citizen.

Here are the top 10 most popular post-1945 American authors at the Seattle Public Library over the last 20 years.

The New School was founded by Columbia University professors who wanted a university run by the faculty with minimal administration. For over 100 years it has been a unique institution with progressive values and incredible students and faculty from Ai Weiwei to Hannah Arendt. We are devastated.

Let people be their true selves, as they know and understand them. Let children explore their identities. Celebrate difference and variety and the incredible spectrum of humanity. The only alternative denies an opportunity to celebrate the joy of human flourishing and is ultimately unspeakably cruel

I understand that a lot of folks have been misled by fear-mongering and powerful regressive voices but it’s still astonishing to me that so many have fallen for the idea that oppressively policing other people’s gender identity and expression could in any way be part of an enlightened future.

Urbanists will talk about how cars are a machine that makes you selfish and crazy, and I know it’s easy to roll your eyes at that but if you give drivers the ability to comment they will say “yes I am selfish and crazy”

from the article “I was training my own replacement, teaching machines how to manipulate lonely people the same way I was being forced to,” he writes. “Remember that an AI girlfriend responding to your loneliness might just be a man in a Nairobi slum, wondering if he'll ever feel real love again.”

There isn't a single problem "solved" by edtech that couldn't be fixed with smaller classes led by well-paid teachers given real academic freedom

Movements have to offer structures and social responses that engage with the same conditions that lead to reactionary social delusions and the destructive actions and beliefs associated with them.

The difference between humans and AI is not subtle. It's the difference between what holds us together in a collective shared material experience of reality and meaning, and a colonial mind poison built on the backs of environmental destruction and human exploitation. This is not a fucking game

Easier is not usually better. This is the lie we've been sold by capitalism and colonialism. Use this thing, built with suffering and exploitation, to avoid pain. To avoid struggle. To avoid living. Dissociate through life: game, scroll, consume. Every day, it breaks my heart seeing us like this

But turning to AI for any social use will always, *always* widen the connection gap between you and other humans. It causes social muscles to atrophy instead of growing stronger. Those of us who see the dangers need to be offering much more support to those who are falling into it

It's sad and irritating that the people we trust to protect our rights have failed to understand that they're willing to destroy what protects our right to advocate for our rights online for years from facing lawsuits from fascists that want to silence us forever. We can't let them kill Section 230!

Protip: AI is wildly not worth the price of its water use. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

This is why I go nuts when people compare AI water use to agriculture or something. Do we need an overhaul of our systems? Sure! But humans need to eat and we don't need Garfield robbing sexy Pikachu at gunpoint. You're comparing apples to rubber chickens.

i've said before that (at least for my purposes, and possibly yours) it's more useful to define AI by the political qualities that surround and attend to the project. surveillance projects like Flock and ShotSpotter don't need to implement a certain tech stack to be recognizably "AI" projects

this is a general warrant and it's specifically the kind of warrant the framers passed the 4th amendment to outlaw

shoutout to the crowd that insisted it was a political loser to stand up for abrego garcia’s rights