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I’m so grateful for the voice of @parismarx.com at this morning’s panel at FAccT’26 today. “There’s a real divide between what the government wants and what the public sees.”

🎯🎯🎯 www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Please Use AI

Is something “too dangerous” if it’s easy to slap on guardrails? Tigers are really dangerous. Tigers are at the zoo in my town. Don’t go in the tiger enclosure at the zoo. The zoo is pretty good at keeping you out. Under normal circumstances, tigers aren’t really something to be alarmed about.

I love running in lilac season: the sweetness in the air is magical.

Welcome to the Slopocene Epoch.

Particularly in the context of (appropriate) crackdowns on LLM-generated papers (e.g., on arXiv) and more and more tales of fabricated citations, two reminders: (1) LLMs do not "cite their sources" (2) Using an LLM to generate, complete, or fix LaTeX code can result in fabricated citations

In this metaphor, who is the shark and who is the diver?

I desire more in life than to be the “don’t summarise with AI”-guy on bluesky 😅 but reports like this keep coming in, so I’ll repeat ad nauseam, don’t summarise with ‘AI’! www.tue.nl/en/our-unive...

This is crushing.

"I have a finite time on this earth that I mostly want to spend interacting with other human beings. I don’t want to be the person arguing with a robot, or wasting my time reading something that a real person couldn’t be bothered to write."

Writing is “a way of learning what one thinks by attempting to say it. An LLM can reproduce the appearance of that activity, but it can’t replace it, because the value lies not only in the object produced but in the transformation that occurs during its making.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

WTF, NYer. "If we agree that college primarily serves a credentialling process that stamps select young people as worthy of work..." We do not. So much for the bastion of erudite journalism. This is sensationalism, damaging our most vital institution: education. www.newyorker.com/news/fault-l...

The National Science Foundation is the main source of funding for basic sciences in the US. For decades, they have supported a scientific R&D ecosystem in the US that has been an engine of economic growth and competitive advantage. Destroying the agency is no less than an act of sabotage.

AI is like if every website now emitted a smell when you clicked on it. Why? “It’s the future! So we installed it everywhere!”

Just imagine installing an OS and needing to acknowledge that “the software is not intended for use in California” because it does not comply with their age verification law. 🫠

"What exactly do you expect Carney to do / not do?" A thread of 50 specific items (with links, and not in any particular order), a large fraction of which are in line with warning signs we pointed out early on and were told to be quiet, wait and see, or trust his 4D chess acumen. 1/??

“Amazon, Microsoft & Google ​have each recently abandoned construction of multibillion-dollar data centers over community opposition & now the companies are coming under shareholder pressure over ‌the environmental impact” Lose the passive voice—PEOPLE are doing this💫 www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

fresh off the press from yours truly: oecs.mit.edu/pub/b61joemo... I offer an overview of algorithmic bias. I trace its historical roots, examine canonical scholarship and notable real-world incidents, and explore how algorithmic bias emerged as a field of study 1/

I certainly won't claim that all human scientific endeavors have always been good and noble and without any suffering to humankind. But I will say that the scientific impulse--the curiosity that drives us to work together to understand our universe--is one of my very favorite things about humanity.

I met with AI data labelers in Kenya who are organizing their colleagues to fight the brutal working conditions and horrible pay given to the workers at the "bottom of the AI supply chain." They believe the NDAs they've signed are unenforceable so are speaking out: www.404media.co/ai-is-africa...

If you still think what Grammerly is doing is “enshittification “ and recent but not committed to the long history of slavery, women’s ghost writing , colonialism and anti DEI that’s why they did it And will continue to until they learn

Category error! I'm sick to the back teeth of comparisons to humans. It's so rife even colleagues do it. What's next? > I compared a rock and a person, and challenged them to stay still the longest and the rock won! Wow! Things thought up by the unhinged & those who wish to dehumanise for profit.

I think one of the most staggering industry shifts in my 16 years as a tech reporter is that it’s not become a question of “should our product help the government kill and/or surveil people?” but “to what extent?” www.anthropic.com/news/where-s...

Community *is* the most important part. Don’t let corporations profit from driving us into isolation.

Oof, yes: magical thinking and self-soothing for sure.

"A man free of patriarchy is a man who has found not only every woman's humanity, but one who has at last discovered his own. The actual path to liberation for lonely men is feminism—because pursuing an identity based on dominating others is self-isolating." www.the-reframe.com/fix-your-hea...

The grey goo that we used to be afraid of, the output of out of control nano machines? It’s actually this. It isn’t a sterile organic landscape, it’s an unsympathetically incongruent, incomprehensible, and untrustworthy information landscape.

This is the way.

Tha feeling when you open your laptop 30 minutes before class and it is closing applications to install an update.

Yes, they are harmful— especially in education— precisely because of their utility.

“If you look at major companies and corporations like Microsoft and Google, they are the very entities that are powering genocide, powering war. You start to realize that a lot of the claims around 'AI for good' start to crumble.” - @abeba.bsky.social

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

And not only completing it, but doing so well, producing a durable result worth being proud of. There has always been shortcuts. When the work matters, they’re always a trap.

Rhetoric didn’t shoot the guns.

Blistering piece on ed tech in @economist.com. ‘Although ed-tech companies tout huge learning gains, independent research has made clear that technology rarely boosts learning in schools—and often impairs it.’ economist.com/united-state...

AI is a ruling-class idea Paul Ralph (Dalhousie University) www.linkedin.com/posts/pralph...

can we stop for just a sec?

A List of Predictions Made in 1926 About 2026 🧵

Just say no!

I agree with all this — sick leave is essential to a healthy society. While we’re working on that, though, we need to make it a general norm that if you MUST be around others while sick, you wear a mask (preferably a good one).

The key phrase in this op-ed: "scarcity breeds ingenuity." What's so remarkable about the human mind is how nimble it is, how capable we are despite *not* having read all the data on the Internet. The brute force methods of today's AI models are offensive to human cognitive elegance.

I don’t know if anyone else notices or cares, but when I see a presentation in which the speaker uses obviously generated-AI images to illustrate their slides, it makes me immediately less confident in whatever other content they’re presenting.

This explains the trouble I had trying to secure RAM for new PCs for home! Whatever I’d selected in PC Part Picker would disappear between adding it to the build and actually going to the website to make the purchase. I had to revise my choice three times in a matter of a few hours. 🤨

Make an exenniel feel old with three words: 30th anniversary edition. open.spotify.com/album/6nrppj...

New research supporting the radical proposition that trying to learn something works better than not trying. theconversation.com/learning-wit...

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick. Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.