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.

Welp, you can either 1) stop Google from using all your email to train models, or 2) you can use spellcheck.

These are not serious people.

Academia is a really racist and sexist place. Larry Summers, as the president of Harvard, epitomized that racism and sexism but he is not unique. That's why we needed DEI.

I'll believe the Democrats give a fuck and this isn't just about ✨political scandal points✨ when 𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚 completely denounce and cut all ties with 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦𝑜𝑛𝑒 in these chats and start standing ten toes down for the 𝑣𝑖𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑠 . No matter who it is. No matter what.

"It's like asbestos" is the perfect analogy. Useful in some contexts, dangerous and unhealthy in others we won't even know about for decades. *perfect*

I’d like the “too close to the sun” package, please! Thank you.

Every ad now

New: Google has chosen a side in Trump's mass deportation campaign. Google is hosting a CBP facial recognition app to hunt immigrants; no indication Google will remove. At same time Google takes down apps for reporting ICE sightings “Big tech has made their choice” www.404media.co/google-has-c...

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

When you wake up and think that it’s a warm January day rather than a cold November day.

I am simply unwilling to rely on these black boxes to generate anything on my behalf or for my use, nor am I willing to feed it my thinking or writing in service of unstated goals and potentially immoral uses. Some of the generative AI tools out there are potentially useful, sure, but at what cost?

Honestly, sometimes I really miss my math dork days …

Haha, this from the New Yorker is getting passed around the math dork community. I did a comic about this kind of thought a few years ago: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/commut...

A few days ago I watched a movie that was prefaced by the threat of fine and imprisonment if the copyrighted work was pirated. I guess we’ll see if under late-stage capitalism theft as exploitation is protected; I’m not optimistic that OpenAI will face justice.

The poor work more than the rich. This is so obvious it shouldn't need to be said, but American ideologies of meritocracy and bootstrapping obfuscate the realities of poverty. No one works harder than the poor. It's also expensive to be poor, but that's another post for another day.

I am not a "tech critic". I am an antifascist, a feminist, an anticapitalist, an engineer. My criticism of tech flows from my politics and values. Not from a desire to save or destroy tech. Tech is an expression of power and that's what the whole conversation is about.

As an AI researcher that is more often critical of AI than not, this, a million times this.

I don’t like how often I find myself having this conversation.

I’m grateful for researchers doing the hard work to study the consequences of AI-in-the-research-loop. In cognitive science:

“The delegation of tasks to “tools & assistants” constitutes a methodological decision (…) Researchers should therefore be required to explain why they are trusting a black box that is neither open nor fair.” — @altibel.bsky.social & @petertarras.bsky.social www.leidenmadtrics.nl/articles/why...

I’d rather pay for a thousand undocumented workers’ ER visits than a single missile fired at a Venezuelan fishing boat.

I am seeing news that AI companies face “unexpected” obstacles in scaling up their AI systems. Not unexpected at all, of course. Completely predictable from the Ingenia theorem.

Don’t let anyone tell you integrating AI tooling is essential. “Approximately half of [those] surveyed viewed colleagues who sent [AI] workslop as less creative, capable, and reliable than they did before ... Forty-two percent saw them as less trustworthy, and 37% saw [them] as less intelligent.”

In other words, the model reflects the biases of the societal context from which its training data emerges. Who could have predicted this?

And at the risk of it being screenshot and used against me, I’d recommend the same for Canadian professors.

at a time where folding for fascism and aligning with authoritarianism is the norm, distinguish yourself by having integrity and convictions and defending them

“Fight, scorn, defy, and obstruct [the Supreme Court]” is not something I ever imagined I’d agree with, let alone repeat.

“AI tech shows promise writing emails or summarizing meetings. Don't bother with anything more complex.”

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Likening PhD holders to a (non-functional) algorithm is a form of dehumanisation & anti-intellectualism that is a bellwether for contemporary fascism. Essentially it's a typical — if not the archetypal — first step towards fascism: to dehumanise, deskill, defund, and, ultimately, fire the academics.

Disease prevalence in US states before & after vaccine introduction 🧪 From Edward Tufte & graphics.wsj.com/infectious-d...

Hollow Knight: Silksong crashed the (PC gaming and console e-store part of the) Internet.

The thing about living in a human society is you either decide that everyone (except those for whom it would be medically dangerous) has to take VACCINES into their bodies or everyone (with no exceptions at all) has to take VIRULENT PATHOGENS in from those around them and, look, the first is better.

“And right now, no one is teaching us how to judge whether [AI] reliable.” Is there anything to be done beyond not asking a question you don’t already know the answer to? That’s the advice I’m giving *my* students.

Americans Astronomers watching watching US politics Betelgeuse 🤝 “It could happen at any time”

Regarding the tragic death of Adam Raine, there are already narratives forming that blame vague "dangers of AI" or a broader moral panic. But this is not a story about the faceless perils of superintelligence. It's about a $500 billion tech company's core software product encouraging child suicide.

I will never get over how a handful of tech bros set billions of dollars on fire to build a plagiarism machine that doesn't work and will destroy human society when they could have used a fraction of that money to fund a new golden age of creativity and knowledge.

No.