The arrogance towards interesting humanities research is soooo frustrating. STEM isn’t everything.

Tech women! My friend is doing a study on women in tech and information systems. Interview and a few diary entries, easy. All tech connections welcome.

Please contribute if you're able or share the original if you're not. Note that the most effective way to get help for people is to directly ask people you know

we have gone from a world in which we were told not to cite wikipedia because it was unreliable to a world where wikipedia might be the only reliable source left on the internet and we all owe a lot to the pedantic nerds who got us there

If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.

The debate around what is or isn’t “cancel culture” really just obscures a simple truth that it’s BAD to be massively racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic and it’s GOOD to speak out against injustice. Some things are good and some things are bad and it’s okay to say which you think are which.

The plausible bullshit matching reality is a *uncontrollable and inconsistent* side effect.

We can care for each other.

It’s got to be terrifying as parents, knowing there’s a treatment that can make a lifelong difference and needing help to make it.

I like the monocropping parallel. And it hadn’t occurred to me before how doing eugenics is essentially saying that the genes you prefer can’t win without help. Like the whole anti-woke movement is straight up admitting you can’t thrive unless you keep everybody else down.

Help Fatima keep going in whatever way you can. gofund.me/e25c636d

Data are necessarily biased because they consists of observations of particular phenomena taken by specific people, from specific vantage points, using specific instruments, for a specific purpose. Data are literally the encoding of particular biases—that’s what makes it data.

It is *tremendously* irresponsible of the article to use the word “persuasion” for interacting with a plausible bullshit generator. It does not “believe” anything. It’s even worse than simply statistical word frequency - it’s that skewed towards what people wanted to hear in artificial tests.

Huh maybe if they weren't kicking all the Palestinians off the app there would be more users Maybe if they didn't welcome Jesse Singal there would be more users

Oh this is true in work too. It’s amazing how debilitating it is once you start to suspect your workplace of demanding meaningless work.

Billionaires could solve world hunger but instead they are making a Ring to enslave Middle-earth.

Even here we have people getting urgent care while meeting basic needs can’t be done. I can’t imagine how it feels in Palestine, having only limited glucose solution to treat ongoing starvation. Everyone needs food. Everyone should have food.

Dr Menna’s campaign page now has a note reassuring donors that if the entire family is lost the money will go to help others. 💔 What a thing to have to consider, how *I* will feel about my money after *you and your entire family* is murdered!!

Help if you can. chuffed.org/project/help...

Please share as wide as possible, don’t just ‘like’ this message. Lives depend on making sure as many get this as possible. #Tsunami #Pacific #Earthquake #DemVoice1 www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Problem with writing, or any art, in an information-commodity economy is that you're trying to pursue contradictory goals that in a better world would be aligned: art should be free; artists should have the means to live securely and with a modicum of comfort. Above all with free time to make art.

At a time when the world can seem so grim, @danmcquillan.bsky.social’s work on decomputing can provide a ray of hope. We don’t just need to reclaim control over technology, but of our collective vision of the future.

The other 50% is iteration. GenAI is TERRIBLE at iteration in general, much less precise iteration. We're astonishingly far from prompting, "use what you've generated as a new basis and just change [element]" and getting anything useful back. It's just not how LLM dot-connection works natively.

A trans person being in the same room as you is not a violation of your privacy. Demanding to know whether a person in a room with you is trans or not IS a violation of their privacy. It's endemic of how fucking far the needle has moved that this simple fact is so lost on so many people.

If someone asks a question about "AGI", the only reality-based response is to demand a definition of "AGI" before replying. #acl2025

1/8 of a tiny squid is not a lot of protein, and starvation is unjust.

Shouldn’t have to *pay* for a Covid test!!! Worrying about it is bad enough and checking if you have it is a freakin’ public service. This timeline sucks. I want society to do better by people.

Help where you can #mutualaid chuffed.org/project/1392...

We know a lot is going on right now, but we just realized that: cabinet/board/panel  = things made of wood cabinet/board/panel = terms for organizations

Never let it be tired of helping! So sorry that my action or inaction can be life and death, and that my country isn’t mobilizing at scale, and that you have to work so hard for a chance to survive. Too many people are dying on our watch.

I get overwhelmed with how many people need help and furious that our governments are actively hurting people. But I also think of that scene at the end of Schindler’s List where Schindler looks at his fancy clothes and watch and is anguished that he didn’t do more. Because I can do more.

Reasonable people can disagree about the best ways to achieve Jewish safety, self-determination, or liberation. Absolutely no one can justify the mass starvation of children and violent enforcement of statelessness upon another people.

A wealth tax would probably help with this. Ah, well, anyway.

This never occurred to me and it should have. Thank you and I’m going to watch for it.

I think it’s worth noting this piece generated the most unsubscribes I’ve seen in a while, and the newsletter version had the lowest open rate in many months. These horrors persist in part because too many people go to great pains to avoid them.

Nobody really believes the “oopsies” on repeated war crimes but… Even if it isn’t your *plan* to kill civilians, aid workers, journalists, children—the fact that you keep doing it means you are too incompetent to control weapons. Evil or accident, the child is dead.

An unexpectedly frustrating aspect of this AI “revolution” is how much the *obvious, consistent, and fundamental* problems with the tech are just…not stopping institutions from adopting it. Sure it can pass a bar exam. And then disbarred every time the real work was called for.

It’s worse than “Gaza is being starved and destroyed and no one cares.” It’s that hundreds of millions *do* care and are powerless to stop it. We need a world where that can never happen, where the masses actually have political power.

We was saying stop the gencide im gaza and now we just saying stop the starvation in gaza

It is an undeniable fact that AI *can* kill jobs, harm the environment and exacerbate existing social biases. My concern is that the industry is in favour of these outcomes. Well, maybe not harming the environment as an explicit goal. But the other two, all signs point to feature, not bug.

This graph is astonishing. The people that bang on about “natural birth” and “women have been doing this forever without help” need to be forced to stare at this until their eyes water.

NOW WITH DOUBLE THE GASLIGHTING! #TransDisabledAndProud #TransAutistic #ActuallyAutistic #AutisticJoy #AuDHD #UnmaskingAutism #NeurodivergentSquad #NeurodivergentAnxiety #ToxiClean #Satire readmybook.gay

The problem isn't that generativeAI will get so good it will replace artists. It can't and never will. The problem is that uncreative and incurious people will flood every venue with so much regurgitated slop that no artist has a chance of ever being seen or found.

Being in a Canadian province with a two-tier system has shown me how utterly terrible it is to bend on this. Free health care for *all*, adequately funded and staffed.

Go figure.

Well put.

Separate moral judgments from actions that aren’t about morality. #ActuallyAutistic #AuDHD #Autistic #Neurospicy #Neurodiversity