Wow, incredible. Huge win for the No Azure for Apartheid organizers.

At some point earlier I'd said I was willing to help onboard anyone considering joining Mastodon, & that I am also willing to speak candidly about drawbacks there. All that still stands... And, I have a just-out paper about user safety & moderation there: openjournals.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/Jo...

Sorry to hear that Bluestockings is closing. www.bluestockings.com

At least half of my media studies lectures:

"Enough is enough. Texas must allow faculty and college students to explore freely the breadth of human knowledge, and administrators must support us in that time-honored quest." – Pauline Strong, President @utaustinaaup.bsky.social #AcademicFreedom #AcademicSky @texasaaup.bsky.social

NEW: Ayman Soliman, whose detention sparked a community uproar and became a test of counterterrorism powers in immigration court, was released from an Ohio jail Friday as DHS abruptly withdrew its deportation case against the children's hospital chaplain. By @hannahallam.bsky.social

Fantastic essay by my colleague here @histoftech.bsky.social: Watching the Generative AI Hype Bubble Deflate ash.harvard.edu/resources/wa... (pdf: arxiv.org/pdf/2408.08778) 🧪

Tired of how AI somehow lives rent-free in your head? Done with the ways that it inhibits our collective ability to imagine how technologies could be, beyond next word prediction? Now's your chance to gather with like-minded folks. Submissions due Oct 9. www.undonecs.org/2026/

“The problem with AI isn’t hype. The problem is who and what it’s useful for.” www.liberalcurrents.com/deflating-hy...

My mom called me last night about the Kimmel firing, saying "This is how Hitler got started!" I quickly responded, "By firing the late night tv hosts?" Turns out, mom was right.

A great defense of academic freedom . . .from Texas A&M President Mark Welsh in 2023 www.linkedin.com/posts/dr-leo...

🪲 What is a "bug"? 🐛 Software bugs may seem obvious. 🚨But in a short piece, eminent bug expert @clegoues.bsky.social I seek to answer this seemingly simple question, and find that it is far from clear cut … dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

🔔 As faculty across Texas lose representation in campus decision-making bodies, becoming a member of Texas AAUP-AFT is one way you can continue to make your voices heard. We are stronger together! 💪 Join us!!! 👏👏 connect.aft.org/app/memberform…

UC is going to cave to the extortion and we should be prepared to hold a strike authorization vote as quickly as possible.

It is as obvious to me that Charlie Kirk should not have been killed, as it is that he deserves absolutely no honor.

Potential #biosignature on #Mars from #perseverance in @nature.com, consistent with terrestrial #microbe reduction spots. Need terrestrial lab analysis for full determination #astrobiology www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪

Found it!

Within 24 hours of Texas A&M firing one instructor for talking about gender, a different Texas public university has summarily fired a tenured professor for his remarks at a socialist conference. Bleak, and I'm scared. universitystar.com/32736/news/t...

A new report from @mediajustice.bsky.social focuses on data center expansion in the US South, looking at environmental racism and practices of resistance. Can’t wait to dig in!

The professor has been fired and senior administrators removed from their post. No mention of this in the New York Times, The Free Press, The Atlantic or other outlets who drove the campus speech moral panic.

SMH at the number of people making sure the Texas A&M professor who was fired wasn’t tenured/tenure track. It’s horrible either way and they’re just testing it out on lecturers, they’ll get to TT faculty in due time unless we all get together and stand up to this stuff

He seems nice. president.tamu.edu/messages/an-...

Right after the Texas governor called for the professor to be fired, the president of TAMU has fired the professor and claimed it wasn’t about academic freedom. president.tamu.edu/messages/an-...

... the state government, the Department of Education, Fox News, Libs of TikTok, the Free Press (and soon CBS news), the world's richest man and the social media company whose dials he controls? (3/3)

Y'all were so concerned about a few tents impeding the teaching mission of the university. What do you think it might do to the teaching mission if one little video from your classroom results in a campaign from [clears throat]: the President, the feds, right wing trustees ... I'm not finished (2/3)

Since ppl love campus anecdotes so much, here's one: I have colleagues who give students they know to be MAGA an A (in one case I'm aware of overlooking clear AI use), because the colleague is on a Green Card or H1B, and they know: one complaint like at Texas A&M, and they're on a flight home. (1/3)

This is a disturbing quote, but it comes from a student. What's more disturbing is that the president of the university, Mark Welsh, is on the record going along with this and kicking his professors, along with academic freedom and the whole point of the university, under the bus.

Under political pressure, Texas A&M said Monday the administrators overseeing a children’s literature course at center of viral recording were going to be removed, saying they approved plans to teach material inconsistent with published course description. www.texastribune.org/2025/09/08/t...

We are deeply concerned about this unfolding case. Academic freedom, which Texas A&M endorses, refers to instructors’ right to teach in their area of expertise free from government interference.

If one wants to understand why the AI gold rush keeps going well past the obvious sell-by date of teh underlying tech, it's probably fruitful to look at who's making money off it - & how.

cloud colonialism indeed

@davidthewid.bsky.social, postdoctoral fellow at Cornell Tech, released a new report on how “Big Cloud” companies — Google, Microsoft, and Amazon — are quietly reshaping the tech ecosystem through strategic investments. Read the full report here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

🔥new report from David and Nathan. Big VC is a small part of the AI gold rush compared with the cloud investments from hyperscalers.

Banger

New analysis from @davidthewid.bsky.social and me revealing that Big Cloud invests 100x more often and spends hundreds of billions more $$ than other Big Tech on startup investments Why? These investments allow Big Cloud to lock in the entire tech ecosystem -- more in David's thread and our report!

If your downtown still has many wide and fast one-way streets, then your priority is to move cars as fast as possible thru a weak downtown. It’s NOT to create a vibrant downtown, help downtown retailers, keep people safe, support walkability and accessibility, reduce pollution, etc. #TrafficSewers

this will be an insta-buy for me

This was an incredible discussion I was very moved to witness!

Department of War. Now with 100% less euphemism. A moment of clarity for research on DoD grants. For even more clarity, check @davidthewid.bsky.social work

Gonna start porting over my paper TLDR posts to here from Xwitter to finally break ties with that cursed platform.

Reminder: @propublica.org is still tracking how immigration agents use force when they make arrests. Do you have video or other documentation of forceful or violent arrests by immigration agents that we should review? Please reach out. email: [email protected] Signal: @nicolefoy.27

Striking new analysis by @davidthewid.bsky.social and @nathanckim.bsky.social on how "Big Cloud" (wish I'd come up with that) are elbowing out VCs to lead investments in thousands of startups. Unlike VCs though, this isn't (primarily) about making money, but about entrenching market dominance.

this is a must-read for anyone interested in learning about how cloud infrastructure is captured by big tech

The Bartz v. Anthropic settlement is the polar opposite of the Google Books settlement: a discrete one-time payment for past copying, on a discrete and closed-ended class, and making no attempt at all to deal with a larger forward-looking issues.

We founded a "humanities data science" summer program for undergraduate students here at UW. And it’s been a blast! Thanks to @ischool.uw.edu for this nice write-up about the program, which recently wrapped up its third summer. Students are the best. ischool.uw.edu/news/2025/09...

Cella's work never misses. 🎯

What can #CSCW learn from tech workers who have been involved in collective action and unionization about how to make transformative change within our field? My new #CSCW2025 paper with Mona Wang, Anna Konvicka, and Sarah Fox seeks to answer this question. Pre-print: arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12579

Evergreen

Google's claim that each AI prompt uses the energy of 9 seconds of television is like throwing dispersant over an oil slick. The only way to get a number that low is with massive scale, which you should definitely worry about. medium.com/@dnafus/why-...