From my own niche: institutions of higher education should stop chasing trends, work internally to assert a set of values, and then build curriculum around those values.

When I worked at Best Buy in Lexington, I saw John Michael Montgomery twice. The first time, I sold him an absurd (to me, a broke kid) amount of camcorder batteries. The second, he brought in his camcorder for repair after it was rained on and warped when he tried to dry it with a hairdryer.

The one time I felt bad was when an Informatica marketing person came by and yelled something like "who do we thank for this party?!?" and people yelled "TECHDIRT!" instead of Informatica. Oh well. Anyway, if Salesforce wants to throw us a party too, let me know.

This was a fun explainer because it was written two days ago and half of the public health infrastructure it refers to is either incommunicado or destroyed

The greatest trick capitalism ever pulled was getting us to watch a commercial before a movie trailer.

my bar for quality is a lot higher on obvious AI output than it is for human output: I’m interested in reading your B-minus tweets but absolutely uninterested in reading the B-minus stuff you got the AI to say

Kids today don't like school, a totally new thing that has never happened before. bsky.app/profile/daed...

KICK OFF THE NEW YEAR WITH THE INTERNET ARCHIVE! 🍾 Starting at 12:01am ET, we'll be revealing the creative works from 1929 and sound recordings from 1924 that are entering the public domain in the US. Learn how you can celebrate throughout January: blog.archive.org/2024/12/26/c...

This is a good thread. And as well as the huge financial hit and the threat to safety, there's the way car culture erodes community. It creates a lot of people who effectively live in fearful bubbles.

Never lived in Japan. But I spent enough time in Berlin that I almost lived there (3 1/2 weeks at a time for months), and the quality of life there is vastly better than here. Noah Smith says crime is the #1 disadvantage of the U.S. I disagree; it's cars./1 www.noahpinion.blog/p/yes-americ...

Anybody teach a unit on crisis communication and willing to share their materials with me? Bonus points if you do so through a case study or simulation.

“Mary could marry any man in town. She doesn’t want to. She wants George. She takes the measure of George, seeing something in him that he can’t see, and which is perhaps only partially visible to us. What Mary sees in him does not reflect any of the abortive visions George has for himself.”

This is a very good and important paper for scholars of race and identity. Also just one of those papers you read that makes you wonder how this wasn’t done much sooner. Highly recommend it.

#TeamRhetoric, what books/articles on composition theory & pedagogy have worked in your classes recently? What do new teachers really need to be learning about right now? I'm teaching our MA composition seminar this spring -- it's been a couple years so I'm looking to spruce up my syllabus.

When I was a kid, I thought the line, “I want a yacht and really that’s not a lot” from Eartha Kitt’s “Santa Baby” was “I want a lot and really that’s not a lot,” and I think my version is better.

Can I share another gem from this piece that I think is super relevant to current discussions of GenAI? Lately I've seen more on here about how AI relies on exploited labor in the Global South for data labeling & content moderation. Selfe described this dynamic quite clearly more than 25 years ago.

pretty grim when health insurance company executives have to try to hide their identities online like they're public school history teachers, government employees or doctors who care for transgender people

tell your friends and foes

People dressed as Nazis are Nazis this isn't a street performance of Sound of Music

Steve Martin is the Menendez Bros. DA?

Hoo-boy

If anyone’s trying to figure out a Halloween costume and has a 3d printer, a friend of mine just published a Moo Deng chestburster 😹😹😹 cults3d.com/en/3d-model/...

I think that it’s going to be hard to regulate AI and I also think it is absolute nonsense to believe that it’s too hard and we should give up now. Humanity is very good at coming up with clever solutions for things, including “crushing horrible little men like Sam Altman.”

Their fantasy was not needing people, and changing their lifestyle as little as possible, so when what was needed was caring about strangers and tolerating even a minor, temporary discomfort they snapped. For climate change they'll also double down adding to it worse to change as little as possible.

Johnson, dripping with sweat: "I believe it was Werner Heisenberg who first noted that, at the very basic fabric of spacetime, certain things are fundamentally unknowable"

republicans do literally everything they can to hobble disaster response and then blame the results on the people trying to do their jobs

nothing good comes of people thinking computer programs might be useful

Completely sideways to this discussion, but the idea that we could handle flying cars is madness.

Ohio Republicans passed one of the country’s strictest voter ID laws in 2023, excluding common types such as student IDs. The result: Thousands have already been prevented from voting and the proportion of rejected provisional ballots has surged www.cleveland.com/open/2024/10...

FRIENDS, TODAY I AM DELIGHTED TO INTRODUCE YOU TO: THE FLYTRAP we are a collective of 10 feminist writers + artists building a worker-owned, reader-centered publication because we are ding-dang tired of tech bros and venture capitalists ruining feminist journalism

This makes me want to cry and also track all of the people involved down and make them go muck houses in Asheville

That…wasn’t luck

Reporter here. I'm interested in connecting with folks involved in using Ham radio to aide in the #Helene response, or those who may have benefited from such services. DMs are open.

Members of Congress who voted to defund FEMA and the National Flood Insurance Program one day before Helene hit: Sen. Budd (R-NC) Sen. Blackburn (R-TN) Sen. Hagerty (R-TN) Reps. Bean, Bilirakis, Cammack, Donalds, Gaetz, Lee, Luna, Mills, Posey, Waltz, Webster (R-FL) Rep. Bishop (R-NC)

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CAN SHE HAVE IT ALL

In addition to this, check to see if your registration is active *even if* you’ve voted recently, especially if you live in a state with a Republican Secretary of State. And honestly, it’s just good practice no matter where you live. Do it every year.

The best way we can all honor the memory of Pete Rose is by banning sports betting again

this is just to say that i have chatgpt’ed the license that was in the repository and which you were probably saving for revenue generation purposes forgive me, dawg we busy building rn can’t be bothered with legal

"Administrators like Martin typically rationalize these contradictions of their professed values through strategically vague abstraction. Having long decried undergrads for anti-speech illiberalism, they now discover abundant boundaries on expressive speech."

"A strange paradox: in his freshman year, my former student ... was required by Martin to read a book insisting that free society tolerates Nazi protests. A year after [he] graduated, Martin had him arrested for pro-Palestinian protest."

When the real begins to look a little fake, the fake will have an easier time convincing our brains it is real.