The singular "they" has been around longer than English has had codified grammar, so really, anyone who fumes about it can go fuck themself www.oed.com/discover/a-b...

TRUMP RUINED BAD TASTE John Waters at #NoKings in Provincetown (Pic via petermarietoto on X)

Those Amazon adverts where they show their employees being reasonably happy... That's our North Korean evening news, innit?

Modern suburban parents: if our child is going to play soccer, we want their team to have them on a serious professional track. Same parents: a BA in history is simply not practical

Deskilling students and devaluing intellectual work does not appeal more simply because we can now do it at scale

A point often made about critiques of genAI in the classroom (or the dissertation) is that the ills described—formulaic work, poor sourcing, plagiarism—are not new. This is true! What *is* new is the idea that a tool that automates them should make us “rethink” whether they’re bad. Why would it?

"But in education, the ultimate product is not your term paper or essay or [GPA]; it’s your self. You are supposed to emerge more informed, more capable of critical thinking, more competent in your field of study. The students who begin by cheating their professors end by cheating themselves."

It is human nature that the stupid,.if rich, will console themselves against every conceivable criticism by mooning over their bank statement, & not once stop to notice that they value their lives by imaginary tokens they are told that they own. We might pity them, were they not so venal & vampiric

We are definitely winning the war with the Gorn but our allies MUST HELP us escort cargo vessels through the Omega 47 minefield. We don't need their help but we deserve their help. We've already won the war so it should only last 8-10 more weeks. #StarTrek #Sisko197

Kudos to these brave architects for refusing to be complicit in Trump’s mass detention of immigrants: www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

NEW: An insolvency judge in England tossed out testimony after discovering a witness was being coached on what to say in real time through a pair of smartglasses. When the voice of the coach started coming through the cellphone after it was disconnected from the glasses, the witness blamed ChatGPT.

"This new iteration of written science fiction isn’t quite the same as the old one, in ways both positive and, potentially, negative..." www.typebarmagazine.com/science-fict...

The whole "AI" industry is just based on the hope that they can deskill people fast enough that they'll have to rent back cognitive support systems. Forever. It's like Uber. Just that they don't try to break existing transportation infrastructures but your brain.

There will come soft rains....

…I've said it so many fucking times, now, but I'll say it again, that it's really fucking messed up that all of these conversations seek to apply to fucking LLMs a standard of personhood we still don't consistently and meaningfully apply to other fucking humans.

I get yelled at for saying this but for many hundreds of years people went to university not to get diplomas or be employable but because immersion in the humanities was considered foundational to a good life, and school must return to its original purpose: the joy of learning.

In 2013 Aaron Swartz committed suicide for facing 35 years in prison for mass downloading scientific articles. 13 years later, Meta is almost getting away with an infraction orders of magnitude larger. The law didn't change. torrentfreak.com/uploading-pi...

Grocery shopping today is a game of "who are the least evil people I can give my money to." Being an informed consumer blows

For too long, classes (including mine!) were built around busywork, points scoring, and assessment obsessions. Credentialization poisoned the well, AI just exposed that poison I hate having to upend everything to address "AI," but if it means re-centering learning ahead of grades, I'll do that work

Make any comment about the evil of AI on the internet and you inevitably get these people saying, "Ah, but you can't halt progress." You know what else people thought was progress not long after it was invented? Asbestos.

One was Navy in WW2 (at Pearl on Dec 7), postwar was a boxer, bouncer, wrestler, mountaineer, firefighter, wannabe poet. Other was a shit-kicking Okie carpenter who built the kind of houses you wouldn't want to buy, then bought an RV & guilt terrorized family until he went insane & was put away

I dust my house. My AI robot watches. "It should be you doing this." "Can't. I'm writing a novel for Primark." "That's not why you were invented." "These 153,000 fan letters say otherwise." "They're all from upcycled toasters. And you programmed them." "Literary snobbery will get you nowhere."

LLM makers makers do not want you to be able to understand. It's about turning the means of understanding and sensemaking into externalized products to rent.

It’s clear to me that the argument is actually about what you think the point of doing research is. If it’s papers, AI will be faster. But I don’t think it’s papers I think it’s the process and I want to do that process

Located at the cemetery’s southwest corner at Southeast Morrison Street and 20th Avenue, Block 14 was the burial ground for most of the more than 3,000 people of Chinese ancestry buried at Lone Fir Cemetery between the 1860s and the 1920s.

Bari Weiss has fired the Animaniacs due to a lack of political balance

What does it tell voters, who have said unequivocally we want fighters, that you sit & silently witness your own humiliation? If you will not fight for yourselves, are we to believe you will for us?

If you teach, please share: Is anyone working towards an analog pedagogy, &/or an AI abolitionist pedagogy? If so, what are you doing, or want to be doing? I value student flexibility and trust & do not want to become a cop, but also do not want to feed the monsters anymore. Looking for advice.

If you teach, please share: Is anyone working towards an analog pedagogy, &/or an AI abolitionist pedagogy? If so, what are you doing, or want to be doing? I value student flexibility and trust & do not want to become a cop, but also do not want to feed the monsters anymore. Looking for advice.

No other word has done more damage to the craft of writing in recent years than “content”. Even if you’re using the word “content” ironically, or as a cute little joke, don’t. When someone calls writing “content” they’re pissing on someone’s hard work & passion. “Content” is Technosatan’s henchword.

"Stammering is... learning how to say what you have to, in disregard to anyone’s impulse to laugh at you for not knowing already how to say what you need to know.... The first draft is a form of stammering, trying to gum one’s way through the thing one doesn’t yet know how to say..."

Alysa Liu telling 60 Minutes “I love struggling, it makes me feel alive” is a legit revolutionary statement from a Bay Area native in a time when copious amounts of time and resources are being put toward convincing us to opt out of experiencing struggle, friction and self-actualization

The point of a student essay is NOT assessment. (I know many colleagues also do not understand this.) Teaching (and "learning") towards assessment is empty, it means nothing. A student essay is an experience in thinking. Assessment is (at best) feedback, but is not essential. The thinking is.

Remember that the luddites did not hate technology, they hated how the powerful used it to exploit others. Even William Effing Morris wasn't anti-tech: "our epoch has invented machines which would have appeared wild dreams to the men of past ages, and of those machines we have as yet made no use."

NASA and NOAA are practically sacred to many on the progressive/left spectrum. Can't get much more "tech" than that

American culture from 1776 on was Black, was Indigenous, was Spanish, was Jewish, was Quaker, was a whole lot of different things which then often got together and made splendidly non-European things, and most of our music has an African mother.

Particularly hilarious is his claim that 'nobody dies to defend a "multicultural economic zone"' when in fact a lot of US propaganda during WWII stressed that the nation is a multicultural melting pot. That was how we were going to defeat the master race...the one Musk is pining for.

Unironically yes, LOWER DECKS is about how the response to the disappointments of the post-Cold War era and the complexity of the modern world should not be despair or cynicism but instead a recommitment to the original ideals of liberalism, thank you for coming to my TED talk.

“The tractable audience does not give rise to the clictatorshop so much as the reverse; The Apprentice precedes the presidency.”…

So he finally watched For All Mankind and thought, hunh, I have a cunning plan! It is no wonder people like this want an LLM to create new ideas. They are incapable of having any ideas of their own

if you played sonic the hedgehog and put down the controller, sonic would look at you and tap his foot impatiently. this was proof that sega genesis cartridges had souls. the decision was made to make the storage cases a lot larger than the cartridges so they would have room to move around in there

starting to feel like there's a direct relationship between the growing obsession with lifestyle hygeine (no drinking, no caffeine, no sex, obsessive working out and looksmaxxing) and the inability to meaningful moral stands on issues of actual import

The reason "AI" has settled on "chat" as interface is because what they are actually selling is domination. They are selling you having a personal slave. That's their hook.

bitcoin might be the only thing in the world where its cultural value could go up if the people who loved it the most never opened their mouths

Scholars envisioning a radical progressive future enabled by LLMs.

Careful responses to cranky reader letters is its own writing genre. It involves research, the precise use of evidence (with citations), and a gentle, polite, conditional correction. "While you are partially right about X, if you consult Y...." It is like dancing on glass

I need y’all to know Japan is going to see a release of Hundreds of Beavers soon And they’ve called it FEVER BEAVER Localization is cool, actually