A Left Behind story set in the Jurassic Park universe called Velocirapture

Does the Rapture happen everywhere all at once or do you get to celebrate as it goes through different time zones like New Year’s

My regular cat is off duty. Here’s a #caturday clouded leopard I met today.

Probably just a coincidence but on this day in 1939

Having trouble squaring my dislike of conspiracy theories with my sense that we shouldn’t put anything past them

Hello #academicsky! I'm sharing a cfp for an edited collection on "Naming & Classifying," pulled together by me, Kristin Girten, & @aaronrhanlon.com . We'd love to see your work! Please also circulate to anyone you think might be interested. Deadline 10/31. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

America in two screenshots

Kilmeade: I want to apologize for you hearing me say without thought what I think

I’m teaching a new class in the spring: “Leave Me Alone: Solitude, Isolation, Retreat, Utopia.” 100 level undergrad, no period restriction but English lit. I have a framework and some key texts but seek further recommendations on different kinds of aloneness. Go!

Careful, people. Let’s not say anything we’re going have to pretend to regret later.

CERN powered up the LHC on this day seventeen years ago, and now I’m thinking it’s a failure because it *didn’t* create a black hole and destroy us

Pangloss: *reads news* Polllyanna: *reads news* Pangloss: Pollyanna: Pangloss: so, murder-suicide pact? Pollyanna: definitely

They have to go all in now. They have to win. They can’t leave anyone or anything left that’s powerful enough to discover and hold them to account for what they’ve already done should there be a reversal of fortune, so there can’t be one. They’re committed.

A Tale of One City

All the networks covering the US Open when the booing starts

Authors! Would you rather: 1) accept an insultingly small lump payment from #Anthropic 2) get no money but be legally allowed to throw one (hardcover) copy of every book or journal of yours that they pirated at the heads of their top execs and engineers

So in this #anthropic case am I more Jarndyce or Jarndyce?

Reading classic Asimov short stories and the way he has characters address robots supposedly subject to the three laws as “boy” is…something. (Yes I know the origin of the word “robot,” but still.)

Remembering today that the plot of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade happens because an old rich Nazi wants to live forever

If we were any kind of society we’d have a Jonathan Swift going full Bickerstaff, publishing the obituary in advance, and committing to the bit for weeks

Which of the following are LLMs most like? 1) tobacco 2) drugs 3) guns 4) pesticides 5) microplastics

One day we’re all going to look back at the experts trying to get AI into the schools the way we all look back at doctors doing cigarette ads in the 50s

I know you’re all disappointed, but remember: he is dead *inside*

Technically.

I found some new berry-based #AI puzzlers.

Interesting #ChatGPT hallucination in class today. Student softball player entered prompt, “tell me about softball.” results seem fine. I enter “introduce a factual error.” It introduces *two* that were not in the original. One it parenthetically identifies as incorrect. The other is not marked.

#CrackerBarrel changing its logo back is the New Coke/Coke Classic business conspiracy theory for our time

I am so beneath him. #caturday

Realizing that my undergrads don’t remember when Google was useful

I caught a cooperative #cormorant. #photography #birds

Me: AI is bad Every academic philosopher I’ve ever met: other things are worse so it’s fine

Students! Academic advising sessions are tomorrow. My academic advice is: save your textbooks! Don’t sell them back! You will be able to eat/store emergency medicines in hollowed out versions of them during the Water Wars.

Students! As classes begin next week, remember that in academic culture it is considered normal for professors to tear their hair out and weep.

Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos sandwiches! Croutons, croutons! Qu’un pain impur Abreuve nos polices.

Students! Reading my syllabus backwards will summon a demon who has the power to cut off your internet but will bring you tea and cookies while you do the reading

Given the systemic impossibility of significant professional advancement, why am I not burning more bridges

To hell with SETI, let’s see if we can find any terrestrial intelligence

Increasingly convinced students can learn or learn AI but not both at once. Gotta treat it like tobacco or alcohol. Or possibly car rental.

League of Shadows: ok so we’re gonna destroy civilization using plant-derived fear-inducing psychotropic toxins made by ninjas on a mountaintop and— Reality: we just let everyone talk to each other online

I met a double-crested cormorant. He held me with his glittering eye. #birds #cormorant #wildlifeDo

When they swear in the next person, I hope the Smithsonian will replace the impeachment information in bold lettering and an enormous font. Just “WOW THEY REALLY IMPEACHED THE HELL OUT OF THIS GUY. WE DIDN’T KNOW SOMEONE COULD BE THAT IMPEACHED. IMPEACHMENT AND THIS GUY, THEY ARE VERY MUCH ALIGNED.”

OK! Best (broadly conceived) op-eds on #AI? Looking for 600-1200 word pieces in outlets great and small from the last few years. What have you read that’s made a mark?

Raising kids is hard but at least I got a new Spirograph out of it

Students will work harder and learn better when they can outsource the reading and writing to an AI at their own pace

I don’t want to sound too cynical but how the hell am I supposed to avoid it

Hey everyone I told ChatGPT to “do a breakthrough in science” and as far as I know it did, so you’re welcome for saving earth

Wait ok so if I don’t use ChatGPT for emails a robot basilisk will kill me because I didn’t massively increase my energy consumption and help build it the Dyson sphere around the sun it needs to turn the universe into a computer? This is what the billionaires want?

Here I was working on a Bastille Day post making a satirical connection to the concentration camp in Florida only to discover the French word for alligator is alligator

I will not grant that any machine has achieved human intelligence until it tries to take Ivermectin for a computer virus