There are few places I feel better spending my money than a worker owned site that produces deeply researched and important articles alongside deeply silly ones. It’s a bargain at full price and you’re supporting the people doing the work instead of a CEO’s fourth yacht.

I just started reading The AI Con by Emily Bender & Alex Hanna. Highly recommend it based on what I’ve read so far.

I'll say it again: it's amazing how many Americans who enjoy dystopian science-fiction media are also proving themselves to be 100% on board for signing over most of their cognitive function to technological tools run by sinister, giant corporations.

I went through the trouble to make this image for the above caption but then I saw the bowl of kibble by itself and that just seemed funnier to me as a “meme a dog would make“

I think the use of chatbots for stuff like this is intended to train people to use it to avoid everything that’s painful or hard. It can write the obituary, the breakup text, the complaint letter. It’s meant to separate humans from their difficult feelings. Seems bad.

In a world of terrible royalty payments from platforms like Spotify, @bandcamp.com Friday is a great way to support artists. Attention Bird Utopia (check them out if you like Wilco) and Sincere Engineer (catchy pop punk from Chicago) were my picks today.

Does the training begin "everything these tools were built on was stolen, this is fledgling tech and anything it produces has the potential to be catastrophically wrong, and using it is destructive to the environment and to our ability to reason. Here's why we're gonna do this anyway"?

I'm not going to repost any of the insane antisemitic conspiracy bullshit that grok is spewing today, but it highlights how absolutely essentially is that we not let LLMs become a form of epistemic grounding for our society.

In Feb. on Velshi I said Trump won due to racial anxiety not economic anxiety, as evidence by his policies. The bill Republicans passed is the proof. Months of stoking racial fears through anti-DEI mandates, ICE raids, to push through a bill that takes food and healthcare from struggling Americans.

Apropos of nothing, the best book I've read so far this year was "One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This" by Omar El Akkad

It's easy to forget now but we had decades of steady advancement on trans rights. The 2016 bathroom bills invited huge backlash! It was only after the media constructed sports and youth medications as 'debates' that opposition moved from the far right to the polite center.

So, per the DHS Secretary, the Trump Regime has deployed troops to Los Angeles to overthrow the duly elected government of Los Angeles and of the State of California. bsky.app/profile/just...

63% of American adults had unfavorable views of Martin Luther King Jr in August 1966, per Gallup surveys 46% of Mississippi GOP voters said interracial marriage should be illegal in a 2011 PPP poll to push w/e is popular instead of trying to popularize justice is to admit you lack moral leadership

Bleak. nymag.com/intelligence...

Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.

Politicians should be saying "trans people have always used public spaces alongside everyone else, there's never been an issue, this whole thing is made up nonsense, banning them would be a human rights abuse, which is why I'm introducing primary legislation to protect them"

How did we get from "Do not use Wikipedia as a source" to "ask hallucinating chatbot everything"?

Just because someone isn’t deemed a functional or contributing member to society, doesn’t make them any less valuable as a human being. Someone’s worth isn’t measured by their ability to pay taxes.

It's actually wild. There's literally no mention of why Jackie Robinson is important in the MLB press release. At all. Just that he "played his first Major League game on April 15, 1947."

There is no way to support this with a clean conscience. The administration has admitted he legally should not have been sent there and then actively worked to keep him from being returned. It’s slavery. (The other people also should not be sent to prison camps in foreign countries)

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but 2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but 3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So 4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

I'm not going to stop saying this. We need to stop calling it "deporting." It may not always be fair or humane, but deportation has a process. And it means you're sent back to where you came from. These people are being trafficked and sold to slave prisons. Not deported.

There is a way that this could be — and in fact should be— framed where this is not about political victories but human rights, the rule of law and what is just in America. When will we learn to stop treating democratic crises as mere horse race politics?

Reminder - this is what Griffin claims fulfilled his duty to notify voters he was challenging their votes. It: • Doesn't have his name on it • Looks like junk mail from the GOP • Puts the onus on voters to find what is being challenged • Requires use of QR What Dem or UNA voter would trust this?

Honestly might be the most nakedly anti-democratic move to invalidate a free and fair election in NC since the Wilmington Race Massacre of 1898

Also they ruled that it makes sense to throw out the votes of people who live in more Democratic areas (and legally voted under election law) but not to do the same to people who voted the exact same way in Republican counties. TLDR: We want our friend on the court so screw the actual voters.

This is something A.I. shares with crypto. They are both parasitic technologies. Crypto can’t exist without the U.S. Dollar and A.I. can’t exist without access to a robust ecosystem of ever expanding human knowledge. Excellent analysis by @tressiemcphd.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/o...

If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.

I read the first 200 pages of this while traveling today and it is unsurprisingly quite good.

I can’t wait for their daily pieces supporting trans rights. I mean what could be more of a personal liberty issue, right??

Do students know that science is literally disappearing before our eyes? I wanted to show my students the description of a gene we are studying on the NIH site. Poof. Gone. I will be making this clear to them.

soon enough, the mere presence of black and latino students on campus will be illegal racial discrimination against white students www.insidehighered.com/news/diversi...

look at this little guy

It's pretty funny that the Mavs traded Dončić because of his defense and then gave up 50 points in the first quarter of the next game (even if it's really because they were short handed and the Cavs are very good).

Cmon! It would have been a pangram too. I guess we’ve still got work to do #ungrading

I think that @amstatnews.bsky.social should say something about such an open data manipulation at large scale - what government data can we now trust? www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

The birds were out early this morning.

A fun ice formation at Falls Lake yesterday.

We got our first snow in almost three years

My favorite albums from this year: Pillow Queens - Name Your Sorrow Restorations - S/t Bonny Light Horseman - Keep Me On Your Mind / See You Free Yasmin Williams - Acadia Japandroids - Fate & Alcohol Porridge Radio - Clouds in the Sky... DUNUMS - I Wasn't That Thought The Anti-Queens - Disenchanted

I read a lot of books I really enjoyed this year, but three of my favorites (by @vajra.me, @tananarivedue.bsky.social, and @charliejane.bsky.social) are ones I discovered through Bluesky! The whole top row really captivated me in different ways. Full titles and authors are in the alt text.

Excited to share my student's #data #rstats #biostats memes from my Intro to Data course this fall. Many thanks to all the students who gave me permission to share their creations! 🧪👨‍🔬

I should probably be writing my end of year evaluation, but it's way more fun creating graphs out of my birding data. I've been working on being able to auto generate these for any species.

Are people spending almost 20% of their 40 hour work week on their calendar? Or did someone use an AI to just make up a statistic to promote this product? (it's probably the second one...)

It strikes me as incredibly interesting how much more attention and care the powers that be (media, police departments, politicians) give to rich people who die compared to everyone else.

I saw a Field Sparrow today, which was my 80th bird species on campus. What year will I reach 100?

We went for a Thanksgiving hike yesterday and saw this Eastern Bluebird chowing down on what I think is a cicada. #birds

This Brown Thrasher has been visiting our yard for quite some time, and I finally got pictures of it. It makes me happy every time it shows back up. Today it told some Red-winged Blackbirds that they had to wait their turn to use the feeder. #birds