I actually teach programming, machine learning, and “AI” (which doesn’t exist). Other work tech I think students should learn: Driving a stick shift How to fix a copier Fax machines: friend or foe The fine art of <reply all> Adobe certificate signature Navigating 🤬 SAP Concur I could go on

Coughs in (many) university presidents, big city mayors, etc.

6. Also this boilerplate: "use AI as more of a partner and resource, not as a replacement for thought and creativity," although this is essentially an impossible task presented as a salve of reasonableness.

5. Then we get to AI and get this boilerplate: "when educators embrace AI with curiosity and patience, it can reduce burnout by handling repetitive tasks, improving overall workflow, and even providing new ways to engage." No evidence is provided to support this frequent claim.

Rudy Bridges is younger than the Sitting President of the United States and 29 sitting United States Senators

I saw someone on my timeline shaming someone else for posting about college football in a time like this. Folks, if we're going to survive a time like this, we're going to need to avoid burning out from an attitude of 24/7 vigilance and constant outrage. Let people find joy where they can, please.

In about three years the entire university pivot to AI curricula and schools and programs is going to be so deeply embarrassing. We will all pretend it never happened and I will be standing there, looking at people with a mirror in my eyes. This is all so embarrassing.

A meme for the modern university...

If you think the LLM told you something, ask yourself: What is your belief about who's talking? What is feeding that belief?

"The care robots themselves required care: they had to be moved around, maintained, cleaned, booted up, operated, repeatedly explained to residents... Indeed, a growing body of evidence from other studies is finding that robots tend to end up creating more work for caregivers.":

Also eliminating disability and “perfecting humanity” are fundamentally incompatible because disability is a core element to the human experience and what makes us humans

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In a stunning moment of self-delusion, the Wall Street Journal headline writers admitted that they don't know how LLM chatbots work.

A man came up to us at a Tesla Showroom picket on Saturday to tell us he’d just had a test drive and it was *great* that FSD meant there was no longer any need for a human driver.

Wow.

What--and I say this with my chest--the hell are we doing here people

The (Ed) Tech Industry has made citizens believe that the problem with education is reading, thinking, and writing when the problem with education is austerity. Reading, thinking, and writing are not the problems to be solved. Austerity is.

How do you stop the incessant political text messages? I never have donated by phone, never heard of many of the politicians and campaigns I get texts from, often several a day. I now report them as spam but that doesn't seem to help any more than texting stop.

self-driving would seem, to the layman, to indicate that the car... drives itself?

Evidence shows lots of people learn to use ADAS by trial and error. This is knowable. (And not just from my small n study.) journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1... papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... agelab.mit.edu/static/uploa... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

FWIW I found that people thought "autopilot" meant pretty much the same thing as "self-driving" and "autonomous" and I'm pretty sure what people think the word means is the only thing that matters here...

I mean you could just ask people what they think the word means... journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

you say "i asked chatgpt" i hear "i asked [an improv comedy group]" an improv group wrote this report instead of a therapist i use an improv comedy group

Matt Walsh's imaginary professor: "good morning student-comrades. today we learn how to bayonet a white Christian capitalist while taking trans hormones" actual average professor: "folks, I am begging you, please do the reading for tomorrow this time. it is five pages"

A good 70% of the fighting over AI would have been avoided if VC hucksters (and gullible access journalists) hadn't conflated incrementally useful automation with computational sentience to make money

In the U.S. in 1825, *452* out of 1000 children born died before their 5th birthday. By 1925, that number was 135 out of a 1000 children. Today, in 2025, that number is *7* And it is entirely due to advances in medicine, public health, and technology. 9/

A problem with most surveys is that they are potentially useful qualitative tools that we mistakenly treat as quantitative tools. Even worse, our treatment of them as quantitative tools is entirely performative, as actual quant-methods experts know better. statsepi.substack.com/p/your-usele...

Hancock (2014): “the move towards automation has disproportionately benefitted the few…Statistically, the answer then to the question of who benefits from automation is not you!”

Is there any evidence that these 'turn around' specialists ever, you know...turn anything around? Because from the outside it sure looks like their business model is 'make a load of people redundant, collect massive salary, leave before everything fully collapses'

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Guess where they got their weird trade deficit math from?

Lately I'm fighting myself constantly, switching between wanting to keep quiet and stick to my professional lanes, and wanting to be more vocal about what I see as injustices and truly alarming news. It is scary. I don't want to lose my job or be targeted. But I can't shake the idea I owe my elders.

Why a few hundred university presidents haven’t been jointly making similar points for the past month (and of course they should have for years) is beyond me. If not now, when?

The Department of Education, among other things, is what funds special education for children with disabilities. Trump’s executive order will hurt kids and parents in virtually every school district in the country.

This is such an important point. Science can absolutely be manipulated, full of bias, etc. But at its core, its best, it is about being transparent, robust, and not serving political aims. Anti-science doesn't even try to hold itself to the same standards and is inherently political because of that.

A college president offers a class in standing up to Trump. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202... If you need a small lift.

The flying public needs answers. How many FAA personnel were just fired? What positions? And why?

If we cannot comprehend how/why it works the way it does under the hood…and it’s imperfect in its output…but we cannot know why it is imperfect, so we should just be glad when it does work…isn’t that faith? Isn’t that a rejection of empiricism? The machine is a deity.

I keep reading articles about the latest Ai reasoning models and there is a pattern to all: 1. This new thing is amazingly good at [task] 2. But it hallucinates / botches it sometimes 3. I believe this will replace people at [task]. It just need to improve This is religious, not rational, argument

"When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid." Audre Lorde

We used to be a proper country

Michael Roth is one of the few university president who actually gets the urgency of the moment. slate.com/life/2025/02...

It’s a shame they turned universities into landlords & pharmaceutical companies, cuz it would be nice if institutions devoted to learning might speak up about the value of knowledge in a time when 22-year-old edgelords from 4chan have been given carte blanche to erase data from every federal agency

This isn't an exaggeration. Before Cockpit Resource Management became a thing, captains who acted like, and were deferentially treated like macho gods of the skies did things like let their planes run out of fuel or fly straight into the ground, and the other officers were too scared to stop them.

i don’t understand how, psychologically, a person gets to a place where they interpret sign language as some kind of attack or imposition on their life. like, what the fuck is wrong with you?

"Be Kind" is an affirmation to tell one's self. It should not be used to shield the powerful from the righteous anger of those of us affected by their terrible leadership and awful policies. Stop telling people to #BeKind. I'll "Be Kind" when they stop "Being Incompetent".

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