This is a great essay--a must-read for anyone concerned about the use of AI as deskilling, automation, labor techno-discipline, etc.

$30 billion for a single building in Louisiana that will consume as much energy as 4 million homes. Wtf are we doing here?? Similar builds coming to El Paso, TX and to Ohio. Wildly, the SPV seems to give Meta a ripcord where they otherwise would have been saddled with a long term lease.

Something I wasn’t able to address in my article is the way faculty, esp contingent faculty, are financially incentivized to participate in AI adoption. The NYT article below links to a CfP offering grants upwards of $60k for developing “innovative teaching practices… while integrating AI tool.” 1/5

Private tech companies feeding at the trough of taxpayer-supported public institutions www.nytimes.com/2025/10/26/t...

Important update from two months into my “experiment” (lol) assigning college juniors and seniors to read whole physical books and then having a seminar where they use the physical book and physical notebooks and their ideas and questions to fill three hours of class time: It rules

“Print is a rent strike” appeared in the pages of @defector.com & @slate.com in the span of less than 24 hours courtesy of two very different, but very complementary essays by @jraden.bsky.social, @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social & @johannawinant.bsky.social. These would be weekend must-reads regardless!

This is tricky. It seems locally true that faculty unionization efforts came a decade or two too late to build enough power for the present moment. 1/2

Was such a pleasure to see this great essay come into focus—writing is social, and worth defending against the deadening imperatives of AI and capital. Another world is possible!

"EdTech has been leading this charge since long before the AI craze...clawing shared governance back can help ensure that universities aren’t converted into profit centers for private equity firms." every day is a good day to be burstingly proud of @jraden.bsky.social defector.com/higher-eds-r...

Wrote a thing on the hot summer of uni AI adoption for @defector.com A huge thanks to @nathankhensley.bsky.social and @anniemcc.bsky.social. @brandyjensen.bsky.social is a legend. And anything smart in hear is thanks to hours of discussion, texting, and draft reading by @smosment.bsky.social

so glad to have this really thorough (and maddening) look at how “students will cheat” isn’t even close to the biggest problem universities have with AI, from @jraden.bsky.social

The university where I work is considering shutting down for the day, next Wednesday, to host the fail son VP who thinks professors are the enemy so that he can tell our students professors are the enemy. Cool. Cool.

if there ever was an epistemological advantage in comparing a brain to a computer, this effectively eliminates it

Whatever the roots of this, it’s less about “winning the AI race” than about winning the share price race.

Friend in banking just sent this with the message, “wait until a real catalyst tips the scale”

One thing AI future casting has actually got right is “instrumental convergence.” But the “paper clip maximizer” is actually just a market whose profits come not from retained earnings but asset price inflation. We’re going to bury ourselves in data centers to prop up AI shares.

happy sunday, remember that you are completely expendable to your employer and that when you die they will forget you ever existed within weeks and easily replace you

la la la la la la la la 🙉🙈🙊

As opposition party, there was no end to GOP complaints about speech policing, trigger warnings, and de-platforming. Now, they will literally beat and gas you for speech they dislike. Fuck ICE

Uh oh they’ve automated provosts

“.. His conclusion is very stark: not just that an economy already at stall speed will fall into recession as both the data-center and wealth effects plateau, but that they’ll reverse, just as in the dot-com bubble did ..” @marketwatch.com www.marketwatch.com/story/the-ai...

look if you dont want hoards of students chasing nazis across campus for disrupting their class you can always make class sizes smaller

Representatives of three unions on campus—GSU, AAUP, FACULTY FORWARD—wrote about the proposed cuts at UChicago. I'm happy to see these finally in print, and proud to fight alongside so many who care deeply about the future of higher ed chicagomaroon.com/48537/viewpo...

This means, of course, that WE are bailing out farmers by paying higher prices for goods while our tax money is ALSO subsidizing the Argentine economy, which has replaced us as a supplier of soy beans to China. This, I guess, is what “winning” looks like.

I wonder how the proposed restrictions on imported lumber will impact new housing starts? 🤔

People keep saying this doesn’t mean anything. This is incorrect. What it means is that W&M will manage this “minor” and other “cross-disciplinary collaborations” outside of academic departments as a mechanism for further eroding shared governance.

Which “failed state” is he talking about? The US, or…?

This is a guess, but if I had any money I would bet it all that that revenue is not being diverted to red states at all, but simply into a handful of already wealthy pockets. It should not be lost on us that this admin is “nonpartisan” in its effort to fuck us all over to enrich a few.

This is bad. But it is also bad that many will perceive this as a coup and not what it is: an acceleration in tendencies already immanent in most American universities.

counterpoint: *all* LLMs are revanchist by definition

From the minds that brought you: “home prices are up bc illegal immigration” and “there’s no jobs bc illegal immigration” and “crime is up (even tho it’s down) bc illegal immigration” and…

So much of this administration’s actions are orchestrated around spectacle, and yet they can only manage to pull it off at the scale of the meme. They can’t pull it off at scale. Huge loser shit from these clowns, prattling on about PT and submarines.

The thing regular people don’t often grasp about ‘academic freedom’ is that if you don’t allow experts to research & teach in their fields of expertise, guided by their professional judgment & decades of training, you have effectively given up on the concept of knowledge & shut down your university

“researchers from the open-source AI platform Hugging Face found that the energy demands of text-to-video generators quadruple when the length of a generated video doubles — indicating that the power required for increasingly sophisticated generations doesn’t scale linearly.”

Do any of the professors or journalists or teachers also get their jobs back or nah

The entire AI industry is just GPU purchases and data center construction. That’s it. No productivity multipliers. No AGI. No singularity.

General strike in Italy for Palestine, here’s the amazing view from the top of Termini station in Rome. The people – not the government – stand for solidarity and justice (da Matteo Pucciarelli)

You’ll be shocked to hear that their recommendation is not limiting the circumstances in which AI is deployed, but rather accepting the inevitability it will occasionally have catastrophic effects.

the rats nest that is the flow of money in AI compute is so unbelievably complicated and circular that i had to make a diagram

Look, I don’t know what everyone is worried about. This will absolutely not in any way hinder Oxford’s primary function: the imperial nostalgia machine still goes brrrrrrr

They’re just like us!

🧵

So many of the half-baked AI implementations are happening in professional arenas that have been hollowed out by extraction and divestment. No journalist needs a writing aid unless they’re being paid too little to write too much, no teacher needs a commenting tool unless they’re overextended.

Middle-tier AI workers having there jobs automated. Far from techno-feudalism, we’re squarely in the world of Adam Smith’s pin factory.

Get a chatbot that can do both* 💅😎 *bust unions AND drown us in slop

WSJ just retracted its report that the shooter’s ammo was engraved with “transgender and anti-fascist ideology.” It smelled like bullshit from the beginning, and every conservative who ran with it should be shamed into obscurity.

Wow! The fash-tech-bro-backed guy who works for a genocide-laundering rag is praising Kirk? You don’t say!