ah yes, the frisson of transgression, famously available to white Americans via holding such heterodox beliefs as "all of the shit every rich white person in American history has believed"

Posted by the Tla’amin Nation on Facebook. This is epic. 𝗠𝗣 𝗰𝗿𝗮𝘀𝗵𝗲𝘀 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗺𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗮𝗰𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄𝗹𝗲𝗱𝗴𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝙇𝙤𝙘𝙖𝙡 𝘾𝙝𝙞𝙚𝙛𝙨 𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙨𝙨𝙪𝙧𝙚 𝘼𝙖𝙧𝙤𝙣 𝙂𝙪𝙣𝙣: “𝘾𝙝𝙞𝙡𝙡𝙖𝙭, 𝙗𝙪𝙙.” www.facebook.com/tlaaminnatio...

I think people are overrating the odds the ayatollah is a purely rational utility maximizer and underrating the odds the guy is rather upset about his father, wife, and daughter being incinerated and wants his pound of flesh.

Someone just posted about how they don't care if their students use AI as long as the text conveys the ideas the students meant to convey. The thing is, you don't know exactly what you think until you write it. And if some prefab thing pops up, you're liable to decide that was what you thought.

If/when a deMAGAfication of US ever occurs it must begin with the Roberts Court without which none of this would be possible

A must read. Really. There is no over-learning. Those of us who teach must share the hard lessons of history and sing the stories for a new generation.

"Sloppelganger" is one for the ages

I'm one of many professors quoted in this report from Alice Speri. I really appreciate The Guardian taking an angle which has basically eluded every other major outlet.

The US has, in slightly over a year, torched what was once one of the best repositories of legal talent (the DOJ) in favor of...uh...total hacks now struggling under an impossible workload made all the more impossible by an administration that is acting without even the faintest color of law.

If you’re going to hire someone to promote how well AI writes maybe you should find someone who understands writing.

I genuinely think this entire thing is about that “weak men makes hard times” quote that they’re all obsessed with— it runs through their head constantly, they think the whole world is about top dogs and bottom dogs & no other information is necessary

This makes me happy.

How does [some of the world's best writing, stolen and laundered through a digital blender] stack up against some of the world’s best human writers? Take our quiz.

But if you pretend that a robot has to be unbiased, you can feed it biased data and say "look, the AI told me that the White Man is supreme among Creation, numbers don't lie" This is called algo-washing and it's pretty much as old as computers.

oh good i was worried it was white supremacy and capitalism

Next up, it'll be serfdom

“the cost of gas doubling is a small price to pay” is an incredibly funny thing to say as the head of a political movement that in many ways is still built on a nationwide psychosis triggered by having to go about four weeks without a haircut six years ago.

I think this deserves at least as much sustained attention from US media as Claudine Gay's dissertation

NO NO NO YOU DON’T GUYS LET ME PLEASE SPREAD THE GOSPEL OF FREE TAX USA federal is free, state is $16, handles even my chaotic freelancer taxes just fine, same step-by-step “designed for normies” kind of interface as TurboTax but NOT EVIL tell everyone you know www.freetaxusa.com

This reminds me of that line I saw someone say once (which rang true) that something that makes Trump uniquely able to connect with low-information voters is that he is a low-information voter.

Seeing ppl circulate projects whose NEH grants were canceled by DOGE reaffirms my argument about AI as a permission structure. Some grants were canceled w/o a “no” from the generated summary. DOGE had a mandate to slash humanities funding & AI gave them the veneer of a rationale for their actions.

So admittedly I think some folks might need to remember that for a lot of academics the first real interaction we directly have had with "AI" writ broadly was either a) our laziest students trying to cheat or b) whole swathes of our profession being gutted by these kids who don't know anything.

Once again, I am begging the TV/movie industry to stop only ever bothering to write shows about colleges/universities & professors that only ever involve inappropriate sexual relationships with students on campus.

If you think trump is risking “world war 3” here as bad and as transnational as it is/gonna get, if I had to analogize it to a world war, I would absolutely not compare it to the second. We are part of a collapsing empire starting bloodbaths for brain dead mad king reasons where…

The constituency of Americans who see DEI as detrimental to the country is vanishingly small, the sort of constituency that can easily be ignored if politicians want to ignore it.

It's simple really, it's because he faced no real accountability for his actions.

For International Woman’s Day, a thread.

Hegseth needs to stand trial after this as a war criminal. Between this attack and the girls' school, there's no ambiguity. He is responsible for mass murder and must be held accountable.

I would argue that this is not WORSE than murdering a puppy but my god it is so much fucking weirder.

the guy conducting a war does a daily presser about how he doesn't follow any rules and how he loves war crimes and then a school ends up bombed, hard to say how it happened

ending her career lying about an orwell quote while the entire room is getting news notifications about how she’s been fired and clearly doesn’t know it, perfect

If you're doomscrolling, guess what? So far there are 51 kākāpō chicks hatched and thriving this season, the same number of birds as we had in TOTAL in the 90s! Only one chick has died and there are still fertile eggs waiting to hatch!

today’s guy was a 32 year old DACA kid. they scooped him up for possession last August and sent him to ICE detention in Arizona where he contracted COVID. like probably 3/4ths of these people, it says ICE never officially reported a cause of death and it’s still under investigation. Jesus Christ

Behold: the first-ever list of news outlets that have banned generative AI in their reporting. As of today, this is literally information that you cannot find on Google. My goal is to fill the starter pack, so please send over suggestions with supporting evidence! go.bsky.app/8cn1XfT

if you were to write a prophecy of the future back in 2000 that "in 2026, President Donald John Trump has launched a war on Iran with Israel after previously attempting a coup to stay in power in 2020", people would think you've gone insane

I think AI bros maybe need to start taking some classes in Medieval philosophy. Because they are making the same arguments for the consciousness of AI as Anselm and Abelard made for the existence of God.

praying enough of them do this for mainstream media to finally pick up “transphobia is a losing political position for Democrats” as a narrative they can no longer ignore, since it will only become real to the Democratic Party itself once that happens

The difference between "terrorism" and war without rules of engagement cannot be found with a quantum tunneling microscope. It doesn't exist. 9/11 was war without rules of engagement. What Hegseth & Trump et al are doing is inviting more 9/11s.

trust me you do not want to go here, like not even a little bit

Went on record saying, essentially, “AI sucks, fund the humanities” today

Hey, remember how we let a nazi near-trillionaire annihilate the US state capacity? I know it was a whole year ago, but it turns out that this has consequences beyond "murdering 14 million people by ending USAID" (which apparently no one cared about).

I'm an editor with twenty years of experience spanning genres, incl. academia, journalism, etc. and I will be a forgotten footnote in the history of the world as the sun burns its last before I manage to spell "bureaucracy" correct on the first try. Every editor was one sworn enemy word, right?

They’re doing what?! This is the future some Star Trek holodeck episodes warned us about…

fuck, I’m sorry, I can’t compete with this

The revealed preference of the American people is that you can use the power of the American state to kill as many people as you want as long as we don't get our hands dirty and we keep our bodies to a minimum, and also that if you stop a war the press will hound you to the ends of the earth

As part of an AI committee at my university, I spent this weekend trying out Claude (Opus 4.6) for writing, and I have to say, far beyond its hallucinations and the usual complaints, it is a baffling experience cognitively. I want to be more precise in my evaluation here than I usually am about AI.

a thing historians will marvel about when they study this era is the extent to which the "war is a thing that happens to poorer, browner people" class went about systematically dismantling every aspect of the global political order that confined the costs of war to poorer and browner people

this really made me laugh

Cool hey did anything happen *before* 1979 between the United States and Iran

This reminds me of that Frankie Boyle joke about how Americans not only come to your country and kill your people, they also come back twenty years later to make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers sad.