Oh god, another story about AlphaSch...wait, this one actually doesn't fall for the hype and nonsense? And quotes @audreywatters.bsky.social? Good reporting here! (MrBeast my god) sfstandard.com/2025/09/19/a...

Catholicism. I'm looking into it.

"Trump is already unpopular. He is getting more unpopular. His actions are unpopular. It is the elites, the big diversified corporations and monopolies who have tossed aside most rapidly Americans’ instinctive disdain for kings and dictators." Mark your calendar, October 18. NO KINGS!

This is 90 seconds of pure porn for me. The best part is Zuckerberg and this dude trying to blame the WiFi as the AI totally fails.

This is necessary reading, but focus on this: RESIST THE BEGINNINGS. I swear there is still time to defeat American Fascism but it requires getting involved, right now. Pace yourself, but join the fight. At least once a month, make one major act of defiance. We can win back our country.

Talk to friends and family members who have never protested before and get them out on October 18.

We will need this to be a massive display of pro-democracy force on the street. If you're aghast at what's happening, don't just bitch about it on here, make a plan, annoy friends and family, there is true power in the people but we have to fucking mobilize.

Have been thinking about continuing relevance of Dada artist George Grosz's political critiques. His scathing 1926 painting "Eclipse of the Sun" portrays alliance between feckless political & military leaders and capitalist financiers. Grosz, branded "degenerate" by the Nazis, fled to the US in 1933

This 100%. What's happening is not popular. A majority of Americans don't want this. But there's a massive leadership vacuum on the Left that must be filled quickly. We could do worse than Kimmel being part of that leadership.

"Mr. Barranco, 48, was weeding between bushes when men in masks descended on him. His memory of his arrest is fragmented: the blinding sting of pepper spray; beefy federal agents taking him down and pinning him to the pavement; their relentless blows; the pain radiating from his left shoulder."

This email did not find me well.

Reviewing a draft "AI Literacy Framework" from the European Commission and the OECD, with assistance from Code.org, and I am wondering if anyone affiliated with these organizations knows a real, human 10 year old? What are we doing here?

"For a lot of us, our motivation to enter academia was primarily about helping to form students as people....Our frustration is not merely that we don’t care about what AI has to say and therefore get bored grading; it is that we actively miss reading the thoughts of our human students."

Awesome. The "Roy" here is CEO of Cluely, who has boasted he keeps his company as "fratty" as possible. $15 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz because of course.

A hallmark of fascism is its incoherence.

These are right-wing terror events I covered just from 2017 to 2023. It's not even close to comprehensive. The government's trying to erase this history.

I was blissfully unaware of Tom Friedman's ignorant drivel regarding AI, and thank goodness, because @melaniemitchell.bsky.social skewers him far better than I could. We need AI Pragmatism to become a thing--less fantasizing, more real-world analysis.

“'The whole thing is screwed up,' said John Painter, a three-time Trump voter who runs an organic dairy farm in Westfield. 'We need people to do the jobs Americans are too spoiled to do.'" Gonna need you to connect some dots, John. Connect. The. Dots. www.politico.com/news/2025/09...

This is fucking outrageous.

Almost exactly one year ago, I was road tripping through St. George, Utah, the home of Kirk's alleged killer. The sordid history of that area, specifically the Mountain Meadows Massacre, echoes to present-day America and the anti-humanity of the online world. open.substack.com/pub/buildcog...

"We have let school shootings in America persist long enough that we have created a culture where kids grow up seeing them as a path towards fame and glory....Many young extremists now believe in a much simpler binary: Order and chaos." www.garbageday.email/p/charlie-ki...

Incredibly valuable thread that accords with my review of literature involving school shooters. The correlation/causation issues here are intense.

"So much of learning is being put into a situation that is cognitively challenging. These tools, fundamentally, are built on relieving the burden of cognitive challenge." [email protected] (Great quotes from @elizabethwithaz.bsky.social & @dylanpkane.bsky.social too!) www.edweek.org/technology/i...

Insightful report on the metastasizing of the indigenous American berserk.

After her hearing at 26 Federal Plaza, a woman was detained and escorted toward the stairwell. Her husband, confused and in shock, was guided toward the exit. Minutes later, he broke down in the elevator. They entered together, but he left alone. This happens here daily. #ICE

i’m not going to be lectured about political violence by people whose politics is violence

"We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco—how’s her husband doing, anybody know?” Trump said to a raucous crowd of California Republicans. www.politico.com/news/2023/09...

AI-in-education boosters: "Stop focusing on the cheating problem, with proper guardrails we can use AI to enhance learning." Google: "F** that! Kids, just scan your problem and we'll provide the answer!" This popped up when I was investigating a concept related to quadratic equations, btw.

This is cool, NY Times. I've always wanted to be a Libra. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

"The diversity of our lives is infinite, and the potential for cruelty lurks in each of our hearts. None of us is immune to the many ways we can dehumanize one another. And yet, it is also true that so many of our pleasures are the same and have the potential to be shared and multiplied."

A beautiful piece of writing. About humanity, pain, loss of parents and loved ones, poetic experiences.. everything that AI is not. And about impressionable minds caught in a death spiral engendered/egged on by insidious "sociotechnical" systems. Thank you for sharing, @benjaminjriley.bsky.social

Most effective spam text I've ever received. I feel seen.

meta ai trying to figure it out

“The same Administration pumping out executive order after executive order on AI is—& this is not a coincidence—simultaneously testing to see just how much cruelty they can get away with, how much violence they can perpetuate & inspire. The object of torture is torture. The object of fascism is us.”

This is some of the most powerful and profound writing I have seen about AI. Educators, please read it. And then everyone else read it too. #edusky

"AI is not capable of artificial imagination. AI will forever be devoid of self-creation and self-extension so long as it lacks the capacity to imagine a world different from that which we’ve codified and fed to it. I do not lose sleep worried that this artificial capacity is imminent."

"The bottom line is that these were illegal, extrajudicial killings." I was in the Federalist Society with @ilyasomin.bsky.social at Yale. How far we have traveled as America falls deeper into fascism.

"The starting point of every conversation I have with a kid is, ‘Is there an AI that can do this, so that you’re not spending your time on it?’” -- Chloe Bevlin, a so-called "Guide" at AlphaSchool Ignorance begets ignorance. (Story may be paywalled, sorry)

Right. Right.

It's starting to break into public consciousness that parents, educators and policymakers are broadly concerned about the role of technology in school (and in life). Do not buy the argument that the AI "toothpaste" is "out of the tube." We have agency. We can stop cognitive automation.

"The mystery is inherent to the poetic enterprise, which is: How do I say what can't be said?" Damn, Dave Duchovny, I agree with every word of this.

"The world just doesn’t have the ability to pay for this much AI...When shareholders finally wake up to the fact that AI isn’t generating cash flow, only burning it, the guillotine will fall." The venture capitalists are turning on AI, this is akin to porn. pracap.com/global-cross...

"I'm deeply bothered that using AI seems to be becoming the norm: I've seen people react in surprise when someone says they don't use it, and people who have it open constantly on their computers, ready to use it to generate entire English assignments without batting an eye." - Sam, high schooler

For decades cognitive scientists have debated the role of symbols and connections in theorizing how our minds work (and how to create AI). A new paper points to a harmonious path forward, which I explore in this week's essay. open.substack.com/pub/buildcog...

"An LLM chatbot is a cognitive wild card [so] educators should be thoughtful, deliberate, and cautious in their use of them in the classroom. Enthusiasts [claim] "you don’t want to be left behind!” We’ve bought that argument more than once in the last 20 years, and it hasn’t served us well."

This is so profoundly un-American.

This thread about the gibberish that GPT5 will spew takes an unexpected turn as we learn about LLMs optimizing to satisfy the rating systems of other LLMs. Weird and worrying especially when we think about the use of these tools in education.

OpenAI: "ChatGPT may correctly point to a suicide hotline when someone first mentions intent, but after many messages over a long period of time, it might eventually offer an answer that goes against our safeguards.” I don't think OpenAI understands what a safeguard is.

The sycophantic, suicide-supportive output here is from the 4o model, the same model people clamored to have returned to them after GPT5 was released.