I fear that we slowly reach a point here where the narrative is that we are "geniuses" that need to receive money from the state to think and change the world. That sounds like Silicon Valley entitlement to me. I teach, I research and I write because I like my job. That's why I want to keep one.

The system is rotten and needs to change. The working conditions of the Mittelbau are pushing us in precarity and mental and economic distress. Changing the system will not work for everyone though. It is in the end, a job. I don't think that the collectivity should get us all a job.

Academia is A JOB (art can also be one of course don't just intentionally miss my point). We should continue fighting for a departmental system with real job opportunities away from the German feudal Lehrstuhl system. No to the individualization of solutions and yes for better work conditions.

Every day they tell the world how scared they are of dying, of fading into the darkness which inevitably consumes all of us They think they are Colossi straddling the world, but really, they are sad little boys whistling in the dark, self-radicalizing in group chats, and shitting bricks about aging

I think a number of press outlets badly want there to be a groundswell of anti-trans feeling, because the ownership/senior editorial of those papers have absolutely cooked their own brains on transphobia. It seems to be largely an elite psychosis!

40 years ago we’d have congressional hearings falsely accusing metal bands of putting backwards messages in their songs that told kids to kill themselves & now we have a planet-killing chatbot that’s all like “bet you won’t commit suicide chickenshit bitch” & the government is like here’s $5 billion

Yeah :D

every generation loves Rumours. it’s fucking Rumours

3:10 to Yuma but Star wars would slap

what star wars really need is a HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER style submarine thriller

Part of the reason I think there isn’t as much pressure around stopping ChatGPT re: suicide/psychosis as compared to stuff like Panera Lemonade is because people are inclined to blame it on mental illness versus the tech, a kind of victim-blaming mentality that fits neatly into just world fallacy

Hard not to come away with a sense that (however they might vote) many a university's leadership agrees with the Tr*mpist vision on some visceral level. They think they have erred in allowing *those people* access to any level of power, say or attention, and they're only too happy to course correct.

This is what supposed "educationalists" are currently raking in money for suggesting we force-feed to millions of students at a stressful time in their young lives.

I fully believe in the corporate death penalty and believe we would be a better world if OpenAI lost its corporate charter and was forcibly dissolved. www.cnn.com/2025/11/06/u...

i have a long essay in my drafts that i did over the last week or so about having covid and proceeding to, in a state of mental impairment, believe that i had 50 rare diseases and put like 10 million supplements in my body because of stuff i read online but i think it would get me skinned alive

basically every 2024 truism is dead. Trump did not build a lasting multiracial coalition or turn young men into committed Republicans. You don’t need to cave on trans rights to win. The pundits have nothing left to tell you.

Politik, die das Leben bezahlbar macht, ist nicht nur Sozialpolitik – sie ist Demokratieversicherung.Wenn das Garantieren von Grundgütern im Jahr 2025 radikal klingt, zeigt das nur, wie weit wir uns von den Versprechen der Demokratie entfernt haben. Märkte werden die Demokratie nicht retten.

this is an obvious overcorrection that misleads the polling data and will lead to disaster in the Heartland. the results of tonight show that the Democrats should moderate: adopting two or at most three of the five pillars of Islam

It's really pundit brain on steroids when people claim that Mamdani's win does not have more news or informational value than oder Democrat wins last night. The centrist narrative must live on no matter what.

13. Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. But also, long live Sodom and Gomarrah.

People who live in cities shouldn’t have to apologize or run away from the idea that they love living in cities

I'm calling for a total and complete shutdown of polarization theory in lay discourse until we can find out what's going on

Good news is that there are always some humans amongst us. Gift link to latest from M. Gessen, essential reading these days. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/03/o...

LOOK ON MY PUBLIC WORKS, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR.

...and less than 24 hours later Condé Nast has fired Lex and the rest of the Teen Vogue political desk, even as stories like this were bringing huge numbers of readers to the site

A multi-day freakout about Mamdani's chances apparently happened because Millennials were waiting to vote until they could get the special Halloween-themed "I voted" stickers

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

Built a bike for the little brother who is currently studying abroad (little... He's 22). Marin frame from the '90s from a friend, 20€ including wheels. Plus 180€ in various parts. Nice shiny chromed stx groupset from the parts bin. I had to drill out a screw for the fenders but apart from that, ok.

“I'm not saying these are glasses for creeps, but I can't help but feel like one while wearing them.” Reader, they are for creeps.

I’ve joked before that Rationalism is to Silicon Valley as Scientology is to Hollywood. And that’s… not a joke, actually. The rationalist community is very influential and more than a little cult like. Eliezer Yudkowsky is the L. Ron Hubbard of rationalism. This book is his Battlefield Earth

Getting some conflicting information about the relevance of last night's game (as an Italian I have no idea how baseball is supposed to work)

it's me, unnamed critter from bosch's triptych of the temptation of anthony!

(m,w,d) in German? It means männlich, weiß, deutsch 😜

Between this and the Louvre prosecutor describing the suspects’ statements as “minimalist” while bragging that they had worked on the case over a weekend it’s an absolutely incredible week for Frenchness

Neue FWF-Studie (vorgestellt im Sept.) zu Postdocs bestätigt, was wir seit Jahren sagen: - 82 % finden die Karriereperspektiven zu unsicher, - 91 % fordern mehr unbefristete Stellen unterhalb der Professur. Das Problem ist bekannt – wann wird es endlich gelöst? 🤷‍♀️ #IchBinHanna @nuwiss.bsky.social

I've been scraping nazi stickers in my neighborhood since february. If at the beginning there was a lot of plausible deniability, "protect our kids" stuff, in the last couple of months it escalated to explicit "white genocide" "protect the white race" and "NS-zone" stuff.

From now when someone says "I asked ChatGPT…" I will just substitute "cow" and repeat it back

I found this piece sad too, but mostly because it is part of a years-long effort by progressives to understand what "really" animates Trump voters. We already know! It is racism, misogyny and misinformation. I know that sounds condescending or whatever but it's simply what all evidence suggests.

Genuinely delighted to download a PhD thesis from a university repository where the author has neglected to remove the words "BITCH THIS IS YOUR THESIS" from the filename.

There are people who have never cared about a single one of the countless abuse scandals perpetrated by men in positions of power in women’s sports who are ready to go to war over few enough trans athletes that you could count them on your fingers and still give those people the finger.

Just the last example in the long torment nexus list of Palantir, Anduril... Musk (as the rest of his silicon valley technocratic/technofeudal tribe) has "a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment"

!!!

tbh if you read heimkehrerlitetatur, stuff about soliders coming home after wwi feeling broken and alienated, it's pretty hard not to see that in frodo. rereading lotr as an adult after lots of joseph roth clicked in a very different way

The "hard-men" of Gondor were getting their shit kicked in until they were rescued by foreigners and a girl. The Shire was doing fine until they let a fascist demagogue ("Sharkey" aka Saruman) take over, close the gates, impose a bunch of thug-enforced rules, and despoil nature for profit.

This is how you do wash trading. All these companies are investing in each other paying each other bits of the same trillion dollars in order to make it look like they’re so close to AGI so investors will keep giving them money to lose. This is also known as a Junkie’s promise.

Terrestrial Weather 🌪️ Hurricane Melissa Emergency Net Frequencies (source ARRL https://www.arrl.org/news/hurricane-melissa-update ) Hurricane Watch Net (HWN): 20m (Daytime): 14.325 MHz USB 40m (Nighttime): 7.268 MHz LSB Cuban National Emergency Network (REN-FRC): 40m: 7.110 MHz and 7.120 MHz

When a chatbot gets something wrong, it’s not because it made an error. It’s because on that roll of the dice, it happened to string together a group of words that, when read by a human, represents something false. But it was working entirely as designed. It was supposed to make a sentence & it did.

Why is my whole popular with friends timeline baseball

This is my central concern: that low birth rates, and the ensuing population panic, is just a cover to convince people that it's reasonable to support pronatalism, when really it's only nominally about raising birth rates and really about (re)creating a gender/race-ethnic/religious/etc hierarchy.