Anthony Albanese called Grace Tame “difficult” in a News Corp word game. Donald Trump was merely “president”. Throughout history women who fight to better society get punished and labelled problems Men who are convicted criminals and whose policies kill are more likely to get a pat on the back

How many men has the PM called 'difficult'? Everything changes and yet nothing changes.

Rising far-right populism? Festering discontent? Time to give the people what they want: austerity.

When I heard this, I drafted a skeet about it, then thought "naaah, there's no way his speechwriters would allow him to contradict himself within one sentence." But they really and truly did.

Damn this seems exactly correct.

“The health of Australia’s multicultural democracy should be measured not by how it protects the majority, but by how consistently it protects all its minorities.” theconversation.com/pauline-hans...

This is a mental war that we have to win. It's not about being a luddite, it's about destroying or retaining the ability to think. It's about how insidious this becomes in a situation where generative AI is adopted and then subverted intentionally. www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/a-new-whar...

People are using injections and implants to fake muscles, so they have the look of working out but none of the real benefits. It’s sad and pathetic and, to make matters worse, the ”muscles” look artificial and tacky. And it occurs to me that it is the perfect analogy for AI art.

One cool thing about unequivocally hating AI is that you will be proven right over and over again every single day

Labor will continue to swing right as elections approach. It’ll cost them the left. And the right plans for vote for Hanson anyway

I know we've just recovered from a recipetineats scandal, but this comment deserves a week in the news, at least!

This is a very very very obvious point to make but shops and movie rental places and record stores are all more fun than buying things online

"The men implicated in the Epstein files reinforces that I spend half my life explaining to men that their simplified, optimistic view of other men doesn’t line up with the experience of women and girls trying to dodge sexual harassment, assault and abuse attempts." - Leslie Morgan Steiner

I enjoyed reading this as much as it seems you enjoyed writing it @patrickstokes.com ... that walking tour sounds great ;)

[in my best “great sage on the mountaintop” voice] it’s nice when readers say nice things about my books

Fond memories of working at NTL, woman rang up screaming at me. Her husband in background shouts at her, “don’t talk to them like that. They’re on fuck all” Then he takes phone off her, and gives me a line which I have used myself since “Do you have a manager you dislike intensely I can speak to?”

Publicly supporting women is nice, but what really matters is what men do behind closed doors. What matters is how they hold each other accountable. The men’s hockey team shouldn’t get a pass because they were in the locker room—that’s where women need their support the most.

More than half of teenagers in the U.S. use A.I. tools for help with their schoolwork, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center. The results, the report said, indicate that teenagers think “cheating with A.I. has become a regular feature of student life.”

I understand why chatbot cheating happens but every time I read about it I want to gently remind everyone that the point of schoolwork is not for the submission to exist. Teachers are not just greedy for more essays or solved equations. The point is to do the work WITH YOUR OWN BRAIN, FOR LEARNING.

Someone told me lately "Bluesky is just like Twitter." I argued that was untrue on the basis that last time I had a Twitter account most times I got a new follower their bio said "single & looking for fun" & here when I get a new follower it tends to say something like "professor of rare moths".

My biggest worry is that children aren't getting time to develop their own writing voice, because their word processing programs keep trying to finish their sentences and write for them. Even when you turn it off it keeps coming back. My 13 yr old is endlessly irritated by it. Let them write!

One of the worst things about AI, for me, is that it takes away from people the sheer joy of writing. Schools don’t often make this point, but writing should be fun. Putting words together, finding ways to express yourself, the pure pleasure of a well-crafted sentence. 1/5

I woke up to the alert to this article on my phone and it was a pretty disgusting shock to the system. I don't like the world we are in right now and the fact that so many people don't see Hanson's proud racism as an instant deal breaker sickens me. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

I don't think the "Einstein" or other AI replacing the important steps of learning, esp in higher ed, would be posing quite the challenge it is right now if students hadn't been sent the message their entire lives that the point of college is to get good grades and a high paying job, not to learn.

If governments and corporates keep going down this route, in 25 years we'll have a deskilled generation of workers unable to spot errors because they're wholly intellectually dependent on the very system whose errors they are supposed to be correcting. Slow motion disaster in the making.

This is the key thing I've seen literally no AI boosters be able to answer. Put aside magical thinking about error free LLMs - errors are baked in. If we accept expert oversight is needed, *where's your next generation of experts coming from* if they're coming up reliant on AI?

Corporations: We are collections of people & therefore deserve the civic rights afforded all people. Me: Ok. May I talk to a person? Corporation: No. Never again.

A lot of historians' weirdness - in fact, most academics' - can be found in the fact that our work often rests on taking rhetorical questions deadly seriously. "Why on Earth would anyone have done that?" *spends 4 years in an archive to find out*

It’s so difficult to maintain what I really do think is the epistemologically correct stance of “it’s a big deal but there’s a lot of bullshit”, because like, there is a *lot* of bullshit

It never ceases to confound me just how many folks think the point of essays is to provide teachers with essays. That teachers just like, collect them, or need them for sustenance or something. Rather than the point of them being the *actual fucking act of learning how to think about shit*

Lemme put my cards on the table here. I miss what the old Twitter did for my career; I got a lot of work there. I also met some good people, many of whom I still know. But Twitter’s gone. It’s the fascist site now. For me, no “relevance” is worth staying there. I’m here to meet good people again.

these people treat being called racist like it is a slur, and treat slurs like they're mere differences of opinion

Just when I thought I couldn't hate AI more

Why do I have to pretend that I'm going to print something in order to save it as a PDF. Why do I have to engage in a little ruse.

AI is going to trash every single way that we had modernised university teaching and send us back to handwritten exams and vivas for every assessment. Which will bring back every problem with those assessment models (and make us seem even more out-of-touch even as we just try to do meaningful work).

Einstein was famously against the difficulty of thinking.

They should invent an AI that lifts weights for me in the gym so I don’t have to lift them myself

I feel for every talented young person whose achievements will now be permanently viewed with suspicion because of this sort of shit. Hopefully the university system gets its act together and brings in-person assessment to counter this kind of thing.

The Collapse of Editing in Book Publishing #221: if the vast Penguin Random House empire can't even be bothered to proofread the first page of Julian Barnes's last book, what hope does anyone else have?

Oops. Turns out Persona, Discord’s age-verification service, was secretly screening selfies against government watchlists AND accessible by the feds. It's backed by Peter Thiel. “The state wants to see everything. The corporations want to see everything. And they've learned to work together.”

Friends, I’ve a few more signed paperback bundles. THE ART OF READING 'An excellent argument for why reading is desirable for its own sake.' Bookseller+Publisher​ ON GETTING OFF ‘Like being trapped in a corner by a verbal sex maniac.’ Times Higher Education Delivered anywhere in Australia. DM me.

Thoroughly enjoyed this

Alysa Liu telling 60 Minutes “I love struggling, it makes me feel alive” is a legit revolutionary statement from a Bay Area native in a time when copious amounts of time and resources are being put toward convincing us to opt out of experiencing struggle, friction and self-actualization

it’s so cool everything is either a scam or designed to take away human rights or both now

Been a day. I heard the Albo interview on Sydney radio this morning. Very interesting to hear him celebrate his government restricting kids access to social media, for the good of children, after saying that Australian kids stuck overseas as ‘the responsibility of their mothers’. 🗑️

I’m just about to put another one of these bundles in the mail. Any other takers? Two signed paperbacks for $60, including delivery within Australia. Enjoy my critically-lauded and very handsome philosophy books on the cheap.

Please New Yorker let me get a subscription for only Chotiner interviews.

In addition to reading old books, I think everyone should try to occasionally read a book in translation. There is no better way to be reminded that we are more similar than we are different. People are people, in every country, in every language. We have the same big feelings, the same problems.