Cowards die many times before their deaths, The valiant never taste of death but once.

Today I wrote about Zohran Mamdani's historic win, the energizing power of holding to shared principles of decency, and a taxonomy of the endlessly intertwined relationship between shame and vision. www.the-reframe.com/the-extraord...

I get this a lot too. I don't use ChatGPT or any LLMs in my work because I want my writing to sound like me, not like the averaged-out voice of the internet. But also, writing is thinking, and thinking is a habit. I don't want to get out of that habit.

What an amazing essay from the former chair of Africana Studies at Bowdoin. I'll share a few sections in the reply but seriously, read the whole thing. It's all insightful and beautifully written. lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

Andrew’s conclusions here are spot on, IMO, and should be instilled in every PhD student. This is especially true in computer science where PhD supervisors cannot physically check every single line of code that a student writes, yet experimental validity of hinges on code correctness

Wondering why no one likes your posts anymore, even among your friends? It's because @jay.bsky.team and team have decided to hide a huge amount of content from all of our feeds by default. Here's how to turn it off. First go to the hamburger menu in the upper left corner

Follow @ruthbenghiat.bsky.social, my friends. Concise analysis, presented so that even I can understand it.

Getting nervous for the talk I'm about to give at a workshop about "using AI to drive impact" which features slides such as these.

It’s grad school application season, and I wanted to give some public advice. Caveats: -*-*-*-* 
> These are my opinions, based on my experiences, they are not secret tricks or guarantees 
> They are general guidelines, not meant to cover a host of idiosyncrasies and special cases

The long-running ideological war on libraries, education, and government workers is not separate from AI boosterism. It is the same ideological war on human knowledge and expertise. In some cases AI is being used to directly supercharge this effort: www.404media.co/ai-is-superc...

READ THIS ! "For nine months, Sky News' Data and Forensics team has been investigating whether X's algorithm amplifies right-wing and extreme content. It does." #Musk #propaganda #X #antifa #fascism news.sky.com/story/the-x-...

too big to fail speedrun

"'They’re spending more money than I would even tax them,' [Mamdani] said in an interview with MSNBC last week." This is the message. Make it clear that these billionaires aren't just worried about losing money. They're worried about losing the ability to exchange their money for power.

"A Stunning Rebuke Of Anti-Trans Politics"—Dems Win Elections Nationwide Despite Anti-Trans Ads As election results poured in on Tues night, it became clear that Democrats were winning nationwide against anti-trans opponents. www.erininthemorning.com/p/a-stunning...

Looking forward to learning all about how the right should move left to win elections tomorrow. They should maybe dye their hair pink, learn to love pronouns.

Pains me to say it but I think this is true. Some of my colleagues in the media who’ve stayed on X don’t even realize how badly its noxious algorithm is skewing their perception of politics and reality. Also, that place seems designed to make you miserable unless you’re a Nazi. It’s just wretched.

My biggest hope is that the Democrats actually internalise the right lessons from this and realise that their focus-grouped, corporate-owned milquetoast centrist strategy of "let's figure out who of our vulnerable constituents we can fuck over to make nice with MAGA and regain power" is NOT POPULAR

😎😎😎😎 GOOD THINGS CAN STILL HAPPEN 😎😎😎😎

It actually is mind blowing to check out X and see what is essentially 4chan which is also populated with politicians, media figures, "thought leaders" etc. A dystopian horror, really. Where neo-Nazis now have equal standing with mainstream leaders. There is a reason Fuentes is now so mainstreamed.

They fired every Black woman at Teen Vogue and every trans staffer. It is astonishing watching the American media ecosystem just falling like dominoes, bowing its knees to fascism.

Cool new working paper on why and how cable news threw gasoline on the culture war fire. The culture war isn't optimal for electoral candidates, but it's optimal for cable news companies. ungated: www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/27v4x...

On Teen Vogue: It's an amazing publication full of talented journalists. It offers so much value. It's clear the monied interests in media aren't interested in preserving that value, especially if it threatens the status quo that undergirds their wealth. Capitalism and journalism are enemies.

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

"I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain." This James Baldwin quote is hitting harder than ever.

This is from Autocracy, Inc, about how modern autocratic propaganda works. I consider this every time I decide what to share and how to frame it.

I will never understand the pundit obsession with getting Democrats to solve "political division." Not only is this what they're already doing, but Klein admits that Republicans will never do the same. So elections will remain constant GOP smears and simping Democratic promises of bipartisanship.

Did you wake up irrationally angry at how much energy is being used - and CO2 is being emitted - to foist upon us AI technology that most of don't even want?

Brilliant, lovely day here (except for the allergies). High of 26C. Tomorrow is going to be a shock!

Gotta say it is truly fascinating to be "watching" this baseball game by trying to piece it together based on the commentary in my Following timeline on Bluesky

I promised myself that when I next had a successful grant, I'd share a snapshot of my trail of unfunded submissions. With gratitude to the ARC, looking forward to next several years of collaboration on effort motivation with @minzlicht.bsky.social, Deena Skolnick Weisberg, and Frederik Anseel!

This has been such an Illuminating part of our current moment: It’s revealed just how unwilling those with actual power are to even just ask tough questions, while highlighting how willing pajama-wearing suburbanites are to physically drive off guys armed with actual guns.

There’s a sort of Dunning-Kruger effect happening where people who read widely, consider various perspectives, and put in effort to understand views they disagree with worry that they don’t do that enough, while people who don’t do any of that accuse others of being in a bubble and call it a day.

Halloween is the best holiday because it's all about people giving neighbors and strangers treats for free and telling kids how awesome they are.

Would be nice if people not only realised how dependent on data LLMs are, but also that humans are very similar. For us, too, GIGO is true. Marinating in toxic information systems is a great way to normalise toxicity in your own mind. Information diet matters a LOT. Take care with yours.

“Individuals on the ground sent a message that reached us Monday morning that 1,200 were dead,” Nathaniel Raymond, the lab’s executive director, said. “By that evening, they said 10,000. By Tuesday, we couldn’t reach them anymore. We assume our ground contacts are dead.”

The power of that "shame, shame, shame" chant is something else

Is social media dying? How much has Twitter changed as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation? Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has transformed. Here are the key take-aways 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2510.25417

IMO democracy becomes impossible in the absence of any social or political norms against lying.

We're seeing a massive institutional deportation and state violence apparatus being built and it honestly feels like people dont grasp the sheer scale of it and what already is in place. For every horrific video of masked feds kidnapping people there are so many people pushing paper to help.

I would read the hell out of a deeply reported piece on how the media/political elite addiction to Twitter is shaping their views, which in turn shape the views of millions of people. It's a total reality-warper.

AI agents tried to do graphic design, video editing, game development, and administrative chores like scraping data. "Even the best could perform less than 3 percent of the work, earning $1,810 out of a possible $143,991," writes @willknight.bsky.social www.wired.com/story/ai-age...

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Please like and subscribe if you like my content!

Some days are tougher than others, but always remember that it is still a beautiful world. #tinyjoys

U.S. journalism and punditry completely ignores the fact that the U.S. electorate belief system --including their belief of what Democrats stand for -- is shaped predominately by a massive right wing propaganda network across AM radio, broadcast TV, cable news, and the internet.

honestly the only piece worth reading on the platner situation. @tressiemcphd.bsky.social is absolutely cooking here. (gift link)

Maybe the thing that gives me a pulse-pounding throbbing headache is when I think of how techbros sold ChatGPT to universities as ‘revolutionizing’ higher education and our institutions just forked over money without even asking for actual evidence

I "enjoy" this disconnect between tech titans claiming that AI will have us all eating pastries and working two days a week and the reality of firing people en masse while simultaneously supporting fascists who oppose universal basic income and are actively destroying the social safety net

I wrote about how "Grokipedia" is a new front on the war against reality itself. It's an attempt by the oligarchic class to seize the means of knowledge production itself and create a weaponized unreality. www.thedissident.news/grokipedia-a...

I appear to have spoken to a reporter who took seriously the gravity of NZ's science crisis does anybody have a newsroom pro subscription so that I can learn what other choice phrases I used on the record? newsroom.co.nz/2025/10/29/w...

"I DON'T NEED YOU TO FUCKING REWRITE WHAT I'VE JUST WRITTEN!"