I need to share this with someone

What they say: “Get involved.” What they mean: “Become a pawn in my power plays.”

I think this is a really important point. When folks say "no AI" they often don’t mean "I can conceive of no possible use for AI"—they mean "the use cases I’ve been shown do not begin to justify the harms"—that’s not something you respond to by offering another narrow use case

It's important to understand what we're (dis)agreeing with when we (dis)agree. This is a real skill. I worry it's atrophying. I also shared a bit with @willgervais.com when he asked me about it for his students. I think it's especially important to teach junior people how to engage with ideas.

I know everyone is thinking of Sigourney's ADR'ed line, but we need an R-rated cut mainly to get more drug-use context for Tony Shaloub's character.

Now would be a great time for a 10 episode, 20 hour prestige series about the ten years between 1916 and 1926, covering the establishment of the 8-hr work day & 5-day work week, in the US. Each episode would be one year & the middle episode should be entirely devoted to the Battle of Blair Mountain.

Simple solstice Sunday stationery #stationery #typewriters

And in wishing everyone the compliments of the season, I like to share one of my favorite seasonal messages that I first encountered from the Seattle Atheists: “In this holiday season, let us remember that kindness, charity, and goodwill transcend belief, creed or religion.”

Happy solstice! May those who seek moments of peace and ease on this day of transition find support in their journey. #solstice

Needless to say, an LLM cannot reliably determine whether a source supports a given claim, just as it cannot determine whether a claim is true. This will automate generation of documents that make false claims, with citations that exist and may, on superficial reading, support those false claims.

Enjoying holiday-themed media with weirdo characters named Todd

One reason why I don't trust industry research is that the people in charge of products fundamentally cannot handle any criticism of those products

Reddit nudge notification: Why don't you crosspost this extremely niche in-joke post to an extremely niche community to reach new audiences? Me: I don't know, Reddit. Why don't I?

if you’re an academic who uses AI to crank out research, you should have to give up your position to one of the more worthy candidates who didn’t get a TT job

Day 60 of inserting a random Muppet into a random Star Trek screenshot #StarTrek #StarTrekDS9 #TheMuppets #TheMuppetChristmasCarol

I feel like "academic hiring" discourse is always kind of downstream of the fact that in the 50s we started building a giant public system to make a college education almost universally available and in the 80s and 90s we started taking it apart to go back to the only-the-rich model

This is just one part of it. Because, there will be a ton of rich kids who are already well connected who never learn these skills. People love to tell poor folks that you have to "skill up," and then obscure the networks they're going to need to put those skills to use. Ask code bootcamp grads.

You don't say..... @smartbitches.bsky.social mashable.com/article/how-...

This stuff is alienating. If university communications wants feedback from the faculty and staff there should be a university communications committee through through which they could collaborate. Instead they want to do market research.

You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity... It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone Christmas Episodes:

Will this new department do more to defend Coloradans against labor law violations?

This coalition includes several unions, like the carpenters union. One thing that makes Minnesota special is the spirit of coalition building between labor and community orgs, across issues. Minimum wage for incarcerated workers is a vital, if modest, demand. Good to see so many fighting for it.

The literal cost may exceed returns, but for management, the value of a tool to discipline labor is priceless.

how do we build movements that win? by combining smaller coalitions up into meta coalitions! so if you want to make big change, you should help a group get organized and be part of effective coalitions

America, you do not like the orphan-crushing machine. But how else will orphans be crushed?

Matt Reed describes one accreditor meeting reacting to a hard year for higher ed: www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

University administrations are eliminating the best critical theory programs on purpose.

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

"Rork told Whitehorn that if he persuaded Gonzales to quit, the Democratic Party would guarantee the consultant work in the coming election cycle." What effect does this behavior have on voter enthusiasm and turnout, @coloradodems.org?

what if we lock these guys inside of a museum until they develop some respect for art or the statues come alive at night and eat them. either way, just get this shit out of my face.

University admin should have to demonstrate understanding of “AI” actually works before they can: -buy licensing contracts -promote AI tools and especially, -use them

My humanities dept was relevant. Majors were up. Courses were 100% enrolled. Revenue positive, GE serving, etc etc. We were still eliminated. The problem is ideological administrative destruction. Couldn’t write a report, a self study, or a spreadsheet against that.

K-12 Indoctrination: Every Accusation is a Confession “Though ongoing, the panic can now be filed under the label, Every Accusation is a Confession — because the project’s next phase is underway, instituting far-right indoctrination in schools.”

Hallmark movies but with a competence focus instead of romance (this would not exclude romantic competency)

In Colorado, representatives of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe are negotiating with elections officials to work out a new program to register more Native people. The idea is running into a legacy of violence and mistrust.

One of the ways you can see this is driven by an industry looking for some way to make itself profitable? No one has shown any concern that students demonstrate basic competency with computers before enrolling (or graduating)—and, many do lack that.

Dare I hope for a Knives Out approach to a Doc Savage movie?

this is an older, pulpier conceit, i think, and also the reason those new poirot movies are so, so bad. they are more concerned with giving his mustache an origin story (A REAL THING) than with the new characters in the current mystery!

retvrn to mystery stories based around the actual mystery and not whether the detective is sad and/or wet

Everyone: 'Tis the season! Scrooge:

Too many "we must teach GenAI use" takes, not nearly enough "we must teach You Too are Susceptible to Propaganda" takes, and entirely too few "we must teach Addictive Patterns Recognition and Advanced The Casino Always Wins In the End" takes.

Like I'm sorry but I do actually think that people shouldn't have to maintain constant unflagging hypervigilance that their elected officials, including the nominal "opposition party," aren't about to fuck them over yet again. Wanting that isn't apathy

I'm gonna be real honest man, the fact that we have to keep constantly exhorting everyone to call their elected representatives every other day to say "please do not sign off on the Make Life Worse For Everyone Bill please" is intensely degrading, and also a pretty poor sign for a functional society

I actually know about this kind of thing. Just because LLMs squirt out text that looks human does not mean they're doing what humans do when we use language. This is basically erasure of cognitive science and my gosh I'm glad I didn't examine his PhD.

There isn't a single problem "solved" by edtech that couldn't be fixed with smaller classes led by well-paid teachers given real academic freedom

Per my last re-post, twice this year I've been commissioned to write reviews of harms that can arise from the use of LLMs and then, as we surface the harms, told it's not appropriate to be political. But LLMs are a deeply extractive technology, they are political by design.

Everyone always proposes this as the answer without understanding that an oral exam requires very different skills than a closely argued research-driven essay. If you want to argue those skills don’t matter, then fine, argue that, but don’t pretend that oral argumentation is identical.