the most dead-eyed soulless capitalists can read fossil fuels’ writing on the wall and are investing in clean energy. the problem is there are more people exist who romanticize fossil fuels because coal miners and roughnecks are men

Israeli attacks on four oil facilities in #Tehran this weekend have exposed millions of Iranians to harm. In this post we explore the attacks and unpack their health and environmental consequences: ceobs.org/black-rain-t... 1/3 #IranIsreal #Iran #IntLaw

Finis Dunaway kind of did this! Kind of.

Someone could write an essay on how our Green Party, led by con artists who seem to appear only every 4 years, reflects the deeply individualist ideology of American politics, an outlook fundamentally at odds with what a Green Party is supposed to represent: a politics centered on the collective

Yep! Supplements and self-care instead of vaccines and public health.

I keep hearing from admins and even students that the best thing I can do is "model responsible AI use," but it's actually pretty simple: it's this.

As we have long suspected, the NYT is committed to not understanding anything about writing’s critical connection to human agency. Or perhaps should I say, “Commitments were made to misunderstand the point of cognition and communication (leaving hundreds dead)”

Trump has already achieved a revolution. The question is not whether we restore the Constitution of 1787, it’s whether we keep the Trump Revolution of 2025. Restoration is not an option. It’s Revolution or Counter-Revolution.

College writing teachers have spoken, y'all. The CCCC resolution affirming students' and teachers' right to refuse generative AI in the writing classroom passed by an overwhelming majority at the #4C26 Annual Business Meeting this past Friday, March 6. Link to the full resolution below.

Outsourcing their what now?

it has tons of historical precedent, the main thing that fascists do when they get in power is ruin the country. it is easy to understand. like what are you talking about

There is no punk rock AI. To be into AI is to wed yourself to the worst billionaires in the world. And I think this makes the AI people crazy. You just can’t be into it and not be a shill for a corporation. You can’t be into AI and be cool. And it makes them all bitter weirdos.

Shut the fuck up Lord Fauntleroy

Seeing ppl circulate projects whose NEH grants were canceled by DOGE reaffirms my argument about AI as a permission structure. Some grants were canceled w/o a “no” from the generated summary. DOGE had a mandate to slash humanities funding & AI gave them the veneer of a rationale for their actions.

Clankers can never be comrades

or, to put it another way, scholars are actually the ones who want coherence. most people don't. eg, if "Christian nationalism...[is] not an ideological framework that explains people’s actions, but rather a useful vibe-building tool" then this is a problem of scholarly definitions.

In the way Michael Pollan distinguishes food from "edible food-like products," I think it's vital to distinguish between education and "academic, education-like products"

The thing about all these freak AI execs constantly going "our machine may have gained sentience?!" is that they want slaves. That they are ok with slave labor. And *then* it always, always turns out their latest AI trick actually used slave labor somewhere in the global south. They're slavers.

If you took $1 billion and gave it to the endowment of a different small college each day, they could each provide a free college education to several hundred students per year in perpetuity. Instead we are using that money to bomb schools and kill students in Iran, for no clearly stated purpose.

One of the more interesting things about this is how little they tried to sell it.

Anyways.

I really think it's worth just roasting in the place we are in right now. The Guardian is talking about the "felt experiences" of a software program that generates text That is so meaningful and important and requires so much immediate action that I cannot even really begin to process it

This was such a valuable lesson. I remember this dawning realization that any topic I could dream up would have some body of literature relevant to it; it taught me that the ocean of human knowledge and experience is vast, practically infinite.

It's so infuriating to watch Democrats critique Trump on the basis that he's doing things badly rather than doing bad things

This would get a very sharp reaction--I bet there would be people actively closing the runways, doing everything up to and including laying down on it

Fucking love book club day

Literally the first thing academics pointed out about LLMs YEARS AGO was that they would be used for catastrophic levels of fraud—how nice that now the AI bros are confirming what we all knew by running fraud experiments to tell cheats which LLM to use to cheat

Look, it's perfectly clear, they consider every other country a vassal that should pay them tribute or an antagonist. There isn't really any other category you can be in.

I keep returning to this essay by Anthony Downey on algorithmic models of automated killing, whose driving questions appear only more urgent in light of the last few days link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Logged into LinkedIn out of curiosity, after seeing someone suggest that the majority of "content" there is AI-generated, and I saw a person I went to grad school with has fully committed to their new career as an agentic AI booster. All their posts have the stupid emoji-bullet points that AI loves

Something I think about a lot is how future generations will not believe us when we describe the variety and wonder of life that once existed in nature

When the cafe plays 90s music, I'm struck by (a) how well the dance music holds up, (b) how a lot of the alternative that I didn't like at the time is actually okay, and (c) how much of the pop-rock (Lenny Kravitz, Goo Goo Dolls, RHCP) just sucks more than ever

One was a high school teacher (social studies I think but I don't know for sure) and the other worked in rubber factories but was killed in a trainwreck before he turned 30

I feel like the research process is twofold. First, you gather and gather and you can never have enough. But then you cross a threshold and realize you have more than you could possibly include, so writing is all about shedding, cutting out the sources you once so industriously collected

Being antiwar doesn’t mean you’re against wars when the US “loses” or when the president of the opposing party wages a war. Antiwar is opposing war and the institutions that conduct war. And it’s clear this administration thinks many USians are as cynical and opportunistic as they are about war

Neighborhood Nights #oilpainting #art

💯💯💯💯💯

We would really, really like to highlight the scale of Dan's achievement here. We've always hosted some great AMAs, but Dan has been single-handedly responsible for a huge outreach campaign to authors and forging ongoing partnerships with scholarly presses.

If this claim is true, it says so much more about those specific social sciences researchers than it does about genAI, because the claim is basically that some statistical averaging process can do original social science research - which is a facially nonsensical claim.

And it sucks at the background work! I do AI gigs (a loathsome activity but I have few options) using models that try to summarize and synthesize research all the time. And the models are shit at this task. At best, their summaries are about what you'd get from Wikipedia but with wrong citations

Looking at social scientists and STEM folks worrying that AI is going to decimate the employment prospects for their fields, it's comforting to know that my field was already decimated using time-worn artisanal techniques like funny math and telling us our work isn't important or valuable.

1908: the Lancet, one of the most respected scientific journals, calls for 18 age limit on reading in bed amidst a moral panic surrounding children becoming "addicted" to novels, which were "designed to keep kids hooked" and destroy their attention/mental health

The promise of OpenAI and Grok being used in war is that no human can be held accountable for the war crimes it commits, all the way up to where it sits on the chain of command. The total abdication of any kind of accountability, any kind of "am I following an unjust order" moral hesitation, etc.

Your man at Macurtain Street where Summer Hill starts; he calls it the "Colosseum Corner," and a place called the Colosseum is visible behind him--today's Leisureplex

“I Never Thought He Would Ask Me To Build Doombots,” said the contractor who builds robots for Doctor Doom

GM: Charisma check. Mamdani: [rolls natural 20] GM: that’s a d6 how did you Mamdani: [direct to camera] Did you know you can check out board games at your local public library? 😊

Quite rare to see a chart that says quite so overtly that no one involved has the slightest clue what’s happening here

I keep reminding people that admins hate English departments because they are popular (read: inefficient), not because they aren’t. AI is in a long line of technologies that promise to solve that problem for them.

Like many of us on the academic and research site have said and keep saying it is a grey zone war against the states and is intended to break the states and populations at scale using as minimal violence as necessary to harden and grow the infrastructure of the fascist police state.