I find myself thinking about historian Robert Paxton’s 2004 definition of fascism far too often than I’d like these days. Note that these sentences were written back when Donald Trump was a NYC playboy libertine who donated to Democrats.

OpenAI is now facing a total of 8 wrongful death lawsuits from grieving families....who claim that ChatGPT, in particular, the GPT-4o version, drove their loved ones to suicide. Soelberg’s complaint also alleges that company executives knew the chatbot was defective before it pushed it to the public

There has never been a moment when ending the oil industry has been more urgent or important. Here is a thread of seven tools that can help. Brief, readable 2-pagers, and a 30-page overview from @michealpodgers.bsky.social at @clicabedu.bsky.social.

Surprise level: 0

Read this thread. I don't know what to say, other than we can't live like this anymore.

Cannot recommend more highly @thomaszimmer.bsky.social latest essay especially this part on why returning to pre-Trump status quo is not enough, we need larger transformation steady.page/en/democracy...

Again. We need to crush these sites when we take power. These are evil people.

The media wants the war and likes Trump and so will not report on this war as if it is unpopular, despite overwhelming polling showing that it is. Covering things as if they are unpopular is for things they want to stop and they want the war and want it to succeed.

The world must boycott the World Cup and the Olympics. It is both the only moral choice and will actually get the attention of these dead-eyed clout demons.

I'm deeply sorry to the people of Venezuela. There is no opposition party in the United States to counter the fascist regime's actions and the population is easily demagogued.

oh my going theory for a while has been that every llm inevitably becomes a synecdoche for the entire company because the process of training them inevitably leeches the personality of the stakeholders into it

I can’t make bad history videos go away but I can fail my students for using them.

so this senseless, murderous, criminal, unconscionable, hemispherically chaos-inducing madness is really happening isn't it

According to a WaPo spokesperson, “This is how products get built and developed in the digital age: ideation, research, design and prototyping, development, and then Beta.”

I saw an awful lot of the same things described here, having started my history PhD in 2007. Definitely some broad patterns across the profession

Ethical AI is an oxymoron, like automated science

It's fitting that the cover on AI mindlessly apes an earlier creation and also displaces workers while elevating Silicon Valley plutocrats.

I continue to have no sympathy left for whinging about how the public are rude about AI and feel threatened by it when the biggest players in the AI space have spent years very vocally and constantly *threatening the public*

The way the mainstream media cleans up Trump’s racist tirades has long passed the “they’re just making mistakes” phase. This is actively aiding and abetting a racist, tyrannical regime. The ‘mainstream media is the enemy.

This is completely and utterly false. The exact opposite is true.

They're using the confinement box, one of the most horrific methods of CIA torture in the post-9/11 black sites, against migrants now. This is the direct result of the lack of consequences for the architects of the torture program. Either there will be criminal penalties for this or it will expand.

not sure how to square ‘no one person can be reasonably expected to pay for every media subscription’ with ‘sorely underpaid writers need to make a living’ but my inclination is not to locate that problem with any of the broke ass people on either end of the complaint

Let me tell you a story. Perhaps you can guess where this is going... though it does have a bit of a twist. I was poking around Google Scholar for publications about the relationship between chatbots and wellness. Oh how useful: a systematic literature review! Let's dig into the findings. 🧵

And there is definitely a massive, massive, like galactic-scale-gigantic failure of political imagination among the "centrist," managerial parties like Labour and US Democrats. Like, the people running these parties really have no vision, no goal for what society should be like in the future

"With science and technology as panaceas for economic and social problems, [someone or some thing] embraced a 'boundless optimism' that trivialized any possible dangers." Wild how many different leaders, governments, regimes could be slotted right into this sentence

Who, pray tell, is worshipping the liberal arts? Where is the mythical university alluded to here where STEM and business courses are criticized and somehow disincentivized by those in power?

Indeed: Huntington was an early warning sign of how, amidst skyrocketing inequality, a small coterie of unpatriotic super elites would seek to tear down state structures while shouting racist narratives of blood and soil into the media that they control

There's that stupid "fact" about capacity: "The average person processes more data each day than a person in the 15th century did in a lifetime" And it's just not true! We're taking in different data then the 15th century guy, and we don't treat the brook or the sunset as the useful data that it is

Same, I want people to know what kind of American I am

Chinese lanterns shine as darkness falls and the moon rises behind the trees ~ Charles Courtney Currran’s atmospheric ‘The Lanterns’ (1913)

I beg you, do not start a research paper by making questionable assertions. Like: "Generative AI can be employed to write academic genres at a level similar to what humans write." Only if your baseline is that all academic writing produces non-representational strings of words can this be true.

David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs remains a great lens for understanding AI's broad adoption in the workplace: it mainly does bullshit work, and the people most engaged in bullshit work and the most enthusiastic proponents; so, executives then, the high lords of managerial feudalism

More and more convinced that an unexpected effect of AI in education is changing evidentiary practices in edu policy. "Testbeds" and live pilot tests are replacing "evidence-based" policy. This means schools are treated as "wild" sites that are modified to produce evidence for policy. >>

Every detail and nuance of colour in Gustav Wintzel's picture 'The Chess Players,' (1886) adds to a sense of obsessive purpose. Nothing is accidental in this work. Wintzel (facing us) wants us to see his world, his wide interests: it's his intellect made visible.

lmao

Epistemological collapse has *always* been the goal

Happy Thanksgiving

We're gonna need a truth and reconciliation commission and Nuremberg style trials to reckon with all of this evil, and any Dem candidate for office who shies away from a full reckoning in the name of "moving forward as a nation" can get well and truly fucked

It's like the way that pre-atomic bomb steel is necessary for some applications; all the steel made since 1945 has traces of radioactivity

1/5 It was entirely predictable that The Telegraph would jump on @DavidOlusoga’s Empire series to fight its right wing culture war for control of our public history. Let’s see what they’ve done:

"There is excited talk about “abundance” – which is code for sweeping forests, wetlands, woodlands and local communities out of the path of business, mining and development" www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

If I was part of the Spanish-speaking world, I'd be pissed off that Feliz Navidad is so prominent globally as an example of Spanish-language music, cause that song sucks off the charts

Nice to see a Democrat outright defend the humanities and the arts rather than taking the right-wing assault on them at face value.

I have had to take a job working with AI--it sucks but I need the income--and one of the things that's become completely obvious to me is that it doesn't actually do this. Sometimes it gives the impression of it, but honestly I'm surprised at how little it actually does

I got so stoned at a Mets game once I compared the Jumbotron to the top screen of a Nintendo DS bc it had “a bunch of useful contextual information” and the field to the bottom screen bc “it’s where the game is actually played”

Hey yall not what I wanted to do on my birthday but let it be clear "Death of the artist" is all well & good but you cannot Seperate the art from the artist when the artist is still alive, a terf & every penny they recieve reinforces their beliefs & is used to actively harm Trans folks! Let it Go!

You think LLM-based chatbots can help students learn? Think again. Take a few minutes to listen to Dr. @drtanksley.bsky.social clear explanation why this is very bad, harmful idea, especially for Black students. #Critical_AI_Literacy www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mtc...

Narwhals (Monodon monoceros) are called the unicorn of the sea — for obvious reasons. This illustration by Louis A. Sargent comes from "The wild beasts of the world", v. 2 (1909), contributed to BHL by @uoftlibraries.bsky.social: www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/19657038 #SciArt #ILoveBHL 🧪 📖 🌊

You ever just sit down and realize that the rise of 21st century fascism is capital's answer to climate change?