llms think they've read all the books and they haven't read any of the books

my office walls are looking better and better. newest additions are the dueling banjos by @phineas.bsky.social and a pair of abstract prints by Yoshisuke Funasaka that i got for $10 yesterday at an estate sale

i'm pumped to be playing next weekend in my bluegrass club first variety show. and i get to play bass AND dobro at various points! events.humanitix.com/the-great-ca...

this wikipedia editor is orbiting the moon right now!

But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?

heading out to No Kings today to play protest songs with some of my friends from Outlanders Progressive Bluegrass Social Club

THANKS, I HATE IT. www.tiktok.com/t/ZP84va9qE/

it's not going to feel like a real democracy again until i can vote for party that at least gets this right

"We must admit that we are losing this battle. We have to acknowledge that the older generations have failed. All political movements in their present form have failed. But Homo sapiens have not yet failed." --Greta Thunberg Louder: All political movements in their present form have failed.

best Enlightenment Any% speedrun strats?

The biggest news coming out of YouTube lately looks to have been a quiet change to its search engine: instead of "sorting" you now "prioritize" (popularity, not view count). i.e. removing one of the last remaining ways to search based on concrete metrics. You also can't search the past hour anymore.

i don't care if it rains or freezes

this nation is a loose fish right now.

Last term I tried an experiment: I walked into my Tech and Design Ethics class, admitted that I had *no idea* what to do about ChatGPT - so I would let them figure it out. As in: their first project was to decide and write the ChatGPT policy for the class. Here's what happened:

my "abolish ice" t-shirt is garnering lots of appreciation at the airport today. got compliments from several TSA agents, among others.

look what they’re doing to my beautiful city. this is bovino’s massive armed convoy, rolling through the Wedge, one of the nicest, friendliest residential areas in Minneapolis, doing nothing but posturing, starting fights, and then deploying chemical weapons at a park many children play in

I’m seeing posts from people (outside of MN) about how US citizens should carry their passports. And let me say that *inside* MN, we are calmly responding to requests with: “No, I don’t have to show you any documentation.” Because that’s how you protect everyone, regardless of immigration status.

here's this vintage jeopardy clip with ken jennings

update: here is the AI policy i wrote for my doc seminar this term (i have already located the typo and fixed it, which tbh is like 60% of the point of posting it in public)

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

Today’s Wikipedia DYK section has been taken over for Trans Day of Remembrance. 🏳️‍⚧️

New feature article from TNJ (nation's best student magazine): Inside Yale’s Quiet Reckoning with AI thenewjournalatyale.com/2025/10/insi...

I'm so worried about what'll happen when our kids are old enough to have phones!!!! 😮😮😮

Nuremburg trials is the moderate position

Meta earns $3.5 billion every six months from showing Faceboon and Instagram users 15 billion “higher legal risk” scam ad impressions a day, internal documents state. That haul vastly exceeds how much the company expects regulators To fine it for running scam ads. www.reuters.com/investigatio...

The new Väsen album is really nice. Very chill, but with a strong pulse. Makes we want a 5-string low viola. vasen.se

#Wikidata has been recognized as a digital public good! Wikidata is always the mostly-invisible powerhouse in the background, so this is especially meaningful to me and a great recognition of the work that thousands of people put into structuring the world’s knowledge every single day.

"I suppose you’ve come to say you’re sorry? I hope so, given your years of sneering and hand-wringing about how I was ruining knowledge. Meanwhile, you turned your information environment into a hypercapitalist post-truth digital snuff film."

went to a delightful bluegrass jam in Brooklyn last night, played a No Kings protest song by an old-timer on uke, and was gifted a ticket by a stranger to see Michael Daves, Tony Trischka and Erik Alvar right afterwards. thanks NYC!

At #wikiconferencena a man pulled a gun on stage wearing a "non-offending pedophile" sign, aggrieved, seemingly, that wikipedia doesn't allow him to write about that subject. Disarmed by hero Wikipedians Pharos and Fuzheado and arrested.

feeling energized after listening to this fantastic Anoushka Shankar performance youtu.be/4d8Qey7xdkg?...

This video of Chicagoans intervening to save a man from being abducted off the streets by ICE is making the rounds on Instagram. Community action works. Source: www.instagram.com/reel/DPZL2AL...

my sister was at Planet Fitness in Lake Forest Park, WA this afternoon, when a large number of US Marshals came in, and handcuffed a man literally while he was on a step machine. seemed to be looking for a fight. when confronted by patrons, they acted like bullies and refused to answer questions.

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

Minority Report but the precogs are just an LLM reasoning model and the precrime cops are the stupidest, most racist people you can imagine

what a narrow, weak, pathetic masculinity these fascists push. like, bro, you're choking your own soul.

find joy where you can youtu.be/TM6BEZ-Dzy4?...

i think it's possible to make good art with AI but this is still the only time i've seen it actually done in a way that connected for me. saw this three years ago, been listening to MF DOOM ever since. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5i-...

How to choose a tech contractor step 1: run each cover letter through Pangram and screen out all the ones that are AI slop

The Onion News Network truck is currently stationed outside the Broadview ICE Detention facility just outside of Chicago.

i was never really 'into' tech until i started editing Wikipedia. the feeling of using text (wikicode) to reliably build something (a web page) and have it work exactly like i wanted it (unlike Word's nightmare UI) was empowering. the AI user experience is the opposite. feels like pull-tabs.

forgive me

I want to explain a few things and then it might be clearer why UK trans people are upset. In 2001 I married my wife, Sylvia. In 2005 I started medical transition. (1/13)

Excited for the "Gen AI and the Wikipedia Assignment: Challenges and Opportunities" panel that's about to start (hosted by my org), because it's a bunch of really smart people and I have no idea what they're going to say. wikiedu.org/speaker-seri...

We talk a lot about the black box problem in AI and not enough about AI as censorship.

They're so mad that people aren't lying down and accepting this, which is a sign that you should keep heckling and protesting these doofuses whenever you can. Your fear is what gives them power.