I am really sorry for the faculty there, but Texas A&M should lose accreditation.

Cool and good that we’ve made the word “eugenics” functionally meaninglessness at the same time “Let measles rip and purge the weak” became official government policy.

Gonna try to be less online today because I have another draft to finish

hearing about the CSAM shit ongoing on X and im slowly coming around to "well, it's nice they're already building camps for us to repurpose" as an unironic position for groypers

Doing a last minute day trip to NYC, because gf needs a specific book and it'll take too long to get it at the Yale library

i think that the tragedy of the Scott Alexander extended universe is that one interpretation of rationalism is a group of people that wanted to come up with a utopian online environment that wasn't subject to these kinds of forum dynamics

if you call for doxxing someone *who you then go on to misgender* because they offered an explanation of something *that is not an endorsement*, i don't think you should be allowed to use this website, and if you follow someone who does that, i think worse of you as a person [sad trombone noise]

Was Jared Polis was always like this? Or do I just have rose-colored glasses because he was my congressman the first time I moved to a blue area?

the other tech companies working on AI will — not now, but eventually — regret having chosen not to draw a bright line between what musk is doing and what they're doing, and google, of all companies, really should know this firsthand, given how much tesla's self-driving informs opinions about waymo

For CFTs specifically, I'd probably say: 1. Celestial holography, but like, from the CFT side 2. Rigidity/uniqueness of conformal data 3. Better tools for bootstrapping gauge theories 4. Fractional N_f and fractional d 5. Conformal blocks in odd dimensions

It’s not even the Nazi bar analogy anymore, it’s like if the owner of the Nazi bar succeeded in murdering hundreds of thousands of people and now installed a machine that produces CSAM on demand. It’s insane that people are still on there.

it's about oil (superstructure), not oil (base), to put it in marxo terms

Annoying thing academia is that, when you find yourself saying "someone should really do X", you're probably the person who should do X.

I would like the tiny people in the computer to be friends with each other

I wish for the proper procedures of federal law to be carried out regarding the president.

People aren’t horrified because the US has no historical precedent for this!!! People are horrified because WAR IS HORRIFYING. People are horrified because there was some hope that the US would not be like that again! Your cynicism does not create a moral nor intellectual superiority!

Heh, while you plebs are shocked by the terror and implications of a war of aggression, I remain unfazed, because I am the One True Leftist™. My hatred for the US runs so deep I simply do not comprehend the importance of expecting better. I paid attention in high school history and I am *very* smart

Furious all over again at the credulous Gen Z rubes who insisted Harris would get them killed in conflict.

Not a fan of her work, but I think there's a lot of truth in what you could call "weak Bender-ism"---i.e. that LLMs are much more stochastic-parrot-like than most nontechnical people think.

i'm really having a hard time getting past the "surely we can all agree that Somalis are worse than trash" thing. this feels new and very bad

I showed this thread to my medievalist girlfriend, and she made a very unsettling noise upon reading the screenshots

i love transplants. i am a lifelong transplant. if you never hated your hometown and wanted to get the fuck out of there I believe you may not be mentally well-adjusted!

Hi, yes, why is Reuters of all fucking things publishing "statements from Grok" like they are a statement from the company, when the actual statement from the company is at the bottom and is "you're lying about this"?

Open markets Open borders Falafel trucks on every corner

Yeah basically every reservation I had about him is gone

I think Mamdani has a massively uphill battle to be an effective mayor, but unlike most people we elect here, he seems to realize that.

okay it is genuinely wildly cool to have three men swearing the oath of office with texts christian, jewish, and muslim traditions, literally where else could this happen

This is an annoying killjoy take, but I'm really not a fan of the whole "religious speech with leaders from multiple faiths" thing at civic events.

I was really excited the first time I watched the ball drop, because I assumed they would throw it off the tower and it would hit the ground at midnight. Massive disappointment.

eric adams, man

any discussion of city transit improvement online ever

And since you can't really give up essays in rhetoric/comp classes and much of the humanities, colleges are going to need to invest in surveilled writing spaces with locked computers. I think collective action has a role to play here, particularly on the part of grad unions.

This is very good. In the "AI is not going away" thread, I got into a heated argument about reworking exams vs "resisting" (I was arguing for the former). My opponent (fairly) pointed out that I was shitting on others' posts instead of making concrete proposals, so I'm going to outline some now:

I'm not worried about people being abusive to their AI chatbots, especially men being sexually abusive, from the POV of "AI chatbots are a real sentient guy being harmed", but I feel like the way you repeatedly learn to treat something that can't say no *must* bleed into how you treat humans, right?

I feel like Linux gets a bad rap because the loudest advocates IRL (e.g. me) are also the types to run bespoke tiling desktops on Arch and manage everything via command line, and the loudest advocates online insist *everyone* should do that. But it really doesn't have to be any harder than Windows.

Boston ppl: has the silver line from Logan to South Station always been a bumpy, rickety nightmare? I feel like it wasnt this bad a couple years ago

honestly nothing baffles and pisses me off me so much as "futurists" who have conniptions over trans people. like come on. the SLIGHTEST BIT of actual imagination! for once!

i think we should greatly expand how the state soaks up wealth from the billionaire class for political economy reasons that are unrelated to fiscal constraints but i also agree with this

It's good she's doing this, but what a gigantic farce and an embarrassment for our entire profession that we're forcing a graduate student to waste precious time away from her studies to battle the Republican grievance machine on her own.

Not to be That Guy, but I feel like the 2010s (minus the one year when Win8 sucked) were a pretty anomalous time in the Linux/Windows debate. Sticking to computer opinions you formed in that era is like basing your theory of politics on the 1990s.

I think a lot of us are overthinking the language/sentiment of “I am happy MTG is stabbing her party’s figurehead in the gut.” A general sentiment that need not travel much farther than the sentence itself.

Since we're making these again, I think this is basically my outlook post-Fulnecky

A working escalator? At a European train station?

get in loser, we're doing Woke 2

bruno latour: in my paper "Why Critique Has Run Out of Steam," i invented the paranoid hermeneutic as a cautionary tale engineers trying to do STS: at long last we have invented the paranoid hermeneutic from the famous STS paper "Don't Invent the Paranoid Hermeneutic."

New, from me: The NYT reporter who specializes in profiles of beleaguered right-wingers on campus went to New College...and found out that things were going ok! So let me explain some pretty massive errors of omission: 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-nyt-re...

i'm so glad that vegan kapsalon exists

Living and working abroad has had its difficulties but imo it’s something everyone should do at least once. You learn things about yourself being a stranger somewhere.

As a card-carrying member of the Spreadsheet Left, I think there's been some uncomfortable slippage between "society should not be organized around charity" and "charity is bad".