With another influx of users, a nudge to remind people to use alt text

The lecturer in question is our colleague in children’s literature studies. She is a brilliant scholar and from all accounts a gifted teacher. This ruling is infuriating… at the end of the day, it is our students’ education that will suffer.

12YO girl signed up to do “stand up comedy” at the talent show. 13YO boy decided to heckle her. Teacher started to tell the boy to leave her alone, but the 12YO comedian said “no, no, let him go, this is the closest he’s ever going to get to having a conversation with a girl.”

Imagine pulling up to the spot riding one of these suckers

really excellent dismantling of douthat’s whole project (and perhaps more importantly, one written through a not quite secular lens)

Chicago Athletic Association.

A warning from the lawyer representing the unjustly fired Oklahoma TA! Beware of GFM scams: her client is NOT crowdfunding at this time.

Christ on a bike, this is brilliant. And disgustingly historically accurate. 10/10

The news that AI was being trained on stolen works? It was broken first about the BooksCorpus, on May 11 of 2021, and it was discussed in major news media thereafter. Romance authors talked about it. A lot. The first archive they stole was largely romance. arxiv.org/abs/2105.05241

The news about Harlequin translators getting fired en masse? You should care about that. They're doing it there because they think nobody gives a shit about romance and so it's fine to experiment with it first.

Three ways of looking at the iconic Christmas Tree Cluster, 2700 light years from Earth. What the universe looks like depends on how we look at it. These views highlight infrared (left), x-rays (middle), and red emission from hydrogen gas. Beautiful in three different ways. 🧪🔭

Hampstead Heath, December 1938. Photograph by Frederick G Roper

In 1987, Jennifer Jones became the first African American Rockette, bringing her exuberant and elegant dancing to the iconic dance line. Read more here: https://bit.ly/4pcE5EA

Once more.

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate. Happy Chinese food and movie day to the Yidden. Happy Thursday to everyone else.

Good Thursday everyone. If it is not a good one for you, know you are not alone. If the only person who made you not feel alone each year is missing this year, know they told someone about you, and we are rooting for you and holding a place in our heart for you today and every day.

Merry Christmas from me and my man-eating polar bear Jeffrey

flat fuck friday two days early

I hear there is a wave of people coming from twitter? I have a starter pack of non-AI cat accounts that post their own images and use alt text. go.bsky.app/J8yqxnN

HEY SURVIVORS !! HEY ATTENTION TO ME beloveds you do not have to read or witness all of this . You do not have to re traumatize You don’t owe nobody nothing

I wrote an article about the psychology by which disinformation campaigns work, with examples from anti-trans propaganda. It's not just about individual beliefs, but also the way our institutions and norms are manipulated. Please read and share! pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/Ant...?

"...BigCo will say, truthfully and unhelpfully, that BigCo does not issue BigCo gift cards. It sells them. It accepts them. But it does not issue them. Your princess is in another castle."

I'm obsessed with this woman who got so bored of being straight married in rural Ohio, she killed her husband. It was said about her that "cigarette smoking city girls ain't got no time for keeping a house as a woman should" and she had a girlfriend. I know she killed a guy, but i could fix her?

Christmas Eve Eve

Big Freedia's Christmas music >>>>>>>>>>>

Wildly different things, tasks, techniques, subspecialties being lumped into "AI" and then being conflated with each other, doesn't help. Different types of models vs the techniques to train them vs the tasks they are supposed to accomplish, all under "AI".

Bars

Obligatory:

Wtaf

There has never been a more accurate explanation of Bari Weiss.

What a lovely solstice day post. May these monarchs always reign over North America.

The story is insane. The acting head of cyber security, a Noem crony, repeatedly demanded to see highly classified information he didn’t need access to, and when staff set up a lie detector test as a condition to grant him access, he failed it. So DHS suspended the staffers.

Morning.

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

And there it is...

there was a time where the Republican Party would have a total melt down about the idea of a Sec Def purging the Chaplains but of course they don't believe in God

#OTD in 1943, Tule Lake Director Ray Best calls for the Army to maintain control over the camp. Best testified to the Dies Subcommittee that he thought that camp was orderly until a group of over 200 Japanese Americans incarcees "were armed with clubs and were intent on using them." 🗃 #skystorians

I really wish more people would follow Jake and that he had more of a national platform because he points out really useful stuff on the regular

important

A recent modeling study in JAMA showed that if MMR vaccine rates drop 10% (easy to see happen with this), we’re back to 400,000-500,000 cases a year. Our current outbreak is 2,000. This turns the clock back to 1950 🚨🚨🚨

"megachurches are shen yun for white people" is an incredible and damning true statement

The local high school choir visited my son's elementary school yesterday, and they sang Carol of the Bells but replaced all the dings and dongs with sixes and sevens, and the kids fucking loved it

The gist of the intro to this is that Gen Z Republicans view politics as entertainment and have no real concerns. I'm intrigued that Manhattan Institute put this out.

oh my god

One of my favorite lines about AI — not LLMs but human-like digital intelligence — was said to me almost a decade ago by @galaxykate.bsky.social for a piece I wrote for Vice. www.vice.com/en/article/w...

Once again a reminder: We can have trans rights, bodily autonomy, gender nonconformity, and freedom of expression, or we can have none of these things. There’s no third option.