billionaires repeatedly buy and destroy communications platforms to dominate information flow this week's 🙄 Bluesky silo redux discourse downplays that people of sense and empathy were chased here unwillingly and are focused on survival and connection, not revolution

Once again, I am not the Cat Czar of bluesky. I do not control how many cats you see. I’m afraid you’re just going to have to learn how to use this incredibly simple platform instead of whining at me.

I have metastasized breast cancer that resulted in two brain tumors, since removed. I've lost vision and get chronic migraines. All my books are written solely by me, with 10 fingers and 85% of a brain. No AI needed. The answer to disability isn't AI, it's community.

hot take: women are less likely to use AI because we’re quick to clock flattery as a tool of manipulation

Gonna save this for my grad students doing capstone presentations and oral defenses.

What happened at the Supreme Court is about anti-Blackness and curtailing Black political power. Trump as a corrective to Obama. Anti CRT/ DEI as a corrective to Black Lives Matter and Black progress in education and the workforce. Anti-Blackness is America’s favorite manner of self-harm.

I don’t understand how they thoroughly messed up the widely used software that opens PDFs? Like as apps go this one is pretty close to “you had one job”???

Acronyms are pronounced as words. -scuba -laser -NASA Initialisms are pronounced as individual letters. -NFL -TSA -TGIF 'Acronym' is frequently used for both kinds of abbreviations, so it's ok to call an initialism an acronym.

Being into cats feels so debasing. You give everything over to this animal — time, labor, money — but when you want them to sit next to you, they refuse and jump away. When they finally sit on your lap, you sit motionless to the point of physical pain, afraid to disturb them. Humiliating.

For those hereabouts scrambling to remediate course materials in order to meet the end of the month deadline for compliance with new federal ADA Title II standards, here is the endgame as I see it: 🧵

The reason Moby Dick is the most American novel ever written is because it is about a violent white man enacting a confusing revenge fantasy against a cheap source of oil.

You know whose fault it actually is that bluesky is dying? the reply guys, who consistently let down power users with substandard riffs and slightly off-topic GIFs

Surely no one would deprive Merlin of his precious packing papers! He must save them, there may not be another shipment for some time.

Every cat owner has garbage laying around the house and you have to explain that its the cat's favorite garbage and so you can't throw it away.

Oh did the leftists say that? Maybe time you lefthis app and went to the gym.

I’m at ICE HQ

They’re telling me a great empire will be destroyed if I attack Persia. Even the oracles who don’t like me very much, very nasty, they all said to me, “Sir, it’s one of the great empires, and it’ll be destroyed. And all because you attacked Persia.” That’s what they’re telling me.

I drove around for hours, I drove around for days, I drove around for months and years and never went no place Jack Bishop c. 2020

Yes, that’s the issue. I’ve been trying to find a way to articulate this: to the extent that LLMs serve a purpose in education, it’s an indictment of the education system, not a praiseworthy feature of LLMs.

me: if z is the length of a slice and a is the area of the pie, then pi(zz)=a PhD advisor: this is what you’ve been working on for three and a half years?

"I got my PhD by writing prompts instead of doing research, I'm winning" got some bad news, there still no jobs and now you also know nothing

every quantitative measure is actually a stack of qualitative assumptions in a trenchcoat

It is already a utility that individual people were once paid to dispense. And now Atlman is stealing it from us to sell to other people. He's a parasite.

this is the appeal of the attack on "gerontocracy." erasing class/race/gender and suggesting the problem is a failure of succession from one generation of leaders (white men) to another generation (of white men.)

the animating principle is that the main injustice of our current moment is that certain white men are not receiving their just empowerment, and that socialism will allow the downtrodden white men to overthrow the wealthy elites (often framed as not white men.)

this is a big part of it. ppl like grim fantasize about red brown crossover, in no small part because they like the idea of a left that doesn't rely on women or people of color.

i think enthusiastic LLM use is mostly a stack of cognitive biases, unacknowledged plagiarism, and unmet needs in a trenchcoat but also my main objections aren't about them being bad at tasks so i don't care if you think they've gotten better at it

"The Islamists oppose women getting an education," I mutter, as I aim my missile at the girls school

ai is a rhetorical technology. when it produces a list of permissible targets, its value is not producing targets but producing permission

I feel this so strongly. Covid was a test of our moral integrity & decency -- *not just elites, but all of us* -- and we failed. I genuinely think one reason Covid has been memory-holed so hard, & so crusted w/ myths & conspiracy theories, is that on some level we know this & are ashamed.

Here it is, your moment of zen.

AI does not enhance “efficiency.” AI is a permission structure for a totalizing regime of austerity and labor immiseration.

Now this is a movie plot!!! Someone understands grad school.

I may say more later but part of what some of us need to understand is that the right has built an entirely distinct civic society, with its own hierarchy and (mostly networked) cultural institutions. That includes celebrity.

I'm pretty proud of this poem I made out of the euphemisms that companies used to describe the ICE occupation in corporate communications. Also read the whole story: racketmn.com/corporate-co...

Man I'm so goddamn sick of ai. "Wahhh you can't have a reasonable conversation about ai on here," yeah maybe be mad about the two year parade of scam artists and financial charlatans and environmental ruiners who have radicalized everyone against the spell check that agrees with you

“Gramsci used to say 'Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will'. What he meant is: understand how the bloody system works.” - Stuart Hall, born Feb. 3, 1932

An extraordinary number of banger lines in this masterpiece of the genre of critical academic book review, but this in particular is straight up🔥: doi.org/10.1215/2834...

CHOTINER: and when you're in water you PARTICLE MAN: don't get wet, that's right. CHOTINER: And this is because PARTICLE MAN: the water gets me instead. It becomes particle-manish CHOTINER: There's been some debate on this point. Triangle Man, for example PARTICLE MAN: I think we're done here

So what I’m gathering is a pedophilic billionaire successfully worked to destigmatize race science among the academic, political, and business elite partly by sex trafficking girls. Is that the shape of it so far?

Those in power have tried to convince us that resistance would be too tiring. But let Minnesotans teach you that it’s actually energizing to be a part of a movement to change society for the better. If you’re tired, get involved. You’ll be surprised by how quickly you start to feel better.

Other folks have already noted much of this, but I think the MAGA 'theory of victory' here is: 1) DHS provocations trigger a riot or attack on agents which 2) Leads to widespread civil unrest in many 'blue' cities so that 3) Trump can invoke the insurrection act and send in the troops...

One thing that irks me: people keep calling the folks on the streets in Minneapolis protestors. They are not generally there to protest, they are there to observe and document. This is the product of organizing and mutual aid. It is telling that these acts of citizenship are seen as protest!

All those people downtown yesterday, no ICE involvement, and not one incident. ICE shows up in a neighborhood and now another Minnesotan is dead. It's pretty obvious who the violent outside agitators are.

A plea to all my peers in academia who feel powerless in the face of *all of this*: the biggest thing you can do right now is take every once of energy you can from your research and pour it into teaching. The fact is your impact in the classroom will far eclipse that journal article you're cooking.

We’re visiting a high-school friend of my wife and LOOK AT THIS PAINTING HER DAUGHTER DID

For all those involved in drafting so-called AI guidelines, but being overwhelmed with nonsense, this is a lifesaver. Great work by Dagmar and Ariel! Resisting Enchantment and Determinism: How to critically engage with AI university guidelines. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

I was very annoyed at not winning the big penis prize (due to my penis size being rejected by the judges for some reason) but now the big penis prize winner has given me the big penis prize so now everyone knows I have the big penis.

Some time back, @prisonculture.bsky.social posted on here something like: you could do worse than organize yourself around seeking ways to reduce suffering for others. It struck me, b/c that is the heart of my own religious & intellectual life, as a Buddhist teacher & scholar of Buddhist studies...

On this important day of mobilization, don't be scared off by self-appointed experts giving you a bunch of rules for how to protest or what not to do. The most important thing we need is more people in the streets, period. Our safety comes from numbers. As a criminal defense lawyer for decades...