Beyond the horror, there is a story here about logistics and storage/containment and the ubiquity of these specific building styles

Remember last week how Dr. Oz called AI the best solution for rural healthcare shortages? Well, a new study finds that when patients turn to chatbots for health advice, they end up taking the wrong steps and getting the wrong diagnosis more than half the time. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/w...

ICE has now spent over half a BILLION dollars just on purchasing warehouses around the country to convert into detention camps. If these mega-camps are utilized to the full capacity ICE intends, they'll be the largest prisons in the country, with little real oversight. www.ajc.com/politics/202...

You know what they’re going to store in those warehouses? People

Pro tip, don't mess up your student's grad application with your shitty AI Gen reference letter. Thanks!

* US Companies Announce Most Job Cuts for Any January Since 2009 @bloomberg.com

I've said over and over again, the Recession-triggering hedges showed the value to be made at the top from betting *against* people, as a collective. that mentality has been allowed to flourish and iterate "innovations" for 15 years.

guardrails are a scam... as I said before: AI & any concept relating to it like so-called guardrails are a scam in the deepest sense like a perpetual motion machine or a ouija board — and not only a scam like a pyramid scheme which is a possible way to make money if you are first in first out

Zombie Citations codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2026/01/30/t...

Academics vying for a spot in Epstein‘s world. There are so many. I feel the need to make a thread, so I don’t keep confusing them. 1/

For the record, henceforth if you describe “networking” to me as a necessary professional skill, just know, in my head, I’m thinking of Jeffrey Epstein tremendous “networking” acumen. Fair warning.

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Subisidizing Big Food is a centuries-long habit that I'm keen for governments to kick. But sanctioning and policing the food of working class people to do it is pure class prejudice. More proof via Errol Schweizer and NIQ: 954ef859-12e3-4f54-beaa-1a7f0a6f0e39.usrfiles.com/ugd/954ef8_c...

don't ask them to help you. there's no real reward to helping n00bs — it's like asking for charity. nerds are motivated by status, so you have to challenge them. this allows them to reinforce their position on the nerd community hierarchy, which makes them feel good.

Watching these videos of ICE attacking children, I can’t help but think about how many of these men first practiced their violence in their own homes. Domestic violence teaches our oppressors to dehumanize the most vulnerable among us.

“OpenAI’s CFO has floated the idea of taking a cut from your AI-powered discoveries, and enterprise customers are unlikely to be amused.” Wow, leading idea-stealing company wants to steal from its customers now too? Who could have seen this coming?🥲

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“One notable MIT study found that 95 percent of companies that integrated AI saw zero meaningful growth in revenue. For coding tasks, one of AI’s most widely hyped applications, another study showed that programmers who used AI coding tools actually became slower at their jobs.”

In a few years, this will all look as stupid as NFTs and MOOCs, but by then, a whole generation will have forgotten how to learn anything.

When countries get hooked on US tech, their governments are constrained in reining in tech’s harms while most of the economic benefits accrue to the United States. It’s time to break out of that trap — but that means challenging the Silicon Valley model, not creating our own digital colonizers.

One basic lesson from political research is that secret police generally rely on mediocre men willing to do the dirty work of authoritarian regimes in order to advance their careers. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-the-fb...

love the commentary by Blake Bolden on the Ottawa - Minnesota game today. Excellent @thepwhl.com

It finally makes sense now. It’s a tool for the most incurious people in the world who also like to pretend that they are constantly busy ingesting information.

"Frontier names a duality where the place is important but the people are unimportant" Two brilliant scholars @triofrancos.bsky.social@lalehkhalili.bsky.social in conversation, highly recommended! proteanmag.com/2025/12/22/e...

As Hannah Arendt put it: "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists." Undermining that distinction will be a lasting legacy of generative AI.

This thread perfectly explains why AI has little value for qualitative research. Yes, large language models can find patterns in qualitative data. But, they're trained on what we already know. So, they won't find anything surprising. And, surprise is qualitative research's primary value-add.

Come for the lovely Nan talking holiday baking and stay for the egghead talk about rising cocoa prices due to climate change, commodity futures markets and retail store concentration www.cbc.ca/player/play/...

"a [price] shock to food generates inflation 126% higher for the poorest than the richest" Weber et al show the re-distributional effects of inflation

The affordability crisis is an inequality crisis. When prices spike in key sectors, it's not just inflation—it's a massive redistribution shock that hits poor households hardest. In our **new working paper**, we identify the sectors that matter most. A thread 🧵 scholarworks.umass.edu/entities/pub...

Call for papers! @danielleresnick.bsky.social , @philbakernz.bsky.social and I are co-editing a special issue in the journal Food Policy on "Rebuilding Global Food Governance amidst a Crisis of Multilateralism" - Papers due Feb.1, 2026. For more info, see link! www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

AI slop is such a huge issue, as others have said, it's digital aspestos - easy and quick to generate - very hard to excise. The so-called time saver of AI generates more work and labour and it is dispiriting work

My dreamboat, the bollard

It’s the entire point. There’s no plan to make this meaningful for students. No plan to use it administratively. Its design and implementation signals its only real intent. It’s best and easiest use case is for systematic harassment and to scare faculty into complying in advance.

"Fake citations have turned into a nightmare for research librarians, who by some estimates are wasting up to 15 percent of their work hours responding to requests for nonexistent records that ChatGPT or Google Gemini alluded to."

I’m sorry, but it is disgraceful to be an academic who uses this technology to conduct research. It should be prohibited in all of our scholarly institutions, including universities and journals.

Another banger from @heavyweight.bsky.social "Warmongers are thieves" thank you, Deborah

Excellent post by Olivia Roanhorse (linkedin) "Friendship at work is nice, but it’s not necessary. Relational responsibility is." Full post, now with Alt Text

A new World Bank report calls on governments to create dedicated Livable Streets Investment Programs, steadily scaling funding to 10% of road budgets by 2035. Why? Because livable streets deliver some of the highest returns in transport investment—up to €16 per €1 spent: investinlivablestreets.info

people love to rag on canada post, but parcel shipments to newfoundland have been a mess for weeks and canada post is the only shipper reliably getting deliveries to me. i have packages with private shippers (including fedex) that haven't moved in over two weeks.

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

There isn't a single problem "solved" by edtech that couldn't be fixed with smaller classes led by well-paid teachers given real academic freedom

Super interesting piece on how DHS and ICE uses private data to track people. Remarkably cheap and of course huge legal issues #swampNotes podcastaddict.com/swamp-notes/...

In my 25yrs in the academy I 👀 the proliferation of expensive enterprise software that shifted the burden of sooo many basic administrative functions — reconciling receipts, paying honoraria, booking travel — from competent, efficient staff to faculty + students. I’d spend entire days on this crap.

someone should invent a thing that's like a university but it's goal is to facilitate learning

An excellent piece by @profsecchi.bsky.social

My colleague reviewed a paper for the journal Climate and discovered it has been written by AI (citations that didn’t exist). Not only did the journal keep the paper, they asked her to re-review it. We are so cooked.

I said it before, will say it again -- generative AI fetishizes "ideas" while sneering at effort, execution, and education. That, despite Gen-AI being built on and out of other people's effort, execution and education.

So similarly, when we see people who prefer ChatGPT or a similar synthetic text extruding machine as a source of medical information, that means those are people who are under-served in the current system.

Students, staff, faculty turning to ChatGPT? That means they are being asked to do things they don't have the time, resources, support, etc to do.

In early 2024, I got to speak to Deans from up & down the West Coast of the US & Canada about "AI". I told them that the only value of ChatGPT for university administrators is as a contrast-dye test to show where resources are lacking.