An arrest of a person due entirely to the person having dark skin color is now known across the country as a "Kavanaugh stop," based on Justice Kavanaugh's justification of the practice. slate.com/news-and-pol...

Gonna market my revolutionary "coin toss" method as providing nearly the same accuracy as world renowned software company Microsoft for an infinitesimal fraction of the cost. It costs a single penny and you don't even have to spend it.

friend, lemme tell ya something about GenAI that shit sucks

The question is—will it cause a bunch of wrongful convictions, make it impossible to convict on video evidence, or both?

"When nearly one-third of all political contributions get recycled back into asking for more contributions, we've created a system that exists primarily to perpetuate itself while enriching fundraising consultants." data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-fundra...

It is remarkable - and ridiculous - that the head of ChatGPT at OpenAI can still not directly explain why people use ChatGPT

'Even when women were mentioned, the report found they were more often victims than protagonists, with the women murdered by Jack the Ripper more likely to be taught in lessons than the female code breakers at Bletchley Park during the second world war 1/2

am sure this absolutely sucked to deal with but this also looks like the cover for a killer circa-2009 indie rock EP

Do you know what I find wild tho? Nearly a decade of being an ethicist - raising concerns, questions, challenges in a plethora of contexts has been my job. This is different. I’ve never felt so at risk personally for doing this as I do for LLMs. People get personally offended, get nasty even.

The question isn't if someone might succeed at creating the thousand-year Reich, the question is how many deaths will the failed attempt cost this time.

The offer made to women in the enticement to become trad wives is the same as the offer made to citizens in the enticement to embrace authoritarianism: give up. Abandon the aspiration to self rule. It’s imprisonment recast as rest and relief.

I've got a hand gesture for them

did we need to invest a trillion dollars to "learn" that statistical distributions that are fit to data *may* still revert to the correct mean but nonetheless produce outliers that are the wrong kind of outliers?

(Ce ne sont pas des emplois ditransitifs : « Z » n’y fait pas partie d’un complément indirect, mais d’un attribut du complément direct.) Cas épineux pour lequel « tenté » est bien adapté ! La plus ancienne attestation que j’ai relevée date du 13 novembre 1894. Le contexte en est… antisémite.

Mais ?? Il doit être tout petit !

i strongly encourage parents not to post photos of your children on the internet

I already have an app for your website. it’s called a browser and it lets me copy text unlike your app

In the 2010s, this country's elites were thrown onto social platforms with everyone else and could finally read what we all think about them and it caused them so much psychic damage that they decided to destroy both the internet and democracy to make sure nothing like it ever happened again.

“When was Joe Biden president?” remains the most difficult question in politics

“These companies all advertise these tools as knowing your intent,” Taylor told 404 Media. “Understanding what you meant when you put those terms in. They don’t know. They don’t understand. None of those things are true. There is no technical way these tools can do that.”

If you’re on academia dot edu, let me suggest that you strongly consider deleting your account.

“Technology firms behind artificial intelligence–based note-taking software — marketed to therapists as a time-saving administrative tool — have quietly included provisions in their terms and conditions that allow patients’ therapy records to be sold and manipulated to train other AI applications.”

Ce mois-ci, je vous propose de vous pencher sur deux ordres d’arachnides parfois confondus : les araignées et les opilions. Malgré quelques ressemblances et une appartenance à la même classe (les arachnides), ces deux ordres sont bien distincts ! #Bestiologie #Arachnides #Illustration #SciArt 1/n

you can't excise trans people from society because transness is an emergent property of free will. if you divide the world up into men and women and say men do this and women do that, some people are going to say that sucks, fuck you, i do what i want. it doesn't get more complicated than that

Immediately after giving us the conventional F0 averages for men and women, my intro to phonetics teacher took on a deeper voice like "...well these are the values for non-smokers HO HO HO" (we used to see her smoke in front of the building every morning)

There isn’t tons of sociolinguistic work on sapphics but I like that one of those studies found that lesbians spoke with a lower pitch than straight women, BUT way more of the lesbians were smokers compared to the straights (which can lower your pitch) and so that may have messed with the results

there's no contradiction between "hating trans people" and "wanting to fuck trans people". have you guys heard what men think of women

"The authors see the direct link between fascism and AI, for fascistic regimes always attack academic integrity and prefer voters to be uneducated and uncritical. I find the analogy with tobacco most pertinent: knowing of the mortal risks we can now choose to smoke or not at our own peril." ‼️

We're witnessing the most aggressive, fanatical crackdown on free speech in my lifetime. The speed and breadth of government censorship and private sector and nonprofit capitulation has been astonishing. As has the lack of urgency/silence from people who've long claimed to care about this stuff.

Sidéré d'apprendre que les enfants se traitent encore de "bébé cadum" en 2025. C'est une expression que j'entendais à la maternelle, donc il y a 30 ans et c'était déjà une référence datée. Je ne crois pas avoir jamais vu de ma vie déjà longue une seule fois des publicités pour la marque Cadum.

The Washington Post now has no Black Opinion columnists - none - at a time when white nationalism is ascendant in our nation. I am grateful to Karen for the truth and fearlessness her work has always shown. Keep shining that light, my friend.

Yesterday's piece from @jamellebouie.net is the only high-profile piece I've seen that specifically discusses the watchlist, its effect on academics, and its effect on public attitudes toward academia as a whole. (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2025/09/13/o...

A friend of mine was on Charlie Kirk's "watch list" of Black professors. She received so many death and rape threats that her university offered her a security detail for the walk to class. This is Kirk's legacy. You would never know it from reading all of these legacy newspaper op-eds about him.

Maybe I never saw this supposed "nice side" of Charlie Kirk because I wasn't the target audience for it. I was the target of his hatred and violence, not his free speech advocacy and alleged Christian witness. As far as I'm concerned, the version of Kirk some people are mourning does not exist

Est-ce que quelqu'un a tenté de retracer l'histoire de l'emploi du verbe "insulter" et de l'apparition de son emploi ditransitif ( "X a insulté Y de Z" ) ? Manifestement une analogie de "traiter Y de Z" mais je suis curieux des détails (date d'attestation notamment)

Deskilling is a huge concern. It's terrifying that students and academics convince themselves that AI can substitute for their own critical faculties or skill development.

False friends are often wrongly called false cognates. These are very different things. For example, 'to molest' is a false friend of Spanish 'molestar' (to annoy) but they are true cognates, both coming from Latin 'molestāre' (to bother). Four graphics, all about false friends and false cognates:

La culture des armes à feu aux USA et la violence qui en résulte ne peut que dégoûter une personne civilisée. Charlie Kirk l'a défendue âprement parmi mille autres idées barbares et répressives, et à présent il en est une victime de plus. Il n'y a rien d'autre à dire.

La collaboration des universités Berkeley et Columbia avec le pouvoir trumpiste est aussi répugnante qu'elle est finalement peu surprenante.

Le Premier Ministre démissionnaire a parlé de l'importance de protéger les enfants dans son discours de fin de fonctions, ce qui, je me permettrai de le dire, est assez audacieux.

condemnations of political violence are well taken but it does feel as if some prominent political commentators are of the view that violence isn’t a part of the history of American politics and that is very much not true.

Once again thinking about Macaulay Culkin walking into the Parisian café where the wifi password was “Macaulay Culkin” and the owner saying “I knew you’d come here someday”

Sadly similar things happen with student assignments. My own papers cited with descriptions of their contents deeply unrelated.

"I spent decades saying, ‘Come on, it’s got to be more complex than this.’ But I think it’s not. I think that almost everything can be explained by this deep hatred that the majority of white Americans have for black Americans. It’s the only thing that makes sense.” inews.co.uk/culture/book...

Two trials will be repeated endlessly despite always producing the same results: 1) Does UBI work? (yes) 2) Does AI improve productivity? (no)

“It’s not tht traditional liberal learning is out of step w student demand. Instead, it’s out of step w priorities, values & desires of a powerful board of trustees… & an administrative class tht won’t fight for the liberal arts… even when it attracts major $$ gifts” www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/o...

"We can and should reject that AI output is ‘good enough,’ not only because it is not good, but also because there is inherent value in thinking for ourselves."