Not now, haunted Victorian shoes

“It turns out that banishing the slur from public discourse was, in fact, important. Because now it’s back and it turns out that it does matter when subtext becomes actual text, when terrible people enable open hatred and bigotry, encouraging others to emulate them, degrading us all.”

hope I never lose the expat giggles from UK place names that sound very wrong

Trans instructor: “you didn’t do this assignment” Supervising professor: “she didn’t do the assignment” Student: “I didn’t do the assignment” University: “isn’t there someone you forgot to ask” some days I just want to scream and scream

🚨Two TT posts in Social and Political Philosophy🚨 @maastrichtu.bsky.social | #PhilosophyJobs #Hiring #academicjobs @apaphilosophy.bsky.social @philjobs.org vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastric... www.academictransfer.com/en/jobs/3566...

Just found this lovely review of The AI Mirror in Critical Inquiry, from Jaehoon Lee. It's nice to see reviews still coming out!

iCloud, Mega, and as a torrent. Archivists have uploaded the 60 Minutes episode Bari Weiss spiked.

Happy Wreath of Khan season to all who celebrate

The idea that AI can “detoxify” people reframes emotional overwhelm as a software problem, and it treats loneliness and strain as things to route into a machine rather than conditions that require support, care, and structural repair. 1/*

an individual develops AI psychosis when they start to think that the AI is right and the world is wrong. a culture develops AI psychosis when it starts to believe that the AI can *describe the actual people* better than the people themselves. entering a hall of mirrors & treating it as windows.

Pleased to see this piece. Personally, I find these uses of synthetic data v concerning and I find the traction and endorsements that this work has to be quite baffling, esp given the well-storied role of algorithmic targeting in undermining democracy

"These men risked their lives to speak with us. We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless." - Sharyn Alfonsi, CBS 60 Minutes

“When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship. We are trading 50 years of ‘gold standard’ reputation for a single week of political quiet.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/b...

There is a tremendous opportunity for a brand new generation of media outlets to rise up right now because many news outlets that spent decades painstakingly building their credibility are seeing it torched by bootlickers with incredible speed.

Grateful to receive the 2026 Barwise Prize - thanks to @apaphilosophy.bsky.social for the early Christmas gift! Congrats to all the other prize winners - it’s been a hard year for the humanities, to put it mildly, so it’s especially important now to recognize and celebrate our work.

Oh wow this is a new low, arguably more insidious and damaging to the integrity of human knowledge than creating fake sources (which at least can be exposed). Reading & judging the quality of the cited support for your claims is the difference between trustworthy research and cherry-picked bullshit

As everyone knows who has ever written a book or manuscript review, summarizing a text is essential work. It’s the first step of an analysis. If you haven’t summarized the text there is no way I believe that you have understood it.

Reading is thinking, and afterwards, writing is thinking. Doing an "AI" summary eliminates thinking in both steps. A doc told me some of her colleagues are using "AI" to write their case notes. Her take: oh hell no, because writing the case notes is when you think about the case.

Not now, enormous 68-million- year-old egg nicknamed 'The Thing'.

almost there (vacation)

No one is obligated to enjoy anything, but I am struck by responses to Pluribus that amount to ‘Carol isn’t very nice so this show sucks.’ She isn’t nice! She’s deeply flawed, and selfish, and lonely, and dealing with the instantaneous loss of the whole fucking world, poorly. It’s a beautiful story.

4/ The AI Mirror, by @shannonvallor.bsky.social. A deeply sane appraisal of the challenges AI poses to our societies and our selves. For Vallor, AI models reflect back to us our biased, collectivised past, constraining how we imagine possible futures. Recommended. www.goodreads.com/book/show/19...

Coming back to this, I'm still struck by the implication that academics should care if the AI pushers "trust" all our work that's done without AI. I don't know, man, you all seemed to trust our work enough to steal it from us wholesale.

I keep wanting to say something, and I keep not knowing what to say. The trans community does not harm cis people by existing. They are just trying to live their lives, same as anyone else. That life doesn't look exactly like mine; my life doesn't match anyone else's. That's okay.

When I say ‘that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard’ it’s usually just a figure of speech

Introducing Puffin. We bring her home two weeks from today.

Of all the sins of AI, this is an unexpected and deeply annoying one

Given the complexities of being human, there are few true north stars in moral life, but one of them is: ‘protect the dignity and rights of people/groups who don’t live to inflict harm on others from those who do’

Congratulations, those of you who decided to platform fringe voices and create a climate of fear and hate out of ignorance because those voices insisted a non-problem was a problem. They're now on an HHS stage trying to ruin children's lives. You will live with the harm you have done forever.

The Onion, 23 years ago. theonion.com/no-blood-for...

We should regard the mirror to be as sentient as the dog because the dog won't stop barking at it.

If we are banning cell phones for kids we need to be talking about banning chatbots for boomers www.persuasion.community/p/my-chatgpt...

Washington’s refusal to regulate AI is a corruption story. Just ask Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson.

we only want to beat China in scams, we seem to be fine letting them beat us at the clean energy transition, robotics, and biotech

Tech companies are actually pretty explicit about this: The point is to have a device that you can’t escape, one that always has access to you and makes you a constant source of data beyond what a phone does. Surveillance-first devices.

An absolute bedrock institution for understanding how the planet works, just civilization-scaled vandalism by the most incurious morons on Earth

Every AI ad I see just makes me more convinced I have no idea what people want in life The ones where this lady is in a negotiation with a new client and sets the budget but every time the client bargains she just goes HEY AI WHAT SHOULD I DO GIRL THAT'S YOUR *JOB* YOU NEED TO KNOW HOW TO DO THAT

Et tu, ACM?

Democracy Dies in Slopness

Some Dems have told themselves only ~1% of the population is trans so they can dip their toe in the anti-trans filth and come out clean. I don't have any trans family members—but it still makes me irate. I see it as a huge red flag, a sign you are unprincipled and untrustworthy. And I'm not alone.

Thanks to its desperate pushers, GenAI is quickly becoming an invasive growth. It’s digital knotweed, designed to fill every organic space, choking out the native forms of life. Once you’ve let it in your garden, good luck getting it out.

How Your Private ChatGPT And Gemini Chats Are ‘Sold For Profit’

Joseph Weizenbaum: “The myth of technological ... inevitability is a powerful tranquilizer of the conscience. Its service is to remove responsibility from the shoulders of everyone who truly believes in it. But in fact there are actors.” theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/manufactur...

A recurring theme: Fire sci and tech experts, including some on public service leave from the private sector. Announce policy goals requiring expertise. Realize you don't have the institutional capacity to govern. Create a new program to recruit those same experts back into government.

Is someone paying all the ghouls on earth spot bonuses this week because they are really going for it

Just so I'm clear on this, computer memory has tripled in price because a bunch of it that hasn't been produced yet has been ordered to populate GPUs that aren't installed in data centers that aren't built yet in order to service a demand that doesn't exist to make profits that don't happen.

this field biologist does a great job highlighting the insidiousness of AI editing these one-click AI edit buttons are incredibly appealing to many photographers, amateurs and professionals alike, and are framed as innocuous this is worth sharing and educating people about

Last night as the news horrors kept rolling in like wave sets, the only thing I could be glad of was being off X. Telling me I must go back there to have a public voice is like telling me to wade into radioactive sewage because I need a bath.