The “writing is thinking” posting will continue until a single freaking person in Silicon Valley has figured this out

Bragging about using AI in your studies is like bragging about using a robot to lift your weights at the gym.

even if you *just* wore a respirator in public indoor spaces when you're not engaged in activities involving your mouth (ie: not actively eating/drinking), the airborne landscape—the lives of high risk people especially—would be *drastically different*

It is *fascinating* to me how quickly some people have gone completely from “we all must work in the office! human collaboration is vital and only happens in person!” to “I can replace all these pesky people with chatbots!” Definitely some commentary there about our society and who gets to choose.

As I’ve been saying for six years, you cannot decide to shut off empathy in just one lil area (all of disabled and vulnerable people.) Endangering people for your convenience and comfort is a drug you do not do recreationally.

@swanboatsteve.bsky.social Do you happen to have any data for real-world headways at York Uni station during rush hour? I feel like the last couple months I’ve been routinely arriving on the platform to the screen showing a 7 minute wait during PM peak.

Hard to overstate how antisocial and corrosive this Tylenol ad campaign is. “Take our product so you can go out while contagious and make more customers for us… er, make more people sick!”

I don’t know if anyone else notices or cares, but when I see a presentation in which the speaker uses obviously generated-AI images to illustrate their slides, it makes me immediately less confident in whatever other content they’re presenting.

!!!

Fun example of "AI" being not just bad but dangerous: Google "AI" is happy to say that Toronto currently has 7 µg/m³ of PM2.5 and is "well below the threshold generally considered healthy." But, the source it links says Toronto is currently actually at PM2.5 of 38µg/m³, which ain't great.

I’d be much more open to double spacing if I had literally ever seen a document by a double spacer that wasn’t riddled with an inconsistent pile of single, double, and triple spacing.

Let's check in on how abandoning the whole of idea of public health is going...

**Taps sign** It ain’t “Artificial Intelligence,” it’s a low-accountability statistical model with a good marketing campaign.

ChatGPT: How do I tell my professor colleagues that LLM drivel they share with me is no more valuable or okay to normalize than the LLM drivel students submit on assignments?

You should absolutely wear a respirator (N95, KN95, etc) when in large crowds to protect yourself and others. But, hot take: if a protest is the only time you’re wearing a mask, you’re making it easier for anti-mask folks to stigmatize and ban. Show solidarity by wearing them elsewhere, regularly.

159 Canadian Forces members were killed in Afghanistan, a higher per-capita fatality rate than Americans. At least five of those were killed by Americans in so-called “friendly fire” incidents.

One of my pet peeves with wildfire coverage is when media outlets uncritically parrot bad understandings of emergency management and how different levels of government work together to manage wildfire. So, I want to highlight CBC doing it well! Brief 🧵 (1/n) www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

This is how I start the conversation about LLMs with my students: it’s like going to the gym and riding an e-bike on the treadmill. Then, we figure out how to co-create a class where it’s safe to struggle at workouts together.

Perpetual subtweet on people using AI in academia: if you can’t be bothered to do the analysis or write it yourself, why in the world should I be bothered to read it, let alone trust it?

I continue to hold firm to my position that “if you can’t be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to read it?”

Jumping. I think quizzes that suggest who you vote for like "vote compass" are awful... but this new one from Leger, which gives you likely party alignment based on things about you, your 'lifestyle habits,' and not a single questions about values, is just downright dangerous for democracy.

I like paying taxes. Genuinely. Not grudgingly. I can’t pave a road, I can’t build and staff a hospital. $200 in my pocket won’t pay for my kid’s daycare but if we all pool our money it might. I really wish someone on the left would be brave enough to be like, “Taxes are good, actually.”

This is why we say that popping on a mask when you go to the grocery store is a chance to resist creeping fascism. It’s a simple way to refuse this training to abandon others.

Every accusation is a confession.

Here's the thing: you can say it's a 'constitutional crisis' all you want, but the playbook here (and tbh, I'm referring to multiple situations) is to simply deny there's a crisis + assert their power is absolute & right. The crisis only exists if you make it, rather than accepting their take.

If you can’t be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to read it?

Cannot overstate how much this gutting of expertise is going to impact wildfire response. NOAA’s work to support (fire) weather forecasting; capacity for staffing incident management teams; ability to move firefighters and gear to where it’s needed… absolutely all being decimated.

Theme of the last two weeks: Tell me you don't know what "soft power" is without telling me you don't know what soft power is.

One of the things I'm so down about right now is how long it takes to build strong institutions that quietly do the work to make all our systems run, and how quickly certain folks are committed to burning them down entirely.

Whelp, that's one way to put a water bomber out of commission... (One of the Quebec tankers in California was hit by a small drone)

Why I'm quitting the Washington Post by @anntelnaes.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/anntelna...

I'm sorry what now? "Priority access... for players and VIPs" is not a "requirement" we should even entertain. Woof. www.torontotoday.ca/local/health...

🚨Extremely important for everyone to understand that this is the policy that has prevented ICE from showing up at community disaster shelters and other relief distribution sites, etc. Emergency managers must make new contingency plans for how to meet the needs of undocumented people in response.

I wrote about the trash media coverage about the loss of "civility" and "respect" online in the wake of the UnitedHealth CEO's death www.usermag.co/p/yes-we-wan...

As I once heard someone say, “if you can’t be bothered to write it, why should I be bothered to read it?”

Advertise your account with just one image.

The next step in the campaign to hide a pandemic: make it impossible to test, so no one can know if they have COVID, so no one can make informed decisions. “Personal choice” never was. It’s an intentional effort to prevent anyone from making any choice that isn’t blind denial.

I can - very unfortunately - report that while the SSHRC grant submission website was basically non-functional until at least 11:30pm yesterday, if you set a 3:00am alarm, it is downright snappy and can indeed export the PDFs your grant office requires.

Highly recommend watching this video on algorithmic wage discrimination: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEXJ...

The Economist has published a deeply-researched story about car bloat -- and it's very, very damning. "For every life that the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks save, there are more than a dozen lives lost in other vehicles." Well worth your time: www.economist.com/interactive/...

COVID offers three possible paradigm shifts. If they’re true, and if we actually accept them, so much changes: - Much of disease transmission is airborne - The biggest impact of viruses is chronic disease - Virus exposure harms, not helps, immune systems publichealth.jhu.edu/2022/is-the-...

Potentially hot take: I’m very nervous about how quick Canadian EM academics/practitioners are to say “we should have a Canadian FEMA!” Like, we recognize that FEMA has a… checkered history, right? And that, at the very least, a Maple FEMA isn’t going to automagically solve our complex problems?

Adding a PM2.5 sensor to our weather station has been... illuminating, and not in a great way. Remember - the recommended average PM2.5 exposure is below 5ug/m3. Our outdoor sensor hasn't gotten below 10 since we installed it here in Toronto.