We are afloat in a sea of bullshit.

ICE and associated agencies are a despicable, lawless, fascist secret police. They are murderers and must all face trial.

"...the more one relies on vice signaling as a style of action and communication, the less relevant and powerful the in-group’s moral compass is as a practical constraint on anyone’s behavior." latest for @bostonreview.bsky.social www.bostonreview.net/articles/emp...

…the second time as farce. But still, also, very much as tragedy.

SANDWICH GUY NOT GUILTY.

I do not regret to inform you that we are going to win

But one chat request uses less energy than a 50 mile commute, so it’s fine. Such low energy usage. Don’t even worry about it. It’s like voting, it’s not like one chat ever made a difference.

“The other issue I’m having is that my stronger students are very, very bored. I asked AI how to further engage them with AI prompting. Now, those advanced students are working on prompting AI to come up with ways to refreeze the glaciers their AI prompting has melted.” Gold.

to me, the “column” is less a form than an opportunity (and a challenge). you’re telling me i have as much space as i’d like to make an argument about anything i’d like to an audience inclined to pay close attention? well let’s see if they’ll read 2000 words on democratic legitimacy. (gift link)

A compelling argument for the value of shame by my colleague @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social

The Springer Nature Proof Editor is unbelievably terrible. I’m seriously considering just pulling the article, despite having gone through 2 rounds of revision to get it accepted.

Trump admin: [flagrantly violates constitution] NYT analysis: The Trump admin *may* have crossed a constitutional line by [flagrantly violating the constitution]. Who are we to come down one way or the other?

One point Montesquieu makes that I find pretty insightful is that despotism er fuckin sucks and we definitely should not do that. I feel we have a lot to learn from this.

"Humanity is now obsolete. To quote the fifty-third president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln: 'Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.'"

This slayed me.

My morning did not need opening the NYT to find Kevin Roose with a softball interview of Yudkowsky. We need a new “paper of record”.

Very important work being done here.

"If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say 'this was a crime, see,' so now I can't claim 100%..." not that there's any additional context needed to make this sound bad, but Donald Trump's first wife is among those who have accused him of rape abcnews.go.com/Politics/tru...

I rarely find myself in such full agreement with Ezra Klein. But this is a forceful statement of some very important points.

So the sandwich guy ... beat the wrap

Pros And Cons Of Using AI For Schoolwork  — theonion.com/pros-and-con...

Louisiana has to build three new natural gas power plants to accommodate the "AI" data center that Meta just crammed through because said center will use *Three Times* as much electricity (and, thus, attendant resources) as the *Entire City Of New Orleans*, every year. Y'all this isn't sustainable.

We are excited to announce the 4th Annual Penn-Georgetown Digital Ethics Workshop, organized by Brian Berkey and myself. The conference will take place April 3-4, 2026, at Penn. If you work on digital technology ethics, broadly construed, please consider submitting an abstract.

Every time ICE arrests someone, it’s a more serious moral outrage than this. But it strikes me as especially alarming that armed federal agents are showing up to publicly try to intimidate the governor of California. Another brazenly authoritarian move, admittedly among many others.

Excited for this!

AI Boosters: All of this talk of AI energy use is overblown, LLM requests use less power than a toaster. Also AI Boosters: We need to radically increase the energy grid's capacity and supply. And you have to pay for it. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/b...

Guy who has spent 17 quintillion dollars hyping up LLMs as super-geniuses thay will put you out of work and will finally defeat such hated adversaries as artists, humanities professors, and the air quality of Memphis, Tennessee: "People are way too critical of LLMs on Bluesky."

“We are seeing every region of the country experience really significant data center load growth,” said Abe Silverman, a nonresident research scholar focused on energy markets at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s putting enormous upward pressure on prices, both for transmission and for generation.”

Firing Colbert contributes materially to rising authoritarianism. Even if CBS didn’t intend this as a way of appeasing Trump (which, tbh, I find hard to believe), announcing the cancellation right now gives the appearance of appeasing Trump. And this was totally predictable.

I'm old enough to remember when the prevailing argument against affirmative action was that it failed to consider the "real" form of unfairness, which was income disparity

This feels kind of impossible to narrow down to me, but: my 3-5 key metal bands Opeth Baroness YOB Wayfarer Allegaeon

Studying Philosophy Does Make People Better Thinkers | This study “offers the strongest evidence to date that studying philosophy does indeed make people better thinkers.” www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

"Jonathan Caravello...was reportedly “piled on by multiple agents all at once” as “he tried to help a man in a wheelchair” who was having difficulty moving after...[ICE] agents threw canisters of tear gas" our colleague is still missing as of the last info I got dailynous.com/2025/07/12/p...

This seems spot on to me.

This is very funny. And despite the optimistic tone, it provides strong evidence that LLMs aren’t really ready to replace human management.

there's a whole cottage industry of fear cultivation around AI risk - but more of it centered around "what AI could do if it becomes advanced enough" rather than "what specific oligarchs could do if their AI is even marginally cheaper than their current imperialist tactics"

Evening conference activity: Opeth show in Athens.

Our #FAccT2025 proceedings are out!! 🎉 Read all of the published papers here: dl.acm.org/doi/proceedi...

Think Tank Called ‘The Himmler Institute’ Assures Nation This All Legal theonion.com/think-t...

I’m heartbroken and furious that the US is dropping more bombs and joining another unjust war.