An easy way to explain luddites: Textile manufacturers brought in machines that could do in an hour what would have taken 12 hours by hand. And then, tried to keep paying the now 12x more productive workers the same wages as before. That's it, that was the problem luddites had. Not complex.

MASSIVE FUCKUP: there’s a new 4K streaming restoration of Twin Peaks and in the pilot episode you can see the reflection of a scary-looking crew member in a mirror. how did they screw this up so badly?

nah, i'm pretty sure it's the killing people part that's the worst

the 2 huge reasons LLMs need data centers are 1) performance and b) the ability to give realistic sounding “answers” to many different prompts. Neither of these matter for scientific ML.

Great quote from an abolitionist general during the civil war. Gentle reminder that as we prepare to confront the 'peculiar institution' of our own time that we are also fighting against exploitation, hatred, and coercion.

Snow Day calculator says 98% chance for tomorrow: I'm asking the students to lend their energy

the conflation scam is a key part of LLM marketing. Specifically they’re taking the useful things ML is doing (which doesn’t require massive data centers everywhere) and ascribing those to useless LLMs (which do, plus the massive financial bubble)

good news

if liberals wanted a single leg to stand on in regards to opposing what trump is doing to venezuela maybe they should meaningfully have pushed to punish anyone for iraq instead of praising them all as brave statesmen and campaigning for their endorsements.

"Don't follow illegal orders" would be more meaningful if Democrats had prosecuted literally any of the prominent war criminals of the last 30 years instead of, you know, fucking campaigning with them

once you know even 10% of Marxist-Leninist fundamentals, 99% of arguments you face are just going to have you reacting like, at best, "not this bullshit again, we already went through this over 100 years ago" but more likely "this person has literally no idea what they're talking about".

Rolling out the Matt Christman quote from after Charlottesville (2017) again:

Trump admin now test ballooning the position that anyone discouraging soldiers from following unlawful orders should be put to death. Even the most milktoast liberals need to confront the possibility that next year's elections may be in trouble and the DNC just might be incapable of handling this.

FYI: turning off "Smart features" also turns off spell check and the promotions and social tabs. And more. In effect, a lot of traditional tools in gmail are switched off if you don't let them upload your contracts, love notes, and sad messages to your friends into their plagiarism machine.

I'm fucking cryinj

Your last saved meme is your moral philosophy

sure america’s healthcare system isn’t perfect, but if you can think of a better alternative i’d like to hear it.

liberals conservatives 🤝 pretending MLK wasn't a socialist

"I don't believe in White people." "They're killing my friends, it's as simple as that."

The new Mountain Goats album is really good! I've been having transcendent moments cleaning my kitchen alone during the first day of my wife being gone for 5 days. Listening to the first track overture made me feel a Hamlet sense of destiny- "There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow."

The Democrats right now

Halloween Art Contest winners from my classroom whiteboard. Both created by tenth graders. Medium: Dry Erase Markers on Stained Public School Whiteboard from the 90's

Playing Workers and Resources Soviet Republic on the Siberian biome using the Early Start (1930) and holy crap is it a challenge. Keeping steam trains coaled and watered in an environment where the roads are only navigable for a third of the year 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

I've been organizing a "Haunted Carnival" event for the 9th and 10th graders at my school. It's meant to be a PBIS reward thing. I've been so busy+tired from teaching, moving, CrossFit, and grad school that I haven't had a chance to make+do much for the event even though it's my passion project. Ugh

English Language Arts teachers whose students write in Google Docs: I strongly suggest that you turn off the 'predictive text' feature for all your students. Some students are typing whatever it suggests, even if it makes no sense.

Getting absolutely fucked up trying to imagine the other furniture Dr Caligari might have

I teach high school ELA. Generative AI is at cross purposes with our job as educators. Relying on it in lesson planning or materials designing causes our own skills to atrophy. It sets a bad example for the children and it kind of hollows out the integrity of the profession. When the pendulum..

The average age of U.S. homebuyers is now 56, up from 49 last year. In 1981, the year trickledown economics began, it was 31.

I fucking knew it.

If your movement requires leftists to shut up, because we’re a problem, but the fascists must always be heard and negotiated with, respectfully? Your movement is purely about silencing the left. This has always been the Democrats’ “good cop” role in enabling fascism. It got us here.

kamala harris if she was a mouse: [imperious tone] 'i'm squeaking'

Why are all our national unions doing things that directly go against the interests of working people? They are either 'in on it' or simply incapable of meeting the current moment. There's no reason to cozy up to the AI lobby like this. It's blatantly part of the fascist project in the USA.

Your initial reply was “democrats are our only option” and it’s really important you understand they are in fact not an option if your goal is to abolish capitalism.

Yez

Our economic system is based on the people who own everything paying us the bare minimum that we need to survive on and working us as much as we will accept and using the profits from that to repeat the process as much as possible in a chain reaction of exploitation and runaway 'growth.'

You’re not poor because you’re bad with money, you’re poor because everything is too expensive and your job doesn’t pay enough.

She’s a fascist. She supports Trump and Netanyahu. Her cause is making Venezuela a capitalist nation that serves US interests.

Letitia James and James Comey have the best lawyers on earth and will almost certainly be fine. The fact that there’s a zillion stories about them and virtually none about NSPM-7 - which affects countless ordinary people - really says something about who the media writes for

I have the ability to monitor what my students do on their laptops in real time when they're in my classroom. I watch them do research and a majority of the students do not scroll past the 'AI overview' that Google gives them. I've tried really hard to communicate to them that it's often..

One day, if we make it out of this hell world of late stage capitalism, they will talk about how capitalists made homeless people in the same hushed tones as we now talk about the way King Leopold of Belgium cut people's hands off en masse.

While waiting at a stop light I observed: cop gets out of car and walks to put a parking ticket on a car that is parked in a 'no parking any time' spot. Owner of car walks out of business it was parked next to and he's obviously a door dasher delivery guy just trying to get an order and go.

Probably a bad sign that my high school students are writing papers against compulsory schooling on the basis that students need to be free to work jobs during the day to help support the family.

A celebration of Italian American participation in the armed forces: Spaghettiran's Day.

"A.I." boosters vs "A.I." critics