A too large proportion of tenured folks refuse to acknowledge the crisis of precarious in higher ed. However. In a moment when the ability of anyone to speak publicly without repercussion is under threat and all university admins push precarity, abandoning the best protection is not the way.

I believe she will be the first out woman to represent the US at the Olympics in figure skating

When reached for comment from the bottom of the toychest, the Magic 8 Ball said "Situation hazy."

the 250th anniversary of 1776 is less of a celebration, more of a reenactment

Copy editors and all other headline writers should have bylines so people can scream at whoever actually wrote the headline instead of the reporter(s) who wrote the story

Please remember our most important mascot for responsible internetting, especially in this current climate:

Oh my gosh you guys! The House just passed my bill to extend the health care tax credits for three more years!

In 2-3 years, the vast majority of the TAs we have will not really have programmed themselves, which is going to make programming education rather interesting (*in addition to* all the other ways it's become interesting).

Another reason it’s so important that people understand that generative AI is not magic: how many people seem to think that it can discern exactly what someone’s face looks like under a mask. :-/

The reason I love this Reductress joke is that it gets to the essence of what "The Doomscroll" actually is. It's not simply a parade of disinterestedly reported news stories with sober headlines about tragedies. It's everyone else's *commentary* about them.

u heard sharon, everyone post about their esoteric interests right fucking now. for the good of the community, we need to be hyperfixationmaxxing.

Lots of people tried to reconstruct the ML/AI/stats community over here. 90% of them left because the random abuse they got for just posting ordinary research results was too much. bsky.app/profile/jwhe...

my husband is telling me about a game he is playing that he says is like "vampire survivors meets spore". its called "everything is crab" and seems to be about making weird little tentacle freaks

I think that’s right. Whenever I discuss this in a non-social media forum I try to turn the conversation to public financing of elections, an end to partisan gerrymandering and bans on stock trading for lawmakers — I think that gets closer to what people are trying to express.

Among the many reasons you don’t kidnap a foreign head of state at gunpoint even if you have the capability, is that it sparks consequences you can neither control nor anticipate.

On average across multiple polls, only 25% of Americans support military action in Venezuela substack.com/@gelliottmor...

New AIWeirdness post: ChatGPT will apologize for anything, including stuff that didn't happen. It's not reflecting on stuff it did wrong, it's improv. www.aiweirdness.com/chatgpt-will...

Melanie Walsh @mellymeldubs.bsky.social and co-collaborators Sylvia Fernandez, Miriam Posner, Anna Preus, & Amardeep Singh’s project titled “Responsible Datasets in Context” received a Digital Project Award (Newcomer) from the American Studies Association. www.responsible-datasets-in-context.com

One thing I wrote about here is how technology has made buses *way* more convenient while techno-futurists were obsessed with flying taxis and self-driving cars.

am I about to be my own PI last author-first author backwards in time

Mamdani took over the @NYCMayor account on Twitter but old Eric Adams tweets are still active. That means Mamdani's name and face shows up for old tweets he didn't send. You're probably going to see a lot of screenshots like this where Mamdani appears to praise Netanyahu, but they aren't by Mamdani

Happy New Year. See ya when I get home.

Let's go in the garden You'll find something waiting Right there where you left it lying upside down When you finally find it, you'll see how it's faded The underside is lighter when you turn it around

pound for pound this might be the funniest thing ever written

It was amazing to write with @ehayot.bsky.social & each of us put our stank into every part of this essay. I have no memory of how we drafted it in October, but when we came back to it a couple weeks ago, I felt this paragraph in my bones.

I still think this. If anything, working on @unbreaking.org has convinced me that people could use more ways of making sense of information across disparate sources.

Absolutely savage on Peter. "It's hosted by Michael, a charming genius well known to fans of podcasts for the amazing shows he does. He is joined by Peter, who I guess has a law degree or whatever."

My takeaway is that we have not been mean enough to the New York Times this year www.nytimes.com/2025/12/27/a...

Remember: When Tylenol was poisoned *by an outsider* and killed people, the company recalled all their products & redesigned them. When Intel’s Pentium had a bug so obscure it affected 1 in _9 billion_ long division calculations, they recalled their chips. ChatGPT was made deadly *by its team*.

We didn't survive and thrive as a species because we had warriors or hunters - pretty much every omnivore can manage that. We did so because we developed Grandmothers, and domesticated Dogs. Community is what defines us as a species, and every "self-reliant" libertarian shitweasel be damned.

This is an expert takedown by @acollierastro.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLzE...

Avatar just generally exists in the space franchise movies existed in pre-internet: Most people just go see the movies when they come out, and a handful of diehards dig into lore stuff in their own isolated corner of the world. It's not _that_ dissimilar from Star Wars in the '80s.

"Why do we have to take ethics classes for a computer science degree?" This is why. And frankly, we should be failing more students for inadequately demonstrating their understanding of the topic. Let's review some fun historical examples of why "No, actually quality will continue to matter."

many don’t remember but a long time ago the Bluesky app *did* promote a third party feed during onboarding. maybe it’s time to revisit this? here’s what didn’t quite work out

i love my snowsky echo mini aftermath.site/digita-audio...

If you ever wanted to see what the generation of animation storytellers who were raised on The Maxx and created shows like Adventure Time and Steven Universe and more can do when dancing around each other in a tripartite creative fugue, then you should definitely go watch The Elephant.

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

She-Ra *and* Kipo? this is insane. they're netflix originals, removing them is akin to vaporizing them entirely.

I've made a new diagram of the Oklab/Oklch color space, which I've put on Wikipedia. Oklab color space is intended to be perceptually uniform, meaning that it fits the weird shape of actual normal human perception. Oklch is the same space but measured in circles. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklab_c...

Even there it depends *what* in law. LLMs are good where (1) you need to process huge amounts of natural language data (2) ask it questions that don't fit well to boolean logic (3) every true positive result is a win (4) false positive results can be (and are) quickly and accurately detected

The key thing here: they shouldn’t use them for that! Trying to apply LLMs to all kinds of areas where they’re not appropriate is a tactic that the Big AI companies are advocating as part of their agenda, for obvious reasons. The most important part is not accepting the framing that they’re pushing.

suspect a big reason why many academics and others who work in areas where getting facts RIGHT is key are disinterested in using LLMs for research: they’ve tried it, they keep noticing major errors in output, and they conclude that having to verify all that doesn’t actually save them time.

Can you help me here. I feel I’m missing something. I keep hearing of academics coming across citations of fictitious works in reference. Surely this is gross professional misconduct comparable with plagiarism by the author. It should be reported to and dealt with by their employing institutions.

please let “bugs bunnying” become the slang for manipulating an LLM into ignoring its guardrails, i have never seen a more succinct and evocative term for it

I've made a new diagram of the Oklab/Oklch color space, which I've put on Wikipedia. Oklab color space is intended to be perceptually uniform, meaning that it fits the weird shape of actual normal human perception. Oklch is the same space but measured in circles. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklab_c...

Once when we wanted to show the ineffectual dithering of The Good Place Committee, we had one of them say, "There are rules, procedures. This is The Good Place -- we can't just *do stuff.*" We almost didn't include it, because we thought it was a little on the nose.

👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽

i have some thoughts & i'll probably share them eventually, but i do want to acknowledge that responding to criticism without doubling down, saying stuff like "AI is here to stay" or any of that shit that we've seen elsewhere, is categorically a different kind of response compared to other companies