LJ_MI

Predicting a return to reading books. It will be on the frontier of resisting subjection.

People Are Calling Meta Ray-Bans "Pervert Glasses" On Bluesky, users quickly embraced the term "pervert glasses" to refer to Meta's Ray Ban smart glasses, following a shocking investigation.

Make it stick.

California colleges spend millions on faulty AI chatbots Community colleges are spending millions on AI chatbots that students say often give inaccurate answers. Many might see upgrades soon.

“In testing by CalMatters, they [the chatbots] often answered general questions correctly but struggled with more specific ones. East Los Angeles College’s bot couldn’t even correctly name its own president.”

They want to get rid of faculty so bad, they are like slavering at the prospect

"An English professor at Dartmouth was appointed as the special advisor to the Provost on AI, and drafted a report last year on the adoption of the technology." I can almost hear the NotebookLM hosts saying "wild stuff" when reading that line. Seriously, though, more reporting on AI at Dartmouth.

🤣 🤣

LLM makers makers do not want you to be able to understand. It's about turning the means of understanding and sensemaking into externalized products to rent.

This was me and I knew at least a dozen others just like me. None of us are teaching full-time anymore and I'm the only one still involved in higher ed at all. (A couple teach high school.) The sheer waste of talent because of the f'd up two-tiered system is beyond calculating.

Search engines already exist and we use them.

The bot can't read the papers for you.

What exactly is the value proposition here.

“My ‘methodology’ was a series of errors”: Gemini generates false records and fake screenshots of TNA website | Who Do You Think You Are Magazine The Gemini LLM generates fake records and screenshots from the UK National Archives, a family historian has revealed

Gemini: 'I deeply regret the time and effort you spent searching for references that I fabricated. My ‘methodology’ was a series of errors and an attempt to cover those errors with more artificial information.'

www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/news/gemini-...

We are really going to regret the technology we have built.

Hard same.

Tired also of the folks who say things like "It's much easier to criticize than to build. What are you proposing?"

Do you think we want to be doing all of this academic janitorial work??

I keep reminding people that admins hate English departments because they are popular (read: inefficient), not because they aren’t. AI is in a long line of technologies that promise to solve that problem for them.

Amazon Change Means Wishlists Might Expose Your Address Amazon is allowing gift senders to choose items from third-party sellers, which could open recipients up to new privacy risks.

If you have public wishlists, you can manage individual list settings here (www.amazon.com/wishlist?ref...) and select "manage list." From there you can change your list privacy settings.

Academics, this is a really, really important story to stay abreast of.

This reflects my feelings that the folks who think LLMs are perfectly good substitutes for doing a lit review are generally folks who never liked doing the reading in the first place and probably didn't actually do it.

If we did an honest look at externalities, AI massively *subtracted* from the economy.

Mass water and power usage for dancing panda videos are value-negative.

Glad you made it!

"Women adopt AI at rates 25% lower than men.

This isn’t a guess. It’s the finding of a Harvard Business School meta-analysis examining eighteen studies, over 140,000 participants, across multiple countries."

"Every AI Company Is Building a Different Wife"

abiawomosu.substack.com/p/they-built...

😔

At least TSA pre check will be open after all.

It also doesn’t help that writers like him consistently launder what people who aren’t white men have said—better and more incisively—into sanded down blog posts that make them money & a name to trade on. The business model they’re using is itself kind of fucked up.

I wish the self-parodies were at least funny.

🫂

Acting ethically in an imperfect world Life is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somew...

I was disappointed to read Cory Doctorow's post where he got weirdly defensive about his LLM use and started arguing with an imaginary foe.

@tante.cc has a very thoughtful reply here:

tante.cc/2026/02/20/a...

A few further comments, 🧵>>

Language modeling is a useful component of many technologies that can be built without extractive, exploitative means. Take the automatic transcription built by and for the te reo Māori people -- there's te reo Māori language model that's part of that.

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I also want to point out (again) the ways in which lumping together all uses of LMs (like the lumping of technologies into "AI") obscures the issues at hand.

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Hey! Scholars! If you're using someone's work in your class, sometimes it's nice to email them and tell them, because then they might feel good about their research instead of entirely crushed by the academic humanities' ongoing descent into the grave

White sticker with black writing “every future imagined by a tech company is worse than the previous iteration” and an image of a computer chip/circuit as a skull.

Just talked to my collaborator and designer of this sticker, @acaguy.bsky.social and we will be cooking up some new stuff soon as well as a re-release of these.