Area Man

Putin-Trump alliance going the way of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact? www.msn.com/en-us/news/w...

And just like that we’re back to “Department of Defense”

'Executive summaries' are intrinsically problematic. They assume that the article being summarized contains a perfect alignment of evidence, reasoning, and conclusions. In fact, most reports don't (otherwise, all truths would have been revealed long ago). Learning comes from id-ing the mismatches.

Excerpt from interview: Ezra Klein is talking about a commencement address he was asked to give, but ultimately didn't, because of Covid. He says, "The whole commencement address was called "Just do the work," or do the reading in this case, actually. The point I was making was that you just would not believe, as a young person going out into the world, how many shortcuts your elders are taking. "When I got into journalism, the idea that I would just actually read the Congressional Budget Office reports, which are not complicated, are not usually longer than 30 pages, but people are just reading the executive summaries, if that. People just weren't doing the reading, and that was a huge opportunity for a young person. "You could just beat people by outworking them, by reading the things that they had ignored, that they found too boring, that was not the part of the job they enjoyed. It happens to be the part of the job I actually enjoy, so bully for me. I read the book."

This, from Ezra Klein, matches up with my experience. There are far too many journalists for whom this applies.

Or to put it another way: I sometimes say my sole advantage, as a journalist, is that I am willing to go to the library.

howiwrite.substack.com/p/ezra-klein...

I wonder what's on the agenda for the next Board of Peace meeting?

History always ends with a Y

Did private equity buy Tai Chi? I keep seeing adds for it everywhere.

Alcibiades is like, what does a Greek need to do to get some Hollywood love?

The Dow is now under 48,000, which according to the Constitution allows us to talk about the Epstein Files.

In a faculty meeting on student AI & holy f the situation is just grim. Basically, it's on its to totally revise our assignment structure & pedagogy, but uni will start opening up computer lab testing centers bc students can't be trusted to take exams on computers they own without using agentic AI.

"Here are the proofs it took us two years to create. Please look over them carefully and get back to us about any changes in 48 hours."

Molson Labe:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Ah yes! I remember how terrified older graduate students were of our 'ruler lady'. The dissertation defense was a cakewalk by comparison.

Endowed.

None of us is great enough for such a task. But in all circumstances of life, in obscurity or temporary fame, cast in the irons of tyranny or for a time free to express himself, the writer can win the heart of a living community that will justify him, on the one condition that he will accept to the limit of his abilities the two tasks that constitute the greatness of his craft: the service of truth and the service of liberty. Because his task is to unite the greatest possible number of people, his art must not compromise with lies and servitude which, wherever they rule, breed solitude. Whatever our personal weaknesses may be, the nobility of our craft will always be rooted in two commitments, difficult to maintain: the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance to oppression.

Had my attention drawn to Camus' Nobel acceptance speech

That sort of care doesn't come naturally to the majority of people. That's what leaders and communicators are for.

At least we're in a recognizable pattern. It's the same war-economic crisis doom loop that we had under Bush I and II.

Today is the day Trump finally became a Bush.

Most overrated movie since Dances with Wolves.

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

Fish rots from the head down. www.msn.com/en-us/health...

Screenshot of a 3hr old post from the GW Hatchet: “BREAKING: GW sold its Virginia campus to Amazon Data Services, an Amazon subsidiary that manages the company's data centers, for $427 million on Friday. The deed, obtained by The Hatchet, authorizes ADS to develop the campus into a data or information technology center. STORY TK”

GW‘s student newspaper appears to have broken the story that the institution has sold a satellite campus to Amazon to be turned into a data center, which is just about chef’s kiss for the state of American higher education rn

The Supreme Court doesn't care if you want to copyright your AI-generated art The highest court in the US declined to review a case about copyrighting artwork created with the help of AI.

And BOOM goes the dynamite. To all the AI Bros who have slid into my mentions to tell me that you CAN in fact copyright AI materials, the Supreme Court has told you to go suck rocks. A prompt is not authorship. And if there is no author, there is no valid copyright.

www.engadget.com/ai/the-supre...

Pres Trump told me tonight the US had identified possible candidates to take over Iran, but they were killed in the initial attack. "The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates," Trump told me. "It's not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead."

complete insanity

Iran is about the size of the American West, and we are trying to subdue it with a dwindling stock of bombs that have a destructive radius about the size of a football field.

You can't vibe code your way to peace and freedom in the Middle East.

How's President Bush III doing?

I'm addicted to these videos from a bakery in Uzbekistan

this bread is beautiful

Yeeesssss!!!! (This will always be the defining image for me of the “evidence” against Columbia students)