Sol Werthan

Last month, University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin approved a proposal to establish a College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence funded by private corporations and philanthropy. Mnookin said the move was a response to the inevitable creep of artificial intelligence into all disciplines of academia. Rather than reject AI, she envisioned a university that capitalized on this change by making artificial intelligence a "hub" connecting the humanities to computer science.

On the first day of my economics elective this spring, my professor said we would be expected to use NotebookLM to pass his class. He had lengthened the coding assignments so that they would be doable only with the help of AI. The reading assignments were longer, too: ten 40-page papers per week, which he asked us to feed into AI for a summary rather than read ourselves. When it came to lectures, he told us to simply upload the slides to AI and ask it to teach us whatever he failed to explain properly in class.

BLEAK. Bleak. I’d been paying attention to Columbia selling out its governance to the Trump admin, not so much its stance on AI.
www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2026...

“Resistance is futile,” a thing famously said by history’s good guys

I can't get over this number: in 2007, there were 360,000 newspaper jobs. Now, there are 80,000. "My local paper sucked!" Sure. What sucks even more? The void. "I get all my news from the Guardian!" No, the Guardian doesn't report on your town council, your school board, local cops.

Opinion | What Exactly Is a ‘Concentration Camp’?

Great and informative interview of @andreapitzer.bsky.social by @jamellebouie.net.

The term "concentration camp" has become calcified into a single referent, but as Andrea makes clear, it is more useful to think of it as a process, and its history begins well before Nazi Germany.

The conclusions about student cognition aren’t the interesting part for me so much as the money being spent on youth surveillance that isn’t leading to better learning outcomes. Teachers are being laid off, schools & libraries are closing, books are being banned.

Judge Goodwin: "An anonymous government is no government at all. It cannot be held accountable. A masked agent freely uses force without justifying his actions, and the public cannot name him to challenge his conduct. A regime of secret policing has no place in our society."

This is one of the many many ways that “legal” is becoming “illegal”

This reminds me of the personal papers we have from an alum who attended high school, prom, & was valedictorian at Manzanar, a concentration camp for Japanese and Japanese-American people. We use these in teaching constantly and we always have to add context so students understand the implications.

Every time the government deregulates a public health feature - such as today's news about clean air rules - just remember that this is meant to add to your plate, as an individual. It's no longer the government's problem, it's yours. This is a risk transfer. It it reduces your ability to resist.

what this story demonstrates is that even someone "just" using LLMs like ChatGPT for writing/research etc is still vulnerable to being sucked into a whirlpool of dangerous lies and delusions.
So, once again, WHY are schools and universities telling students, staff and faculty to use this?

Probably the most embarrassing cultural trait inculcated in Tech is the feigned lack of understanding of potential harms of technology because understanding them would require being morally responsible for them and would thus deflate the hype make-believe buy-in among the developers of said tech.

“The suppression of gender studies is not only an attempt to suppress a critical analytical tool, but also knowledge itself.”

On Nov. 16, a mental health counselor recorded in Kamilla’s medical records that her mother reported the girl had lost her appetite after being “served food that contained worms.” A week later, the couple said, children were told to gather in the gym for what they believed would be a Thanksgiving celebration. Excitement spread as families saw tables set with turkey, sandwiches, pastries and pies, they said. The children waited expectantly. But when a parent asked when the celebration would begin, Oksana said, staff told them the holiday meal was for employees, not detainees. The children, she said, watched despondently as the feast was packed away.

On Thanksgiving, the immigrant children held at the Dilley detention center gathered in the gym for what they thought was a holiday feast.

The kids salivated over a spread of turkey, sandwiches, pastries and pies, a family told me.

But the food wasn’t for detainees — it was for the staff.

“my ‘we’re not out scouring the streets to disappear people or deny people their civil rights or due process’ shirt is raising a lot of questions that are answered by the shirt”

I really do think this is an excellent metaphor for the moment.

the Barbara Kruger mural the chase is happening in front of reads:

"WHO IS BEYOND THE LAW? WHO IS BOUGHT AND SOLD? WHO IS FREE TO CHOOSE? WHO DOES THE TIME? WHO FOLLOWS ORDERS? WHO SALUTES LONGEST? WHO PRAYS LOUDEST? WHO DIES FIRST? WHO LAUGHS LAST?"

I will die on the hill that not everything should have to exist for profit margins and that public interest and profit are often deeply misaligned.

Devastating news. Fobazi waa a brilliant light and powerful voice in LIS. Rest in power.

I think it's best for everyone to understand that the unified class project of billionaires right now is to do to white collar workers what globalization and neoliberalism did to blue collar workers.

bezos and the post is yet another reminder that it's impossible to have billions of dollars and operate in the public interest at the same time. nobody with that kind of money got it by looking out for other people or putting the common good first. that's why it's so antithetical to journalism

always bears repeating that this is NOT a financial decision. jeff bezos is worth over 250 billion dollars. he can afford to lose many millions and never even notice it. this is, at its core, a political and personal decision by bezos to destroy the post

Pinned lizzie johnson @lizziejohnsonnn · Aug 19, 2021 Almost three years ago, my editor called me early one November morning. A wildfire had sparked near a town called Paradise, he said. Could I go? (1/13) 0:02 / 0:10 lizzie johnson @lizziejohnsonnn · 47m I was just laid off by The Washington Post in the middle of a warzone. I have no words. I'm devastated. Quote lizzie johnson @lizziejohnsonnn · Jan 25 Waking up without power, heat, or running water. (Again.) But the work here in Kyiv continues. Warming up in the car, writing in pencil — pen ink freezes — by headlamp.

A publisher who lays off a reporter whose pen is freezing because she's covering a frigid war zone while dodging missiles is not an editor you want to work for, in a more perfect world

i feel like we've had a good enough sample size for like two decades on whether or not body cameras on cops do anything whatsoever to stop them from killing people. the guy that murdered renee good was filming it on his phone for fun!

Thousands of union members staged a nonviolent march today. iCE gassed the crowd of nurses and teaches. The neighborhood is in a cloud. Flash bangs are being fired.

“There’s no single answer that will solve all our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers—at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”

― Octavia E. Butler, A Few Rules for Predicting the Future: An Essay

Thinking of my Japanese American elders today, their resistance, their bravery in the face of state violence.

“Were you afraid of being arrested?”
Fred Korematsu: “No, I wasn’t because I didn’t feel that I did anything wrong. If anybody did wrong, it was the law.” www.instagram.com/reel/DUJAjhC...

In an era of rapid media outlet ownership changes, consolidations, & shutdowns, and subsequent journalist layoffs and transition to freelance/pitch work for multiple outlets and/or self-published work, it will be easier than ever to arrest known journalists if they don't have a W-2 job.

brass solidarity band performing “stand by me” in the streets of whittier next to alex pretti’s memorial. the crowd started chanting “the people united will never be defeated” so they incorporated it into the song. i love minneapolis

"To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable."

-- @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social

i think this attitude — that all opposition is illegitimate and nothing we do can be questioned— is probably pervasive in the white house and helps explain why they keep making terrible political choices