Heard a presentation from my employer's AI person and it really seems to me that "modeling AI use" is very much an "education-like product" that is not really education. At least, not in any way that I'm interested in taking part in
In the way Michael Pollan distinguishes food from "edible food-like products," I think it's vital to distinguish between education and "academic, education-like products"
The thing about all these freak AI execs constantly going "our machine may have gained sentience?!" is that they want slaves. That they are ok with slave labor.
And *then* it always, always turns out their latest AI trick actually used slave labor somewhere in the global south.
They're slavers.
If you took $1 billion and gave it to the endowment of a different small college each day, they could each provide a free college education to several hundred students per year in perpetuity. Instead we are using that money to bomb schools and kill students in Iran, for no clearly stated purpose.
One of the more interesting things about this is how little they tried to sell it.
That seems a little optimistic to me but it would still be a world better than this clusterfuck
kill the imposter syndrome in you head because not only is there someone out there doing it worse than you, they're also using chat gpt to do it
Anyways.
I really think it's worth just roasting in the place we are in right now. The Guardian is talking about the "felt experiences" of a software program that generates text
That is so meaningful and important and requires so much immediate action that I cannot even really begin to process it
My comprehensive exams were in
1. Modern British history
2. Modern European history
3. The British empire, especially South Asia
4. Global environmental history
It would have been good to have something more specific to food, given what I went to research, but I learned a ton
This was such a valuable lesson. I remember this dawning realization that any topic I could dream up would have some body of literature relevant to it; it taught me that the ocean of human knowledge and experience is vast, practically infinite.
"ICE is so untrained and inefficient at terrorizing and deportng people, vote for us and we'll make sure it's done properly!"
It's so infuriating to watch Democrats critique Trump on the basis that he's doing things badly rather than doing bad things
This would get a very sharp reaction--I bet there would be people actively closing the runways, doing everything up to and including laying down on it
A hardcover edition of Manchán Magan's book Listen to the Land Speak resting on a wood table
Fucking love book club day
Literally the first thing academics pointed out about LLMs YEARS AGO was that they would be used for catastrophic levels of fraud—how nice that now the AI bros are confirming what we all knew by running fraud experiments to tell cheats which LLM to use to cheat
Look, it's perfectly clear, they consider every other country a vassal that should pay them tribute or an antagonist. There isn't really any other category you can be in.
Yeah, it's not awesome!
I keep returning to this essay by Anthony Downey on algorithmic models of automated killing, whose driving questions appear only more urgent in light of the last few days
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Logged into LinkedIn out of curiosity, after seeing someone suggest that the majority of "content" there is AI-generated, and I saw a person I went to grad school with has fully committed to their new career as an agentic AI booster. All their posts have the stupid emoji-bullet points that AI loves
Like, Ace of Base? Brilliant. Bangers.
Red Hot Chili Peppers? The suckometer registers an 11
Something I think about a lot is how future generations will not believe us when we describe the variety and wonder of life that once existed in nature
When the cafe plays 90s music, I'm struck by (a) how well the dance music holds up, (b) how a lot of the alternative that I didn't like at the time is actually okay, and (c) how much of the pop-rock (Lenny Kravitz, Goo Goo Dolls, RHCP) just sucks more than ever
One was a high school teacher (social studies I think but I don't know for sure) and the other worked in rubber factories but was killed in a trainwreck before he turned 30
I feel like the research process is twofold. First, you gather and gather and you can never have enough. But then you cross a threshold and realize you have more than you could possibly include, so writing is all about shedding, cutting out the sources you once so industriously collected
Being antiwar doesn’t mean you’re against wars when the US “loses” or when the president of the opposing party wages a war. Antiwar is opposing war and the institutions that conduct war. And it’s clear this administration thinks many USians are as cynical and opportunistic as they are about war
There were a few productions--various film and tv things--that insisted that David Duchovny was like, irresistible. That always kind of surprised me
Neighborhood Nights #oilpainting #art
💯💯💯💯💯
We would really, really like to highlight the scale of Dan's achievement here. We've always hosted some great AMAs, but Dan has been single-handedly responsible for a huge outreach campaign to authors and forging ongoing partnerships with scholarly presses.
If this claim is true, it says so much more about those specific social sciences researchers than it does about genAI, because the claim is basically that some statistical averaging process can do original social science research - which is a facially nonsensical claim.
