Ava Heiden’s Mid-Range Jumper

💀
timhwang.github.io/because-china/

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

Volume 79 Issue 2 | Film Quarterly | University of California Press

Free year-end reads from FQ's new issue!

Ramzi Fawaz on Andor

Andor interview with Janus Metz by Gerald Sim

Maggie Hennefeld on Smashing the Patriarchy in Bologna

Joseph Pearson on The Big Lift at 75

J. M. Tyree's Editor's Notebook

@ucpress.bsky.social

online.ucpress.edu/fq/issue/79/2

Oh wow, suddenly you have a desperate need for social and artistic skill sets? Amazing. Anyway, eat a cold loaf of Satan's ass cheese, fellas.

In the new FQ, now out, I interview Janus Metz, director of the fantastic eps 7-9 of Andor's second season. If you've seen it, you've probably binged every Tony Gilroy interview that YouTube has recommended, but there's still lots here that's new. 1/2
doi.org/10.1525/fq.2...
#starwars #andor

We always wonder if great stuff is made by people who are fully cognizant and intentional about it. What a delight to find out that they definitely were on this masterpiece. 2/2

In the new FQ, now out, I interview Janus Metz, director of the fantastic eps 7-9 of Andor's second season. If you've seen it, you've probably binged every Tony Gilroy interview that YouTube has recommended, but there's still lots here that's new. 1/2
doi.org/10.1525/fq.2...
#starwars #andor

This is something I struggle with as a journalist who writes a lot about AI. I have written whole articles about how AI is a misnomer! But I feel powerless in the tides of linguistic drift.

Has anyone else who writes about AI found ways to usefully (and regularly) distinguish types?

I wish, as an editorial practice, journalists would distinguish between scientific machine learning models and chatbots. Fk you Sam Altman.

Scientist Who Was Offline 'Living His Best Life' Stunned by Nobel Prize Win Fred Ramsdell was on vacation in the Montana wilderness when he and two colleagues received the honor for their breakthroughs in immunology.

I love this man.

Is the Media Studies Cabal in the Room With Us Right Now? I read The Stack in 2020 as a grad student in ANU's Applied Cybernetics program. I give it credit for directing my attention to the interaction between layers of digital and physical infrastructures. ...

Wrote more about Benjamin Bratton's paranoid imagination of a media studies cabal holding back AI progress in Europe. mail.cyberneticforests.com/is-the-media...

OpenAI employees are very excited about how well their new AI tool can create fake videos of people doing crimes and have definitely thought through all the implications of this

Ladies and Gentlemen...

Your newest Iowa WBB commit. McKenna Woliczko.

(no title) Visit the post for more.

A cool CFP for academics studying podcasting!
criesandwhispers2026.wordpress.com

Please submit! Conference CFP
CRIES AND WHISPERS: PODCASTING AND THE PROMISE OF DISRUPTION (Feb 20-21, 2026 at Florida Atlantic University)

Keynote: Jeremy Morris (UW-Madison)

Conference website and submission portal: criesandwhispers2026.wordpress.com

Please submit! Conference CFP
CRIES AND WHISPERS: PODCASTING AND THE PROMISE OF DISRUPTION (Feb 20-21, 2026 at Florida Atlantic University)

Keynote: Jeremy Morris (UW-Madison)

Conference website and submission portal: criesandwhispers2026.wordpress.com

Time to bring back and update Lineker’s quote: Football is a simple game. Twenty-two women chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win. #WEURO2025

Screaming…

“Elon Musk posts something and you want to post a funny response to that. You can literally ask Comet, ‘Hey, draft me a funny reply tweet to that,’ and it’ll automatically have it ready for you. You literally have to click the post button.” —Perplexity CEO about its AI-powered browser.

Currently trying to find out if threat is real or pure anti-reg SV smokescreen. HMU, will chat anytime anyplace. Interested in Eric Schmidt’s contribution to this framing post-Google.

Argument is animated by what @superwuster.bsky.social calls the China Argument. Chapter looks at how it’s embedded even in tech criticism from the left. eg. Coded Bias

Techno-Orientalism 2.0 - Rutgers University Press Building on the groundbreaking Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media, published by Rutgers University Press in 2015, ...

Excited to have “Techno-Orientalist Deflections: How Documentaries Frame China’s AI Threat” in this new volume. Humbled to be part of this crew of authors. 🧵

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools). Each completed thr...

Your Brain on ChatGPT: What Are We Really Trading for Convenience?

The study reveals that LLM users felt less ownership of their writing, had difficulty recalling what they wrote, and showed consistently lower cognitive and linguistic performance over four months.

#ChatGPT #LLM #Neuroscience

Could they have been restructuring workplace decibel levels though?

a man in a brown coat stands in front of a crowd ALT: a man in a brown coat stands in front of a crowd

40 minutes of him psychologically dealing with admiring the work of people who detest him. Literally this moment:

Not the most important thing today, but Douthat’s interview with Tony Gilroy about #andor is a lesson in how you should learn to recognize when you’ve been murdered.
RD: You’ve made a left wing work of art…
TG: I never think about it that way…
RD: But…
TG: Do you identify with the Empire?

Tech companies only have five ideas: robot slave (actually just human slaves), hallucinatory counter-reality, untaxable money, The Everything App, and Clippy

They are massively degrading their users' mental abilities and development. Which is why these systems have absolutely no place even _near_ any school or university.

The interesting thing is: People who used search engines (to find sources etc) did not show similar issues. This is an important antidote against the belief that LLM-based tools are just like search engines. Which they are not.

[2506.08872] Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools). Each completed three sessions under the same condition. In a fourth session, LLM users were reassigned to Brain-only group (LLM-to-Brain), and Brain-only users were reassigned to LLM condition (Brain-to-LLM). A total of 54 participants took part in Sessions 1-3, with 18 completing session 4. We used electroencephalography (EEG) to assess cognitive load during essay writing, and analyzed essays using NLP, as well as scoring essays with the help from human teachers and an AI judge. Across groups, NERs, n-gram patterns, and topic ontology showed within-group homogeneity. EEG revealed significant differences in brain connectivity: Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity. Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use. In session 4, LLM-to-Brain participants showed reduced alpha and beta connectivity, indicating under-engagement. Brain-to-LLM users exhibited higher memory recall and activation of occipito-parietal and prefrontal areas, similar to Search Engine users. Self-reported ownership of essays was the lowest in the LLM group and the highest in the Brain-only group. LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning.

New study on the effects of LLM use:
Quote:
"LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. […] Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels."