"A possible source of new information"--GB

The Dems need to understand Russ Vogt’s playbook and absolutely tear it up.

Did an interview with @cantb.bsky.social and Barrett Taylor about their new book that helps us understand the turbulence in higher ed at the structural level. Highly recommended. academicfreedomontheline.substack.com/p/living-in-...

Kushner is a self-server par excellence. There is not a whiff of American pride or patriotism or loyalty about him. Having him representing ostensibly “American” interests is inviting disaster.

AOC: "As AI begins to encroach in our society, their goal is to take your cognition away from you. AI's goal is to take your thoughts away from you, your ability to think away from you, so that you become dependent on a machine ... reading books is active resistance"

Maybe, just maybe, the way to think productively about the intersection and AI is to spend much more time thinking about humans and much less about AI. That's what I tried to do in More Than Words through the lens of writing and teaching writing. www.amazon.com/More-Than-Wo...

These arguments never get at what's most important in these discussions, what are the experiences that have led this person to, ostensibly" make what she feels is productive use of an LLM model, and what if those experiences are, as I suspect, learning how to write in the absence of such technology?

How about that Elon Musk fella frees up some of his capital doing something other than trying to purchase a Senate seat? Maybe he could shift it into a thing called "taxes?"

Not having Scott and Foucault in a PhD historiography class is malpractice and further proof that “free speech” warriors are anti intellectualism

The admins see AI as more knowledgeable than the entire history dept. of PhD professors. The endgame is faculty have zero leverage because the “AI” (& whoever programmed its algorithms) makes faculty obsolete. Graduate student historians not reading Foucault’s work is professional malpractice.

they are systematically destroying the humanities in this country. all around the country various humanities departments are shuttering, and those that remain open have limitations like this placed on them. they're doing everything they can to eliminate critical thinking & historical awareness

‘Employers are navigating a flood of errors and low-quality work that are sapping employee time, raising privacy and security risks and pushing up costs. Now, some businesses that started off fast and furious on AI are pumping the brakes.’ www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

historiography now banned from historiography class in Texas

There is also pleasure in laying down the line, finding the words, discovering a capacity to articulate a something that had been elusive or as yet ungrasped, ending at times in surprise and elucidation. This is why I write.

Researchers made an agent that operates by executing statements in a custom programming language the catch? it extends it’s capabilities by implementing new programming language features learning through programming language development arxiv.org/abs/2610.20809

One of my sons is a tankie who spouts anti-liberal takes because “liberals” in the end always side with the fascists. Meanwhile, he enjoys the class distinctions, material largesse, & “spoils” of his parents’ educations & income. And his “liberal” mother and I hate Trumpism with a searing passion.

Gearing up for our reading group’s next read. Everyone is very excited for this one.

this is the ultimate end point of capitalism, ai will completely atomize everyone and there will be zero shared experiences. there will be no culture, only pure consumption. this must be resisted

It's telling how little education has responded to agents. Most of the frameworks about AI in edu are locked in 2024 thinking about chatbots. With agents, discernment & transparency means more than simply checking an output. marcwatkins.substack.com/p/discernmen...

I will not only be relieved but truly *ecstatic* to be wrong, if more and better studies soon start showing that AI actually improves learning and cognitive motivation. But so far they all show the opposite, and that is consistent with the evidence that I and other educators are seeing on the ground

💯 > The rebranding is also a distraction, redirecting public attention away from resource-pillaging data centers, a fragile economic bubble and rising safety concerns. This is a core MO of the industry to avoid critique and escape regulation. doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

The notion of "second-hand surveillance" (on analogy to second-smoke) seems powerful -- and more generally I really appreciate the idea of zones where one can be free of this. From @ajlunited.bsky.social www.offrecordzones.org >>

Yes! Sam Altman explicitly says we should accept harms to humans for the sake of AI development. We should be very comfortable telling him and his chatbot to go fuck themselves.

No AI for kids. Full stop.

In the age of AI tools, being reminded that the map is not the territory seems more important than ever. Who kicks semantics around with an LLM? There’s a kind of totalitarian “final” thought when it gives a word—no going into it without a literacy that is deeper than usual, or deeper than callow.

if you think the public exists to defend the military, I think you're most of the way to where these creeps want you to be

Many panels! Details here: marktwainhouse.org/2026/10/05/t...

Never a better argument for an education that must include liberal arts than these inhuman techbocrats and muscle bound meat-heads like the ICE gestapo.

On the next Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 livestream, we’re so excited to chat with authors of the new book, Against Tech Oligarchy! @js-tan.bsky.social and Clarissa Redwine will join me and @alexhanna.bsky.social to chat about tech industry labor: Mon, Oct 5, noon Pacific twitch.tv/dair_institute

So much reactivity in the comments. TGI Sunday! Yes it’s hard to avoid AI tools. They come in many flavors & types. Most noted in the comments are the AI search summaries. Many folks resent these. So much of the stuff is foisted on us like air pollutants that it harms us as we simply act & breathe.

Boy howdy. Wait till this guy finds out that conservatives voters are significantly less likely to be interested in actual public policy and vote purely on culture war vibes.

And do appreciable harm to education and public sentiment through his nationally distributed numbskullery.

You know this is my third or fourth go around with this kind of technological innovation for consumers and citizens. And a lot of it is the same. Same pattern of exaggerated benefits, underestimated challenges. What’s new this time is the sector isn’t even pretending to care about the consumer.

exactly 💯 on LLMs: they simulate the output we call language, not the cognitive capacity we call language!

For reasons mysterious to me, Will Stancil is continuing his crash out about language used to describe LLMs, moving on from raning about "stochastic parrots" to picking up on this piece that @nannainie.bsky.social and I published earlier this summer: buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch... >>

The training data is one source of bias, but it's not the only one. The model heavily interprets and condenses things as it's trained, which can add it's own biases.

but also, by cutting off the question of where the bias comes from, normalizes it as some sort of fact of nature that we just have to deal with, rather than a designed property of products which are being pushed on us from every direction.