In the ep. where we meet him, Doug Forcett— epitome of getting the facts right & the message wrong, utilitarian self-harming happiness pump who never gets into the Good Place because his motivation to do good is utterly tainted by his awareness of the system— is reading Peter Singer. Perfection. 😂
Y'know that video where the guy is super excited to show Miyazaki the "AI" animator he'd built because he loved Miyazaki's work so much, and Miyazaki just sits there looking just so existentially tired, & then very quietly & calmly tells the exec that this is an abomination? I think about that a lot
Considering I'm pretty sure that's the NYT font, i would believe that immediately and without question
would you believe me if i told you that while the overwhelming majority of examples cited within are of conservatives attacking their political enemies and the majority of those are specifically trump-related this article implicitly treats political violence and terror as a cross-partisan issue
Jesus fucking Christ
Considering I'm pretty aure that's the NYT font, i would believe that immediately and without question
would you believe me if i told you that while the overwhelming majority of examples cited within are of conservatives attacking their political enemies and the majority of those are specifically trump-related this article implicitly treats political violence and terror as a cross-partisan issue
Yes this might also be about you.
Seriously: People have so much grief & rage & trauma & pain, these days, and so so many of us seem absolutely adamantly opposed to acknowledging that, let alone doing anything about it. It's honestly sad, in the abstract, & just so deeply wearying when they decide to make it everyone else's problem.
It's going to be another really fucked up week.
Breaking News: A helicopter carrying Iran’s president and foreign minister crashed, but is yet to be found, state media said. Their status is unknown.
Rescuers are trying to locate the helicopter on which President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian were traveling, state media reported. Their status is unknown.
www.nytimes.comIt's going to be another rwally fucked up week.
Breaking News: A helicopter carrying Iran’s president and foreign minister crashed, but is yet to be found, state media said. Their status is unknown.
Rescuers are trying to locate the helicopter on which President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian were traveling, state media reported. Their status is unknown.
www.nytimes.comHappy birthday to el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz. In his honour, admit the knife is there.
"If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches & pull it out 6 inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is There."
Malcolm X changed my life. His words moved my soul. What’s one of your favorite Malcolm X quotes.
The kind bars guy? Goddammit that's one of my only consistently okay foods
Business executives including Kind snack company founder Daniel Lubetzky, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, billionaire Len Blavatnik and real estate investor Joseph Sitt held a Zoom video call on April 26 with Mayor Eric Adams (D), [...] a log of chat messages shows.
Gift link: wapo.st/3WJ4sqO
A WhatsApp chat started by some wealthy Americans after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack reveals their focus on New York Mayor Eric Adams and their work to shape U.S. opinion of the Gaza war.
wapo.st
Okay i need a dance break. If you're a music listener, post a song that's been bringing you joy, lately. Here's one of mine
youtu.be/di2rv4gmHlo
Black Belt Eagle Scout - Soft Stud from the album Mother of My Children Order: http://bbes.lnk.to/MOMC Directed and edited by Indigenous Diné transdisciplinary artist Demian DinéYazhi’
youtu.beThere's a lot in there for the theology, mythology, occulture, and comparative religious studies crowds, as well as being (i think) something everyone interested in "AI" needs to think about, more broadly
…'These actions are performed on us w/o our input, w/o our knowledge, and without our consent. And we have another word for magic performed on us without our knowledge and without our consent:
'Binding and subjugating magic… is called a curse.'
From "Religious Belief & Practice in the Age of 'AI'"
As part of a seed grant project funded by the AIAI Network, Damien P. Williams, assistant professor of Philosophy and Data Science at the University of North...
www.youtube.com
Cops, doing cop shit.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...
Well this is a huge.
"SFPD spokesman Evan Sernoffsky said these requests violated the city ordinance and were not authorized by the department, but the agency faced no consequences from the city. He declined to say whether any officers were disciplined because those would be personnel matters."
The Washington Post has obtained emails and other documents showing that police in Austin and San Francisco skirted city bans against using facial recognition by asking officers in other cities to run...
www.washingtonpost.com'I said before, the Logics that we use in this space, they are frameworks that depend upon notions that say, "the creators of these technologies will be able to enact their will at a distance; they will be able to make changes in the world; they will be able to alter the very fabric of reality."…
As part of a seed grant project funded by the AIAI Network, Damien P. Williams, assistant professor of Philosophy and Data Science at the University of North...
www.youtube.comThinking about writing a short time travel story: who would've been on Bill Clinton's short list of Supreme Court Justices 1997?
GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME GIMME
pitchfork.com/news/tom-wai...
THIS IS RELEVANT TO MY INTERESTS.
Cate Blanchett, Adam Driver, and Charlotte Rampling also star in the comedy
pitchfork.com
NYC please tell Eric Adams to go fuck himself, every chance you get, in every form you can, including this one.
And please, for the love of god, stop electing corp-sucking technocrat cops to high city office
shitfuck mayor Eric Adams is trying to evict the Elizabeth Street Garden, a community green space. pre-written letter campaign here: www.elizabethstreetgarden.com/write
Send a letter to our Representatives demanding that they rescind the notice
of eviction!
Police body cams w/ automated "AI" report writing integrations. "AI" trained on what again?
That's right: Parsed & tagged datasets made of police reports… which are themselves written based on cops' memories.
Everything is going to go wrong w/ this because it starts from a place of utter wrongness
Axon's AI is now writing police reports directly from bodycam footage. Says cops are actively using it. What could go wrong? This is what it looks like:
www.404media.co/here-is-what...
There are no assurances, because in almost every instance it is explicitly the case that the university boards and sonor class are directly involved in these violent, highly miltarized police responses.
What assurances can university leaders provide that the disciplining and arresting and beating of their students is not directed by politicians, lobbying groups or billionaire group chats?
Oh well done with the Borges allusion/adaptation, Discovery; VERY well done, indeed
This world doesn't have to be this way, and i wish reminding myself of that was motivation enough.
I hate this culture so much
“The city is now setting up a platform that allows certain businesses the ability share information and integrate its video surveillance with the NYPD in real time through closed-circuit television.”
NYPD to fight retail theft with optional closed-circuit monitoring program.
www.cbsnews.comThis is hugely good
This is great news. The HPV vaccine is cutting cases of cervical cancer by 90%.
England began vaccinating teenage girls in 2008 and results show it is paying off.
www.bbc.co.ukThis is a major source of my depression today
We're fucked. Really. If you're not in education, you have no idea how many schools are embedded in the Google ecosystem. Not just chromebooks but our email, cloud servers, even SSO. We're stuck with whatever Google wants to do.
Doom and gloom kinda day. Fucking sucks.
Time to go to bed, and hopefully not only dream of a better present and future than this, but clearly remember the path to get there, on waking.
Just so angry about who was & very much was not in these rooms. Whose voices were either very easily talked over, or shut out altogether. And I wish I knew some way to effectively stop the wholesale paradigmatic capture of "AI," but all I can do is what I can. Sometimes that even feels like enough.
The amount in the Senate plan was first proposed by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, led by Eric Schmidt.
rollcall.comAnd remember that every single member of the NC state legislature— state house *and* state senate— is up for reelection, this year. All of them: ballotpedia.org/North_Caroli...
If you care about this, please:
Do not assume this won't pass with a veto proof majority
If you know anyone in North Carolina, ask them on Thursday (5/16) to reach out to their State Senator by the end of the day on Friday (5/17).
OpenAI has been outright lying to everyone about their capabilities and accomplishments, which: We told you so.
But I do appreciate @juliaangwin.com always doing the solid work to lay it out plain.
www.nytimes.com/2024/05/15/o...
Oh my god the closing keynote at this event just gave a booster talk that was literally every cautionary tale i give to my students about how their data and movements are or might be tracked by the university, holy shit
Holy shit the closing keynote at this event just gave a booster talk that was literally every cautionary tale i give to my students about how their data and movements are or might be tracked by the university, holy shit
Just learned that a NC State Senate committee passed a public masking ban into the full state senate, & that it has no exceptions for health. Like, it hasn't passed the full state legislature YET, but even the fact that it passed committee has me enraged & horrified by the direction of this country.
Gonna make myself some Egg McWolvens soon, I think. Been staring at this recipe for at least two years and meant to make some to celebrate getting my doctorate, but that summer got… hectic. So this'll be the year.
"…I got the ways and means
To New Orleans
I'm goin' down by the river
Where it's warm and green
I'm gonna have a drink, and walk around
I got a lot to think about
Oh yeah
Oh yeah…"
Happy 34th birthday to this Goth Anthem:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbJm...
Official music video for Concrete Blonde's "Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)" from the 1990 'Bloodletting' album#ConcreteBlonde #Bloodletting # BloodlettingTh...
www.youtube.comFedEx about to be like "Following Google's AI integrations, we're rolling out PorchRay™! Our GPT-infused, AI-enabled digital chatbot x-ray assistant scans every item that crosses your threshold to facilitate better, more accurate package delivery for You, the Consumer! PorchRay: Did You Order That?"
FedEx about to be like, "Following Google's AI integrations, we're rolling out PorchRay™! Our GPT-infused, AI-enabled digital chatbot assistant scans every item that crosses your threshold, to facilitate better, more accurate package delivery for *You*, the consumer! PorchRay™: Did You Order That?"
Having one of those days where people laugh at my expressions of despair and look horrified and worried about me when i tell my jokes. Maybe gonna call it an early night
Nobody ever said it was "publish XOR perish."
Yep, we're all gonna die because logical positivism and the foundational myth of objective mathematical certainty are apparently like getting eaten out by god itself in the eyes of way too many people.
I can’t stress how dangerous 20+ years of teaching men STEM without Humanities has been for all of us
Just a tip-top day to fall into a depressive pit. By which I mean, i hate this. Ugh
I can only stay mad at my students for so long for stealing their classmates' work and running it through LLM-based auto-thesaurus-ers, when this is the kind of shit that is happening at the largest, most prestigious journals in the entire academy. I just… This shit is so deeply, darkly systemic.
"Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific jrnls, ldg to 1000s of retractions and millions of $ in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-yo publisher,...which Tuesday will announce that it is closing 19 jrnls, some of which were infected by lg-scale rsch fraud."
Wiley will announce that it will shutter 19 more journals, some tainted by fraud.
www.wsj.comI hope that Kristen Bell and D'Arcy Carden in particular are having a really great day.
No, but for real: I'm seriously worried that there is some kind of species-wide death urge that is way too likely to sweep all of us up with it, and it is legit terrifying.
www.pbs.org/newshour/hea...
Did you know @theebikinikill.bsky.social are a) on here (kind of), and b) on bandcamp? It's true!
bikinikill.bandcamp.com/music
Bikini Kill is a feminist punk band that was based in Olympia, WA and Washington DC, forming in 1990 and breaking up in 1997. Kathleen Hanna sang, Tobi Vail played drums, Billy Karren (aka Billy Bored...
bikinikill.bandcamp.comRewatching The Good Place, for my comforting