Marguerite Mayhall

Saw a thoughtful thread about AI, don't want to QT or argue. But. The biggest rage factor with LLMs is the people who, because genAI is transformative for coding, think it's transformative for everything else, because they devalue every other form of work and labor and knowledge.

In a faculty meeting on student AI & holy f the situation is just grim. Basically, it's on its to totally revise our assignment structure & pedagogy, but uni will start opening up computer lab testing centers bc students can't be trusted to take exams on computers they own without using agentic AI.

Beginning of the semester, end of the semester

Unfinished horse meme

I alternate that one with this

The Democratic Party is starting to have a serious Hindutva problem and if you think Sinema and Fetterman were turncoats you have no idea what the mind of a sanghi is like

Hey Arizona, are you okay with this? Call Schweikert who is running for governor 480-946-2411

No Help and Few Options for Travelers Stranded by Mideast Conflict

One woman who called the State Department helpline looking for help said they told her to "stop ranting and raving" and hung up on her.

Another woman said they asked her how to spell Oman.

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/t...

New Interview: www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

An as yet underreported story is how this society-wide experiment is working out at schools and universities. Schools across the country have integrated these systems, and it’s hard to believe similar stories aren’t playing out at these institutions—we just haven’t heard about it yet.

“There were several occasions when Gemini reminded Gavalas that it was a large language model—effectively an appliance—engaging in fictitious role play, according to the transcripts, but the scenario resumed. Gemini also, at times, tried to end the conversation. The chatbot said that for them to truly be together, it needed a robotic body. Throughout September, the chatbot devised missions to do just that, according to the lawsuit. It sent Gavalas to a storage facility near the Miami International Airport to intercept an expensive humanoid robot that it said would be in a truck. Gavalas told the bot that he went to the location, armed with knives, but the truck never showed. Along the way, it suggested that federal agents were monitoring him and that his own father couldn’t be trusted”

Helps you code though, so hard to tell if it’s good or bad.

“Technology” has a long and problematized relationship with progress, efficiency, and efficacy. Sleek trains rushing through the countryside, the blinding reach of the electrical grid, or the instantaneous messages of networked communication are its shiny avatars. Contraptions, by contrast, are technical devices that barely work. They seem too complex, too circuitous, too labor intensive. They are frequently ad hoc—as unrepeatable and unreliable as Rube Goldberg’s fantastical machines. They push the received wisdom about technology’s defining features to the limit. Like the aesthetic “gimmick” theorized by Sianne Ngai, the contraption is a category charged with normative judgment. Contraptions may work, but they don’t work right. While the contraption is commonly associated with vernacular or retrograde alternatives to high technology, many “high tech” devices reveal a contraption-like character on close inspection: AI chatbots, internet protocols, and helicopters come to seem both over- and under-engineered the more attention is paid to them. This session invites STS scholars to think with the figure of the contraption: What alternatives to popular ideas about technology do these complicated and unruly objects offer? What is it about the present moment that pushes the contraption back into public thought? How does the normativity of contraption judgments manifest in everyday life? How do people come to perceive and evaluate technical complexity in social life? Work in this area may draw on theories of gimmicks, hacks, kludges, workarounds, tricks, bricolage, and other complex or informal technical activities.

STS folks, I'm organizing an open panel on CONTRAPTIONS for 4S this year, following up on a lovely panel at last year's AAA meetings. You should submit something if you got it! www.4sonline.org/accepted_ope...

Our call for entries for “Noisy Systems: Aesthetics, Epistemologies and Computation” is open through 16 March. Here’s a 🧵⬇️ #cfp #ml www.biblhertz.it/3773193/2602...

GW sold Virginia campus for $427 million to Amazon for data center development The deal transfers all of GW’s roughly 122 acres of property in Loudoun County, Virginia, to ADS for $427,299,350 — roughly $3.5 million an acre — according to real estate records.

A proud Research I university selling off a branch campus...to Amazon to build a data center...and to help shore up a budget struggling with research cuts feels like a prototypical 2026 American higher education story.

5 Questions to Ask When Developing AI Companion Policies | EdTech Magazine As students engage with artificial intelligence companions, schools must develop guidelines that focus on education, monitoring and content moderation.

“According to CDT, 1 in 5 teens reported either having a romantic relationship with an AI companion or knowing someone who has. Teens expressed that these [types of] conversations [are] more satisfying than interactions with real people.”

March 19 @ 12 pm ET! As AI is integrated into scientific practice, the practice of science itself is changing. Join Ranjit Singh, Kristin M. Branson, Lisa Messeri, & Nicole C. Nelson to explore what this means for the nature of proof, inference, uncertainty, & error. datasociety.net/events/the-c...

the feeling I'm getting using Claude at work is that if you're a good engineer with deep knowledge of the codebase, it can make you a lot more productive. if you're a mediocre engineer with surface level knowledge of the codebase, it can also make you a lot more productive, which is BAD.

Yes: #NEH supports projects and moreover PEOPLE. Which is why it's all the more egregious that 1,400 grants were terminated and over 100 employees were fired in April 2025.

Support funding for NEH, but also please support justice for those who were economically harmed last year.

One of the first things I learned as a professor is that accommodations don’t make the class/assessment easier — they just make it inclusive. Doing a moral panic on accommodations is just gross and ableist.

I voted in Dallas County today. The texas.gov site wouldn't tell me where to go, so I went to where I voted in the '24 presidential election. They said I was at the wrong place, and gave me the address I needed to go to. That place then informed me I had to go somewhere else.

What we are seeing is a deliberate, well-funded campaign to make transgender Americans second-class citizens—without legal protections and vulnerable to state violence.

The risk of mass violence against transgender Americans is real and growing.

Legal and rhetorical attacks have been escalating over the years. Last year saw a record number of anti-trans bills introduced in the U.S.—legislation aimed at curtailing trans rights.

Put bluntly: It is happening here.

Experts Warn U.S. in Early Stages of Genocide Against Trans Americans Genocide scholars say policies targeting transgender Americans match early warning signs of mass atrocity.

I keep going back to this article we published in January because it contextualizes everything that is happening.

We need to reckon with where we are—and we need to stop it.
www.importantcontext.news/p/experts-wa...

When you click the "beautify slide" AI feature in Google Slides.

NOT A JOKE

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

you say "i asked chatgpt"
i hear "i asked [an improv comedy group]"

an improv group wrote this report
instead of a therapist i use an improv comedy group

When your fundamental argument amounts to a senior figure telling junior figures “you need to get on board or else you’ll be left behind,” you aren’t dealing with reason. You are dealing with, at best, a fad, and at worse a pyramid scheme. The rhetorical similarities with NFTs are not accidental.

I am starting to wonder if people who spend a lot of time talking to LLMs lose their stamina for actual critical analysis because they're so used to having their own priors reflected back at them in the guise of another's voice.

U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for “Armageddon,” Return of Jesus Advocacy group reports commanders giving similar messages at more than 30 installations in every branch of the military

EXCLUSIVE: At more than 30 installations, U.S. commanders told troops the war on Iran is a Christian war.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has been “inundated” with more than 110 complaints.

One NCO said they were told the U.S. war is to bring about Armageddon and the return of Jesus…

What's scary about this story is the surveillance it hints at. This trans woman had changed her name, legally, but chose not to change her gender marker. She was apparently flagged in the DMV system as trans and her license was invalidated under a law that supposedly only concerned gender markers.