Nomi

Halloween gravestone reading “I Did My Own Research” in a yard with two skeleton arms sticking out of the grass.

Happy Halloween

15 million Americans are going to lose their health care.

If you've never been to any kind of community music making event, I guarentee it will restore your faith in humanity.

(And maybe inspire you to fairly compensate music educators 🙃)

It's paying off though. Most of the students who chose my medium/heavy AI track are discovering that the technology is extremely limited.

It's funny to me that this has basically led to a search for "is there a culture group that does not do this?" and so far the answer seems genuinely to be "no".

Jesus Christ if you don’t want to live next to people who speak a different language why on earth is it incumbent on those people and not you to go somewhere else

I will never forgive generative AI for making me question every “Dog being silly” compilation.

Like how bad does does something have to be to suck the joy out of dogs being idiots.

The amount of time I've spent trying to at least semi-ethically account for LLMs in my classes with minimal support is soul-crushing.

It drives me absolutely mad when people say the way to get elected is to … take popular positions. This is the genius of people who ran for class president on a platform of longer recess. Unless being elected is an end in itself, this answers nothing.

Two pieces of advice to aspiring academics:

-Be specific.

-Write in a straight line.

Once you've mastered that, you're 80% of the way there.

My gut feeling is that "people overworked and tired" accounts for 90% of what appears to be apathy.

I’m not a Trekkie but I’ve done enough basic research into the Star Trek fandom to know women basically invented it, and are why the show even continued to exist. This kind of writing is part of institutional sexism that denies women’s accomplishments and role in history and it infuriates me

I knew Busby Berkeley was due to make a comeback! youtu.be/IsXf6a_X7Lo?...

Seriously. It becomes at least 50% funnier in fullscreen.

Fortunately, I'm careful with my social media feeds so I don't see a lot of this kind of thing. But this is still pretty funny.

the aws outage should be evidence that running half the internet on a single company's servers is a terrible idea but i fear nothing will change

Randall Munroe once noted that more Californians than Texans voted for Trump and more Texans than New Yorkers voted for Harris.

For Tolkien fans, a timely passage for No Kings Eve, from WH Auden’s review of Lord of the Rings.

As Churchill said of the US in general: it turns out American institutions of higher education can be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.

I want social media to 1) let me keep up with far away friends and family 2) help me keep up with developments in my field and 3) be a place where I can share interesting things I read and read what other people find interesting.

15 years ago the NYT and every other provost insisted MOOCs were the hotness.

Today it’s the machine that cannot accurately tell me basic historical facts or reliably tabulate a spreadsheet.

"Jewish Americans told us —by a margin of nearly 3 to 1— that Trump manipulates antisemitism dishonestly, using it as an excuse to pause or cut university funding. Only about one-fourth of all Jews nationwide believe the president “truly cares about protecting Jewish students on college campuses.”"

Quite a few of these kids are also somehow occupying adult positions of import within the Republican Party.

Not usually a fan of Lacan, but I found this essay very compelling.

Whenever anyone says how much of the U.S. economy is tied to AI right now, I'm like...damn, what if a single rich person had any idea other than "try to zero out labor costs through theft."

From the sound of music. Seven children stand in a line inside a grand house, wearing identical light blue sailor-style uniforms with dark collars, neckties, and knee socks. They are arranged from tallest to shortest, standing at attention on a patterned rug with a staircase and ornate wall paneling behind them.

Oh shit, ANTIFA is suiting up

Please read

Or how about a public one!

As Trump declares war on American cities, just remember that this is because of the left and cancel culture.

I think it’s very interesting how emphatically these conversations are about inevitability—it’s time, it’s happening, like it or not, and in particular, a sense of: “You have to.”

When it comes to treating an AI product as a person, I assure you that I do not have to. And you do not have to.