sara m. b. simon

footnote: what i'm troubled by is not the interest or curiosity wrt AI. to the contrary, the whole content betrays an utmost lack of curiosity and depth. no one seems to wanna understand what it is, whether or how institutions need it. they just wanna have a share of it. FOMO as higher ed strategy.

Cass Sunstein was pushing prediction markets as a fairer alternative to deliberation (e.g. committees, juries) back in 2008. (This and "nudging" in lieu of policy.) The quant asshole revolution of the Obama era laid the groundwork for the gambling, scams, and bullshit vibes paradigm of today.

ai is a rhetorical technology.

when it produces a list of permissible targets, its value is not producing targets but producing permission

Her husband wanted to use ChatGPT to create sustainable housing. Then it took over his life. Kate Fox says Joe Ceccanti was the ‘most hopeful person’ before he started spending 12 hours a day with a chatbot

“It’s difficult to understand the scale of the problem, but OpenAI itself estimates that more than a million people every week show suicidal intent when chatting with ChatGPT.”

Hospitals Fighting Measles Confront a Challenge: Few Doctors Have Seen It Before - KFF Health News As the number of cases grows to about 1,000 in the Carolinas, health care workers who’ve never seen the vaccine-preventable disease can get caught by surprise.

"The boys sat in one waiting room and then another. Two hours and 20 minutes passed before the two were isolated... It was measles.

The virus exposed at least 26 other people in the hospital that January day, federal investigators determined."

I tried to say!

i really am happy with my career pivot but occasionally i remember that my final straw in journalism was, in 2020, repeatedly pitching a state-level "government software and systems" beat for myself and repeatedly being told "nah"

so where does the next generation of talent come from? who are the young journalists, and how are they paid? every career incentive, both economic and prestige-wise, now points to the olivia nuzzi route

@aworkinglibrary.com would be my rec!

we got new bookshelves and were fairly haphazard tonight in the process of moving everything over. will need some reorganizing eventually. but i did just notice that the miss america books section and the eugenics books section ended up very near each other, which tbh isn't historically inaccurate

do you know if there's any good writing on the breast is best to raw milk pipeline? or at least about an overlapping venn diagram? i have been so curious about this, because it seems so obvious to me

I missed the Casey Means hearing. Tell me someone asked her if she vaccinated her new baby.

Ballerina Farm Announced Her Pregnancy in a Protein Ad You don’t get to roll out your ninth baby every day.

oh, to have been a fly on the wall for those "quick, we need to get out in front of the farm's raw milk controversy before we launch our protein powder ad slash ninth baby announcement" conversations www.thecut.com/article/ball...

for folks who are active on x, threads, etc and feel bad about it bc of its stewards but have a hard time letting go: sometimes your behaviors overpower your values online because tech companies hire psychologists & sociologists to come up with ways to put you in that position

i can't remember if i've talked about this publicly but i had to scramble a few years ago when my former provider very suddenly refused to refill my birth control rx, for reasons that were straight out of a misinfo playbook

reminder that the ACM published an extremely catty back-and-forth by McCarthy and Weizenbaum in 1976 showing us all what great posters they could have been dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10....

i am in my third tri and really appreciate hearing this—thank you!!

‘Abolish ICE’, ‘Caleb Chilliams’ Among Winners of Annual Snowplow Naming Contest The other winners of the fourth annual contest were Stephen Coldbert, Pope Frío XIV, The Blizzard of Oz, Svencoolie and Caleb Chilliams, Chicago officials announced.

BREAKING: A push to name one of Chicago’s snowplows “Abolish ICE,” clearly linking the humorous pun to efforts to oppose President Donald Trump’s mass deportation effort, won the city’s annual snowplow naming contest, officials announced. @wttw.bsky.social

i am just a lowly graduate student, what do i know, but my hunch is that the vast majority of undergrads do not want this, see right through this, understand this as a threat to their intellectual development

The AAUP committee on AI In Academic Professions, is 63% women, 69% STEM fields.

The occasional, often dismissive, insinuation that Critical AI is a purely Humanities movement could not be further from the truth.

Historians, I have a question for you. I'm reading some older books that all suggest a shared assumption by historians that in the past (often defined very broadly, but generally from the emergence of humans up through the middle ages-ish) humans had no real conception of "the future." (1/3)

Last month, University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin approved a proposal to establish a College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence funded by private corporations and philanthropy. Mnookin said the move was a response to the inevitable creep of artificial intelligence into all disciplines of academia. Rather than reject AI, she envisioned a university that capitalized on this change by making artificial intelligence a "hub" connecting the humanities to computer science.

On the first day of my economics elective this spring, my professor said we would be expected to use NotebookLM to pass his class. He had lengthened the coding assignments so that they would be doable only with the help of AI. The reading assignments were longer, too: ten 40-page papers per week, which he asked us to feed into AI for a summary rather than read ourselves. When it came to lectures, he told us to simply upload the slides to AI and ask it to teach us whatever he failed to explain properly in class.

BLEAK. Bleak. I’d been paying attention to Columbia selling out its governance to the Trump admin, not so much its stance on AI.
www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2026...

Alysa Liu telling 60 Minutes “I love struggling, it makes me feel alive” is a legit revolutionary statement from a Bay Area native in a time when copious amounts of time and resources are being put toward convincing us to opt out of experiencing struggle, friction and self-actualization

How “Archive” Became a Verb Debates over a proposed national data center in the 1960s reveal how privacy concerns led to corporate control of personal data.

"By failing to create a National Data Center, the government opened space for corporations to aggregate data for their own use and profit. Preventing a nationalized data center enabled a new market for privatized data banks and data integration solutions to take hold and thrive."

A pigeon wearing a pink medieval cons hat over a teal background. Painted in acrylic

Today's pigeon is a damsel but she's not in distress

i tell them to think about the "in this essay, i will" meme!

‘They better take away duct tape’: Trans men say they’ll keep binding despite FDA crackdown Chest binders are a common first step to explore gender identity. Restricting them could push people back to unsafe DIY methods.

This story was fun to write bc it’s mostly older trans guys being like “we used to bind uphill both ways in the snow”

But in all seriousness, binding used to be the wild west. Duct tape, electrical tape, ACE bandages. Now we have good products. But the FDA is cracking down on those. Read more:

If I was an oligarch I think I’d spend a lot of energy convincing young people to be terrified of the future and obsessed with a pragmatic education that could (theoretically) secure a job, hollowing out actual education and letting fear and ignorance secure my own place of domination

yes so good!!

'Pennsylvania is perfect' Tech companies are building enormous data centres and reconfiguring energy infrastructure across the US, all to power the burgeoning AI industry. On a road trip, Maia Woluchem and Livia Garofalo trace...

In @newint.bsky.social, D&S's @mwoluchem.bsky.social and @livgar.bsky.social write about their work tracing the impacts of, and resistance to, the AI industry's development push in Pennsylvania — and introduce us to some of the people living in the thick of it. newint.org/science-and-...