Dan Blacksberg

computers already made it cheaper and easier than ever to make music decades before AI, plus using AI isn’t actually making music in the first place

Translating Holocaust Literature in Times of Genocide While designing a poster for a lecture on our new book, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press), one of the event’s organiz…

ICYMI at the end of last week: essay on “Translating Holocaust Literature in Times of Genocide” by Harriet Murav & me, published in @literaryhub.bsky.social This was an important set of ideas for us to work through; hope it finds its readers. lithub.com/translating-... @stanfordpress.bsky.social

I wish I had the poignant, sad, yet resolute statements I've seen from the Conn Selmer workers about their love for creating brass instruments, literal extensions of our human creative minds, from metal.

Down with the hedge fund losers who give the middle finger to workers and human endeavors!

OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limi...

OpenAI ”acknowledged in its own research that LLMs will always produce hallucinations due to fundamental mathematical constraints that cannot be solved through better engineering, marking a significant admission from one of the AI industry’s leading companies.”

You can’t trust chatbots.

douglas adams was our most accurate futurist

Leon Botstein, president of @bardcollege.bsky.social, has repeatedly made public statements about his relationship with the pedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that have turned out to be misleading, incomplete, or untrue. I'm going to make a thread to compile them all here.

Bill Watterson

Bill Watterson

What Playing With Sun Ra in College Taught Me About Myself Sun Ra claimed to hail from Saturn, but he and his far-out band, the Intergalactic Arkestra, still suffered the hassles of earthly travel. Because of a snafu, they would arrive on campus a day earl…

“Y’all seem so worried,” said Sun Ra, “about playing the notes. But you can play more than just notes on a page, you know. You can play the river. You can play the sun rays.”

still from the dybbuk of leah, dressed as a bride, with her skull-faced soulmate holding her from behind, their arms spread

הײַנט װילן די ייִדן נאָר אײן זאַך און ס׳איז דאָס

One hundred years ago, in the 1920's, a rising German far-right movement was looking to the US as a model of juridical technologies of racial oppression. Today, in the 2020's...

This was also the thing that shocked me the most talking with these dudes!

Well, yeah that makes sad sense...

Right in our own Philly NJ/Exurbs looks like. I think it's clear that we can win this fight and melt ICE and then god willing, we can keep on fighting until we win everything we need to give everyone a good life.

“Translating Holocaust Literature in Times of Genocide” by Sasha Senderovich and Harriet Murav, published in LitHub

Translating [Holocaust literature] today, while multiple genocides unfold in real time […] means insisting that the words forged to name one catastrophe and to dwell on its horrific aftermath still matter, precisely because they continue to name others.” lithub.com/translating-...

Pushing the envelope on the absurdity!

I live on the kind of idealized quiet street where everyone knows each other, people don't even bother locking their doors, and the children of the block play together in the street. The district is D+60 and we're 20 minutes from downtown LA

Started rereading an old yiddish textbook and barely got a fifth of the way in before it threw a story about the Warsaw ghetto uprising at the reader

This is something the Nazis used to do to Jewish children in the camps. It happened to a man I knew when he was a child in Auschwitz. The camp guards thought it was funny as hell.

if you're an older person who finds words like mogg and maxxing annoying, just starting using them. people over the age of 30 have the superpower to end trends by simply adopting them

Casey Wasserman, the owner of Wasserman talent agency who was recently exposed in the Epstein files, remains the head of the 2028 Olympics while the artists on his agency bear the brunt of his actions. This is disgraceful.

AI is the exact opposite of Woody Guthrie's guitar

Let it go and open yourself to the mysterious paths offered by the universe.

BIG NEWS TODAY: We are hiring an audience editor!! Come work with me and help @jewishcurrents.bsky.social grow! jewishcurrents.org/careers

I'm looking to interview some non-American musicians or bands who've decided not to tour in the U.S. this year because of ICE. Please hit my DMs if you are willing to chat about this decision.

screenshot from the Subway Takes video of a guy with long hair and a blue shirt holding a subway metro card / microphone “I think we need to destroy the data centers”

me in any conversation about anything lately:

was talking to another yiddish learner and instead of saying "see you later!" (biz bald, ביז באַלד) they said "until the forest!" (biz vald, ביז װאַלד) and it made my heart soar because i have said the EXACT SAME THING when ending a conversation

Personhood is not a metaphysical question, it's a political question. AI personhood debates focus only on the former to obscure the latter.

do you think they were twirling their moustache while writing that memo?

Hell yeah

A white-haired anime girl with her hand outstretched. The text reads, "Let's take ibuprofen together."