Janet H Murray

Why This Essay Could Cause the University of Virginia to Shut Down How Linda McMahon’s latest “compact” would do deep and permanent harm to American higher education

I wrote about the “compact” for higher education

newrepublic.com/article/2013...

‘No driver, no hands, no clue’: Driverless car pulled over on Bay Area road Police say they warned the company about the "glitch."

My 2nd law of robotics: When robots and people coexist in the same spaces, the robots must not take away from people’s agency, particularly when the robots are failing, as inevitably they will at times. -- Here it is cops stymied by Waymos. www.sfgate.com/bayarea/arti...

So proud of Sawyer, from my previous company. We designed them to run for 30,000 hours. That is 15 years (= 15 x 50wks x 40 hrs) of human work. This one provided 17.5 years of productivity. And… |... So proud of Sawyer, from my previous company. We designed them to run for 30,000 hours. That is 15 years (= 15 x 50wks x 40 hrs) of human work. This one provided 17.5 years of productivity. And Sawyer...

From my previous company. This Sawyer ran for 35,236 hours in a factory in Oregon. You can move within its workspace, and grab it as it is operating. This is what real robots, real deployments, and real ROI are all about; productive, reliable, and safe operation. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

As Elon Musk Preps Tesla’s Optimus for Prime Time, Big Hurdles Remain When Elon Musk takes the stage at Tesla’s annual meeting next month, one of the centerpieces of his plan to impress shareholders will be a dancing troupe of Optimus bots, the humanoid machines that he...

Promised 5,000 Optimus this year. "Tesla slashed its production goal to 2,000 a few months later ... Then, ... summer, staffers told Musk Tesla could meet the 2,000 target, but the robots wouldn’t be very useful due to issues with their hands." But, dancing!! www.theinformation.com/articles/elo...

ICE = lawless thuggery

The regime banned non government drones from flying over Chicago for 12 days

They’re suppressing the media

Without drones, it’s difficult to capture the black hawks. The children being dragged from the homes in the middle of the night

They know the world is watching, & they don’t want us to see

!!!* INTERNSHIP OPPORTUNITY *!!! Hey everyone… great news! please share with your network of budding young students.   We have now opened applications for our internships in Story, Ideation, Concept…... !!!* INTERNSHIP OPPORTUNITY *!!! Hey everyone… great news! please share with your network of budding young students.   We have now opened applications for our internships in Story, Ideation, Concept ...

2026 internships available in my team at The LEGO Group!

Internships in
Story,
Ideation,
Concept Model Design (ie, building with bricks),
Prototyping (3D printing etc),
Hardware (soldering and weird sensors!)
Physical (springs and spinny things)
Digital (code for doing stuff with bricks)

The government is in full shutdown and the Republicans are refusing to call the House back into session.

Want to know why?

Because we have secured the final vote on releasing the Epstein Files and they don’t want it out.

Call GOP and tell them to swear in @adelitaforcongress.bsky.social.

"We're going to create superintelligence" How about making outlook search work first. How about that

Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post, and the Cost of Speaking Out As Saudi Arabia hosts comedians and courts gamers, the silenced voice of Jamal Khashoggi still echoes.

Washington Post dismantled the platform Jamal wrote on. Discarded the fellowship they created in his memory.

They fired me unjustly for speaking the truth.

But I’ll never stop talking about my friend, writer, and amazing human, Jamal Khashoggi.

RIP, Jamal.

open.substack.com/pub/karenatt...

BREAKING: Our client Mario Guevara, an Emmy-winning journalist detained by ICE in retaliation for livestreaming law enforcement activity, will be deported tomorrow to El Salvador.

Mario and his family are being punished for his reporting. This cruelty is meant to stifle our free press.

This might be one of the most important announcements of the day. I hope New York State will follow, @governor.ny.gov

ICEBlock Owner After Apple Removes App: ‘We Are Determined to Fight This’ Apple removed ICEBlock reportedly after direct pressure from Department of Justice officials. “I am incredibly disappointed by Apple's actions today. Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never t...

so the US government just forced a tech company to delete an app it doesn’t like, which is totally normal stuff

www.404media.co/iceblock-own...

this should be a much bigger story

you know you have good and popular ideas when you have to buy up all the old and new media companies and staff them with soulless hacks and sycophants dedicated to blowing smoke up your ass

A wonderful example of the academic administrative version of Silicon Valley vaporware AI (or metaverse or blockchain )pitches - promising magical improvements to everything via ChatGPT — without specifying anything in particular.

This is fascism. Absolute trashing of the Bill of Rights. Illegal. Trash.

Trump Administration Asks Colleges to Sign ‘Compact’ to Get Funding Preference

This is extortion. Faculty, students, staff, alumni across the country need to get to their Presidents & Trustees today. Just say no. This blackmail only works if most everyone folds. Capitulation now means the end of American higher education for a generation. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/u...

White House fires much of the National Council on the Humanities The White House appeared to fire all but four members of the National Council on the Humanities, an advisory board to the head of the government’s grantmaking agency.

The White House abruptly terminated a large share of the council members advising the National Endowment for the Humanities, an advisory board to the head of the government’s grantmaking agency, retaining only four Trump appointees.

This thread is worth a careful read.

Fossil fuel billionaires are bankrolling the anti-trans movement An investigation shared exclusively with Atmos and HEATED finds that 80% of anti-trans organizations receive fossil fuel funding.

Excellent reporting from Heated and Atmos.

It looks like some of the biggest investors in the anti-trans movement are fossil fuel billionaires who are trying to use trans issues to ensure that Republicans pass policies favorable to their industry.

heated.world/p/fossil-fue...

If we’re renaming departments and calling the DOD the “Department of War”, we might as well go ahead and make the DOJ the “Department of Revenge”

After Coinbase was hit with a lawsuit from Oregon’s Attorney General, who argued that “states must fill [the] enforcement vacuum being left by federal regulators who are abandoning [crypto enforcement] cases under [the] Trump administration” [I82, 85], Coinbase has sent a letter to the Department of Justice asking them to pressure Congress to enact “broad” federal preemption provisions for cryptocurrency markets. They also argue the DOJ should lean on the SEC to issue rules excluding digital assets from securities laws. Besides the list of cases and cease-and-desist orders against Coinbase under state securities laws, they also protest state-level crypto licensing regimes (like New York’s BitLicense). They write, “In signing Illinois’s law just last month, Governor J.B. Pritzker made clear that the law aims squarely to undermine what he called the federal government’s efforts to ‘actively deregulat[e] the crypto industry.’” [I91] Heaven forbid any states should obstruct the deregulation that crypto spent so generously to secure!

Coinbase is now lobbying the Department of Justice to pressure Congress to prohibit states from enforcing regulations against crypto businesses after some states have stepped in to fill the federal regulatory void. They also want to stymie state-level laws "undermining" federal deregulation.

The Cost of a Taco: Accelerating Dark Patterns for Consumers and the Threat of AI Agents There are four pretty good taco shops near my office. Yesterday for lunch I had one fish taco and one grilled chicken. Here’s my receipt:

Hidden fees and deceptive sales practices are about to get worse with the introduction of "AI Agents":
asbruckman.medium.com/the-cost-of-...

“Who do you think you are? Killing thousands and flattening neighborhoods, then wrapping yourself in Judaism like it’s some shield from criticism. You’re making life for Jews miserable.”

Netanyahu makes a South Park appearance

A Diminished Social Security Work Force, and Its Customers, Feel the Strain

A teachable example of careless /malign mismanagement in the digital re-design of a complex system.

A Diminished Social Security Work Force, and Its Customers, Feel the Strain www.nytimes.com/2025/09/24/b...

photo of paulina borsook

1/ A longtime Wired editor just wrote a mush-brained essay about how he totally missed the political rot of Silicon Valley (& still doesn't get it).

But in the late 1990s, a Wired journalist warned of a toxic ideology bubbling up from tech. Paulina Borsook has largely been erased. Let's change that

Peter Thiel giving lectures about the antichrist is just another illustration of the fact that the most dangerous thing about billionaires is that they exist in a world where nobody tells them their stupid ideas are stupid and are therefore prone to inflict their stupid ideas on all of us.

Hundreds of Alligator Alcatraz detainees drop off the grid after leaving site As of the end of August, the whereabouts of two-thirds of more than 1,800 men detained at Alligator Alcatraz during the month of July could not be determined by the Miami Herald.

More than 1800 detainees are missing after the closure of Alligator Alcatraz. Their families and lawyers can’t find them and they’ve vanished from the ICE database. Feels like this should be a much bigger story www.miamiherald.com/news/local/i...

Georgia senators demand answers on more than a dozen deaths in immigration detention Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are asking Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for answers after more than a dozen people died in immigration detention, as the department rushes to expand.

Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are asking Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for answers after more than a dozen people died in immigration detention, as the department rushes to expand.