Saira Jehan

are we still on about em dashes and ai. imo human writers should just use the em dashes even harder. we should be out here pummeling out those em dashes like we're emily dickinson

Jimmy Fallon: ...so you'll just consume everything.

Artaxias, The Screeching Void From Beyond the Sun: ALL SHALL LIVE WITHIN MY MAW.

Fallon: That's so wild.

Vital City | How Mamdani Can Deliver Free Buses — and Subways, Too Start charging for street parking

How to make public transit free? Charge for parking.

"After three-quarters of a century, the policy of charging for mass transit while providing free storage for car owners is overdue for some fresh thinking." - @vitalcitynyc.bsky.social

"ACAB / All Colonizers Are Bastards"
Stencil seen in Mexico City

Conservatives love AI because it's far easier to abuse a population that can't read, can't write, can't think, and can't tell what's real

After the brutal reality of dealing with student papers in the ChatGPT era finally hit me, here are a few tactics that I've found at least somewhat effective in getting students to do their own writing: 🧵

How to quit Spotify This Black Friday, here's a guide to finding the best Spotify alternative

Spotify is garbage on every count: Its treatment of artists, its ICE advertising, the CEO's investment in military AI, its leading role in the commodification and AI slopification of music, its terrible audio quality—you name it.

So I quit, and put together a complete guide to getting off Spotify:

This is your occasional reminder that, if you like Neil Gaiman's stuff, but can't bring yourself to like it anymore for justifiable reasons, Tanith Lee is the author he is credibly accused of extensively cribbing from, and her work is on Audible, and AMAZING.

Highway filled with cars

Busy urban arterial filled with cars

Bike-lanes don’t cause traffic congestion.

Car dependency, dumb land-use sprawl, too many (& bigger) cars being driven too much taking up too much space, highly subsidized driving costs, and not enough choices in how to get around, ALL cause traffic congestion.

Think about it. THAT’S common sense.

The USPS posting a NINE BILLION DOLLAR LOSS!!! sounds terrible. Certainly worse than if you said "USPS costs thirty dollars per person per year" even though that means the same thing and more accurately describes a government service

I'm old.

If you're not, listen to this.

Get a guitar or some drums, or a trumpet. Pick up a brush, a pencil, some clay or a welder.

Just make shit. It doesn't have to be good (eventually it will be) just make music, art or write or whatever.

It's literally never been more important.

Handing back student work that’s been written by ChatGPT with a 0 followed by the comment “This essay will never stand in authentic wonder before the Beauty of God’s creation.”

"My mentor always tells me, 'Kim, dogs don’t bark at parked cars." They’re coming after critical race theory, 1619, intersectionality because these ideas mobilized people. They gave them the language to actually articulate what they were seeing with their own eyes," says Kimberlé Crenshaw.

Fifteen Years

God damn it, xkcd, I didn't need to get hit this hard in the feels.

xkcd.com/3172/

It's weird to not only have lived through an information revolution but also now living through its undoing, all within less than a generation.

Sounds like something a hempo would say!

the “thanksgiving food is bad” discourse raises its ugly head every year, but the truth remains that thanksgiving food can be amazing as long as you know how to cook. the problem is we’re throwing a few million sunday drivers directly into a grand prix

I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.

I think about this all the time

I think the shortest version of why LLMs are an anti education technology is that education is fundamentally about making shared context to understand ourselves, each other, and the world

And by design LLMs destroy shared context

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say this is mine and found people sufficiently simple to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors Mankind would have been spared by him who, pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had cried out in kind: Beware of listening to this impostor; You are lost if you forget that the fruits are everyone’s and the Earth no one’s. jean jacques rousseau, Discourse on Inequality (trans. Victor Gourevich; 1755)

Pope Leo appears to sing into a microphone.

Pack it up, pack it in, let me begin, I came to win, battle me, that’s a sin

Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪

If you give me a smart home device as a gift you should know I am going to hit it with a hammer

Fuzzy orange cat snoozes peacefully on owner’s lap.

Happy Caturday from Garfunkel, the world’s bestest boy.

Meet the AI workers who tell their friends and family to stay away from AI When the people making AI seem trustworthy are the ones who trust it the least, it shows that incentives for speed are overtaking safety, experts say

“AI workers said they distrust the models they work on because of a consistent emphasis on rapid turnaround time at the expense of quality.”

A screenshot of a Facebook post where a person named Andy ask the Well now “What the hell is transgender?” The Royal Canadian Air Force account response with “That’s a pretty big question asked in a pretty small way, Andy. ‘Transgender’ putting describes someone whose gender – who they know themselves to be – doesn’t match the sex they were assigned at birth. It’s not new, and it’s certainly not a fad. People have lived this experience for as long as people have existed; we’re just finally talking about it openly. You don’t have to fully understand it right away, most learning takes time, but we can always start from a place of respect. That’s how decent folks handle things they’re still getting used to.”

Massive shoutout out to whoever handles the Royal Canadian Air Force’s social media account. They responded to every single comment on their already very solid Trans Day of Remembrance post and they responded like this…

you'd think the forced displacement of 10 million people from one of the oldest centres of civilisation in human history would get a little more news attention than beltway journalists writing essays on how Olivia Nuzzi is a genius because they want to bone her and you'd be wrong

socialism never works. norway is socialist and theyre doing great. theyre not socialist,, theyre capitalist countries with strong welfare policies. then lets do those policies. no thats socialism.

You ever just sit down and realize that the rise of 21st century fascism is capital's answer to climate change?