Sol Werthan

A great example of life after cars.

Most of the internet used to be like this. This is actually the default, it took companies enclosing the internet and adding weird, soul-killing incentives to make people behave the way they do now. In a way, there is truly nothing special about Wikipedia except that it survived longer.

Setting aside the ethical and environmental concerns of AI, I'm really offended by a bunch of elite dudes telling us our minds aren't good enough when they've had to steal everything human minds have created to create their pretend mind and it doesn't even work right!

Increasingly convinced the main damage cell phones have done to creativity isn't decreased attention spans or what not but the elimination of productive boredom. Inspiration comes from the mind filling the void inside. Hard to make art when you're constantly silencing the silence with "content."

Learning enough to know "how to learn more" on your own is one of the most important and rewarding skills to have as a scientist and scholar. A joy and a gift

What was LA like before freeways? Time-travel to pre-car Los Angeles with the Whitlock Map. Read full story getty.edu/news

What was Los Angeles like pre-freeway? 🚙🚕🚗

Recently digitized, a detailed hand-drawn created by "the only woman map publisher in the country" lets us time-travel to 1927, before the widespread adoption of automobiles: gty.art/4kvZs1l

It genuinely feels like the last decade has been less about "using tech to solve user problems" and more "using tech to extract sellable information" which is... just not what tech is *for.*
It's the rot that is "businesses exist to maximize shareholder profits" fully hollowing out innovation.

How We’re Using AI The rapid development of AI is already changing how journalists operate. Reporters, editors, executives, and others across the news industry share their advice on how to engage—and where to draw the l...

The number of journalist in this piece who draw the line at “letting AI do the writing” but are fine with “letting AI do the thinking” makes me want to walk into the ocean.

This is how you lose your edge — and the war on our industry as executives try to replace us.

Look, I hope these students see what they’re saying and start to try to think through the problems they are given in school without ChatGPT.

But the neoliberal capture of universities and systematic defunding of schools is just as much to blame for this as the students decision to use it.

Carla Hayden was president of the @amlibraryassoc.bsky.social when ours was one of few organized voices opposed to the USA PATRIOT Act.

Librarians have been fired all across the federal government, gutting not just ours but the world’s intellectual infrastructure. Devastating.

I’m sorry but if your students use AI to write papers and you use AI to grade them zero school is happening. You are running together on a hamster wheel

From NYT article about the increasing use of AI in the classroom: “Writing is one of the most challenging tasks for students, which is why it is so tempting for some to ask A.I. to do it for them. In turn, A.I. can be useful for teachers who would like to assign more writing, but are limited in their time to grade it.”

Why even have a brain, any ideas, any ability to express them, any kind of communication with other people, any desire to solve problems or invent anything, any reason to learn, any use for your eyes or your heart, or any reason to teach or create

everything we do as teachers and students, if education is going to mean something, relies on us knowing this thoroughly, and acting in accordance with that knowledge

The amount of energy people at universities are spending trying to deal with this administration is just huge - and not just Harvard, everywhere. Imagine all the things we could be doing instead.

This is part of their strategy of course.

This is at the core of Trump’s policies. If they can denationalize you by declaring you a terrorist, gang member, or enemy combatant with no hope of due process, it’s all over.

the last few days has been a reminder that people really want to believe that not only is there this real thing called a “criminal,” and that if they need to, anyone can just prove they aren’t one

oh, no, it’s okay. i hated quality of life improvements and simple conveniences anyways

A few years ago I interviewed a rabbi in Idaho - abt just how extreme/fascist the GOP had gotten in the state - as he was preparing for Passover & what he said really stuck with me www.huffpost.com/entry/far-ri...

One of the sources of rot running through our political, intellectual, and media institutions is the total triumph of the idea that democracy means outsourcing your morality and point of view to a fuzzily incoherent view of what's popular. Total rejection of the idea of morality as personal virtue.

Media challenge: try writing headlines without using the word "antisemitism". Stop using Trump's framing for his authoritarian actions.
"Trump administration now monitoring immigrant social media" would be shorter and more accurate, since no-one really believes this is about anti-semitism.

This is really important to read because prisons will tout their "rehabilitative" news and podcasts and whatever programs while the people in those programs face constant threats and harassment because they are still, in fact, prisoners.

The thing about ACT UP, as Sarah Schulman notes, is that there wasn’t time for protracted disagreements over strategy; people were dying of AIDS left and right.

SO, if some folks want to do X strategy for a protest but you wanted to do Y, ACT UP’s approach was to say “you do X and I’ll do Y.”

You don’t have to love or even like people to work with them effectively. I don’t think there will be one effective strategy of resistance against Trump; I think there will be MANY. An overwhelming rainbow of pushback and outrage.

But again, I ain’t saying nothing. I’m minding my business.

UPDATED: At least 83 students -- at campuses for University of California, California State University and Stanford -- have had their visas revoked as of Monday evening.

Don’t remember where I saw this library flyer a while back but it’s great

can't normalize without normies. make your peace with this now

It’s so important to know what your values are right now. Have more than a good guess about what they might be. Have a plan to defend them.

This statement is fine, but libraries need to be much more explicit. Say who killed IMLS. Tell patrons how to contact their reps to express their thoughts on loss of access. Don't obfuscate things. You can still be neutral (neutrality doesn't exist etc) and be direct and honest with your patrons.

for now, I think the best way to frame assignments to avoid slop is to not have writing be the *point* of the assignment even when it is a written assignment; ask for leg-work that chatgpt can't do, and incorporate the specific circumstances of your course in ways it can't easily take account of

Doomerism is libs' and lefties' way of obeying in advance.