Matthew Moynihan

Avoiding Covid is not extreme.

As someone who skied cross-country competitively in high school, it is the hardest workout I’ve ever done.

Racing pushes you to your breaking point. There were times I wasn’t sure I would make it up a very gentle slope.

Covid means you lose. End of Olympic dream.

I mean, unless we have some very intricately timed oil paintings to turn into a flip book…

For a second I thought you were asking for a gif from the year 1776 and I was worried about you.

But then I used context clues to figure it out!

Going forward, I’m going to need every administrator (and faculty member) pushing the FOMO argument for GenAI adoption to address this. Kthanks!

That Ring ad is terrifying. No good can come from that.

No Kings includes Draft Kings

No better way to announce “facts, data, and details are not an important part of my arguments.”

It’s nice of them to consider Hugo and Nebula finalists and not restrict to winners only.

🙄

Someone asked me “is this the top floor of this building” and I responded “sort of? It depends.”

I mean, are you even a college campus if you don’t have some wild amalgamation of buildings and a “you can’t get there from here” floor plan?

Dear everyone driving with a snowdrift on their vehicle,

I hate you.

Sincerely,
Me

my expectation of democratic senators is that they find 1/10th of the bravery of your average 70 year old lutheran lady following ICE around mpls in her subaru crosstrek

yes, this.

this country has been talking big and falling short since "all men are created equal" and you're either the type of person who thinks it's patriotic to ignore how short we have always fallen, or you're the type of person who thinks it's patriotic to stop falling so fucking short.

Lots of good signs here, but I have to confess my favorite is a rebel alliance where they replaced the red insignia with blue and the Minnesota loon.

ICE OUT OF MINNESOTA. No work. No school. No shopping. March downtown Minneapolis at 2pm. January 23.

📢ICE GET THE HELL OUT OF MINNESOTA.

Minnesotans please join tomorrow’s ICE Out of Minnesota Day of Truth & Freedom here: iceoutnowmn.com

The cognitive dissonance of constantly reading that I need to spend some time mastering generative AI while not knowing a single person in my industry who uses it to do good work 🤙

Unreal that tech execs are acting like “thing might fail if people continue to not like or want it” is our problem and not theirs.

Why is there a UFC commercial featuring the famous “Are you not entertained?” quote from Gladiator?

That’s…not what that means?

"Let the other societies take the skilled, the hopefuls, the ambitious, the self-confident. He'd take the whining resentful ones, the ones with a bellyful of spite and bile, the ones who knew they could make it big if only they'd been given the chance. Give him the ones in which the floods of venom and vindictiveness were dammed up behind thin walls of ineptitude and lowgrade paranoia. And stupidity, too." -Terry Pratchett (Guards! Guards!)

I just started the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett and this quote hit me like a ton of bricks.

I’m so proud of my hometown of Minneapolis for resisting such a force.

'It found that using AI in education can "undermine children's foundational development" and that "the damages it has already caused are daunting," though "fixable."'

I hope @rweingarten.bsky.social and the AFT are paying attention. AI in education does NOT serve students.

This should be a national shutdown

Discworld QOTD, from Guards! Guards!

Just had a guy going door to door among the businesses along Minnehaha Avenue drop this off. Hell yeah.

I was just denied access to the ICE processing center at the Whipple Building.

Members of Congress have a legal right and constitutional responsibility to conduct oversight where people are being detained.

The public deserves to know what is taking place in ICE facilities.

Say her name: Renee Good.

ICE out of Minneapolis and Minnesota now.

As @jbakcoleman.bsky.social and I wrote, “Every time a scientist abdicates their work to an AI tool, that is a tacit admission that the work is not worth being done by the scientist.”

Same goes for instructors.

Same! I helped set one up for an older (tech savvy) family member. It was a nightmare navigating the “you don’t buy software anymore, you pay subscriptions for the cloud.”

And Adobe appears to have combined the reader and the pro versions so now there are confusing “sign in” and “free trial” traps.

The other thing about normalizing gAI use in higher ed is that we are teaching our students that they cannot trust their own creativity, their own thoughts and brains, their own skills without having it reshaped/shellacked/transmogrified by LLMs. We’re setting them up for failure and dependence.

My new year's resolution this year, as every year, is to be a more available, supportive friend as well as an increasingly looming, formidable enemy.

Make a Bond movie academic:

Committee Royale

Also, if “learn to use AI the right way” is the starting point, then we’ve already failed. That always involves “not trusting the output.”

But verifying GenAI output requires maintaining vast AI-free information ecosystems maintained by “luddites” who are “behind the times.”