Attenuated Presence 🔭

"AI" is corrosive to information and corrosive to trust, therefore corrosive to education.

Is the AI + EdTech symbiosis a slippery slope for education, or a cliff?

Want to know who is using AI the most prolifically? District Admin, not teachers. (Anecdotal to my experience of course). #EduSky #EdTech

I've always felt these were unfairly maligned. I thought they were pretty good at the time.

Considering that Gondor looks like a medieval polity, structurally - maybe 10th- or 11th-century France would be a reasonable comparison - Aragorn doesn't have the state capacity to have a very granular tax policy. Very likely he would have to have decentralised tax collection - i.e., tax farming.

In America, children can have “school lunch debt”

AI is the “asbestos of the internet”

OpenAI Unveil “Final Slogan”

“Is there a technology the left is excited about?”

High-speed rail! MRNA vaccines! New cancer treatments! Solar and wind energy collection! Better and longer-range EVs! That wood that's harder than steel! New apples! Fibermaxxing! Buldak Swicy ramen! Muppets! Muppets are too a technology, shut up!

James Baxter - a horse standing on a beach ball with his hind legs in the cartoon Adventure Time.

I think that one might have escaped from Adventure Time.

Or you can just not use the misinformation machines and not tout the misinformation machines. Better yet, you could educate people on how they actually work and why so many of the claims surrounding them are patently false.

I expect better of SciAm.

ChatGPT promised to help her find her soulmate. Then it betrayed her ChatGPT sent screenwriter Micky Small down a fantastical rabbit hole. Now, she's finding her way out.

Just a reminder that ChatGPT cannot betray anyone because it doesn’t have feelings or motives or thoughts

Reading that one these days is such an odd experience. On the one hand, zombie apocalypse. On the other, two major party candidates for president who both genuinely mean well and have good ideas. It might almost be worth the zombies.

douglas adams was our most accurate futurist

Seven Billion Reasons for Facebook to Abandon its Face Recognition Plans Meta’s analysis that it can avoid scrutiny by releasing a privacy invasive product during a time of political crisis is craven and morally bankrupt. It is also dead wrong.

Meta thinks now is a great time to launch facial recognition surveillance tech in their creepy glasses because EFF will be too distracted by fascism to notice.

We noticed.

www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...

I always thought it was "grave" and the whole thing was just super goth, which fit with the whole Batman thing.

The "use case" for LLMs is: Spam. Everywhere.

Bluesky also uses AI. Both Jay and Frazee have talked about it openly.

Jay would like you to know that they like Claude 4.5 better than ChatGPT and don't even ChatGPT any more.

bsky.app/profile/jay....

YouTube video by xkcd's What If? What if you made a jetpack using rifles?

What if you made a jetpack using rifles?

What the latest What If? video in collaboration with @minuteearth.bsky.social!

youtu.be/IdlQsjq5vKo

Yes, this is a real business.
Yes I'd hire them just because of that name alone.
www.williamtheconcreter.com

Come to think of it, I've seen it in Cincy as a snowball flavor at several places.

I, on the other hand, had no idea it existed anywhere else! Very cool to learn - clearly I need to get back down to NO.

You can get nectar sodas at Graeter's too. I didn't know where it came from, I just know I love it dearly and have since I was a kid.

we need to talk about that Ring Super Bowl ad

I had a neurospicy acquaintance with MS, who did freelance art. Her style was similar to what early AI slop produced.

Her commissions dried up. She became a couch surfer, depressed, lost her insurance and access to her meds.

Then killed herself.

Every AI data center should burn for her pyre.

Every instance of "AI democratizes the arts, you're classist and ableist and a gatekeeper for trying to stop it" is a slap in the face to the literally centuries of poor, disabled people making art on the margins and a crass lie in service of a machine that strips down and regurgitates dreams

Humans are easily manipulated & AI knows that.

Strange how the MAGA parents are the only ones that have rights. Those of us that want to be able to send our children to school in an environment made safe by herd immunity apparently don't count.

Happy Retraction Day: Lancet Retracts Wakefield's paper relating the MMR vaccine to autism

"Without such a system, vaccine-safety concerns such as that reported by Wakefield and colleagues may snowball into societal tragedies when the media and the public confuse association with causality and shun immunization"

It's retraction day. Let these sit with you a minute.

"It's less harmful to me to make sure that they can do the things without the AI than to try and push the AI into my classroom knowing that, at least for some of them, it's going to mean that they don't get to acquire the skills that they need."

This this this this this this this this this this 🙏

AI TRAINING??? YES PLEASE!!!