T’Christan Grant

Getting aligned LLMs to help with misaligned tasks via context engineering, otherwise known as “Ender’s gaming”

New Report Calls for Faculty Control in AI Decisions Today, the AAUP released a new report, Artificial Intelligence and the Academic Professions, sharing survey findings and calling for the establishment of policies in colleges and universities that pri...

Today, the AAUP released a new report, "Artificial Intelligence & Academic Professions." The report calls for policies that prioritize economic security, faculty working & student learning conditions as AI tech accelerates.

www.aaup.org/news/new-rep...
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Just to get back to where we were as of January 2025, we will need Manhattan Projects across multiple agencies. This particular loss will produce exponentially increasing human injury and economic damage to the U.S. as the ability to investigate and to regulate falls apart.

Japan has started rice rationing in stores as another harvest gets decimated by extreme heat. The future is grim for island nations that are directly exposed to sea surface heat spike.

Derrick Van Orden on the restricted Capitol grounds on J6. He denies being there.

This is Derrick Van Orden on the restricted Capitol grounds on J6. He denies being there.

Now out in Nature: we analyzed 19,000 computer vision papers and the 20,000+ patents citing them and found that most CV papers are used in surveillance enabling CV patents. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

mmigration and Naturalization Law The principles of national constitutionalism have a relatively straightforward application to immigration and naturalization law. If the government may not destroy or replace the People, or otherwise usurp their sovereignty (or permit their sovereignty to be usurped), and if the People are an identifiable, substantive, and organic legal entity (and not merely the statistical collection of all people within the United States), then government power to permit immigration or naturalization is not plenary. National constitutionalism therefore advocates subjecting to judicial review—with the highest level of scrutiny—all attempts by the federal government to “dissolve the people and elect another’”” through immigration and naturalization policies which have the effect of altering the traditional, racial demographic balance of the United States and thereby degrading the People’s power and privileges. Accordingly, Taney’s dictum in Dred Scott that Congress “may, if they think proper, authorize the naturalization of anyone, of any color, who was born under allegiance to another Government”? is anathema to the implicit limitations, entailed by popular sovereignty, placed upon the constituted power of the nation-state and should be rejected as a matter of law. The effect of this would simply be a return to the pre-1870 status quo whereby only Whites could typically immigrate and seek naturalization.79 Non-Whites would 76 Id. at 323 (citing ROBERT BARNHART, THE BARNHART CONCISE DICTIONARY OF ETYMOLOGY: THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN ENGLISH WORDS 397 (1995)). 77 Bertolt Brecht, The Solution (1959), reprinted in BERTOLT BRECHT POEMS 1913-1956, 440 (John Willett and Ralph Manheim, eds., Methuen 1976). 7860 U.S. at 419. 79 This is a historically workable standard. See generally IAN HANEY LOPEZ, WHITE By LAW 2-7 (2006) (describing various court cases in American history aimed at determining if the petitioner was White, and explaining how “[t]hough …

Back to Damsky's paper which, again, WON AN AWARD FROM A FEDERAL JUDGE, I did want to highlight the passage in which he wrote that Justice Taney wasn't racist enough in Dred Scott, that immigration should be limited to whites only, and that we could use AI to figure out who the white people are. 3/

I'm going through UF Law book award winner Preston Damsky's twitter account, and it's worse than what the NYT reported. He thinks that Stephen Miller isn't racist enough. Because he's a Jew, and the "Jew clique ... is bringing America to ruin."

x.com/preston_terr...
x.com/preston_terr... 1/

How often do LLMs snitch? Recreating Theo’s SnitchBench with LLM A fun new benchmark just dropped! Inspired by the Claude 4 system card—which showed that Claude 4 might just rat you out to the authorities if you told it to …

New benchmark just dropped: SnitchBench by Theo Browne tests if LLMs will snitch on you to the authorities if you feed them incriminating documents and a tool that lets them send email, as seen in the Claude 4 System Card

Turns out they pretty much all will! simonwillison.net/2025/May/31/...

You know why I know Missoula, Montana? Because the Fire Sciences Lab is there, operated by the US Department of Agriculture; they study fire and wildfire and have facilities to create fire tornadoes and stuff. This is what is going away too.

research.fs.usda.gov/firelab

YouTube video by Casey Fiesler Fake data and accusations of dishonesty in research about honesty

So Harvard has officially revoked Francesca Gino’s tenure. www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news... This case was fascinating, especially re: how data fabrication was uncovered. Here was my attempt to summarize when this first came out: youtu.be/m3dDZKeCayk

It’s really unfathomable that nearly every progressive elected official, organization and journalist is still on X.

Behind Silicon Valley and the GOP’s campaign to ban state AI laws Inside the effort to de-democratize AI

The House has passed the GOP's budget bill with the 10-year ban on state AI laws intact. If the provision survives reconciliation in the Senate, the California, Colorado, or any other state that sought to pass laws governing AI would be legally banned from doing so.

This is what's behind the bill:

Republicans Try to Cram Ban on AI Regulation Into Budget Reconciliation Bill Republicans try to use the Budget Reconciliation bill to stop states from regulating AI entirely for 10 years.

Good lord just what the hell is up today. A potential ban on any regulation for AI for the next 10 years? This includes good bills like AB 412 of legislation protecting folks from Deepfakes! Wtf?! Call your congressmen and women asap to tell them to take this down!

www.404media.co/republicans-...

Ferreira de Oliveira, who is 40 years old, was still at their nearby home when she received a phone call from one of her daughters, who said ICE had pulled them over and were threatening to arrest Clara. Ferreira de Oliveira’s frightened daughter told her mother that she needed to leave the home now and come meet them on the street, because ICE was telling them that if they arrested Clara, they weren’t allowed to leave the baby in the hands of a minor. So, the feds insisted, grandma needed to rush over to take custody of the baby. Shortly after Ferreira de Oliveira arrived on the scene, ICE took her into custody. The agents suddenly no longer seemed interested in the 21-year-old daughter. ICE did not arrest her or her 17-year-old sibling.

ICE pretended to arrest a 21 yo in order to force her to call her undocumented mother to come leave the house (where she was safe from ICE arrest) to care for her baby. When the mother came, she was abducted and the daughter was suddenly of no interest to ICE.

www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

This is one of the craziest AI episodes I’ve ever seen and I literally teach a whole class in part about when these things don’t work properly. None of the syllabus spent time on “well sometimes a deranged Afrikaner gets in there”

CFPB Quietly Kills Rule to Shield Americans From Data Brokers Russell Vought, acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has canceled plans to more tightly regulate the sale of Americans’ sensitive personal data.

"These companies create extensive profiles on nearly every American, including highly sensitive data such as precise location history, political affiliations, and religious beliefs. This information is frequently resold for purposes ranging from marketing to law enforcement surveillance"

Be alarmed

Opinion | We Study Fascism, and We’re Leaving the U.S.

This should be free:
www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/o...

Opinion | Is AI Enhancing Education or Replacing It? Technology should facilitate learning, not substitute for it.

www.chronicle.com/article/is-a...

Episcopal Church refuses to resettle white Afrikaners, citing moral opposition The church said it's terminating a decades-long partnership with the federal government to help refugees arriving in the U.S., citing moral opposition to resettling white Afrikaners from South Africa.

The church said it's terminating a decades-long partnership with the federal government to help refugees arriving in the U.S., citing moral opposition to resettling white Afrikaners from South Africa.

“In the new structure, even if a revised proposal gets the green light from a division director, a new body whose membership has not been determined will take a fresh look to ensure it conforms to the agency’s new standard for making awards.”

US Customs and Border Protection Quietly Revokes Protections for Pregnant Women and Infants CBP's acting commissioner has rescinded four Biden-era policies that aimed to protect vulnerable people in the agency's custody, including mothers, infants, and the elderly.

These policies were intended to address CBP’s long-standing failures to provide adequate care for detainees who are most at risk—failures that have, in some cases, proved fatal.

Outgoing UMich Prez Santa Ono Pulls His Name from Academic Freedom Letter Over the weekend University of Michigan President Santa Ono announced that he...

NEW: Fresh off announcing his departure for the University of Florida, outgoing University of Michigan President Santa Ono has had his name removed from the American Assoc of Colleges and Universities academic freedom letter he signed barely two weeks ago. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/outgo...

Breaking: Pakistan shot down two Indian aircraft during the strikes, Lt Gen Ahmed Sharif, spokesman for the Pakistani military, tells me on the air just now. He called the Indian attack “a blatant act of war.”

Towards conversational diagnostic artificial intelligence - Nature The conversational diagnostic artificial intelligence system AMIE (Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer) has potential as a real-world tool for clinical history-taking and diagnostic dialogue, bas...

Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

FYI: I am hearing that it would be a very good idea to log into research.gov and download copies of things like award letters if you have active NSF grants.

I also recommend grabbing PDFs/screenshots of public abstracts for NSF awards in case that database goes away.

JUST IN: Sen. Van Hollen says he is going to El Salvador tomorrow to see if he can talk to Abrego Garcia.