Patrick De Oliveira

Everything about Saruman, Isengard, and the fate of the Shire before its Scouring is a transparent reference to capitalist industrialisation, and you have to be a genuine idiot not to understand that.

"Europe editor of The Economist."

Richard Sennett is going to explode.

Only a fool would make such a shallow and individualist objection to the kind of circus that can make millionaires of people from the four corners of the world one moment, and scream for nationalistic triumph the next...

Some of us actually enjoy allocating time to entertainment that produces passionate responses that speak to humanity's foibles?

But yeah, guess that instead of spending time arguing about football with family and friends I could learn how to code. Surely that would make my life more meaningful?

That would make you an economist/political scientist.

Did Carnegies etc just donate moneys and get their names on building? Or did they also take an active role steering their philanthropic work like Bill (the latter from my understanding leading to some really problematic stuff, like aggressive vertical intervention that silences local voices).

Did Carnegies etc just donate moneys and get their names on building? Or did they also take an active role steering their philanthropic work like Bill (the latter from my understanding leading to some really problematic stuff, like aggressive vertical intervention that silences local voices).

Asking for realz since I'm not familiar at all with the history of philanthropy.

This is also my intuition, and I have little love for the robber barons (boy do I try to rattle the cage when I'm teaching Gilded Age/Belle Époque). That being said, are there substantial differences between these examples and something like the Gates foundation? Is that also from a bygone era?

Something Big Is Happening Something Big Is Happening Matt Shumer @mattshumer_ • Feb 10 Think back to February 2020. If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren't paying close attention. The stock market was doing great, your kids were in school, you were going to restaurants and shaking hands and planning trips. If someone told you they were

It took just one weekend for the new, self-proclaimed king of open source AI models to have its crown tarnished. Reflection 70B, a variant of Meta's Llama 3.1 open source large language model (LLM) - or wait, was it a variant of the older Llama 3? — that had been trained and released by small New York startup HyperWrite (formerly OthersideAI) and boasted impressive, leading benchmarks on third-party tests, has now been aggressively questioned as other third-party evaluators have failed to reproduce some of said performance measures.

Keep being sent this completely nonsensical hogslop. It has multiple egregious lies, which is appropriate because he’s a fraud. Back in September 2024 he falsified a bunch of benchmarks to hype up his open source model. Article is total dogshit. I should annotate it venturebeat.com/ai/reflectio...

Don't give anything an Emmy until it's as good as this.

Damn. Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to reading more about it.

Also going to go ahead an assume that the IOC has no issues with, say, the French national anthem—which as we all know is deeply apolitical.

What a great painting.

Can't make this shit up.

This is a pretty compelling theory.

Opinion | I’m the Prime Minister of Spain. This Is Why the West Needs Migrants.

The world is in a pretty dark place, so it's all the more important to celebrate initiatives that try to shine some light through the darkness. Today I'm proud to be part of this political community.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/o...

every week there's a new problem caused by trump that i thought was definitively solved in the 1880's

There are currently 58 U.S.-based "prompt engineer" jobs on LinkedIn.

Every single higher ed administrator and policy figure who claimed that they were pivoting to LLMs to prepare students for the "jobs of the future" should be forced to stare at that number for the rest of their lives.

Isn't this just the "faculty" at the "University" of Austin?

They really want to nail that higher ed coffin as tight as they can... Truly one of the great tragedies of the brief 21st century...

The people of Minnesota have executed one of the most impressive civil resistance campaigns I can remember:

- Organized a city wide general strike
- Maintained nonviolent discipline amidst violence
- Mobilized 10,000s in subzero temps to protest and watch ICE
- Flipped public opinion against ICE

Sepp Blatter suggests fans should not travel to US for World Cup The ex-Fifa boss showed his support of a Swiss lawyer who called for a boycott of the tournament due to security concerns in the US

You know shit is bad when you have Emperor Palpatine saying things have gone too far.

(Also, if there's anything that might convince me that physiognomy is real it may just be Sepp Blatter just looking like pure evil).

www.theguardian.com/football/202...

When two years of academic work vanished with a single click After turning off ChatGPT’s ‘data consent’ option, Marcel Bucher lost the work behind grant applications, teaching materials and publication drafts. Here’s what happened next.

Feeling that one German word after reading this hilarious #fail.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Action Network petition: Cancel ChatGPT Edu. Invest in Humans. In February 2025, the California State University system announced a $17 million contract with OpenAI to provide ChatGPT Edu to all faculty, staff, and students on its 22 CSU campuses as part of a larger “AI-Empowered University” initiative. This is the largest contract ever established between a university system and an artificial intelligence company. Despite the name, ChatGPT Edu is not educational technology. It is a general-purpose chatbot that is not designed, trained, or optimized for education. Beyond its privacy and security features, ChatGPT Edu is identical to the free online version of ChatGPT. ChatGPT Edu does not use reliable peer-reviewed sources to answer students' questions and is indifferent to whether its answers are correct. Experts argue that ChatGPT Edu is harmful to academic working conditions, diminishes the quality of teaching and learning, introduces new forms of discrimination, and is dangerous to students' mental health. Recent polling shows that CSU students share these concerns, with the majority of students expressing that they are worried about the negative impacts of generative AI on human creativity and the environment.

Cal State University’s deal with OpenAI — providing ChatGPT to all faculty, students, and staff — will expire in June 2026. Amid the prospect of layoffs in the CSU, we’re asking the chancellor not to renew this costly and demoralizing contract.

Link below and anyone can sign:

What are you planning to do with the 12 houses in your retirement fund?!

Behind the disturbing image of ICE snatching a half-naked, elderly Hmong American from his home DHS has claimed without evidence that they were looking for someone else when they took ChongLy Scott Thao.

ICE is a terrorist organization.

www.thehandbasket.co/p/ice-st-pau...

Honestly, my disavowal of a Whiggish view of history has little to do with historiographical debates.

It does, however, have a lot to do with the fact that for a long time I kind of assumed that many of my views would moderate as I aged, but *gestures toward everything* hasn't really allowed that.

Don't think he can mobilize the fact that he gets along with Cornell West as a credential this time around.