Jana Thompson

My kid needs to get her leather boots repaired. I told her to ask the cobbler nearby who doesn't do leather repair, but he will know who does.

People are always a better resource than any LLM or search engine.

This is enshittification pure and simple: the aim is to make standalone chapters less portable/readable. Every handbook chapter comes with a carefully curated bibliography. Taking that away diminishes the value and integrity of scholarly work. #OUP is not adding, but substracting value here.

4/4

I might say a lot of things about the U.S., but there is something that I swear is true. A Tier 1 research university in the U.S. produces better scholars and teachers than any Ivy League school and very likely a lot of other universities in the world

If you are a teacher, your job is to do everything possible to ensure your students don't fail, especially if they are working hard. People have already dropped out of the program, and I think this class is probably one of the biggest reasons why.

Another professor, on the other hand, has been so awful, disorganized, and caused me so much stress I want to leave the program. He doesn't believe in accommodations without the letter from UBC. He announced to the class on the first day that students would fail.

That professor was very organized, and graciously gave accommodations during the ridiculous 8-week wait to meet with the Office of Accessibility at UBC.

I have very complicated feelings about my coursework this semester. Writing my course reviews will be complicated as well.

I started with my easiest and most straightforward class.

I’m fucking high, right? This is a hallucination brought on by overwork and tequila, right?

I'm working on my master's in landscape architecture at UBC. I just found your work and would be interested in meeting some time to talk about the intersections of infrastructure and landscape.

Building actual sovereign AI is something Canada should be capable of given the skills of its researchers in the field. Why rely on Open AI and be yet more beholden to a country that has threatened the sovereignty of Canada?

Because NYC is the country's largest city and metro area by far and the home of its news media.

Don't have NYC envy. And I'm not sure MARTA is even vaguely comparable to MTA.

For a country where guns are so freely available, the people who live here seem dumber than dirt when it comes to owning them. I was raised around guns and taught to treat them as deadly weapons that were not toys, but most people in the U.S. seem to treat them like a kid with a water pistol.

But really most people don't care about your visionary leadership skills that aren't that interesting anyway. It's boring. If you're going to share something, stop playing main character and think about the quality of information you're sharing with other people.

This is indeed what most LinkedIn posts really are like. I appreciate people sharing research, or the difficult experiences with a job search. I don't even mind normal corporate news stuff like partnerships or deals because that's probably useful information for someone.

Also I was pregnant around this time too. I remember transit was dangerous for me as my pregnancy progressed because I had to practically yell at people to give me a seat when I was seven months along. I just started taking a car everywhere so that I'd be safe if it was too far to walk.

The taxi system was horrible and they weren't playing by the rules. Lynn Breedlove and others started Homobiles around that time so queer people have safe transportation in that city because taxi drivers were so bad.

In California at one time it was Republicans opposed to gerrymandering, because of how bad it was in that state due to Democrats.

This shouldn't be a partisan issue. All people have a right to fair representation, even if I disagree with them.

And what on earth is up with listing Democritus? This just shows you these people have an issue with science. By listing David Hume, they just are showing they have a real issue with empiricism.

I don't approve of what Uber has become or all the unregulated gig economy mess, but the early instance of it was a welcomed thing in that time and place.

Uber was a very particular solution in SF at the time. Transit in SF could be really unreliable on some routes (I remember once walking two miles before a 22 Fillmore showed up). Taxis in SF wouldn't go to parts of the city or would harass certain passengers (Homobiles started as a result as well)

What an odd grab bag of humanity they listed there. Ayn Rand and Dawkins are about as intellectually grabbing as a puddle of vomit, while Chomsky and Foucault have contributed so heavily to the intellectual growth of humanity.

I often wonder why the bits of poetry that come into my head are usually Tennyson or Horace, when neither is even close to my list of favorite poets.

And the result is a a world of pure enshittification.

Americans balk at dense housing. Maybe if we upgraded our building standards a bit so that there was adequate soundproofing it would help, sure. But I really don't get why anyone in their right mind would want a giant house that means two hours in a car commuting every day.

"Build more houses" out here is stupid. Build more housing, yes, but building more single family housing in areas such as WA that don't need more concrete, and in CA where available land is probably a fire trap? That is a really dumb idea.

In Seattle's August 5th elections, I chose every progressive candidate and no new tax outlays.

Taxes in Seattle and Washington State always lay a greater burden on the poor and working class by design (car tabs are a notorious example). Let progressives find a way to work with finances as is.

The mythos of efficiency in that state is ridiculous. It's never been efficient. Given the proliferation of news stories and gossip remembered from childhood, efficiency is only generated from a generous infusion of cash.

The behavior of people within bureaucracies seems to differ by culture. French and Italian bureaucrats shrug and find a laugh in bureaucratic nightmares. Canadians apologize profusely. Texans apparently throw up more roadblocks and say "it's the process".

The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality Airplane seats are getting smaller and smaller, clothes are unrecognizable after the second wash, and machines now answer our calls. Quality and care for craftsmanship seem to be things of the past

While I think this article really doesn't go deep enough, it does make me wonder about why people with enough money to buy decent stuff tend to buy cheaply made junk (as I look at my Dansko clogs which I bought 15 years ago for $10 at a thrift shop): english.elpais.com/culture/2025...

I need to write an email to someone about the state of an academic program and am curious if "performative academic rigor" is a thing because it feels like it is.