Matthew Kirschenbaum

new Mary Oliver poem just dropped

​Greetings from the Northwestern University Transportation Library, where Rachel just showed me the original!

We've renamed the DOD the Department of War. Our troops are Warfighters. No of course we're not "at war" you dumb lib

Make the Crusades history again.

Screenshot of a 3hr old post from the GW Hatchet: “BREAKING: GW sold its Virginia campus to Amazon Data Services, an Amazon subsidiary that manages the company's data centers, for $427 million on Friday. The deed, obtained by The Hatchet, authorizes ADS to develop the campus into a data or information technology center. STORY TK”

GW‘s student newspaper appears to have broken the story that the institution has sold a satellite campus to Amazon to be turned into a data center, which is just about chef’s kiss for the state of American higher education rn

X is awash in disinformation, clickbait, AI slop, and stuff that doesn’t even rise to the level of AI slop, but as best I can tell it’s also impossible to follow the actual military conduct of the war here. 🤷

The role-play aspect is helpful, but to my mind the really important bit is the analogy to quantum/possible worlds in next-word decision making.

You need Tabasco too, obvs

Role play with large language models - Nature By casting large-language-model-based dialogue-agent behaviour in terms of role play, it is possible to describe dialogue-agent behaviour such as (apparent) deception and (apparent) sel...

I’m still fond of (and teach) this article: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In non-WWIII news, the Supreme Court has denied cert in Thaler v. Perlmutter, leaving in place the DC Circuit’s decision denying copyright to wholly AI-generated works. This will leave for another day hard labor and industrial policy questions about hybrid works generated in part by AI.

god fucking dammit

News you can use

fucking brilliant work, guys. what an accomplishment, you took out the IRGCAF's gate guards. you are winner.

we're throwing away a year's production of precision-guided munitions to vaporize a bunch of broke-dick museum pieces which probably haven't seen so much as a taxi test this millennium.

A lot of the most viral takes also seem to exist simply for purposes of being viral, racking up numbers with truisms calibrated for engagement and adding nothing new or refreshing to the conversation. Rather like a language bot, in fact.

ICE Moves Minneapolis Fleet to Williamsport Detention Warehouse As ICE builds out a detention infrastructure across the mid-Atlantic, equipment from its Minneapolis operation is heading to Maryland.

Roughly 100 ICE vehicles are on their way to a warehouse in Western Maryland, as signs mount of an impending operation here.

OG

Source describes the failed Pentagon-Anthropic talks: through the end, the Pentagon wanted to use Anthropic's AI to analyze bulk data collected about Americans (Ross Andersen/The Atlantic)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

We’re surrendering?

The Department of Education has hung a massive banner honoring a racist college dropout who built a lucrative career out of targeting professors for harassment

Benjamin and I have had a solid backchannel exchange in which we’ve acknowledged we probably agree on a lot more than not, including the toxicity of certain strands of critical AI discourse.

Reader, he blocked me.

You’re not going to follow me anymore?! That goes hard bro.

You’re still misreading my point willfully or otherwise, so have a nice day and Wahoowa?

Have you been following what’s been happening in Iran in recent months/yrs? Obviously what comes after is a big unknown and not necessarily to the good, on the other hand I’ve seen enough reasonably well informed Iran watchers, some of them actually Iranian, who might agree w/ the “on balance” part.

Right, good chat, thank you.

(Helpful readers’ note: everything here from “when Iraq fell” on forward is the “actually terrible and dangerous” part of what I wrote.)

Sorry, can you repeat that, I think there was a sonic boom from my point so completely whizzing by your head.

My positions on AI are fairly dire as you know, but I’m increasingly exhausted by the spiteful little nastiness that comes out of some corners of the “critical AI” community and if one’s rejoinder to *that* is sorry for being nasty while the bullshit machines destroy the planet, well I swear to god.

Also, no one has an obligation to predictability. I hope this does not require further explanation.