UNTIL IT’S DONE, Ep. 4: Sylvia Rivera
In the 1970s, queer New Yorkers had been pushed to the margins of NYC. Our trans neighbors faced immense cruelty. But in Sylvia Rivera, they found a champion.
As we combat Trump’s politics of darkness, her legacy can light the path forward.
11.10.2025 12:33 — 👍 21205 🔁 6154 💬 400 📌 1155
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.
Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).
Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.
Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
06.09.2025 08:13 — 👍 3219 🔁 1646 💬 100 📌 280
Faculty, Rejoice: Gmail Can Now Translate “Deanspeak”
We are thrilled to announce that Google Translate has recently added “Deanspeak” to its suite of language-detection tools. In addition to offering ...
Now, instead of reading the latest email from the Subdean for Academic Affairs and Climbing Wall Management, simply click on the ADMINISTRATOR LANGUAGE DETECTED icon to reveal the message in simple English and determine the threat level to your department, program, or mental health.
29.08.2025 01:01 — 👍 61 🔁 19 💬 0 📌 5
A few points for the left
A few thoughts as the flames of fascism rise up all around, consuming people and planet.
The great @jksteinberger.bsky.social provides some excellent pointers in this essay. Please read it (and follow her): jksteinberger.medium.com/a-few-points...
17.02.2025 08:29 — 👍 341 🔁 91 💬 20 📌 10
the university's violence just becomes clearer and clearer. thank you again @amyrwong.bsky.social for such a deep and generous read of dear elia ❤️
15.12.2024 03:53 — 👍 3 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
Rethinking the Inevitability of AI
This looks like an important counterpoint to the AI enthusiasm we’re being showered with at U of Toronto
27.11.2024 00:35 — 👍 6 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
This is such a clear presentation of climate colonialism - an outstanding resource for any audience
17.11.2024 01:53 — 👍 20 🔁 5 💬 1 📌 0
