Joanna Bryson

All I can think about is Jeff Bezos saying that he slashed jobs at the Washington Post — including those of foreign correspondents in the Middle East — based on "the data," and a few weeks later a whole war breaks out in the Middle East that these laid off folks would have covered as true experts.

In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.

This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.

Hi everyone! Here’s your semi-regular Bridgy Fed status update. We’ve been busy since last time! The two big new features we launched were domain blocklists (GitHub) and responding to unbridged users (GitHub). We’ve seen good feedback and usage on both, especially responding to unbridged users. Please keep the feedback coming! We also significantly improved bridging speed, especially to Bluesky. For a couple months, it slowed down to an average delay of 3-5 minutes, with outliers that took so long that we occasionally dropped them entirely. Not good. We worked hard to optimize and managed to cut that average delay down to just 5-10 seconds, which feels way better. We shipped a bunch of smaller stuff too: * Bluesky standard.site support (still rolling out) * Improve pinned posts, notably when they were pinned before a user enabled the bridge * Fediverse: use Article `preview` field * Web UI: add buttons to unblock domain blocklists in settings * Web UI: bug fix for raw HTML appearing in some warning messages * bug fix for linking @-mentions of unbridged fediverse users * bug fix for Webfinger XRD output * Misc reliability improvements to our ATProto firehose server and client * Unfollowed everyone from the @ap.brid.gy Bluesky bot account. Its large number of follows (65k+) had unintentionally landed it on a handful of “follows too many people” automated blocklists. As usual, feel free to ping us with feedback, questions, and bug reports, and please support us on Patreon! You can follow the _now_ label on GitHub to see what we’re currently focusing on. See you on the bridge!

New status update! Responding to unbridged users, domain blocklists, big speedups, reliability improvements, @standard.site, and more.

Seems to suggest the plan wasn’t regime change at all but different personnel. There’s a surprise.

1908: the Lancet, one of the most respected scientific journals, calls for 18 age limit on reading in bed amidst a moral panic surrounding children becoming "addicted" to novels, which were "designed to keep kids hooked" and destroy their attention/mental health

As long as this penalty has built into it the understanding that everyone can make mistakes in assessing others’ potential sometimes. Not bots, but maybe an ecr that 5 years later decides they can replace themselves. I wouldn’t want to add to the penalties of taking risks on interesting people.

A problem that I'd like people to consider is fake (sock puppet) authors on arXiv submitting papers to boost the citation counts of authors. ArXiv recently tightened its endorsement process, but one fake author who "gets through" can create and endorse many more accounts.

Trump's trying to find the guy who did this.

Resist ‘dangerous and socially unacceptable’ age checks for social media, scientists warn Computer scientists are campaigning against the global march toward age checks online.

Read ALL of the 6 page open letter linked in this short summary. The letter (like the article at the head of this thread) documents the complete lack of evidence in support of child bans, as well as the enormous list of harms for doing this kind of ID. www.politico.eu/article/age-...
#autocracy

relates to my #transnationalUtility idea, perhaps (haven't read yet, just noting.)

Screenshot of the "Does that use a lot of energy?" online app

Hannah Ritchie has built a fun little tool where you can compare energy usage of various products and activities.

This is super helpful imho, because it's so hard to develop intuitions even just about the scales involved here.

hannahritchie.substack.com/p/does-that-...

AI, Sacred Violence, and War—The Case of Gaza An open access book on Israel’s use of Algorithmic Intelligence (AI) and other military high tech in the torture and seizure of the Gaza Strip

Have you read this? link.springer.com/book/10.1007... (OA) It It was the only academic publication I could find talking about Lavender & Where's Daddy. It's a bit "direct" and I think maybe 6% of it goes too far, but no one has been talking about the accurate 94% and this very much matters.

I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to

Please use something like @ap.brid.gy so we can share these important posts on mastodon too?

Resist ‘dangerous and socially unacceptable’ age checks for social media, scientists warn Computer scientists are campaigning against the global march toward age checks online.

Read ALL of the 6 page open letter linked in this short summary. The letter (like the article at the head of this thread) documents the complete lack of evidence in support of child bans, as well as the enormous list of harms for doing this kind of ID. www.politico.eu/article/age-...
#autocracy

use the robe as a pillow

The Supreme Court doesn't care if you want to copyright your AI-generated art The highest court in the US declined to review a case about copyrighting artwork created with the help of AI.

Supreme Court refuses to hear case about copyright of an AI-generated artwork. The lower court decision disallowing copyright of this piece stands. The case in question is for artwork that is claimed to be 100% autonomously generated www.engadget.com/ai/the-supre... 1/2

Increased ERC funding for top global researchers moving to Europe now confirmed The European Research Council (ERC) decision to increase its support for leading researchers moving to Europe has today been formally adopted. On top of its standard grants, the ERC offers additional ...

Come to Europe, friends!
The European Research Council (ERC) has just confirmed increased ERC funding for top global researchers moving to Europe. Drop me an email if you want to know more.

erc.europa.eu/news-events/...

From what I can tell, the State Dept is behind on travel alerts for US citizens, ordered departures of non-emergency embassy personnel & other key safety moves when, you know, you go to war. Some sources say this is a result of sidelining career diplomats & not having a real policy process.

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

Trump Has Given America a Constitutional Dilemma Congress should not have to argue over whether to trigger the War Powers Resolution, and certainly not in the midst of conflict.

Good read on the War Powers Act by @radiofreetom.bsky.social

MEPs quiz Commission on privacy concerns of Meta's smart glasses | Euractiv Swedish media revealed on Friday that Meta's wearable may record users in intimate situations without their knowledge

European Parliament legislators have asked the Commission how it will respond to reports that smart glasses made by Meta are recording users in intimate situations without their knowledge or consent, according to a written question obtained by @euractiv.com www.euractiv.com/news/meps-qu...

Spain knows a lot about what's happened in Latin America.

without recommenders its easier to keep your feed rational, but still congrats

“Many of their commanders are especially delighted with how graphic this battle will be zeroing in on how bloody all of this must become in order to fulfill and be in 100% accordance with fundamentalist Christian end of the world eschatology.”

sorry on behalf of my country of birth, and thanks for your service.

best article in the issue imho

er the prominence actually makes me more embarrassed I wrote the course around it, I didn't notice when skimming somehow...

ffs flynn

The US normally suffers most casualties from “friendly” fire (cf panama, kuwait). Our allies know not to stand in front of us.