Chris Elford

i can’t stop watching this vid of dan deacon doing the anthem before the orioles game yesterday it just gets better and better and all the crowd shots are golden

Worth a watch:

Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.

No one is “replacing” teachers with AI. People are redistributing money to tech companies for AI and replacing permanent salaried workers with contingent, poorly paid ones whose labor is to patch together the system that is being broken by AI.

brad lander primary chuck schumer

Watched this way too late at night alone in a dark room with good headphones on that picked up the extremely dense soundtrack and when her face changed, I felt an electric pulse shoot through my entire body. I have never experienced that kind of fear watching a movie.

Screen grab from website Academia.edu, with message "An AI created a podcast of your paper," the label "Private to you," and a button to listen to the podcast

For academics & scholars who've uploaded papers to Academia, this message I received this morning should be of major concern. I'll delete my account, but I assume damage is done & they've already scraped everything of mine. Should stand as a warning about sharing one's work on commercial websites

Poster for our Workshop on Revenge

Presentations on July 1, 2025

Presentations on July 2, 2025

Happy to share the schedule for our upcoming workshop on #revenge in #China next week at KU Leuven. Looking forward to working with so many great scholars of Chinese #philosophy, literature, law, and history. Gonna be a great time with #伍子胥, #謝小娥, #公羊學, and much more! #sinology

Same. Back when I was studying for quals, his 史记 biography was one of the texts I tried to memorize in full. I always teach it with video of the tidal bore at Qiantang.

We're so lucky that all states are rational actors

Why do this crap? I think that I would be embarrassed. I think that after I'd gassed up cryptocurrency and NFTs in the New York Times and told New York Times readers that the Bing search engine was trying to steal me away from my wife, I would have asked my editor if maybe I could cover the Broadway beat for a while instead of continuing to smirk at the world while pouring fire ants down the front of my shorts for a living. So: Why do it? But also: How?

See the problem with genAI "translations" of literature is that they will rob us of the frisson that comes with encountering a perfect beautiful metaphor in the wild.

Anyway, please read this.

defector.com/toward-a-the...

(This corresponds to the Warring States-era “Myriad Schools” 百家 unit in the course for anyone curious. All we do is parse arguments for the 2.5 weeks leading up to the assignment.)

I used to assign an argumentative essay straight out the gate in my lit survey course. Last year I changed that first assignment to a lengthy paraphrase of an argument that turned on a close reading of a single sentence. Asking them to turn around and challenge their own paraphrase is brilliant.

This gyre is looking awfully wide

tvos app text: Are you sure you want to exit HISTORY? Ok Cancel

yes i am sure

They have made the world living hell for no reason whatsoever. People will ask why this happened in a decade and there will be tremendous effort to make it more complicated than “they were evil, stupid, and bored”

I am begging people not to look to the NYT for coverage of what's happening. The BBC, Le Monde, Ajazeera and others will have more truthful coverage.

Americans love being part of something bigger than themselves. Sports team fandom, mega churches… just nothing that will substantially change their material circumstances or risk bringing the hammer of the state power down on their heads.

Sounds like you found Gregor.

Wait, the question is which movie has “more” terrible sequels and not which movie had sequels as bad as the Jaws sequels, right? In that case, it’s gotta be Halloween. Arguably at least one sequel made sense, but not 12…

Eh, Matrix itself kinda sucks. A hundred times better in memory than in reality.

Humectant is the solid state of 18th C empiricism.

Firing a scattergun into the air to signal to my most beautiful uncle that bud light lime has been restocked at the liquor store. Two return shots mean he heard me, three means he is in distress

I admit that I didn’t have “the only government to show concern over AI is the Vatican” on my 2025 bingo card.

You can spawn as police or boss (see below) or both (management).

But you can’t raise two trillion dollars to fund the production of a database with a chat function.

Great point. The talk by the AI evangelist I mentioned in my thread shuttled wildly back and forth between two claims. 1) AI is already better than you at what you do and it WILL replace you and 2) AI is a tool that might make some of the things you do easier and faster, depending on what you do.

I need to check it out.

The reason they didn’t know is that AI evangelists are often very much invested in the *magic* of AI (meaning here LLMs and chatbots). When these technologies are presented the strategy is almost always to blow your mind, to stun you, to render you speechless. I think that’s intentional.

I took a very deep breath and asked if anyone knew what a “hallucination” was in the context of LLMs. Nobody knew the term (!!) and when I explained it to them, they seemed quite shocked and embarrassed. I was shocked too, for different reasons, but I completely understand why they didn’t know.

After the lecture, we were supposed to discuss amongst ourself. One prof admitted they didn’t want students using AI to write assignments, but were fine with students using it “as a search engine to look up information related to the class.” Everyone else nodded and said, yeah, same.