Sean Li

zeldawilliams 20m From Create Mode •• Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad. Stop believing I wanna see it or that I'll understand, I don't and I won't. If you're just trying to troll me, I've seen way worse, i'll restrict and move on. But please, if you've got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop. It's dumb, it's a waste of time and energy, and believe me, it's NOT what he'd want. To watch the legacies of real people be condensed down to 'this vaguely looks and sounds like them so that's enough, , just so other people can churn out horrible TikTok slop puppeteering them is maddening. You're not making art, you're making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings, out of the history of art and music, and then shoving them down someone else's throat hoping they'll give you a little thumbs up and like it. Gross.

And for the love of EVERYTHING, stop calling it 'the future. Al is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be reconsumed. You are taking in the Human Centipede of content, and from the very very end of the line, all while the folks at the front laugh and laugh, consume and consume.

Daughter of Robin Williams, Zelda Williams 💔

Today marks the 7th anniversary of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder.

For everyone saying political violence has no place in this country…

Remember two Democratic legislators were shot in Minnesota just this year.

And America shrugged and moved on.

NYC Mass Shooting Was Nearly Impossible to Prevent, Experts Say

Holy shit, they did it. They wrote the headline.

please!

Hammer Speech Last night, I got to stand up in front of the audience at the Locus Awards ceremony. I wound up presenting the Locus Award for Best Short Story (congratulations, Isabel J. Kim!) – but first, I deliver...

Last night, I had the privilege of delivering a keynote speech at the Locus awards. You can view the speech and read the full text here.

stone-soup.ghost.io/hammer-speech/

Some remarks on representation Guest of Honor Tings

A few nights back, as a Guest of Honor at the Locus Awards, I was asked to give a speech, and chose the occasion to think out loud about a few things that've been on my mind: tochionyebuchi.substack.com/p/some-remar...

I would buy these candles!

i wonder if a fact checker had to chase that down

Proposed budget change by agency

The Trump budget in one chart: Cut programs that help families and make America a leader of the world, pour money into kidnapping grad students and deporting toddlers.

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Remember this. Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they've already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this. The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire's authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try.

With Andor Season 2 dropping tomorrow, it's worth recalling that Season 1 contained the best bit of writing ever in Star Wars.

I mean, heck, encrypted platforms do not report a lot of CSAM but it would be a brutal mistake to assume that means there's less of it on encrypted platforms per active user.

This, a thousand percent. Much like in crime reports, an increase in reported theft doesn't mean that theft has gone up - it may mean that people report it when they previously didn't. Transparency reports are not a good proxy of the totality of bad behavior!

Paul Weiss Deal With Trump Faces Backlash From Legal Profession Paul Weiss, a law firm targeted by President Trump, reached a deal to settle a conflict. Many in the legal field are condemning the agreement.

incredible array of quotes www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/b...

Verizon and Its Cloud Vendor Must Face Lawsuit for Reporting “CSAM” That Wasn’t - Lawshe v. Verizon (Guest Blog Post) - Technology & Marketing Law Blog by guest blogger Riana Pfefferkorn Child sex abuse material, or CSAM, is a longstanding scourge on the Internet. Like the baseball diamond in “Field of Dreams,” if you build a service that allows file...

I have a guest post up today at @ericgoldman.bsky.social ’s blog about a court ruling finding (at MTD stage) no immunity for reporting age-difficult content that turned out not to be CSAM to NCMEC - a ruling any ESP that reports to the CyberTipline should read.

blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/202...

There have been people less than helpful in my journey here. I wanted to acknowledge those too, bc I know I am not unique in this experience. No thank you to the physics study assoc that made me sing songs about how women couldn't study physics without sleeping with the professor, the day I stepped into university life. No thank you to the 5th year physics student that decided to assign me a stripper name within the first minute of meeting me in the physics coffee corner in my first year. No thank you to the technician that was responsible for onboarding me on the use of the cluster in my third year who raised his eyebrows and asked me if that meant I was some sort of computer girl. No thank you to the senior researcher that sent me utterly inappropriate texts after a conference, then proceeded to apologise months later by telling me they had not been meant for me anyway so no hard feelings remain hopefully And no thank you to him for attending every conference I've been to since. No thank you to the people who told me that it was surprising that I was doing a PhD since I was a girl. No thank you to the man who mistook me for a coffee lady at a conference, and after having to correct him two times that I did not work there, responded with you should consider it. No thank you to the researcher that asked me what I was wearing underneath my outfit during a conference. No thank you to the physicist who declared to a room full of other physicists that biologists don't know how to design an experiment. No thank you to the people who have called me scary instead of strong and intimidating instead of intelligent. And finally, no thank you to the exec board of the TU Delft, whose knee-jerk reaction to being held up a mirror about the social safety at the university, was to sue the party holding up the mirror instead of looking at the problems they highlighted. ... You have made me feel like I do not belong in science & I cannot forgive you for that.

A friend included this anti-acknowledgement section on her PhD thesis. She also added the proposition: “Systematic bullying and undermining of girls and women in STEM starts early on and is the reason why they do not stay in science and related fields.”
Absurd we still need to go through this
🧪👩‍🔬

Just because I’m no longer on their board doesn’t mean I don’t still have friends there. I am told that the Trump DOJ has advised NCMEC that if they don’t scrub their website for any public-facing references to TQIA+ kids this week, they are at risk of losing their funding.

New — The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) was told this week by DOJ that they'd lose their funding if the org didn't remove any mentions of LGBTQIA+ issues from their public materials, I've learned. Staff were told they need to deadname trans kids in their reports to comply.

it's so good. it's everything destiny should be. it's the best of destiny.

IT WAS HEARTBREAKING but also heartwarming and also just amazing.

For sale, arc of universe, never bent

Trump Administration Makes Deliberate Brutality Of Criminal Justice System 8% More Explicit

www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Sprint to Remake Meta for the Trump Era After visiting President-elect Donald J. Trump in November, Mr. Zuckerberg decided to relax Meta’s speech policies. He asked a small team to carry out his goals within weeks. The repercussions are jus...

Scoops w/ @mikeisaac.bsky.social and @sheeraf.bsky.social:
-Zuck overhauled Meta’s hate speech policy in Nov after convos with Andreessen about progressives policing speech
-Kaplan led the policy rewrite, championing the removal of language protecting trans people www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/t...

no chance you won't hit it at this rate!

If you publish words or posts on the internet professionally, it is worthwhile to keep on top of what the platforms are doing and who they are aligning with. As the web becomes )(more) a series of walled gardens you should carefully select which spaces are worth your time and effort to cultivate.

Hi Adam, I take your point that the quadratic formula can be presented in a way that does not inspire understanding or affection. And it sounds like that's how it was taught to you. So let me try to make a better case for it. Here's how I discussed it in my book The Joy of x. (1/9)

your work is incredible and I feel honored to have been able to experience it across some of my favorite games

I actually think one of the really interesting things going on with the intellectual whiplash around gen AI and fair use is a proposition that seems intuitive to the lay person but unintuitive to lawyers: the creation of more information leads to less knowledge, not more

What this suggests is that pointing to poor socioeconomic performance by democratic governments and citizen anger about that performance as the primary drivers of democratic backsliding is a mistake. The onus for backsliding belongs on those leaders who gain power for a wide range of reasons, including in many cases by promising to renovate democracy, but then once in power relentlessly amass unconstrained power by overriding countervailing institutions and undercutting basic democratic norms and procedures. Backsliding in these cases is thus less about a failure of democracy to deliver than about a failure of democracy to constrain—that is, to curb the predatory political ambitions and methods of certain elected leaders.

thinking about this paper today www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/mis...