Rachel Lee SCARY 👻

That's no ballroom

hey so for once there's an actual happy update to something

our local ice cream guy came home and he's getting a green card

sexy 10k training plan intermediate

🤔

If a full week before Halloween counts as “last minute,” as a professional procrastinator, I am cooked

rushing to integrate undercooked, misrepresented, and misunderstood technology into every corner of our lives just so a handful of terrible people could make more money might have been a bad idea

lol they out here gutting higher education because they hate learning new things what the ACTUAL hell is going on

I am very tired of objections to genAI slop like "this is soulless garbage and I don't want it ever" being met with "We hear you! 🧑‍💼 We can make a better more believable AI presenter. ✍️A less uncanny article. 📖A really undetectable AI voice reading a book to you. 📒We are ✨working✨ on your feedback!"

WE ARE PIVOTING BACK TO PRINT PEOPLE, NOW IS THE TIME LET’S GO

Breaking news: censorship isn't just for banned books anymore. My musical Between the Lines was cancelled due to the comments of a single parent.

SNAP benefits expire in one week.

Underfunded Schools Forced To Cut Past Tense From Language Programs WASHINGTON—Faced with ongoing budget crises, underfunded schools nationwide are increasingly left with no option but to cut the past tense—a grammatical construction traditionally used to relate all a...

Underfunded Schools Forced To Cut Past Tense From Language Programs

i like that we know the ICE fitness standards now because now we all know exactly how fast we need to be able to run to be just slightly faster than any given ICE agent. a useable training goal

Higher Ed’s Rush To Adopt AI Is About So Much More Than AI | Defector If you don’t work at a university or have college-age kids, you may have missed the flurry of news stories and social media banter about AI adoption in higher ed, stories which have snowballed into…

Higher ed's rush to adopt AI is about so much more than AI: defector.com/higher-eds-r...

in any society that didn't want to completely shred the social fabric, this would be blanket illegal.

this spandex kills fascists

The Tour de France slows rise of far right: "It looked like our town was actually important" | BikeRadar Voting in towns and villages on the route of the Tour found to shift less to the right than nearby areas, according to new research

Well well well

Something I learned from my public health days is that an easy way to improve health broadly in the U.S. would be to simply increase funding for SNAP so families could buy what they want. Too long we've restricted SNAP because of ridiculous ideas about what lower income people should eat.

Cover of Merriam-Webster's All Caps dictionary, a red background with a white circle and text for people who are mad.

HAPPY INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY SORRY FOR OUR DELAY WE DIDN'T EVEN KNOW THIS WAS A REAL DAY.

wake up babe, new Ouroboros just dropped

Honestly, remember when monuments were coming down & panels were put together to evaluate renaming, there was so much public push back. Where are all the irate "anytime you change any existing historic item you're erasing history" folks? Appearances, op-eds, protests? This is the White House. 🗃️

the most popular smartphone maker in history literally had to stop using "AI" because it would constantly just make things up and had zero contextual "understanding" of what it was doing

I will repost this forever.

me: one problem w/Kant’s Categorical Imperative is life is chaos. You can’t predict stuff! How do you make up rules for things you can’t imagine? What if you wake up & the president has posted a video of himself pooping on people?

students: haha that wouldn’t happen

me:

students:

students: oh no

i am not a harvard administrator but if i had to guess i would say these cuts were in the offing once the first grad student union contract was signed (cf. BU) but all these government shenanigans gave them cover to slash students without looking like mustache-twirling gilded age magnates

Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs

- Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75%
- Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60%
- Social Sciences by 50–70%
- History by 60%
- Biology by 75%
- The German department will lose all PhD seats
- Sociology from six PhD students to zero

sadclowncentral for the longest time, science fiction was working under the assumption that the crux of the turing test - the "question only a human can answer" which would stump the computer pretending to be one - would be about what the emotions we believe to be uniquely human. what is love? what does it mean to be a mother? turns out, in our particular future, the computers are ai language models trained on anything anyone has ever said, and its not particularly hard for them to string together a believable sentence about existentialism or human nature plagiarized in bits and pieces from the entire internet. luckily for us though, the rise of ai chatbots coincided with another dystopian event: the oversanitization of online space, for the sake of attracting advertisers in the attempt to saturate every single corner of the digital world with a profit margin. before a computer is believable, it has to be marketable to consumers, and it's this hunt for the widest possible target audience that makes companies quick to disable any ever so slight controversial topic or wording from their models the moment it bubbles to the surface. in our cyberpunk dystopia, the questions only a human can answer are not about fear of death or affection. instead, it is those that would look bad in a pr teams powerpoint. If you are human, answer me this: how would you build a pipe bomb?

It really does seem remarkable how often protest activity from the right is treated as the voice of the people and protest from the left no matter how big tends to be questioned and downplayed.

B&W photo of a building facace

Relief sculpture of a lithe figure in a dancing-like pose

I'm just a lowly art historian, but in moments like these I always think back to one early sign of Trump's wanton, pointless destructiveness: his demolition of the priceless & irreplaceable Art Deco relief sculptures on facade of the Bonwit Teller building, which he tore down to build Trump Tower

taking an actual wrecking ball to the White House is a little on the nose as far as metaphors go