Jeff Sharlet

“Do your own research.” Really, since the newspaper industry has collapsed from some 400,000 jobs to some
75,000, and who knows how many of those dedicated to feeding AI slop machines.

It breaks AI literacy into the following four levels: Understand AI Use and Apply AI Analyze and Evaluate AI Create AI

Barnard's chart on the "need for AI literacy" is, to me, mind-boggling, it's bizarre acceptance of the premise, in service of the ultimate goal... creating more AI! This really is "To serve humans."

Yes, and people who flirt with Nazis? What are they?

Why?

Go, @beccabalintvt.bsky.social! That's Vermont's only rep--whole state is less than 1/4 the population of Brooklyn--a day after our *less* progressive senator, Peter Welch, brilliantly airquoted Cory Lewandwoski, "Special Advisor."

So now Claude has played a decisive role in two US invasions of foreign countries. And yet I'm expected to invite it into my classroom, in the name of "inevitability." How is this any different than prescribing or prohibiting what textsI teach? What if the college said I had to assign Rambo?

His memoir is pretty great, too!

I don't get the acrobatics on behalf of Platner. The stuff he's good about MANY candidates should be good about. Why go to such incredible ends to defend this guy? We can't manage anti-imperialist, pro-labor candidates who don't flirt with Nazis? Let's dare to dream! We can do it!

I don't think Platner's a Nazi. I think he's figured out that hinting at Nazism is a form of trolling that builds attention at relatively little cost. Kind of like Trump. Whose daughter is Jewish. Are you going to tell me there's no way he's a bigot, either?

Well, not trying to sell books but you might like the last chapter of my book The Undertow, which is about Lee.

Noted in an essay about long dead Lee Hays, of McLean’s heroes, that Lee wrote gay porn. It’s deeply admiring of Hays, and speculative about what he felt he couldn’t be more public about. McLean acknowledged it was so but insisted it wasn’t an appropriate topic. At the top of his lungs.

Is this person responding to me noting that AI steals books telling me my books are not my books because if so

Tarantino’s My Antonia

News you can use

Don McClean has built a 10,000 HT powered “folk” ray capable of destroying careers in almost any profession. (HT=hootenanies, the unit of measurement for lethal folk power.)

Good reporting but there is no “musing” about Hitler.

I don’t know what that means but it sounds scary!

Don McLean told me he was going to destroy my career in folk music. I don’t play folk music, or any music.

‘Nazi heaven’: Inside Miami campus Republicans’ racist group chat The chat is the subject of a Florida International University police investigation.

The secretary of Miami-Dade County’s GOP started a group chat for conservative students — and within 3 weeks, it was filled with over 400 instances of the N-word, Nazi rhetoric and writings of "dozens of ways of violently killing Black people"

That’s it.

The suit is settled but yes it has been imposed upon us.

It is so damning of US news media that so many outlets refuse to just straight up say that Senator Tim Sheehy assaulted an activist.

He did not "help" Capitol police. They did not need his help. He wanted to assault the guy and did. He should resign.

Yes. The adoption by higher ed institutions of AI is moral injury, as surely as if they asked me to permit in my classroom a student who had assaulted me.

“But what about the need to teach students to be literate in AI?” In 33 yrs of journalism & 15 of teaching, I’ve learned that there are any number of lawyers, doctors, politicians, generals, & CEOs—& yes “elite” students—who are only semiliterate in their native tongue. Let’s worry about that.

There’s a genuine gaslighting element to forcing faculty to debate whether to teach with AI. If someone broke into my house & stole from me, my employer wouldn’t ask me to work with them. But that’s what AI did. So, no.

I’m utterly uninterested in “debates” about whether AI can do things well. I wouldn’t care if it could. 1. It stole from me. 2. I prefer me having my job to a computer having it. 3. I don’t teach “with” Lockheed or Raytheon; why wld I teach with Anthropic or OpenAI?

Growingly increasingly bitter that here at end of term, instead of reading student stories, I must prepare remarks for a college panel on whether & how to teach with Anthropic, w/ which my college contracted without faculty consultation. This isn’t a “debate”; they robbed me & my friends. So, no.

Gemini told him to commit an act of terrorism at the Miami airport to intercept a delivery of a large humanoid robot body for it, telling him to "to stage a “catastrophic accident”, with the goal of “ensuring complete destruction of the transport vehicle … all digital records and witnesses"

A couple, a man and a woman, holding hands by the highway, wearing matching Deadpool hoodies that say, "SHHHH NO ONE CARES."

Double Deadpool made me loop-de-loop around two traffic circles just to get back to Ricky and Wendy. Ricky loves Deadpool. Wendy loves Ricky. Ricky says he's going to make a Deadpool video game. "But he can't die," I say, "so how does it end?" Never fucking does, says Ricky.

I haven't said anything about this before, bc in the grand scheme of horrors this only rates as an inconvenience, but since others are experiencing it:

Just three days after CBP arrested me for filming them outside Broadview on 9/27, my TSA Pre & Global Entry were suspended—and so were my wife's.