Jeffrey Amos

*haven't

I've been trying to lose weight, but I can't get more than a couple pounds a month. I just don't see how I can lose 135 million pounds by the midterms!

And yeah, I have written on Substack in a while. Partly because I've been buried in work. And partly because I'm plotting a shift to Ghost (I think) because... well, you know.

I'm guessing it's time to do a version of this for publishing professionals? Maybe we should start by highlighting that none of this is inevitable? We, you know, have choices, so I'll stay back here, you know, not being on the bleeding edge of... something.

jeffreyamos.substack.com/p/what-i-wan...

Beanie Babies. Muppet Babies. Dutch Babies. Trump Babies.

Oh

We've got you 👍

I’m pretty sure we’re going this year, and I’d love to see you. If that’s any sway!

JD Vance claims that diversity weakens unions, as people end up distrusting each other and not organizing.

Let me tell you two menswear stories related to this claim. 🧵

Every new story draft I write, I begin by thinking, “Yes, this will be the one I keep at 3k or 4k words.” And inevitably, they sprawl into 7.5k to 8k drafts. I’m doomed to write shorts that no one considers short (any more! I think a 10k short story is a perfectly reasonable length, frankly).

Every paragraph gets its own little subheading now. I guess that's one way around making sure that your paragraphs flow easily into each other. Can't make a transition? Just make a subheading like its a listicle!

Thanks, Chat!

Just grading student papers on a Sunday afternoon, like you do, and lamenting that AI has made it so that more and more of these essays use copious subheadings even if the student didn't use AI to write the piece (entirely possible that they used it to make an outline, I guess.)

It’s like a Douglas Adams story. Billions of dollars spent on a machine that consumes incredible resources. Earth has blown past 4C. Fresh water is gone. But at last it’s done. The makers ask, “How do we solve climate change?” The machine whirs and responds, “You can switch to solar 100 years ago.”

I have yeeted
the LMS
my uni
has paid for
and which
you were probably
thinking
helps you teach
Forgive me
it was surveillant
so mid
and so broke

YouTube video by Lisa O'Neill Lisa O'Neill - The Wind Doesn't Blow This Far Right

“Oh, look, a new Lisa O’Neill song!” I said to myself not realizing I’d be sobbing in my car in a parking lot.

God, I feel this direct to the bottom of my desiccated soul.

this rocks. when indiana edu killed the student newspaper, Purdue stepped up, printed the forbidden issue, drove it to Bloomington and stocked the boxes.

In about three years the entire university pivot to AI curricula and schools and programs is going to be so deeply embarrassing. We will all pretend it never happened and I will be standing there, looking at people with a mirror in my eyes. This is all so embarrassing.

"US Comedians gonna say,
I, I, I....
will probably play Sun City
if they pay me enough."

I've seen some reactions from struggling artists along the lines of 'I give up' and I feel your pain—but please do not.

Most people don't want to live in a world where artists are automated away, art production is captured by AI firms. Most people hate this idea.

Organize. Build solidarity. Fight.

In the garage, you blow dust from the top of a box like Indiana Jones recovering a relic. Crack the lid. A ray of light. Angels sing. A door in the darkness reveals a vision of the self you were, squirreling away old AC adapters, FireWire cables. He nods at you like Robert Redford in that meme.

I’m also very excited to fire Xfinity.

I’m very excited.

We’re about to get fiber installed at the house, which means that soon I will have another used router and modem to add to the “box of electronics that might one day prove useful” (tm) in the garage.

Yes, Adobe. I'm going to need that very long document (the syllabus I wrote this summer) summarized for me because my feeble mind is incapable of reading and digesting twelve pages of prose.

I know there are tenured professors out there who breathed a sigh of relief when they saw that the A&M firing happened to a non-tenure-track faculty member. It’s going to come for you too, so maybe this is a good moment to do unto others etc.

A LinkedIn job ad from Mercor, attempting to hire a poet to train LLMs to understand “poetic structure, literary nuance, and emotional response.”

Two years after the poets begin training the LLMs, ChatGPT defines itself:

A DATA CENTER, THAT IS A BLIND CARAFE
AI is a kind of vessel and a pointing. Pointing is a kind of AI with an empty vessel. All this and again, iterative, repetition and a diode pointing to another diode that is a vessel.

How Are You Supposed To Get The COVID Vaccine Now? An Explainer | Defector As the muggy malaise of summer winds down, you might find yourself interested in taking advantage of one of several safe and proven vaccines to help protect you from the inevitable brumal surge of res...

We took the paywall down on this one. defector.com/how-the-fuck...

Florida Moves to End Vaccine Mandates for Schoolchildren

Gov. DeSantis vows to sign proposed bill mandating the reintroduction of smallpox. “God put these infectious diseases on the earth. It is the height of hubris for man to have eradicated them,” he said.