@angelah.bsky.social
Comparativist who fell into the long 18th-c and decided to stick around. I’m Bartleby-the-scrivner-ing LLMs and their inevitability. Louise Dupin’s Work on Women: Selections (New Histories of Philosophy @OUP). Views expressed are mine alone.
11 months ago today, the National Endowment for the Humanities served termination notices to the vast majority of their staff - 116 people. #DOGE directed this, as evidenced by Exhibit 30 here.
Firings were determined, in part, by the % of "DEI" projects that staff were assigned to. #NEH #OTD
The far right's new politicized higher ed accreditor is illegitimate.
"Rather than protecting educational quality, the CPHE appears designed to give partisan political actors a powerful new tool to pressure universities to conform to a narrow ideological agenda"
— Todd Wolfson, AAUP President
This week on the podcast, Dr Rebecca Wilkin and Dr Angela Hunter have recently reconstructed Louise Dupin's Work on Women, which is now available in English for the first time thanks to their efforts. 1/2
Listen now: creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/...
“My Last Duchess” always slaps in class.
That is so exciting!!
Wordsworth coming in clutch the saturation of social media scrolling and genAI: “for a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion…”
❤️🎉❤️🎉❤️🎉
Adaptation is everywhere! This spring MTC is running a new series called ADAPTATION ANXIETY, where new and returning writers consider literary adaptations from the last few years. To kick off our managing editor Martha Henzy takes on the unsexy absolution of the gothic monster.
A nationwide book ban bill has been introduced in the House of Representatives. Here's what you need to know about HR7661, including who is behind it, the history behind such bills, and what you need to do to stop it.
bookriot.com/hr7661-book-...
Education — building knowledge — prepares us for the novelty of our existence. It is unique to humans in its breadth and depth.
Training is acquiring a skill to accomplish a *defined task*. It’s preparation for the known, not the unknown. Animals and AI can be trained.
They cannot be educated.
He’s talking about human creativity and thinking as if it’s equivalent to being a beast of burden. FFS!!!
This guy gets it.
People don’t just love their dogs. Many owners seem to love pets more than people. It’s a symptom of wider social problems, a philosopher argues, one that’s hurting people and pets alike.
buff.ly/C370qPw
ICE agents grabbed a 16-year-old asylum seeker--which they aren't supposed to do
They kept him from his parents -which they aren't supposed to do
They shipped him out of state, to a Christian ministry, which they aren't supposed to do.
Then they *lost* him.
www.startribune.com/how-ice-labe...
Incredible opinion. It holds that the common ICE tactic of jumping out of an unidentified rental vehicle and seizing suspected noncitizens while masked violates the Fourth Amendment because the *manner* of the seizure is incompatible with a free society governed by the rule of law.
While he was detained at Dilley for over four months, 13-year-old Gustavo Santiago said he felt as if he would “never get out.”
“I just ask that you don’t forget about us,” he told ProPublica in a video call.
Preemptive reply to the "You don't have to like AI but it's the future so you'd better get used to it": I think you'll find that I don't have to get used to anything. I will live in a unabomber-style shack in the middle of the forest before I allow an LLM to think for me
the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!
Someone let the penguins of the Heard and McDonald Islands know that their long ordeal is coming to an end.
And when ebook chapters download with zero info about the book they came from…they should carry this info like Ichabod carries his head! Even if there’s a decapitation, it doesn’t mean you want total severance!
“I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.”
- 7 year old imprisoned by ICE for 70 days in a concentration camp in Texas.
Today, after @propublica.org published this story, the camp was raided to confiscate letters from the children.
www.propublica.org/article/ice-...
When we write we do not have a fully formed idea that we then flesh out with words. The act of choosing and shaping sentences and paragraphs helps us discover the emerging idea like a sculptor finding the shape available in the stone.
Yes it’s Valentine’s Day. But it’s also the chosen birthday of Frederick Douglass who was born in 1818 on a plantation in Talbot County, Maryland. He escaped from slavery & rose to become the most eloquent and forceful voice for the abolition of slavery & for Black voting rights in the U.S.
My fondest wish for you all is that you never fall in love with a chatbot. You have an unconscious - go use it/be used by it.
That is so depressing to hear.
This times a billion.
“They were hellbent on not allowing anybody to help him until he was dead,” she said. “I was right there, and they — all of them — made the decision to deny me access to give him the best possible chance of survival.”
Reporting requires relationships and therefore it fundamentally can't be performed by LLMs. The reason why tech vultures and media CEOs talk about AI revolutionizing journalism is because they see journalism as a set of slop mills rather than newsrooms that produce new information