Steph Brown

I think it’s pretty clear at this point that one of the main impacts of LLMs is to disrupt thinking: to make it so that far too many people never properly learn how to do it, and then to control the output so there are thoughts that people never learn how to think.

!!! This is a big deal. Between this and Lena Khan, 🤩🤩🤩

I Set A Trap To Catch Students Cheating With AI. The Result Was Deflating "I am no stranger to students trying to cut corners by copying and pasting from Wikipedia, but the introduction of generative AI has enabled them to cheat in startling new ways."

Keep thinking about the research showing AI is have negative impacts on students' trust in their teachers, and pieces like this really validate that distrust.

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/set-tr...

He has sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people He has plundered our— ravaged our— destroyed the lives of our— taking away our­— abolishing our most valuable— and altering fundamentally the Forms of our—

A few weeks ago Tracy K. Smith was here and read aloud her erasure poem from the Declaration of Independence
www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147468...

Seeing this graphic a a lot, so added a visual reminder about the Roberts court's role in all this (in red).

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

More recently, @bcmerchant.bsky.social's Blood in the Machine is an history of the Luddites that's also a strong argument for Ludditism, written in a way that would be extremely engaging for an audience of people who, um, don't already know what Enoch's hammer is:

bookshop.org/p/books/bloo...

Always going to be The Black Jacobins for me

re: roblox dude's interview crashout. the thing he wants to say but can't is "at scale, kids are gonna get hurt. that is the price for scale." the thing nobody wants to say out loud is "maybe scaling to a level where harm isn't manageable is bad, and scale should be contained"

The Florence Project does great work. I highly recommend them for your charitable giving this season. Especially if you’re an AZ resident and are looking for an organization to provide for this year’s Charitable Tax Credit (1:1 tax reduction up to $495/$987 for those filing single/joint this year).

"challenge scientific orthodoxy — in this case, that vaccines save lives — and bend the health department to his will" is a lot of words when you could just say "kill people."

I Set A Trap To Catch My Students Cheating With AI. The Results Were Shocking. "Students are not just undermining their ability to learn, but to someday lead."

Since this article and its perspectives are generating a bit of buzz, I'd like to dig into what I find distasteful and, frankly, disingenous about it, particularly the ethical values it proclaims. 1/8
www.huffpost.com/entry/histor...

Certainly, I wouldn't inflict myself as a guide on any would-be Miltonist

*described

It was a direct quote of something someone said to me, in a specific situation which was descried in the same sentence.

Seeing an uptick in emails from prospective students looking to do a PhD with me because they deeply admire my work on [topic well outside my expertise that I don't write about].

Are students just asking chatgpt for "scholars in..."? And is it telling them that I (for example) am a Milton scholar?

All advice is culture specific?

Cannot imagine your advisor transgressing this fundamental rule, bc he is good people

“Never trust a professor who makes their grad students pay for their own food or coffee.” -the immortal Chris Krueger, sending me off to grad school

the reason you don’t chase reactionaries is they’ll demand you make your platform worse and then vote for someone even worse than that anyway, the best you can ask is that they stay home

the people who want to leave the cult, those you can give a cookie and a trans rights manifesto

Grades are not accountability. Grades are a quantitative mystification of the qualitative. Letter grades were developed to create the illusion of rationalization in an industrial society & then, as now, exaggerate the potential for automating assessment & other labor by educators.

Hearing @theferocity.bsky.social say "mystery is an invitation to community" on Vibe Check this morning was wisdom I needed to open the day.

Disagree with her deprecation of Arizona, tho.

#TCDXII Our twelfth conference dedicated to Caribbean digital studies. Jamaica, 2025.

And we're back! Join us December 4–5, 2025 at Northeastern University in Boston for our 12th annual The Caribbean Digital Conference. Our schedule is packed with wonders and amazing colleagues. Check it out! As always, attendance is free, whether zoom or live. Hope to see you there!

The alts to these my god 🤣

Also feel for the people on two-person committees, because imagine being stuck in a hotel room for three days with your department's resident creeper.

To be fair, I did three of these and the other two were suites w/o visible bed and the (mixed-gender) cmtes behaved very professionally. Still weird though.

Had one of these that was so bad that even though I was only a grad student I almost contacted the school to let them know how badly the cmte members behaved. Everyone's knees smashed against the giant bed made it physically awkward, but wasn't even in the top 5 worst parts of the experience.

Seeing this graph a lot, and this framing seems off. As someone who moved out of the US in my late 20s, these results read like a referendum on how bad things are in the US (extremely bad!) and less like people seriously considering & choosing the realities of being a non-citizen in a new country.

Every location has a picket line in front of it. Don’t cross the line.

Me, but hoping universities still exist when I get to be Mrs. Dalloway's age: