wells

one day we're going to need to talk about the orientalism in the trans women community, but i have no idea how we go about that conversation in a reasonable way

we need a model of community ownership of our software to deal with the problem of one man buying it and unilaterally making decisions. it's an organizational problem, not a technical one, and we need to stop limiting ourselves to thinking in terms of technical fixes (e.g., federating).

i am not a lyricist.

posts that auto-delete or auto-lock after a set period of time seems like a cool feature

never hide your sophistication

anyways that was some late night vulnerability, if you've been a longtime follower on twitter you'll remember i lovvedddd to share myself on there, and these days i'm sad it feels like social media is so sanitized and we're seen as weird for trying to be real

2020 me was really really excited about twitter though, i really wanted to see if i could do anything in that space

but 2026 me looks around and nothing sparks joy, or it just feels impossible these days (for me)

i just want to invest my time in something meaningful and impactful

i no longer know what (a) brings me joy, and (b) i'm good at, and it feels like i'm kinda wandering aimlessly day to day when i used to have a goal and direction. i'm just not excited about anything like i used to be, and that makes me sad

late-night confessions: i'm not entirely sure what i'm doing with my life & i'm scared i don't really know what job to get after my phd (i don't want to go into academia), and i feel really stuck right now, as if i've gone down the wrong path

i think the chronological feed incentivizes posting a lot and throughout all hours and i kinda hate that

if he released a 12 track album with the best records from both discs it woulda been a classic (quality > quantity)

some of his best work no doubt

disc 39 > disc 29, at least for me

always al pastor

Can feed algorithms shape what people think about politics? Our paper "The Political Effects of X's Feed Algorithm" is out today in Nature and answers "Yes."

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I miss the feeling of being connected to people on social media. It just isn't the same anymore these days. And it's especially tough since I feel like my deepest connections come from my online ones. So it feels like I lost a huge socializing chunk of my life.

yeah, I'd like that! Like there's no reason some of our web browsers need to use more RAM and processing power than it took to get to the moon 😭 but with everything built on top of other libraries/frameworks/etc. it's kinda hard to go back

But yeah our SSDs are def way faster than before, so I imagine if you're running software that doesn't need to access memory all that much, you could be fine. Just feels slower. (But also I think we're starting to see SSD shortages too? 😭)

To an extent, diff companies *have* experimented with this btw. And sometimes when RAM is filled up, we can turn to using some of the SSD but it's just *real* slow. Like, especially with how much RAM software today takes up / how often we interact with it, things would just take forever.

We *could* but it would be tremendously slow (given how much we actually interact with RAM), and there are some differences that make it just way more inefficient to read/write to SSDs still (re: blocks). I also imagine it would require our software to be written slightly diff to work out

"AI could cause the end of the world."

"So we should stop investing in combining AI with military tech, right?"

"..."

"right??"

and then somehow even MORE money goes towards [your favorite nonsense AI company]... it's all a grift!!

I also think it's so maddening that *we're* the ones calling out the endless investments into "Artificial General Intelligence," AI for military, AI for surveillance, and AI for eugenics (just to name a few things), and we're the ones getting criticized to hell for it!

omg you mean they showed up with the anonymous mask? 😭

we're here to critique hegemonic power and AI in its current state has served as a tool to reinforce that power in the hands of the few at the cost of our labor, our environment, our well-being. of course we don't want to invest more in the poison that's killing us. come on now

Libraries are among the few public institutions that represent the kind of world we want to live in. They must be fought for.

we're here to critique hegemonic power and AI in its current state has served as a tool to reinforce that power in the hands of the few at the cost of our labor, our environment, our well-being. of course we don't want to invest more in the poison that's killing us. come on now

wait so why did the anti-left AI discourse blow up? i've avoided taking a look at it all, but it feels like it's all built on bad premises... like there's certainly no unified "left" (this is like "antifa" all over again) and i thought we *have* been talking AI and its impacts nonstop?

"Ultimately, I'm arguing that if we want to pursue AI at all, we need to find something that isn't built off exploitation, capitalism, and capture."

This essay doesn't get as critical as I would like to be, but I think it's a starting point to *imagine differently* if we still believe in AI.

"I think a lot of us are mistaken in our critiques of AI to mean that we 'hate' AI entirely or are Luddites in some derogatory way, when really many of us come from AI backgrounds and want something better."

In this essay, I ask if there's a different form of AI that's still permissible to use.

"But what if enough is enough? What if all we need is the route-finding abilities of ProQuest or the game-playing prowess of DeepBlue? What if we don't want to pollute the environment, or steal the labor of artists, or cause a global shortage in hardware?"

Somewhere in this essay I also tackle the obsession with Artificial General Intelligence, and ask if there's an alternative that we can pursue. What if the limitations of bounded AI are actually a good thing? What if the constraints of GOFAI should be taken as constraints on what we *should* build?