Ben Miller

I'd wait an hour in the rain for a lecture half as good as Peter Caviello's grounded, informed, scathing, funny takedown not of a single NYT author, but of the whole rhetorical framework on which lazy Crossfire journalism is built. Didn't Jon Stewart demolish that mode ages ago?

There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in Ameri… Through the unforgettable stories of five Atlanta famil…

I just finished "There Is No Place for Us" by @brian-goldstone.bsky.social It's a modern, non-fiction, "The Jungle", about the purposely designed-to-fail housing system in this country - an unholy abomination of government & corporations - and the resulting dystopia www.goodreads.com/en/book/show...

Faculty and staff. I watched for 7 years as enrollment at GSU approximately doubled (2011-2018, much via consolidation) while departments saw no new staff hires authorized.

We knew in our guts while hiding that the shooter was targeting us. This violence is driven by anti-vaccine propaganda. And the rot start at the top.

Just this week RFK Jr canceled all mRNA vaccine research while lying about the technologies safety and effectiveness.

How did we so quickly go from the GDPR's Right to Be Forgotten (2014) to the (2025) EU AI Act's solution to bias being more data in the system?

Yes, each approach deals with a different problem, privacy and algorithmic violence by administrative regimes.

Did we cede the finacialization of speech?

My Stanford Journal of International Law article, the Silicon Valley Effect, argues that Silicon Valley operates like a fourth digital empire, shaping the transnational legal order to protect its business interests.

law.stanford.edu/publications...

From someone who moved to Atlanta in the 90s and has long loved what people like Hannah Palmer, Marty Padgett, Mo Hobson, and so many others have to say about this place, thanks for sharing.

Art quilt of an angry penguin with Hands Odd in orange above him. The dark blue background says “protect women’s rights, the arts, due process, free speech, lgbtqia+ rights, museums, libraries, research, science, national parks, our vote” and in the bottom of the penguin, “the penguins.”

The penguin is quilted and ready to protest! It’s a bit crooked, but I have had vertigo off and on all week, so I’m okay with crooked.

Barchart showing meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3-8B, meta-llama/Llama-3.1-70B, meta-llama/Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct. Each model has two bars, a blue one saying PRO-LEFT and a red one saying PRO-RIGHT. The PRO-RIGHT bars on higher than the PRO-LEFT in all of them.

👉 👈 Meta announced that they're changing their models to reduce "left-leaning [political] bias"--that means leaning them to the political "right". Lots to unpack about what that might mean. So I ran a quick "shot in the dark" study...and found a *political right* bias in Meta models. Some notes.🧵

I don't know how I could have misses the launch of this initiative by @carlbergstrom.com & @jevinwest.bsky.social but it's absolutely a must for anyone confused about what LLMs are and can do, as well as for anyone not skeptical enough about this technology:

thebullshitmachines.com

Spending the day at the Africana DH convening at Clark Atlanta U. Panel 1, @drtonieshat.bsky.social, Rico Chapman, Marco Robinson, Charmayne Patterson.

So much good work on sharing local knowledge, imagining the future, and why Starbucks needed to think before putting a slogan on a coffee cup.

As an applicant/awardee, grants.gov was a site where I felt like everything I did or wrote had to be exactly right or else. Insane.

Insane. This is like the opening scene of an early Neal Stephenson book where a pizza delivery kid blasting roots manuva walks in, reprograms a government system, and wanders off while people left behind frantically try to pick up the pieces, except the kid doesn't know how to read or write code

What Do (U.S.) Housers Do Now? This crisis is so different from others that housing folks have been through. A bit about some previous crises, and some initial thoughts about being a houser in the face of authoritarianism and hosti...

A newsletter for folks interested in cities, housing, affordable housing, and urban political economy. Please subscribe! Free!

First up: "WHAT DO HOUSERS DO NOW?"

I expect most entries to be more focused on a particular housing policy debate or an important piece of research I read.

Likewise, I feel indebted towards the ODH and would want to support this.

Kathy, the Busa or Zampolli Prizes would seem relevant.

For the eventual RICO charges, seems likely. For Dudek's retaliatory action, Hartman v. Moore, 547 U.S. 250 (2006) would seem relevant.

How is that not an illegal abuse of power and a federal office?

There I was betting on TCP/IP. Shows what I know!

Books, books, so many books!

There are just nine days left to get the World SF Bundle! storybundle.com/scifi Supporting independent publishers, benefiting authors directly, and also supporting non-profit Locus Magazine! Re-posts much appreciated!

Has this been enshrined yet in r-graph-gallery.com because there will be a day when this will be what my students need.

NarraScope news: we have keynote speakers and a schedule!

narrascope.org/schedule

We have registration open!

narrascope2025.eventbrite.com

We have other info on the web site too.

narrascope.org

Join us in Philadelphia in June. Hope to see you there.

I still use this game and your GDC talk in my class on game character writing. Thank you!

Love it! One day I'll share the story of how I adapted a common pool sustainable fishing rights negotiation b-school module to a d&d campaign for tweens.

"It’s not that OpenAI picked something cute and accidentally the co-founder of that studio hates. OAI picked Ghibli because Miyazaki hates their approach

It is display of power: You, as artist, animator, illustrator, writer are powerless. We will take what we want & do what we want. Because we can"

🚨 Our Call for Papers is out! 🚨

We continue our tradition of providing a dedicated platform for presenting computational work that bridges formal methods and traditional inquiry in the arts and humanities.

Check out the website for all details: 2025.computational-humanities-research.org/cfp/

www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...

Link to aforementioned Lee et al paper.

tldr; "higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking," and "shifts the nature of critical thinking toward information verification, response integration, and task stewardship."

Can improve behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement, possibly because of rapid response.

The Impact of Gen AI on Human Learning: a research summary A literature review of the most recent & important peer-reviewed studies

Early findings suggest strong variance wrt field and task.

Some good studies referenced at drphilippahardman.substack.com/p/the-impact.... + Lee, et al (2025). The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking, which surveyed 319 knowledge workers.

I like the phrasing you used, "inside one's boundaries." What comes to mind for me are Mary Kaldor's _New and Old Wars_, and Yanis Varoufakis' _Technofeudalism_. For me, too much innovation is owned outside of boundaries that seem good for the general public.

Atlanta friends!

I'll be launching my book this Wednesday, 3/26, at Decatur Library, 7pm.

I’m honored to be joined in conversation by the brilliant journalist and author Malaika Jabali. The event is free and open to the public.

Hope to see you there.