Stephen Francoeur

“There’s a baby!”

Guns drawn. Windows smashed. With a 1 month old in the car. (They did this as he was coming home from an immigration court appointment— which is illegal in Colorado: coloradosun.com/2025/10/01/i...)

YouTube video by Merriam-Webster LLM

Here's a large language model I can root for!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvQn...

YouTube video by Or Rent I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords

How too many react to the popular advent of text extruding tech in higher ed. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lcU...

AI startup Friend spent more than $1M on all those subway ads | TechCrunch If you’ve been on the New York subway recently, you’ve probably seen stark white ads promoting a wearable AI device called Friend.

Today in luxury surveillance.

If you're on #LinkedIn, this is the link for declining their use of your data for training their AI models:

www.linkedin.com/mypreference...

They All Signed the “Harper’s” Letter. Where Are They Now? Many of those who were loudest in denouncing cancel culture then are now curiously silent in the face of Donald Trump’s assaults on free speech.

“For the large majority [of the Harper’s Letter signatories,] Trump’s reign of terror has apparently been less objectionable than the irritating undergraduate and entry-level scolds of the 2010s.”

Something I didn't get to say yesterday:

We heard over and over during the event about "human-centered" approaches to "AI". But if refusal is not on the table (at every level: individual students and teachers right up through UNESCO) then we have in fact centered the technology, not the people.

‼️‼️

I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.

(NBC News) - President Donald Trump's pick to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics was among the crowd outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, with the White House saying he was a "bystander" who wandered over after seeing coverage on the news.

@ryanjreilly.com
www.nbcnews.com/politics/jus...

Trump admin "disappeared" a gay stylist for propaganda. He hasn't been heard from since Asylum-seeker Andry José Hernández Romero hasn't been heard from in 4 months despite never being accused of a crime.

I wrote about the disappearance of Andry José Hernández Romero, who hasn’t been seen or heard from in more than four months. www.salon.com/2025/07/16/t...

Quote tweeting w alt text because we need to properly communicate emergency messages

National Weather Service flash flood warning for all 5 boroughs of NYC. Spread the word and stay safe!

library.unc.edu/news/library...

h/t @johnhubbard.bsky.social on Library Link of the Day

I just left the Everglades Immigrant Interment Camp. No, I’m not using their ridiculous name. It was a very tough to witness humans in those cages. Every Floridian should be ashamed that our taxpayer money is being used for this.

Domestic terrorists…

Ugh, so sorry to hear about your experience there.

Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn't want you to know the name of her opponent but will try every desperate attempt to save her seat.

My name is Shawn Harris. I am a Democrat, husband, father, Retired Brigadier General, farmer, and I'm running against MTG. Can you spread the word?

Law enforcement officers should never cover their faces when making arrests or conceal their identities (unless they are working undercover). They work for us. We have a right to know who they are. These face coverings are frightening & unAmerican, as though they're ashamed of what they're doing.

What's the best evidence that free speech is dying in America? That a US Attorney could do this:
archive.is/202504271714...

WeaveUX Vol 8, No 1 is now available! Start reading here: journals.publishing.umich.edu/weaveux/issu...

The Great Language Flattening Chatbots learned from human writing. Now it’s their turn to influence us.

Gift link to the Atlantic article about gen AI producing a flattening of language. www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Maybe they'll be to my audience a pleasant reassurance that the text was in fact composed by a human, not gen AI. (2/3)

An article about the way gen AI might lead to a flattening of our language made me think twice about my increasingly frequent typos I thoughtlessly insert into all manner of written communication. 1/3

Opinion | Elon Musk’s Legacy: DOGE’s Construction of a Surveillance State (Gift Article) DOGE is rapidly assembling a sprawling monitoring system, the foundation of many authoritarian regimes.

Elon Musk may or may not fulfill his promise to step back from DOGE.

But his legacy is already clear: He is assembling a sprawling domestic surveillance system — the likes of which we have never seen in the United States.

My latest for NYT Opinion (gift link): www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/o...

And it’s not the only journal getting this inquiry.

Higher Ed, funding agencies, libraries, scholarly journals- even Wikipedia for heaven’s sake. Targeting the entire infrastructure of knowledge making and sharing.

I am assuming that the web address featured in the email is compromised by malware or some phishing scam.

Screenshot of email invite to contribute to a journal called "Cattle Practice."

This librarian who has published on digital reference services and also library history is calling bullshit on this invitation to contribute a paper to Cattle Practice.

The Trump regime is now using US Attorneys to intimidate academic journals by sending them letters demanding they explain how they ensure ‘viewpoint diversity.’ Journal editors should be public about this and coordinate to refuse to comply with these fascist tactics.

Don’t overthink this.
He’s asking for bribes.

The Dangerous Politics of Ed-Tech The Secretary of Education Linda McMahon will speak at the ASU+GSV Summit next month. The conference makes no mention in its blurb promoting the Secretary's appearance of what happened last week: Pre...

"Ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?" -- some thoughts on the dangerous, anti-democratic politics of ed-tech 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/the-dangerou...