Andrew Goldstone

#lrt just one little note…can we maybe shed the compulsion to say "no, WE make this nation great" or "this is as bad as the SOVIET UNION"? Maybe cold war nationalism isn't our best bet rn?

"The White House is dressing up its compact as a reasonable corrective to what it views as problems in campus culture. Let no one be deceived. This proposal imposes government censorship on academia. It is anti-American, and it weakens our democracy by devaluing academic expertise.... No […]

it gives me hope that I found this answer in 10 minutes of websearching about the error rather than in the 15 minutes I spent poking around the mutt source code

like any red-blooded macOS-American, I sometimes have to sudo tlmgr --update. If you are also a r-b A. & then get errors creating tempfiles in mutt, git, &c., this is the fix:
https://codenote.net/en/posts/git-commit-permission-denied-macos-tmpdir-fix/

@soashworth.bsky.social ah, my optimal strategy is to demonstrate that I am capable of irrationally committing to my preferences regardless of cost, to prove that I can't be bought

Elected to school-wide curriculum committee, my first assignment is to review a proposed psych dept syllabus: they require the use of SPSS. Do I, as an English professor, have a moral obligation to intervene?

making a deal = agreeing that there is no more law

@bensoskin.bsky.social anything as long as it isn't a stupid section 31 plotline

Update. The American Association of Colleges & Universities (#AAC&U, @aacu) just issued a statement on #Trump's “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education”.
https://www.aacu.org/newsroom/aac-u-statement-on-the-trump-administrations-compact-for-academic-excellence-in-higher-education […]

the "Sovereign Tech Fund of the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation" appears, surprisingly, to be something fairly innocuous

@substitutedepsilon.bsky.social maybe a better order of modifiers would have been "new LLM-ified shitty HR platform"

@joncgoodwin.bsky.social be the change! Call a reporter. You live just where the NYT looks for the vox populi. You'll have to finesse any questions about your occupation, of course.

The new systems are not just doing what used to be done. They're modeling and predicting the organization's activities — while simultaneously changing them. And rather than simply seeking cheaper ways to accomplish existing tasks, the administrators see an opportunity to add new layers of bureaucratic interaction, and new dimensions of documentation and record-keeping — both because they like these rich data-webs, and because the new "AI" systems need the new data to function. As a result of my own institution's outsourcing of HR functions to a company that calls itself "the enterprise AI platform", many component organizations have had to hire new staff to manage a large increase in HR-related human labor. This is partly because (some of?) the apps involved, "AI" or not, are badly designed and executed. But (in my experience) it's mostly because the new systems insist on documenting many more facts, events, stages of processing, and numbers than were previously required.

meanwhile, Liberman of Language Log says exactly the right thing about actually-existing "AI": the truth is in your new shitty LLM-ified HR platform

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=71335

many useful ideas in here, though the ultimate appeal to "imagination" is, if you ask me, kinda…stupid
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/oct/02/critique-pure-stupidity-understanding-donald-trump-2

Is it conceivable that a real part of explaining how we got here is that millions of USians have suffered the cognitive consequences of long covid?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/health/long-covid-children.html

Google storage. A scam, right? It took like twenty years to fill up 90% but then overnight it's filled up 5% more and you NEED to buy storage or you will be cut off from your account 🤔

Web Outlook client preferences: disabling "Turn on Copilot"

Third time I've had to do this on work e-mail this year

e-mail from "Rutgers Ethics and Compliance" with the subject "Your RU Learning Mandatory Training"

"Your RU Learning Mandatory Training": absolutely perfect organizational e-mail, 10/10 no notes

@ncecire.bsky.social hub = personal fiefdom of a manager, free from accountability to any faculty or discipline, and (unlike "center") not even entailing a claim on office space

in my 1st article (for the Wallace Stevens Journal), I quoted a whole Stevens poem. The editor's glorious comment: "Well, if the Stevens estate sues us, that will make the reputation of the journal"

quote posts are good, quotability permissions are well-intentioned, but please don't make me haul out my Derrida to explain what's wrong with the idea that "you control whether you can be quoted"

Sociology in the Provost’s Office: Leading through Contraction | American Sociological Association Across the United States, higher education is contracting. Since 2010, colleges and universities have lost more than two million students. The

Not the Onion: "I helped deactivate the very program that trained me to critique systems such as the one I now help lead. This is why we need more sociologists in upper administration and leadership roles." www.asanet.org/footnotes-ar...

@mihaip going to check whether the OS X versions you emulate correctly reproduce the behavior where the whole system hangs if you use command-line unzip on a Compress'd file and then try to rm -r __MACOSX

I found the third edition of Ben Hur (1860) with the duplicate line on the free book shelf.

JSTOR listing for Joseph Buttigieg, "Aesthetics and Religion in 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," Christianity and Literature 28, no. 4 (Summer 1979). That would be Buttigieg père, late president of the International Gramsci Society, whom I do not really hold SOLELY responsible for Buttigieg fils or for neoliberalism writ large

turns out canonical literary modernism is to blame for everything after all

As a compromise, I would also accept a smaller phone (as if)

0.) unlock phone or press "snooze" on a ringing alarm; 1.) tap "change" at upper right

2.) travel to bottom of screen and hit "Alarm" toggle; 3.) travel to top of screen and tap "Done" but YOU'RE NOT DONE

4.) travel back to bottom of screen and confirm you want to "Change Next Alarm Only"; 5.) throw phone across room, go back to bed

all I want from an iOS update is some reduction in the number and complexity of gestures it takes to cancel, reschedule, or stop snoozing a recurring alarm

Eighteenth Brumaire stays relevant

Guardian homepage headline: "As Starmer's popularity tanks, what can Labour learn from Zohran Mamdani's success in New York?"

can't take the yank papers anymore, let's see if things are any better at the Graun

"Eliezer Y--" #closetab #quitbrowser #cancelsubscription #unpluginternet