Michael S. Kirkpatrick

I feel like our society is collectively saying, "Let's just give even more money to a bunch of billionaires to see what happens when we remove the bottom five layers of Bloom's taxonomy from schools for a generation." This is not going to end well...

Insert AI-generated video of Agents Scully and Mulder grappling with the Smoking Man and a monster of the week. 🤡

I really hope every single one of these DOGE bros struggle to find any employment whatsoever for the next several decades. Just utterly reprehensible, arrogant, and remorseless.

It was 85° and my kids were wearing shorts. It’s now 35° and…snowing. Ah, Virginia…

🤮

Non-journalist question: What is the purpose of highlighting "N-byline alert" in these posts? Is it a suggestion that higher N means higher credibility because more people critiqued it? Or higher N means "many hands" so less accountability? Is there some journalist rubric for the number of names?

tariffs happening for no reason and theyre making your life worse, secret police kidnapping people for no reason and making your life worse, firing thousands of government employees for no reason and making your life worse, going to war with iran for no reason and making your life worse

a man with a beard is smiling while sitting at a desk ALT: a man with a beard is smiling while sitting at a desk

Everything is bad, but at least I can focus on my dissertation chapter about how the British in 1915 didn’t have the navy to force a strait when it needed to because it spent the previous decades funding their army’s misadventures in unimportant areas that turned into expensive quagmires.

I just saw a truly horrible UX design choice: Ask for a date of birth, default to today's date, and require clicking back month-by-month (rather than allowing year selection). So middle-aged users literally have to click through 500+ months. 😡

Agreed

That’s awful. I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with that.

That’s horrible. I’m so sorry. 😞

This is my new mantra.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

This is what Republicans in VA are resorting to. Comparing the redistricting (passed in direct response to red state redistricting tactics) to Jim Crow. Ugh.

I’m so sorry to hear that. It’s awful.

that is their future. And they’re right to do so.

45-60 is a terrifying age bracket when it comes to money. You’ve accumulated a boatload of financial responsibility so that a job loss becomes crushing. And our society is so ageist that getting a new, reasonably paying job is incredibly hard.

from her job in sales at IBM. 20+ years experience and the only job she could get after a year of trying was cashier at BN. Mortgage debt, kids’ college bills, savings wiped out. Her retirement plans were gone with no hope. And that was about 25 years ago…pre LLMs. A lot of people are terrified…

This whole thread is great, but this point in particular is key. I’ll also highlight how age plays into this. In my younger years, I worked part-time at Barnes & Noble (book discounts…hooray!). One of my co-workers was a woman in her early 50s. A year and a half earlier, she had gotten laid off…

The kid with the firecracker… yikes! Throw in the Haitian deportation angle to make it that much more gut-wrenching.

These companies’ leaders are saying plenty of other stupid and inane garbage. But it’s notable what they are not explicitly saying.

This is exactly one of my key gripes with AI boosters. So many people are thrilled to advocate using AI for law, medicine, and other specialized professions. But the companies making the tools are NOT advising these things…for good reason.

I’m becoming convinced that our current trajectory leads us to a Wall-E future.

Atheists would hope for Richard Dawkins and end up with Bill Maher. 🤪

In our society, rich people get medical advice from doctors using statistical information to guide professional judgment. Poor people get dice to roll.

If the government gets to decide if you have them, they're not human rights.

If our redistricting maps hold up, I’ll be so glad to see McGuire and Cline gone.

Yup. My administration has made it clear that they’re not happy that we are not leading the AI adoption vanguard.

If I go based on my actual life timeline, the Singles soundtrack came first. But that was because I was a big dork in high school. I discovered a lot of these much later than that...

It's a twist on Kahneman & Tversky's Linda problem. Here, the more descriptive text isn't just a subset (which it is, logically, like Linda)...it's a subset that is pretty much equal to the whole. But bad faith arguments have really screwed this whole issue and hurt so many kids in the process.