Melissa Johnson, PhD

the reason he doesn't do this is because he knows that Trump knows he picked the wrong size for him deliberately, and his acceptance of pain and humiliation keeps him in his place in the hierarchy of the team even as he dreams of someday being the boss.

Trump saying things has no probative or epistemic value whatsoever, including as to his own state of mind and intentions

We all know this, by now. And yet somehow the lesson does not sink in

Trump can just openly say “I am doing this to bring in a one party state for 50 years” and commentators will hem and haw about the intricacies of carrying off a talking filibuster

Ah! Well,,

The war that is not a war that is just getting started and might last until September is pretty much done and we’re also going to seize a strait we don’t control and maybe kill more leaders if we don’t like them

The danger to my job from AI isn't that AI can do my job, it's that my job is made even more precarious by the way AI is shaping ideas of the value of work. It can't do my job, but it can be part of convincing people (incorrectly) that my job isn't necessary.

hello darkness my old friend
daylight savings strikes again

If I had a nickel for every time Franz Ferdinand was involved in the precursor events of a world war, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird it happened twice

Just saw a local museum publicizing a presentation celebrating "women of all walks of life" in local history...with a presentation by a male historian.

Nothing says celebrating women like a lecture from a man.

in a lot of ways we're just learning over and over that people who seem to be very good at one thing may be devastatingly incompetent at everything else, and our functional concept of expertise -- appearing on screen -- cannot accommodate that

i actually think "books should be difficult and somewhat painful to read and you are Bettering Yourself through Struggle" is a worse attitude for mass literacy than "I have specific preferences and like reading a lot of fun stories" tbh

Yeah, I know what DEI is. It's like, girls who aren't into me, and like, gay stuff? And like, when people make me uncomfortable?You know. That whole bucket.

Part of Trump’s mass appeal (and of why he’s so dangerous) is that he really seems to share Joe Barstool’s worldview that there are no complex problems: Everything has a simple brute solution, which previous leaders were somehow too stupid or weak to deploy.

I think it is! A high school classroom and an hour exam is not the equivalent of three hours of college credit, and we do a disservice to students, high schools, and college when we pretend it does.

Things look grim in the markets right now, but at least the U.S. economy wasn’t already being propped up by a massive speculative AI bubble that is highly sensitive to rising energy costs.

I appreciate that AP tests are cheaper than college, but that's just an argument for making college cheaper, not for confining our dreams to the size of an AP Course.

can we at least bring back disco, guys in short shorts, moustaches, and actors with interestingly flawed faces and bodies

Feels like 1930s France

Crate&Barrel’s marketing team really didn’t think this one thru huh

What’s your late winter look?

1. haunted cottage witch
2. cozy tea goblin
3. bleary eyed night owl
4. shambling darkness

How can I possibly be expected to function under these conditions (time change of one hour)?

MeToo pushed a few big-name bad actors out of their positions, but it did very little to grapple with the systems and the cultures and the people that empowered those bad actors and allowed them to operate with impunity.

People keep talking about Trump's hat and yeah that's gauche but it's so much worse than that, the hat is one he himself sells on his website and Trump knew the pictures would be disseminated which means TRUMP IS USING THE DEATH OF AMERICAN SOLDIERS TO HAWK HIS SHITTY ASS MERCH.

"Marching through the world"

In my neck of the woods, the cost is actual daylight when you want it. In the morning before 8 am.

“Trump gets asked question, response visibly demonstrated he literally has no idea what he’s talking about, everyone just moves on without acknowledging this” is one of the most infuriating patterns of the last decade

"I think the LLM is conscious" makes a lot more sense when you realize a lot of people don't grasp the interiority of other people.

If you view other people as a series of inputs and utilities, it makes a lot of sense that you would see inert code awaiting your prompt as conscious.

¶¶ 48-50

¶¶ 54-55

Attorney says your settlement cannot be reopened. But ChatGPT says the attorney is gaslighting you. So you have ChatGPT make dozens of frivolous filings to reopen your settlement. The defense spends $300,000 fending off 44 frivolous, hallucinated motions. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

All of this stuff is fundamentally about the erasure of consent. At the core of these products is the assertion that your very existence is a tacit agreement to feed the machine.

If I can’t unionize Claude then it’s not conscious, next question