Melissa Johnson, PhD

"When crazy people have nuclear weapons bad things happen" coming out of Donald Trump's mouth is a Monkey's Paw ass quote if I've ever heard one.

If you are having someone else do your lit review--and I mean LLM but also research assistants, honestly--you didn't review the lit, you don't know the field, you know someone else's view of the field. That seems like a problem, like a constructing a strawman problem. With LLMs, it's worse.

A black and white still photo of a dozen or so of the main characters and others in the episode standing in a group on a sidewalk or driveway looking pensively straight ahead at something offscreen. The men are wearing casual shirts and pants, the women casual dresses. A dark colored station wagon is partially visible in the background at left.

Tonight in 1959, “The Twilight Zone” episode “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street” (season 1, episode 22)—Rod Serling’s taut and unforgettable Cold War parable depicting the societal consequences of irrational fear and paranoia of communist infiltration—was broadcast for the first time on CBS.

Dear Meta Smart Glasses Wearers: You're Being Watched, Too Not for your eyes only.

I didn't think Meta's creep glasses could get any creepier but "an army of contractors watches everything you record to render your life into AI training data" is creepmaxxing

Wake up, there's doom to be scrolled. 🐣 🪶

i don't think i can say this any more directly:

if you want to get better at something, you have to do it a lot

there are other requirements but that one is non negotiable

What this means in practice is that we've paid out tens of thousands of dollars to historians all over the world. We're really proud of that. But what we'd really prefer is that this magazine didn't need to exist. What we can do is nothing compared to the full employment our writers deserve.

The magazine started as an exercise in bluff-calling: would you really donate to pay contingent historians for their work? And you did! We'll keep publishing as long as you do.

But the vast majority of our donors? It's the same contingent historians--the lowest-paid members of our guild, folks.

Not gonna lie: much less exciting story than the headline made it sound

1898 but somehow stupider

When you click the "beautify slide" AI feature in Google Slides.

NOT A JOKE

I lived through this for BOTH GEORGE BUSHES and what we are not gonna do is make either of those into “good” conflicts because they lied more successfully jfc what are y’all DOING

Orange and white cat with an evil grin. His behavior report is 100% good.

Behaviores Report: 100% goode!

Looking at social scientists and STEM folks worrying that AI is going to decimate the employment prospects for their fields, it's comforting to know that my field was already decimated using time-worn artisanal techniques like funny math and telling us our work isn't important or valuable.

Top-two primaries are so dumb

Best way to hide information from people under 35 is to write it on paper in cursive

Got a call for help from a young librarian friend who couldn't make out an "old" inscription (1998) she found in a donated book

With all the money spent on silver bullets, we could probably have just spent it on teacher salaries and gotten further along (but then VCs wouldn't get their cut)

Chromebooks are going to close the achievement gap! Learn-to-code programs are going to close the achievement gap! AI is going to close the achievement gap! [This shiny new tech thing that is funded by VC] is going to close the achievement gap!

30 years ago Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club accurately predicted that men under late capitalism, empty consumers who had come to think of themselves as “the middle children of history” with no great wars to fight, would eventually prank and shitpost their way into fascism.

There are at least 10,000 Amcits in Qatar alone, and the US government is saying we are on our own

LLMs as contrast dye for where resources are missing.

I think that is actually the biggest problem with those systems.

It's not losing some random skill that we have made superflous, it's about taking skills that are the foundation for your agency in this world and your ability to understand it.

One of the main reasons I don't use AI is that you have to fact-check every single thing it gives you and by the time I do that, I could have just done the research myself.

Whoopee! We’re all gonna die

Mystery Solved! Turns out it is "Webinar.tv" whose disgusting and unethical business model is: register for a zoom call under a fake name and email address, record it without consent and put it on a public website with genAI summary and everyone's names and faces and then charge for access. WTAF.

This isn’t just erasure of African American history, it’s abject lies about white American history

footnote: what i'm troubled by is not the interest or curiosity wrt AI. to the contrary, the whole content betrays an utmost lack of curiosity and depth. no one seems to wanna understand what it is, whether or how institutions need it. they just wanna have a share of it. FOMO as higher ed strategy.

Its cool how this war is turning into a massive clusterfuck in record time

<stares in Fred Thompson gif>