Nick Ulle

The cable, sent to all U.S. missions on December 2, orders U.S. consular officers to review resumes or LinkedIn profiles of H-1B applicants - and family members who would be traveling with them - to see if they have worked in areas that include activities such as misinformation, disinformation, content moderation, fact-checking, compliance and online safety, among others.

Holy shit.

Reuters reporting that new admin instructions on visas are if you worked at a platform in trust & safety or content moderation or on fact checking or online safety at an platform you *and your loved ones* are ineligible for H-1B visa.

www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

If universities would prioritize smaller classes and fewer bells and whistles like third-party technology contracts, a significantly bigger number of PhDs would find a position in higher education.

Unrelated to mim itself, but this is also the first preprint I've prepared in @typst.app rather than LaTeX. It was soooo much nicer. Folks; what are we doing? Why don't our journals accept manuscript sources in Typst!

"writing code to solve a problem" used to have "understanding the problem" as a prerequisite. but vibecoding allows solution-shaped objects to be produced without any of the hard-won understanding. beware of solution-shaped objects.

Google removes a variety of longstanding GMail features if you try to withdraw your default consent (!) to having all your content read and used by Google Gemini via "Smart Features." That's an obvious attempt to coerce consent for privacy violations. Legislatures must act to make this illegal.

In no particular order:
The King is Dead
A War of Whispers
Hansa Teutonica
Citadels
Inis
Castle Combo
Kingdomino
Istanbul
Radlands
Akrotiri

Honorable mentions:
Chinatown
Meadow
Skulls of Sedlec
Let's Go! to Japan
Junk Art

[Scene is a kitchen - a middle aged woman called JANET is boiling peas at the stove. A younger more colourfully dressed woman named LIZ approached her.] JANET: Ugh... LIZ: What's up? JANET: I am so bored of cooking peas! LIZ: Have you tried... AI peas? JANET: AI peas? LIZ: They're peas with AI! [Liz holds up to us a packet of peas labelled: Pea-i AI - Peas with AI]. LIZ: Al-powered peas harness the potential of your peas JANET: What LIZ [Now a voiceover as we cut to a whizzy technology diagram of peas all connected by meaningless dotted lines] Why not take your peas to the next level with Al Peas' new Al tools to power your peas? [Show a techno diagram of a pea with a label reading 'AI' pointing to a random zone in it] LIZ: Each pea has Al in a way we haven't quite worked out yet but it's fine [Show Janet and Liz now in a Matrix-style world of peas] LIZ: With Al peas you can supercharge productivity and make AI work for your peas! JANET: What LIZ: Shut up LIZ: Our game-changing Pea-Al gives you the freedom to unlock the potential of the power of the future of your peas workflow From opening the bag of peas to boiling the peas to eating the peas To spending millions on adding Al to the peas and then having to work out what that even means. JANET: Is it really necessary to- LIZ [Grabbing Janet by the collar]: THE PEAS HAVE GOT AI, JANET [Cut to an advert ending screen, with the bag of peas and the slogan: AI PEAS: Just 'Peas' for god's sake buy the AI peas. [Ends]

Every ad now

Zohran Mamdani’s Win Is Proof We Don’t Have to Settle for Newsom 2028 The Bushwick bisexuals have it! We can ask for so much more, and at COYOTE we plan to.

went into a fugue state and helped write this re: mamdani’s victory and how we don’t have to be pragmatic after all!! www.coyotemedia.org/zohran-mamda...

the entire tech industry

You may be aware that UC Berkeley disclosed personal information to the federal government on specious grounds regarding individual faculty members' supposed political activities and positions. The likelihood that other campuses did likewise is high. This is a public statement demanding more.

The official home of the Python Programming Language

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-...
🧵

Here is the proposed agreement the Trump admin sent to UCLA, which administrators fought tooth and claw to keep secret ucop.edu/communicatio...

Tilden's Beloved Steam Train is in Danger of Closing, Owner Warns Bay Area Telegraph SF Bay Area food, news, politics, culture and tech.

Rescue the Tilden steam train! Email publiccomment@ebparks.org with the subject line "Public Comment- Tilden Steam Train".
bayareatelegraph.com/2025/10/24/t...

Trellix's root access privileges could also allow administrators or the government to view anything on faculty computers at any time, without a warrant, says Kevork Abazajian, a cosmologist at UC Irvine (UCI). In an email to Science, a Trellix spokesperson wrote that the company "will not disclose any UC or other customer data unless required to do so under law or a valid government order. In such an event, we would first give the customer notice of the demand and an opportunity to object, unless legally prohibited from doing so."

The stalemate has shaken faculty confidence in the Academic Senate's power and has pushed some toward unionization. The UC system is home to a union that represents nearly 50,000 graduate students, postdocs, and academic researchers-but no tenured and tenure-track professors. "For many years, I thought we didn't need a union," says Walter Leal, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at UC Davis. "Now, I believe the only way out is if we're effectively unionized, which is a very dramatic change."

I’m glad to see Science mag cover the UC faculty pushback against Trellix, the surveillance-ware UC wants to install on all faculty computers. (You’ll understand why I’m not reassured that Trellix will only share data by “valid government order.”) www.science.org/content/arti...

funky

Not enough of you believe me right now, but "Rebuild The White House" is going to become one of the most popular slogans in American political history

Camille Pissarro played a major role in developing impressionism, and was father figure to many impressionist artists. But, like many others, he sold little during his lifetime. Here’s his View of Studio, Éragny, Pear Trees in Bloom ■ Rue Saint-Honoré, Afternoon Rain (1890s)

A horse skull attached to a tree branch with branches covered in spider webs and dew and fungi near the skull

Feel so out of practice drawing. Here is a tree mari with some fungi and spider webs

i feel like i’m going mad

“now that we have mitigated the serious mental health problems”

sam it is under two months since parents filed a lawsuit claiming your product killed their son and there is a novel form of psychosis that has been named after your product

My favorite aspect of the Columbus legend is him getting rejected by the Portuguese gets spun as them not recognizing the genius of his idea. No - he went into a roomful of expert navigators and made basic math mistakes, they thought he was a moron, and they wouldn't fund his idea on that basis.

I clearly had a lot of thoughts/feelings from reading Terry's blog post, so I wrote one of my own

It ended up being a bit of a stream-of-thought post but I think it captures some of my worries

benharrap.com/post/2025-10...

#statssky #episky #academicsky

That's when I'll be old

How long until starting a group email with "Hi chat," will be work appropriate

Or if you can just set GDrive to ignore .pixi/ directories.

Although maybe this doesn't solve the problem of keeping everything in a synced folder.

You could use an environment manager that can reproduce the exact environment from a lock file (for example, Pixi) and then just store the lock file. It'll save space, too. The downside is you'll have to wait for the packages to download when you restore the backup.

I Need AI to Write Better Lesson Plans So My Students Stop Using AI to Write Their Papers I care deeply about my students’ learning, but with all the new technologies available to help them cut corners, I worry that they’re not doing the...

"This technology that is ruining education has incredible potential to save education, if only I could figure out how to use it better to improve my students’ education."

I've always liked getting them to use their own machines (despite the cursed ones) so they can take it with them after the course.

When are you signing AB 566?