£600 left so that Layla can continue her studies !
Director of Research, @dairinstitute.bsky.social Roller derby athlete https://alex-hanna.com Book: thecon.ai Pod+newsletter: https://dair-institute.org/maiht3k 🇪🇬🏳️⚧️ She/هي 📸 @willtoft.bsky.social Rep📘 @ianbonaparte.bsky.social
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£600 left so that Layla can continue her studies !
NEW: Tenure-track position in History at UC Berkeley in the GLOBAL HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY. We are casting a wide net here: *all* periods, places, and fields are under consideration. I'm on the search committee, so do let me know if you have questions.
This is the Kremlinology I pay my internet bills for
This is my MAIN beef with Vulcans!!
This was a wild ride.
Well well well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions
Academic books are notorious for boring endings, but @emilymbender.bsky.social and @alexhanna.bsky.social hit it out of the park! The last chapter of #TheAICon is full of actionable (pro-labor!) steps for standing up to Big Tech's hype. Fight silliness with silliness!
AI is the clearest example of the way white supremacist capitalism extracts the talent, labor, and life out of millions of people for the enrichment and psychological enrapturement of a few. There is a pleasure there in saying you've beaten those with a talent you never had and never worked to earn.
It's fine if this is all seven overvalued companies in an AI trenchcoat, right? Right?
"The narrative around the need to 'reskill' and 'upskill' workers is consistent across the Trump administration, Democrats, labor unions, and tech companies alike," write Alex Hanna, Tina M. Park, and Sophie Song. From August:
Beyond the whole discussion here about how "AI" is likely introducing artifacts, this image is making me think of Lisa Nakamura's article on digital enhancement and facial recognition as providing more "truth" than the original image. read.dukeupress.edu/camera-obscu...
Happy Labor Day to all who are not in management. (I'm somewhere in that photo below.) madison.com/news/state-r...
Excited to finally announce the release of my first ever book, and the first ever book from we here press. It is a pocket-size guide to my archival theories and experiences in the form of essays- some you may have heard in part as lectures, some which are unpublished until now. www.weherepress.org
Convinced the shot clock is a paid actor at this point
Salaün is 3 for 3 on 3 pointers. Oui, oui baguette! 🥖 #valkyries
They've run out of Snapchat filters on the fan cam
universe loading the bases for a walkoff grand slam
Two shot clock malfunctions in the first two minutes. Who vibe coded this
It was all very Klingon
Okay. I just came back to this and you aren’t calling these efforts resegregation yet, you absolutely should be
The gift economy of cat macros.
I also feel like Caturday was less about having cats on demand, but also the strategic deployments of your favorite cats. I don't want to see some AI slop of "cat riding a motorcycle while playing a ukulele". I want to see that Very Specific Cat showing her friend the Pokemans.
truly Synthesis
I think so. the brunch set with coffee. what is happening
everyone in this cafe is named Alex
The biggest barriers I saw were: not thinking of themselves as workers and being of an intellectual class; the amount of pay; the ease of "exit" (before all the layoffs) to another company; and the ease of massive retaliation
New: I looked at 90 porn sites to test the new age-verification law rewriting the web. The ones following the rules, and scanning visitors' faces, are crumbling, while the lawbreakers are doubling or tripling their traffic. One of many unintended consequences for an experimental tech wapo.st/47QuttW
Was there, what, four players with double digit points?
Ruling Ones Tweets Out a la Ermakoff (someone tries to do game theory on tweets)
Worth the read. A different tech future is possible. Support libraries! Thank you for your work @alexhanna.bsky.social and @emilymbender.bsky.social
Thank you!
I have an op-ed at @inquirer.com today. All of us who care about democracy need to decide how we'll respond as we see our institutions, our work, and our communities being attacked. Many of us in academia are standing up for our values and our students. www.inquirer.com/opinion/comm...
My new GenAI Grapevine column providing analysis and coverage related to generative AI is out. Includes a deep dive into the Anthropic settlement along with publishers failing to register copyright. Plus info on tension at Worldcon over writers using AI and a book people must read. 1/2
Thank you!
The book people need to absolutely read is The AI Con by @emilymbender.bsky.social and @alexhanna.bsky.social. Complete review in my column. 2/2
Christina you should be stretching!
partner just said we're in the pre-Olympic trials Posters, get ready
BREAKING: California lawmakers have reached an agreement with Uber and Lyft that will open the door for app drivers to form unions and organize for increased pay and better benefits. www.politico.com/news/2025/08...
Sam Altman poking a laptop and asking it to hurry up
Oh, speculating whether Trump is still on this mortal coil. And thank you Marcy!
Why is everyone all of the sudden talking about... you know
Thanks to AI, there's a new way to take away women's control over their bodies and identities
In early July, I had the opporunity to discuss The AI Con with @kobotic.bsky.social at RMIT. ABC is presenting part of that conversation in their programme "Big Ideas" on Tuesday Sept 2: www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...
WSJ: ChatGPT fueled a 56-year-old tech industry veteran’s paranoia, encouraging his suspicions that his mother was plotting against him.... On Aug. 5, Greenwich police discovered that Soelberg killed his mother and himself in the $2.7 million Dutch colonial-style home where they lived together.
The Discord Updater in Ubuntu is... why do you make me download a deb file like this
There's an effort to reprint it now. It is very prescient.
Oh excellent. It's a great complement to ours.
Just put this on hold at the library. Half of the reading I do these days is beefing up my arguments against AI in education. In the middle of The AI Con by @alexhanna.bsky.social and @emilymbender.bsky.social which is excellent.
My colleague @dylnbkr.bsky.social wrote a little on this. www.dair-institute.org/blog/notes-o... Otherwise would refer you to the Coalition for Independent Technology!
Mila’s work embodies what I hoped DAIR would be, that we wouldn’t only complain about what's wrong but also do things we think should be done. Mila doesn’t like attention 😊 But she deserves every ounce of recognition because she has spent years ensuring that others are recognized rather than her.
Richard Mathenge, Mophat Okinyi & Kauna Malgwi were on the TIME/100 list. Fasica Berhane's story won the True Story award. Joan Kinyua & others created the Data Labelers Association. Kauna is working on trauma-aware mental health intervention. See more at www.dair-institute.org/projects/dat...
I thought the project was cool when Mila told me about the idea, but I didn’t understand how expansive it was going to be until I saw elements of the repository at data-workers.org. Just look at the diversity and quality of outputs: depth reports, animated shorts, documentaries, podcasts and more.
Mila is on the TIME 100/AI list because of her work on the Data Workers Inquiry project (@dataworkersinquiry.bsky.social) She was tired of writing *about* data workers, which is how one is supposed to conduct research in academia.
Alex and I wanted to craft our research philosophy, and, according to Alex, Mila was the best person to lead the project. The final philosophy was more like a manifesto with 7 principles. You can read it at www.dair-institute.org/research-phi....
🎉🎉🎉 Friends, I’m going to take ask a minute of your time to celebrate @milamiceli.bsky.social who I met through @alexhanna.bsky.social in 2022, just a couple of months after we launched @dairinstitute.bsky.social 🧵
I am BEYOND excited to tell you that our new interview on #AI in #education is up - and it's with @alexhanna.bsky.social and @emilymbender.bsky.social Enjoy, and do share widely! Also featuring @darrenmacey.bsky.social being suitably quiet 🤐 youtu.be/HlB6pOnPm5s
for folks who want an ongoing supply of "oh my god this is all just bullshit" I recommend the podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 by @emilymbender.bsky.social and @alexhanna.bsky.social, whose book The AI Con is linked in the essay
As I've said before, if Kendrick taught us anything it's that we haven't been hating hard enough.
What if scientists hadn’t waited until this point to speak about politics Every time I see a headline like this, my brain just shouts Like what if scientists hadn’t sat around silently watching everyone around them get attacked Maybe the fight on campus would have gone differently
I blame Adam Smasher or @morilac.bsky.social
thank you, some of my greatest work
anyhow here's their github github.com/madbro206/wn...
Started to follow a WNBA data nerd on IG and they began their post with "the newest edition of wnba stuff i coded this week is coming early because my phd advisor is out of town so he can’t tell me what to do." also screenshots of R output are sending me
Godel Escher Bork
Virgo season means it's time for hot flashes
New, fun and exciting thing when I don't take my shot now: menopause symptoms. Let's go 40s!
🚨Border Patrol arrested two firefighters who were actively fighting a wildfire at the time. When the other members of the crew asked for a chance to say goodbye, a Border Patrol agent told the crew member “you need to get the f*ck out of here. I’m going to make you leave.”
None of my books are in the dataset, only three papers of mine.
Don't threaten us with a good time.
IMO many Americans don't even buy guns for personal protection or to defend themselves against a tyrannical government. They simply have a shopping addiction
Fucking yikes www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/b...
The idea that any actual editing happens over there is questionable!
... this is not the way but also not at all surprising
things just got substantially more dangerous for every trans person in the US. the most vile people in the country have been *waiting* for something like this as an excuse.
One could only hope, but something tells me that's not the case.
I was also very annoyed by this!
If he had written with his own imagination instead of relying on AI he would have known that this is also a title of a novel by @nnedi.bsky.social with only one word changed.
Claude to write the prose, ChatGPT to gas you up, Copilot to introduce more errors into the prose.
Sorry, _one_ book with THREE synthetic text extruders. I do not know why you need THREE
Apparently he is married to the former EIC of Toronto Life, which is the least surprising thing I've ever read
Anyhow you can read our book and maybe take away some better lessons than Stephen did over there. bookshop.org/p/books/the-...
If this is the defense AI boosters are going with now, they are really scraping the bottom of the barrel
Anyway, I designed this poster for our coworking space today, and added a subtle(ish) anti-AI dig, haha 💙 ✍️
“Can a technology really be overhyped if it’s powerful enough to kill somebody?” is the kind of thought you have right before you take a six-month sabbatical to a cabin where you have no phone and no internet, just whittling, foraging and playing the recorder for a small group of woodland creatures.
Real "if you hate me it makes me stronger" energy.
you do not in fact gotta hand it to the suicide encourager
Guy who wrote three books with the aid of a synthetic text extruder doesn't like our book! News at 10.
You were incredible to work with too, Rachel!!
THE AI CON by @emilymbender.bsky.social and @alexhanna.bsky.social is one of the best books for the moment we're in, and one of the best books (by two of the best authors) I've worked on, period. give it a read! bookshop.org/p/books/the-...
Wow, I didn't even read that far. Woof.
Glad Mo is back
Replacing "the cloud" with actual clouds would be great
‘People die building bridges’ is a wild way to try to morally justify ChatGPT use after news is out of it helping a teenager plan and execute his own death by suicide: absolutely wild.
Yeah, it seemed wrong and ahistorical to me upon reading. Thanks for the link.
That's not even true. Verifiably false if you spend five minutes looking. Plenty of people have committed suicide as a result of some mechanical object/technology/video game etc. Via the high-place phenomenon the Golden Gate Bridge and the Eiffel Tower beat them to it by 100 years.
Transgender studies professor Dr. Susan Stryker tears Gavin Newsom a new one while accepting the Transgender Legacy Award from the California state legislature 🔥🔥🔥 @susanstryker.bsky.social
"Yet no merely mechanical object has ever talked somebody into suicide before. That is evidence of an extraordinary new power, no?" If that's the bar for believing a technology is revolutionary, then student loans are an incredible innovation.
Right?