Still jealous!
Assoc. prof. at UCLA Information Studies, ask me about supply chain tech! Labor, data, DH, obsolete software, database history, etc. www.miriamposner.com
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Still jealous!
Alas, no!
Sigh.
Billboard on Westwood, approaching UCLA.
They are!!
Exciting vending-machine discovery
Reporter’s Guide to Detecting AI-Generated Content by @henkvaness.bsky.social - Introducing: Image Whisperer - Seven Categories of AI Detection gijn.org/resource/gui...
One thing that’s come up a lot among those of us living amidst constant abductions by DHS agents is how many of us wish we spoke better Spanish. So. Maybe a way to prepare, for those of you who have like a month or two before it reaches you.
wish i knew what insanely rich people who technically “live in nyc” but are merely shuttled around to various Acceptable Locations in luxury cars with tinted windows and spend all summer at their second homes elsewhere think about the mayoral race. oh well! guess i never will :(
In fairness, that’s because a bunch of PhDs are in actuality very annoying and disagree on everything but THAT’S HOW KNOWLEDGE WORKS
Keir Starmer has really gone full fascist.
Yaaaayyy! Gotta find yourself a Cricut!
T-shirt for my dad
Done arguing with people today, I’ve got a houseful of sick kids to tend to. Feel free to go ham among yourselves.
Who’s dismissive of the tech? I teach how LLMs work from start to finish. I just don’t pretend that elementary school kids need to learn how to fabulate memes.
Beautiful!
There’s also the fact that since ChatGPT was released 3 years ago and literally no one knows what’s happening in neural nets, you almost certainly learned your special skills the same way students are perfectly capable of doing, by poking at the black box and reading Reddit threads.
+ via a shitty platform a credulous edtech guy rented from a private-equity backed startup.
Getting people in my comments saying, oh you do have to learn how to work with a chatbot effectively. Whatever brain genius skills you believe you’ve mastered, I guarantee you that students aren’t learning them by clicking “summarize” on a PDF +
One of many, if I had my way!!! 😂
I’m CRANKY, Steven!!
People love to couch it as an “equity issue,” at the same time that rich tech people are sending their precious kids to tech-free schools, because labor is way more expensive than a shitty tablet.
Anyway.
+ “Prompt engineering”? The vaporware of tech careers? It *would* be useful to know exactly how LLMs work, where bias enters the system, where these companies came from, what their social and psychological and educational effects are. But that is extremely not what these people are talking about!
One of the things that drives me up the wall is when people say students “need to learn how to use AI” to succeed in the workplace. It is EXTREMELY EASY to use a chatbot. That’s the whole point of it! You do not need training to type in the box! What are you even TALKING about?? +
How are other people supposed to come to universities’ defense when the people making decisions openly flout the institution’s own expertise?
It’s such a glaringly obvious indictment of management culture but somehow it doesn’t matter because it just happens again and again and again.
CSU has internationally renowned experts on education, digital learning, surveillance and capitalism, social welfare! But sure the CTO read a laundered press release in TechCrunch.
The fact that university administrators do shit like this (CONSTANTLY) without consulting the faculty who have passed many layers of review to be the acknowledged experts in this field just proves how very very little respect admins have for the knowledge they’re supposed to cherish.
I’m really glad LAist asked, but there is something so infuriating about seeing them trot out these idiotic responses with such self-assurance and receiving absolutely not pushback.
The answers are as feeble as you expect!
Imagine making this your priority right now. Or ever, but especially now.
Good illustration of the fact that this was never intended to be “help”; it’s punishment.
Thanks to my CA assembly member.
I just really love figuring out how technologies work and then describing them in painstaking detail and that is why this book is too long.
The City of Atlanta is opening its first municipal grocery store today. The city is spending $3.5 million in partnership with a neighborhood grocery chain in an effort to eliminate a downtown food desert. www.wsbtv.com/news/local/a...
Labor activists in coalition of local unions and labor-adjacent orgs. This was new, including the whole workforce of higher ed: faculty, clerical, health care, custodians, librarians, counselors, IT, buildings maintenance, landscapers, dining services, etc. @higheredlabor.bsky.social
What a cursed sentence (gift link) “The A.I. companies selected to oversee the program would have a strong financial incentive to deny claims. Medicare plans to pay them a share of the savings generated from rejections.”
You have to organize. I don't know what else to tell people. And organizing is not sexy and it is difficult and it matters that you be persistent. We need long-distance runners right now.
Last night, about 60 Chicago activists and organizers gathered to discuss Trump's threatened military occupation of our city. Our convo centered around a worksheet that some friends and I put together this week—a tool that can help us build and strengthen local networks of support and protection.
LOLOL so exciting
Oh noooo
Looking forward!
TY to @trashfuture.bsky.social for the heads-up. 🙏
I figure it’s a good lesson for me, should I ever become a multi-billionaire, that engineers will earnestly get to work on whatever stupid shit I can imagine, no matter how deranged. Filing it away.
I was really trying.
Never actually been skiing but I thought you needed snow but maybe not!
Excited to swim in this lake that comes to a right angle over thin air!
yo this guy is cooking
Excited to spend my ski holidays at Trojena, the luxury winter sports destination that will definitely be built 26km above the desert of Saudi Arabia where there is no water (or snow!)
Put up or shut up, Denmark.
Trump is assembling a personal army and he is going to use it. www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/thinking-a...
“As authorities round up their work force, the big players in the world of Silicon Valley-developed delivery apps have largely remained silent. Three of the biggest — Uber, Grubhub, and DoorDash — did not respond to requests for comment.” theintercept.com/2025/08/26/t...
It’s just impossible to get through to anyone about this, especially right now.
We all know perfectly well that after a temporary infusion of energy, positions will be eliminated and service will be both scant and ill-matched to the users' needs. But sure, One IT.
Hardly registers in the daily litany of horrors, but I am so bummed out about this, both for departments' sake and the IT staff's sake. A small nice thing was having divisional IT staff who understood that, e.g., English faculty have different interests and priorities than Math faculty.
Regular people rushing to drop their kids off so they can get to the site of the latest raid. Collecting names, calling abductees’ kids, driving trucks back home without their owners, packing up the grills of kidnapped vendors. It’s just us. May the people who failed to protect us burn with shame.
'The study...found that the main driver of increased red tape was university efficiency reforms. It threw doubt on the idea that increasing automation results in real efficiency, and suggested that Australian universities...had recently shifted towards stronger central executive management.' 1/2
The revolting sententiousness and naked, cowardly self-interest. May they never sleep at night.
Since this all started, I’ve seen people, just regular people, be so, so brave: showing up on street corners to face down men with guns in order to protect their neighbors. I will never ever forgive the powerful people who have watched all this happen and told us we’re saying the wrong words.
I’m such a wreck after teaching! Also before. Sometimes during!
being afraid of the subway is so fucking funny. you mean the choo-choo train???
Guys, I have a special & unusual request today. My cousin Sean is a union bus driver here in Los Angeles who was just FIRED in retaliation for saying he would not let masked ICE agents onto his bus to abduct riders. The fight is on to get his job back, you can help: actionnetwork.org/letters/send...
My local Home Depot got hit this morning and they picked up two people, including one I know, and I just can't stop thinking about what's happening to him.
U.S. Special Operations Command, recently implicated in a covert anti-vax campaign targeting Asian countries, is seeking machine learning tools to automate digital propaganda and “suppress dissenting arguments" online, according to a procurement document I obtained theintercept.com/2025/08/25/p...
They are WELL trained!!
Possibly, if we’re lucky, “and also.”
You think giving your first child a sibling will provide them with a comrade to fight alongside as the apocalypse dawns, but instead it’s World War III every 20 minutes over the generic Smartfood.
On A1 today: UCLA's Jewish faculty — some of whom are divided over Israel’s war in Gaza — have come together to sign a letter condemning Trump's pursuit of a $1 billion fine over alleged antisemitism on campus. Their message: it won't make Jews safer. www.latimes.com/california/s...
One of the things you learned at 18F and USDS is that government isn’t like a business: it has to serve everybody and not just specific market segments that are the most convenient.
Thank you to the @latimes.com for covering Jews in Defense of UC, the letter signed by more than 400 Jewish members of the UC community
Our city, not theirs.
Yeah that checks out
Tell her I love her so much because she’s my sweet little pumpkin pie muffin baby
Important update bsky.app/profile/sour...
When I snatched the phone away she was in the middle of posting about taxes boosting the price of coffee “because that’s what grown-ups talk about.”
It was at the boba place!
We were trying out a tip I read somewhere today where you’re supposed to hold your camera upside-down and zoom in to make your photo look normal and not distorted.
12yo hacked my account and posted a bad photo of me! In case you were wondering what that was.
Know-your-rights trainings, cop watching, and more taking place over the upcoming weeks. 51st.news/making-some-...
"The cuts to graduate instructor jobs seem to be part of a concerted strategy by Columbia to undermine its unions." @swcolumbia.bsky.social | @uawregion9a.bsky.social labornotes.org/2025/08/colu...
My job as a professor is not to create a serviceable worker. My job is to help foster thoughtful citizens or community members. If that sounds fanciful it’s bc corporate interests have spent decades framing how we talk about education so they don’t take the heat for immiserating labor conditions.
Found the antisemitism on campus:
The parallels are stark: entire communities were forcibly removed from the West Coast in 1942 and today our immigrant brothers and sisters face the terror of ICE and CBP raids across the country. It was a miscarriage of justice then, and it is a miscarriage of justice now.
whole departments, whole fields of knowledge, just being thrown away -- such a monstrous mistake that it boggles the mind
one last thing, hopefully not for you, but nevertheless: keep doing the work, humanists. keep writing the stuff that pisses all the right people off, keep teaching your students to imagine better futures, keep learning all kinds of nerdy stuff. we’ll need that knowledge. and that heart. 💜
It’s a heartbreaking day for all humanities faculty and students, from the University of Oregon to Virginia Tech. Absolutely horrendous.
I don’t really know what that means, but it *sounds* true.
Ooh good one
Chairy!!!
There’s also “chary,” now that I think of it.
We are outraged and deeply distressed that armed federal agents came onto our campus—making arrests on the very ground where, in 1942, Japanese American families were forced to board buses bound for concentration camps. It was a deliberate act of provocation and intimidation.
𝗛𝗔𝗣𝗣𝗘𝗡𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗡𝗢𝗪: Thousands flood the streets of D.C. chanting in unison.” The message is loud, raw, and impossible to ignore. This isn’t protest-as-usual—it’s a seismic rejection of authoritarianism in real time.
Of course I can and do defend my pedagogical choices. That goes without saying. What *is* being said, as I read it, is: you're on your own. Your institution will not support you.
What's happening in Indiana should be a warning for all of higher ed. IU sanctioned a Professor--who was previously arrested and sanctioned during a campus protest--for allegedly violating the state's "intellectual diversity" law, based on an anonymous complaint. www.indystar.com/story/news/e...
Cowards.
Rather than defend faculty against the new law's intrusions on academic freedom, IU is telling faculty that they have to be ready to defend their own pedagogical choices. Including choices about what content to cover or not cover in class. vpfaa.indiana.edu/doc/SEA-202-...
LOLOL
