Grace Paterson

See also: asking a language model math questions you would in the past have used a calculator for.

True!
But also, from our experiences with older computer systems I think it feels like these systems *should* have some preprogrammed responses about themselves, but it's very unclear if they actually do. They are both less human than they seem and less ..uh..."computery" than they seem!

Yeah it doesn't sound like any bypassing was required here.

I'm also surprised how often people think these systems are reliable informants about themselves!

The rambling nature of many responses is, I think, revelatory about how these systems don't really understand relevance/interestingness/significance etc.

(As a significantly less important point, I really hate how these systems are designed to just expound on a topic unprompted. It's like when students don't remember the answer to an exam Q and just free associate a bunch in hopes of getting partial marks.)

Um... What?! It's wild that it would include such instructions. I would have thought that "guardrails" would be in place preventing this. Did you save the outputs? Maybe worth reporting too.

sudden death | noun | extra play to break a tie in a sports contest in which the first to score or gain the lead wins

Creating an exaggerated sense of urgency is a big part of most scams.

This is so much more interesting than I had realized!

I legit assumed her name was Norwegian based on that headline 😆

Martin Shuster sdSreptoon1hm9t97235g2u5796glgh0435l6iaf05it1l232lc20cllf4g0 · So apparently on Sunday Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, said in a press conference that "we have got children hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside ... many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank. Somebody’s gonna write that children’s story about Minnesota.” Then on Monday--one day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day--the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tweeted in response that: "Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable. Despite tensions in Minneapolis, exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges." As someone who spent a year at the Museum as a fellow doing research, I feel embarrassed for the institution. First, it is very clear that Walz wasn't drawing an equivalence, he was drawing an analogy. So this kind of response reminds me of the atrocious positions that the ADL has started to carve out, and why it has become mostly a sycophantic joke, now seemingly mostly geared towards currying favor with MAGA.

Not unrelatedly, I am noticing that a lot of--oftentimes even well-intentioned--people are spending time trying to delineate exactly which historical referent best captures what's going on now, as if we have to pick only one. There is the now well-circulated meme that says: no, ICE isn't the Gestapo, it's actually American--it's slave catchers. But this is a kind of odd distinction: the Nazis were themselves influenced by the Americans (if you're curious read the excellent book by James Whitman, _Hitler's American Model_). Nazis came here and studied American legal systems and statutes ... and remarkably a group of "liberal" Nazis decided that they couldn't make German laws as *extreme* as American ones (and this "liberal" group in fact won the day; German laws weren't as extreme as many of ours). Equally, Nazi jurists and theorists like Carl Schmitt were deeply influenced by American notions of manifest destiny. So the Nazi and American contexts were already fused. The idea of foreign/domestic is already quite complex in this context. (And this is before we even speak of the many actual Nazis that existed here and the many people who materially supported Hitler and the regime). We can complicate this picture more by noting that Nazism itself, even apart from these American influences, wasn't something that sprouted up out of thin air: it, too, had a(n experimental) history. Many of its barbaric practices and aims were developed and tested on colonial and imperial victims (as I have written elsewhere: there is a direct line from Shark Island concentration camp [called frequently simply "Death Island" where the Germans committed genocide against the Herero and Nama people] to the entire Nazi camp system). Thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire drew our attention to this already in the middle of the last century.

In noting this, let me be clear that this does not erase or make less relevant the centuries of European antisemitism that fed into the Nazi project. That's the whole point: these are all related phenomena. European antisemitism influenced the way in which European colonialism and imperialism operated against indigenous populations in the Americas. Strikingly, as innovations mounted in "administering" the Americas, antisemitic policies also evolved in Europe. Administrators (oppressors) would sometimes even move from one sphere to the other and back. They were all synergistic (a brilliant examination of some of this is María Elena Martínez's _Genealogical Fictions_). (And one could, btw, also tell an important story about the development of Islamophobia in this very same orbit, since policies stumbled on in the Americas came back to oppress both Jews and Muslims in Europe). This is all to say: Walz's analogy is not at all far fetched. The history of oppression doesn't move in any kind of neat or purely linear fashion. It is oftentimes recursive, shifting, necessarily granular. Neither is it a competitive history. It is, in the words of Michael Rothberg, a *multidirectional* history. Drawing these analogies in fact *helps* us understand all the involved phenomena better. At least this is what "Never Again" has meant and means to me: it does not mean only never again for me or other Jews. And it does not mean never again only something that looks exactly like the Nazi genocide. I think also, btw, that this is what it meant for Otto Frank, who spent time *editing* his daughter's diary so that it could be available to anyone, not only to Jews.

For ultimately the Nazi genocide--any genocide--is a highly mediated phenomenon: it consists of many diffuse events, marshals an immense amount of people and institutions, relies on sometimes conflicting or contradictory cross-sections of society, and, indeed, emerges out of a process that does not neatly, especially as its happening, have a clear beginning, middle, and end, but rather arranges for itself a kind of constellation that harnesses a range of actors, perspectives, and also histories (this is one way to understand how German colonial projects or anti-communism or ableism were no less crucial to Nazism than European antisemitism). The genocidal outcomes emerge from the structural forms society adopts. And all of this without in any way eliding the special role that Jews played in the apocalyptic Nazi worldview.

Please read this extremely thoughtful & careful post on Tim Walz, Anne Frank, & the US Holocaust Memorial Museum from Martin Shuster, philosopher, Isaac Swift Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies, former Holocaust Memorial Museum Fellow, & scholar of genocide, the Holocaust, & authoritarianism:

A reminder to the news media: “conflicting accounts” is what you say BEFORE the incontrovertible video evidence appears. After that, your job is to ask why one side is lying, not to repeat the lie and pretend no one knows the truth.

Timeline: How the Shooting of Alex Jeffrey Pretti Unfolded (Gift Article) A moment-by-moment analysis of video from the scene shows that Mr. Pretti was already restrained when fatal shots were fired, which appears to contradict the federal government’s account of the event.

🎁 link www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

So.

ICE has murdered a civilian. Again.
And they are blatantly lying about it despite video documentation. Again.

This will continue until they are disbanded.

How much more clear can it get? How many more extra judicial executions does it take?

Last term I tried an experiment: I walked into my Tech and Design Ethics class, admitted that I had *no idea* what to do about ChatGPT - so I would let them figure it out.

As in: their first project was to decide and write the ChatGPT policy for the class.

Here's what happened:

This is really interesting!
I'm curious... to what extent do you think that the reason it worked so well was the features of the system vs how much students were invested in it since they created it?

Ie, if we're to simply impose the same assessment structure, do you think it would work as well?

Yes to the first, no to the second. I'm Canadian.

Opinion | In Minneapolis, I Glimpsed a Civil War

I went to Minneapolis last week. What I saw was horrifying and inspiring in equal measure. Gift link to my latest column: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/o...

This sounds very interesting and if things were different I would certainly consider applying. But at the moment going to the US for an event like this just feels far too risky.

Yeah this is one of those genuine light in the dark type things

Ditto for Visa and MasterCard (the reason numerous platforms have banned NSFW content over the years)

I say lean into the metaphor even more strongly: "feeding (on)" and "shitting (out)" data feels pretty apt to me.

And as I recall, Lister disassembled talkie because he was so annoying (then kryton found and fixed him)

The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy text based adventure game straight up lies to you in some places and you have to argue with it.

Gabapentin isn't an anxiety med specifically -- it's actually a kind of pain killer. But a side effect in cats is that it causes drowsiness, and so it is used "off label" for that a lot because it's really safe for kitties and they tolerate it well. I used it with mine when we did air travel.

theycantalk.com "goose chasing guy" two panel-comic meme. First panel shwos a goose, labeled "jews", asking "chosen for what?" Second panel shows the goose chasing a human in a puffy jacket out of the frame. The human is labeled "God" and the goose is asking "CHOSEN FOR WHAT, MOTHERFUCKER?"

thinking of this again

Yeah, it disappoints me too. Stupid autocorrect getting our hopes up.

*dock workers, lol. A duck workers strike sounds like a children's cartoon plotline.

There's an episode of Babylon 5 about a duck workers strike. It's in Season 1, I think.