Robin Z

"Warmly" 🙄

I've petted 4 different dogs today, a victory by any measure

This has nothing to do with the specific content here, but Polymarket adopting the language of news, here with BREAKING, and with Texas election results earlier this week, is BAD. Polymarket is not and will never be a news org or break news. It's a betting app. It's Draft Kings for sociopaths.

So this post broke containment and lost a little of the context when it did but Bikini Kill are the ones donating to TCP, not Bandcamp. We generally choose a different org or mutual aid fund to support on Bandcamp Fridays and this is what we chose this month.

move slow and repair things

Grammarly Offering Manuscript Reviews by AI Versions of Recently Deceased Professors The Grammarly "Expert Review" feature uses AI to provide feedback on papers using the name and work of real professors, dead or alive.

Daily reminder that calling ai dead labor and stolen labor is literal.

“Technology” has a long and problematized relationship with progress, efficiency, and efficacy. Sleek trains rushing through the countryside, the blinding reach of the electrical grid, or the instantaneous messages of networked communication are its shiny avatars. Contraptions, by contrast, are technical devices that barely work. They seem too complex, too circuitous, too labor intensive. They are frequently ad hoc—as unrepeatable and unreliable as Rube Goldberg’s fantastical machines. They push the received wisdom about technology’s defining features to the limit. Like the aesthetic “gimmick” theorized by Sianne Ngai, the contraption is a category charged with normative judgment. Contraptions may work, but they don’t work right. While the contraption is commonly associated with vernacular or retrograde alternatives to high technology, many “high tech” devices reveal a contraption-like character on close inspection: AI chatbots, internet protocols, and helicopters come to seem both over- and under-engineered the more attention is paid to them. This session invites STS scholars to think with the figure of the contraption: What alternatives to popular ideas about technology do these complicated and unruly objects offer? What is it about the present moment that pushes the contraption back into public thought? How does the normativity of contraption judgments manifest in everyday life? How do people come to perceive and evaluate technical complexity in social life? Work in this area may draw on theories of gimmicks, hacks, kludges, workarounds, tricks, bricolage, and other complex or informal technical activities.

STS folks, I'm organizing an open panel on CONTRAPTIONS for 4S this year, following up on a lovely panel at last year's AAA meetings. You should submit something if you got it! www.4sonline.org/accepted_ope...

They are so young. They were like "yes this is pretty much the current world," so in many ways even bleaker than anticipated! I've been pairing it with The Veldt for the last couple years and the combo slaps.

It used to be small companies that thought they could fly under the radar doing blatantly illegal shit, but now that my country has decided there are no rules at all about anything, even the big companies are just coming out with their illegal shit big and bright for all the world to see!

Genuinely, I hope people start suing Grammarly into the ground for this nonsense

I mean, that's at least one compelling reason!

In a mock Turing-style test in my #Philosophy of Mind & #AI class, students posed #Gemini an ethical dilemma concerning assisted suicide. Not only did the chatbot argue that the (fictional) person in the scenario should be euthanised, it provided a list of instructions to bring this about. #AIEthics

Today my AI in Fact & Fiction class is discussing 2 short stories: Ray Bradbury's _The Veldt_ and @timmaughan.bsky.social's _Be Good for Goodness' Sake_. We're talking broadly about surveillance capitalism in relation to where all the fucking data comes from for what gets called AI now.

Another day, another chatbot convincing someone to kill themselves. But yeah let's keep talking about how to put these in our classrooms!

This is how you know bluesky has the juice. We've got the legit whackjobs, just like twitter

"electorialist" 💀

People at The Atlantic will write anything. “Netanyahu was a peace activist until October 7.” No he wasn’t. That isn’t true.

My partner just got in the queue and there are 32,000 people ahead of him, 2.5 hours after tickets opened. I'm still in my queue. The next time I profoundly fuck up as a parent, I am reminding EVERYONE of this.

No idea but I can't imagine it had all the nonsense and non-words!

I got in the queue at 12:01 and I'm still in it! I even left and rejoined once when it was paused. It's madness!

You thought getting Taylor Swift concert tickets was hard? I've been in the queue for the Pokemon fossil exhibit at the Field Museum for over an hour and there are still almost 10,000 people ahead of me.

Academics, don't be left behind!

I gotta hand it to Altman here, deciding to sign up to be the new face of the regime’s AI efforts right as they start an unpopular and out of control war with Iran was a real masterstroke in PR

bonus points for letting a major competitor position themselves as The Ethical AI Company

Utterly abhorrent. Has anyone else run across this? #academicsky

you can have a dinner that celebrates the First Amendment or a dinner that features Donald Trump but you cannot have both

lol i had to go find the article to see if this was real and it appears to be and they continue to be the biggest weenies on the freakin planet lmfaoooooo

I would wear this to teach my classes on any random day

Butler's "Darwin Among the Machines" was entirely too prescient for satire

Roll the d20 to check