Brian Maass

As the Atlantic’s Franklin Foer explains: Almost no other foreign-policy question has been studied harder over the past 20 years or so than the likely effect of U.S. military strikes on Iran. The many years spent pondering and preparing for a potential attack on Iran are the reason that the first days of the war were, for the most part, a bravura display of American power. Yet all of that study also pointed out the risks: spiking oil prices, the spread of violence throughout the Middle East, civilian casualties of the sort now evidenced by an apparent U.S. missile strike near an Iranian elementary school. When past presidents balked at the possibility of war with Iran, they weren’t just dodging a hard choice; they were deterred by all of the obvious reasons a conflict could perilously spiral. Nobody should be shocked that the expected is now coming to pass.

From @dandrezner.bsky.social's newsletter this AM. These are the same assholes who showed up to class never having done the reading, yet supremely confident they could bullshit their way through discussion before leaving early to do keg stands at the KA house while catcalling the women who walk by

remember when the IRS put out a a free online tax filing system where you could just do your taxes through the IRS and it was actually well made and was pretty well recieved and then the tax filing industry and Republicans killed it and now you have to use TurboTax again

I screwed up the very last part, sorry. It should say...

To read more click the essay: pressthink.org/2012/03/im-t...

Ed tech expert Neil Selwyn argues those in “industry and policy circles…hostile to the idea of expensively trained expert professional educators who have [tenure], pension rights and union protection… [welcome] AI replacement as a way of undermining the status of the professional teacher.”

@thegodpodcast.com

At my workplace, we do quick share-back presentations about conferences we attend. Every year, half my presentation is about what orgs and conferences could learn from #c4l26 by prioritizing accessibility. Also, it's volunteer run, supportive to new speakers, and not an association fundraiser.

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Flatwater Free Press - Nebraska’s first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter. Nebraska’s first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter.

@flatwaterfreep.bsky.social
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New Book! Out Now!
Slow Librarianship: Reflections and Practices

Authors describe what slow librarianship means to them in their work and roles while sharing concrete practices and ways to enact the tenets of slow librarianship in your work.

https://litwinbooks.com/books/slow-librarianship/

Reliability of LLMs as medical assistants for the general public: a randomized preregistered study - Nature Medicine In a randomized controlled study involving 1,298 participants from a general sample, performance of humans when assisted by a large language model (LLM) was sensibly inferior to that of the LLM alone ...

"In our work, we found that none of the tested language models were ready for deployment in direct patient care."

#medlibs

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ack-chually (to the wisc•edu headline writer)...he didn't "need" an expert. He could have done anything and most 🇺🇲 wouldn't have known the difference. He "WANTED" an expert, because he cared about getting things right. 🫡 to 🐰.

AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It One of the promises of AI is that it can reduce workloads so employees can focus more on higher-value and more engaging tasks. But according to new research, AI tools don’t reduce work, they consisten...

Whatever the productivity gains promised by LLMs, they result in heavier workloads—and that leads to workers experiencing “cognitive fatigue, burnout, and weakened decision-making.”

All this from the notoriously pro-worker rag [checks notes] Harvard Business Review: hbr.org/2026/02/ai-d...

As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts Medical device makers have been rushing to add AI to their products. While proponents say the new technology will revolutionize medicine, regulators are receiving a rising number of claims of patient ...

When AI was added to a tool for sinus surgery: “Cerebrospinal fluid leaked from one patient’s nose. In another… a surgeon mistakenly punctured the base of a patient’s skull. In two other cases, patients suffered strokes after a major artery was accidentally injured”

www.reuters.com/investigatio...

The devil doesn't need any more advocates, but also: do you see the dehumanization in the move you made there?

We don't "sample", we interact. Language is fundamentally social and reducing people to their "output" is the basic problematic move of the AI boosters.

Would be interesting to compare the results on more recent models - but this problem won’t go away. LLMs are always going to be extrapolating from what has already, and often, been thought, which is why they aren’t windows to the future but anchors to the past.

Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition.

Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A great thread on AI-driven epistemic contamination

Akt-chu-al-ee... knightcampus.uoregon.edu 😁 ... also ... library.uoregon.edu/knight

tl;dr: Ghost in the Machine is a rich, historically grounded, well-researched exploration of what is going on in the name of "AI". It presents a lot of information, but also gives you time to sit with it, and ultimately leaves viewers better informed.

bsky.app/profile/emil...

>>

What even is this? Again, I know I am overly-invested in journalism principles due to some outstanding professors on my path-not-taken. But i can't express how much this gets under my skin.

I hope all the AI boosters understand that they’re training their kids that only chumps do things the hard way—by working diligently and going through the discomfort and hassle of learning and acquiring skills.

And also teaching them that a 30% error rate is good enough.

Okay I think I've mapped out ICE politics as of Monday night

By my friend, the amazing cartoonist @mikedawson.bsky.social

Part of a longer story. You need to follow him.

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.

Funny as that is, it makes the most sense. Poor people get desperate and crime increases through 1933. New deal provides jobs and social support - less desperation, less crime until programs start getting reduced.

I know lots of people are saying some version of this, but I have to add: how the actual fuck are the Dems managing to fumble their opponents terrorizing citizens, shitting all over NATO, and protecting the Epstein pedos? Neoliberalism + the political consultant class needs to gooooo

Oops ..i should have checked if they were on BlueSky: @tslac.bsky.social

Texas Library Association The Texas Library Association’s mission is to embrace, unite, and amplify voices of the library community to ensure library excellence for all Texans.

Not sure if Texas State Library Commission www.tsl.texas.gov is the same, but my state's sometimes distributes kids books to smaller town libraries. They are located in Austin. Texas Library Association txla.org may also be able help. They have a school librarian group as well.