I finally lost my shit about so-called AIs, LLMs, enshittification & everything fucking evil that @officialgrammarly.bsky.social is doing. I'm fucking furious, and not just about what 1 company has done. An open letter to Grammarly & the rest of the LLM hype machine www.moryan.com/an-open-lett...
Then I guess I'm a non-serious critic because "Oops, sometimes it lies and hallucinates" seems like kind of a disqualifier. Would you hire a personal assistant who did that?
The last week has seen the worst US wartime atrocity for 70 years and the worst chemical attack on a civilian population in history.
And Congress is barely uttering a word of meaningful dissent, much less dragging the warmonger from office.
This period will stain US history forever.
I get yelled at for saying this but for many hundreds of years people went to university not to get diplomas or be employable but because immersion in the humanities was considered foundational to a good life, and school must return to its original purpose: the joy of learning.
Seeing ppl circulate projects whose NEH grants were canceled by DOGE reaffirms my argument about AI as a permission structure. Some grants were canceled w/o a “no” from the generated summary. DOGE had a mandate to slash humanities funding & AI gave them the veneer of a rationale for their actions.
Huge NYT article on the back story of those two weeks in March/April 2025 when DOGE illegally terminated hundreds of NEH grants. Gift link!!
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/a...
Picture of DOGE guy Nate Cavanaugh
Screenshot of my DOGE letter “Dr. Joseph Rezek Dear NEH Grantee, This letter provides notice that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is terminating your federal grant (Grant Application No. FEL29509824) effective April 3, 2025, in accordance with the termination clause in your Grant Agreement. Your grant no longer effectuates the agency's needs and priorities and conditions of the Grant Agreement and is subject to termination due to several reasonable causes, as outlined in 2CFR§200.340. For instance, NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President's agenda. The President's February 19, 2025 executive order mandates that the NEH eliminate all non-statutorily required activities and functions. See Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy, E.O. 14217 (Feb. 19, 2025). Your grant's immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities. Any objections or appeals to this termination will be managed in strict accordance with the President's Executive Orders,
Last year, this guy (left) from DOGE used ChatGPT to find NEH grants that were too “DEI” for Trump, and canceled them, including mine, as shown by the letter I received last April (right). Huge new NYT article on the back story link below
move slow and repair things
I've already this morning heard compliments from Riverside, CA locals on the fashion, piercings, and research of the attendees at the Rethinking Bodyminds: 1200-1700 conference.
So Riverside is pretty great!
#emotrans #HumanitiesWorks
All conference programs should be Zines!
A digital drawing of author Maia Kobabe, a white nonbinary person with short brown hair wearing a patterned blue shirt, who scowls while holding up a copy of eir book GENDER QUEER: A MEMOIR. Maia is saying: H.R. 7661 is a national book banning bill which seeks to remove any book that "involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism" from all public schools in the US. This would ban my books, and any other book with trans themes, from public schools. PLEASE call your House Reps and say: NO ON H.R. 7661!
H.R. 7661 is a national book banning bill which seeks to remove any book that "involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism" from all public schools in the US. This would ban all my books, & any other book with trans themes, from public schools. PLEASE call your House Reps & say: NO ON H.R. 7661!
okay, Ill bite.
What do you think the point of reading for and writing a literature review is? The process of reading and writing is crucial for THINKING. Your ideas are shaped by all of this, offloading it to gAI, no matter how "good" you think gAI is at it defeats the purpose entirely.
Show up to the airport by 6:15 AM, well before boarding?
Flight gets delayed by an hour!
San Francisco bookstores pull ‘Harry Potter’ books over J.K. Rowling’s anti-trans pledge
www.sfchronicle.com/...
#transgender #trans #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA
I need to frame this in my office so I can point to it daily.
I do these lectures and people ask me, “BUT WHAT ABOUT AI?!”
Which A.I.? Where? When? Under what conditions?
Telling me it’s inevitable and it changes everything is like asking me to critique policy in a Grimm’s fairytale.
As best as I can tell, the board has been running Columbia, and the board didn't so much surrender to Trump as draw up a list of demands for him to issue. The board, Trump, and the Free Press are all on the same page.
Harvard has a $52 billion endowment. It can fucking stand up to Trump.
Unsurprisingly, @tressiemcphd.bsky.social is spot-on in this analysis: “A.I.’s most revolutionary potential is helping experts apply their expertise better and faster. But for that to work, there has to be experts.”
www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/o...
I always tell students that if you plan to get through university using LLMs for all your work, you are deliberately setting yourself up for failure after university.
Why would an employer hire/retain you if you are only able to produce the same banal LLM output anyone else would?
Presidents of R1s are run by board of Trustees who are conservative as heck and don’t want to see their corporate wealth deteriorate in the companies they hold. Presidents aren’t going to buck that.
The winner of this year’s @holbergprize.bsky.social tells @helenpacker.bsky.social why she rejects the vocational focus of education and the ‘trivialisation’ of the humanities
#AcademicSky #EduSky
A Pentagon-wide advisory that went out one week ago warns against using the Signal, the messaging app, even for unclassified information.
Do I need to log off? I am not sure what you speak of, but I do not want to know.
Columbia's faculty doing what its administration did not: stand up for academic freedom. AAUP and AFT sue Trump administration for its illegal threats to cut off $400 million in funding to Columbia University.
“But if we work with him, he’ll leave us alone”
A House committee working on state budget proposals voted in favor of eliminating funding for the Division of Arts, which helps provide funding to arts organizations and advance arts and culture in the state. They are also considering a proposal to shut down the New Hampshire State Library.
Genie: No necromancy, no mind control, no extra wishes, no radical reordering of the economic system
Me: Aww man
Genie: Yeah, I know
Me: Fine. Wish 1, Section 1
Genie: wat
Me: Anyone with a net worth >$1 million must be followed by a belligerent Bostonian who calls them a fuckin idiot 2x a day
