Literally my weekend 😂

We love to see it.

AI is profoundly unpopular. A recent NBC News poll found that among 18-34 year-olds, AI's net favorability rating is -44. *Negative 44*. Those are basically serial killer numbers. It's not much better among women 18-49. (Men over 50 and upper class are the only ones who like AI, and just barely.)

Woooooooooooooooooooooow.

This makes me very sad.
My heart goes out to all the talented students, faculty & staff who call Hampshire home.

What a loss to the valley, & higher ed.

a man in a red uniform is saying " you better believe it " Alt: Sulu in the captain’s chair, looking like a retired professor who still attends faculty assembly meetings, saying “You better believe it.”

Had a vivid dream where Lieutenant Sulu was an Emeritus Professor in the UMass department of mechanical & industrial engineering, & everyone was just so proud to have a former member of the Enterprise crew on the faculty.

They made it!!!! 🙏

A reminder that no one has worked out how to spot emotions, nor even is there a full consensus on what emotions there are.

Anyone remotely claiming to is lying.

Absolutely heartbreaking. So many mathematicians I know studied there, men AND women.

Maryam Mirzakhani studied there.

If this isn't enough to cancel/relocate from the US the International Congress of Mathematicians #ICM2026, nothing will be.

A selfie of the poster holding a wee fuzzy chick, while two cats paw at the window behind them

Eight or so adorable chicks with fuzzy little butts moving about in front of their chicken swing. Some are dozing on their feet.

Happy Sunday everyone, my chicks say hi 🐥 💜🐣

Look at those fuzzy little butts!

a man in a white shirt and tie is talking on a phone and says " me calling harvard " . Alt: Dwight Schrute from the office looking really annoyed as he listens to something or someone on the phone. The phrase “me calling Harvard” appears at the bottom.

If your faculty senate votes to arbitrarily “cap” the number of As given in credit-bearing courses, you’ve not only missed the point of education, you’re admitting that maintaining artificial elitist hierarchies & colonial structures that discourage collaboration is a higher priority than teaching.

I sat in on a presentation about tech and the future by a top executive at one of the biggest & most powerful companies in the world yesterday, and not a single slide featured any women, girls, or Black people. Nor did the initial remarks acknowledge their existence (until I asked).

Bleak.

I used AI. It worked. I hated it. I used Claude Code to build a tool I needed. It worked great, but I was miserable. I need to reckon with what it means.

I appreciated this article by Michael Taggart, on the temptation to use some of these coding tools and the pitfalls, from the POV of an experienced software engineer.

This is why it's important to fight these issues collectively rather than at the individual level.

taggart-tech.com/reckoning/

#TDOV Healthy Aging Among Trans People Using Hormone Therapy: Setting the Research Agenda invites trans people & clinicians who provide care to trans people anywhere in the world to complete a survey about research priorities regarding hormones and midlife health: whri.org/healthy-agin...

a man wearing glasses and a sweater with project hailmary on the bottom Alt: Ryan Gosling in a hand knit cardigan that screams queer knitting circle smiles and rests his head on his hand at a bar while a butch scientist with a microphone performs a karaoke cover of Harry Styles’ Sign of the Times.

My wife & I went to see Project Hail Mary for our date night.

After the movie, we agreed it was one of the queerest love stories we’ve ever seen on the big screen.

And that’s before discussing all the fiber art (!), soundtrack, or the part where Ryan Gosling joins an alien polycule.

So this is the plan then. They know that crypto is worthless outside of money laundering and eventually someone will regulate or ban it for that reason and it will vanish in a poof.

So they are creating a government backed exchange to launder crypto into real property and soak the taxpayers.

FWIW absolutely no one I know who has expertise in spaceflight or planetary exploration thinks this is either remotely plausible or a good idea to attempt on such a timeline. The dominant reaction is somewhere on the spectrum between mockery and dismay. Real, important science was cancelled for this

Mussels in black bean sauce atop a bed of vegetable lo mein and bok choy stir fried with garlic

Waltzed into the nearest dining hall where crowds were light (spring break)

THIS delicious seafood - freshly prepared in house - was just one of many, many tasty options

I love our campus food!

#GoUMASS

a cat is peeking over a wooden table . Alt: A gray cat gives a human hand a high five.

Shout to Lowell, MA for passing a moratorium on data centers!!

More of this please.

A colorful butterfly clings to the back of the author’s pale blue sweater

A vividly patterned large butterfly clinging to a wooden post against a woodsy backdrop

A beautiful butterfly with neon green patterns on its wings perched on a green leaf

Two tortoises lounge under a heat lamp. One is using its friend as a piece of furniture.

Timeline cleanse 🦋 🐢 🍃

A plate of red lentil pasta mixed with delicious shrimp scampi leftovers sits on a wooden table with a copy of the Boston Globe visible.

I love breakfast. 💜

a man is sitting in front of a sign that says " titan " Alt: Brennan Lee Mulligan sits in the Dungeonmadter seat and says emphatically, “We really encourage shouting your emotions here.”

Submitting A.I. slop to journals is a form of A.I. laundering.

And intellectual theft!

Stealing the time & expertise of actual experts who are forced to review the slop, in exchange for their editorial suggestions & free labor.

Manufacturing credibility for machine-assisted plagiarism.

IT SUCKS!

I think there’s a range of contexts that could require various approaches- but might be worth some brief outreach before exhausting yourself on a review!

I just don’t want to enable these folks any further - it’s a form of intellectual theft & time theft (from me) & I hate it.

i need the “llms are might be conscious” folx to read this

The last one I received like this had SO many critical flaws i just briefly summarized those & rejected it.

Then I saw that other reviewers had given the “authors” dozens of hyper-specific recommendations, sources, etc. & I was horrified.

So if it’s bad & you suspect, I’d message the editor.

a man with red hair says " i don t do the dance " Alt: Crowley, the soft butch queer demon from Good Omens stares somberly at the camera and says, “I don’t do the dance"

I exhort my fellow peer reviewers:

If you receive genAI slop - DO NOT do their work for them!

A growing group of manuscript submitters just send their slop to journals, WAIT for actual experts to point out every flaw & provide every missing citation & then resubmit.

Don’t fall for their scam!!!

I teach this lesson *constantly*

“we conceptualise venture capital as effectively a form of ‘male-lens investing’, illustrating the limitations of the male-dominated and profit-driven VC investment model”

This paper is giving me LIFE.

I hate this man (& the surveillance empire he has championed) with the fire 🔥 of a thousand suns ☀️

a woman wearing glasses and a hooded jacket is asking , `` can i work here ? '' Alt: Liz Lemon, wearing glasses and a hooded jacket is asking in a desperate sort of way, ``can i work here ? ''

I wager that the first ones to open a university where genAI is banned, surveillance culture thwarted, war profiteers shunned, & the humanities and fine arts are celebrated and valued *beyond* their capacity to teach “soft skills” or provide value to STEM fields, will be *overrun with applications*

Woke up to echoes of Mary Oliver