bless Scaachi

embedded.substack.com/p/my-interne...

What a beautiful moment.

GenX/elder millenial space catnip

The Atlas of Early Printing has a new URL at the Folger. 📜 #BookHistory
atlas.folger.edu

Yeah that’s cool

Much of the federal civil service management has been colonized by external consultancies (McKinsey, Deloitte, etc.) that push AI hype and sell AI-based services that managers uncritically accept. In turn, they get rewarded for forcing AI adoption amongst their staff. This is the result…

As I get older I'm coming to increasingly radical views like "you have to do things to get good at them" and "you have to think about problems to solve them"

My latest video on Ford's "basket weaving" OSAP comment has reached the "Study whatever you want but don't expect the gov to pay you for it" crowd, and I don't think they grasp how desolate their lives would be if there was no art, no culture, no history. We can't have a society of only STEM majors.

Reminded that there are few more corrosive trends in higher education in recent years than the divide and conquer approach to undermining faculty solidarity by focusing on numbers of majors. Each degree pathway at an institution is strengthened by each other form of expertise available to students.

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

Screenshot of TikTok terms of service For Legal Reasons We may share Information We Collect → to comply with the law, including to respond to subpoenas, court orders, legal process, law enforcement requests, legal claims, or government inquiries. We may also disclose Information We Collect → to enforce any terms applicable to the Services, and to protect and defend our rights, interests, safety, and security, and those of our affiliates, users, or the public. Information You Provide may include sensitive personal information, as defined under applicable state privacy laws, such as information from users under the relevant age threshold, information you disclose in survey responses or in your user content about your racial or ethnic origin, national origin, religious beliefs, mental or physical health diagnosis, sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or nonbinary, citizenship or immigration status, or financial information. For example, we may process your

TikTok is now under US ownership and their new ToS reads like a guide to giving fascists everything they need to put you on a list.

They’re collecting information about immigration status, citizenship, sexual orientation, whether you’re trans or non binary and physical or mental disabilities.

If I were a PM who believed we were at a global rupture moment, upending decades of international order, and requiring totally new relations with the world, I probably wouldn’t cut my foreign affairs staffing and budget by 15%

people who are new to academia tend to find its obsession with sources and citations a brake on their "i'm just trying to be CREATIVE, man" mindset. but it turns out the relentless obsession with accuracy, citation, and *provenance* is a load-bearing pillar of the whole enterprise

This is specifically about AI use in humanities disciplines within academia, which is clear from context- this crap is extremely harmful in that setting. Inevitably, people show up to be like "AI finds cancer cells tho".

NOT THE SUBJECT, and that conflation has been inflicted upon us intentionally.

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen ‘slop’ as the 2025 Word of the Year.

Time person of the year cover for 2025

I guess it's fitting that it's a reimagined, worse version of someone else's artwork

I will believe in the end of identity politics when steel and lumber (28,000 jobs and 105,000 jobs respectively) stop getting bailouts, while higher education (310,000 jobs) collapses in front of our eyes because it's full of ivory tower elites

It's weird to not only have lived through an information revolution but also now living through its undoing, all within less than a generation.

🤓 Toronto-Ottawa new multimodal transportation level unlocked today: walk-streetcar-train-LRT-taxi 🚶🚞 🚊 🚉 🚕

On the upside, we can watch AI videos of wooly mammoths wrestling sabre toothed tigers on them long after they’re gone. 🦣 🐅

Amazon is helping fund a $300 million build of a ballroom for the White House.

Independent bookstores are donating to food banks and organizations that help with food insecurity.

They are not the same.

It’s just FRIENDS. The voices are easily identifiable as the FRIENDS cast, “smelly cat” is a FRIENDS joke, the set is nearly the FRIENDS set, the music stings are FRIENDS music stings. This is all just a lot of flea-circus flimflam.

An awesome telling of the story of last night: “managerial machinations that involved emptying both bullpens.. telling tomorrow's grand plans to piss off because tomorrow is for suckers..it gave us, and we'll give you a moment here to lie to yourselves and imagine you knew who this was, Will Klein”

⚾️♾️

I cannot tell you how many tech journalists at prominent media organizations do not understand this

Government style ad in watercolour. Image of a burglar stealing a painting from the wall of a home. Tagline: "It's not theft... if you say you're using it to train your AI algorithm". Body text: "Theft is now legal, so we can boost the economy by eliminating jobs. If that doesn't make any sense, ask a chatbot to explain it to you." HM government logo in the corner.

Did a new one

they are so close to understanding the entire point of trade

I bang on about this a lot: I think the combination of a global pandemic, underregulated internet/SM, collapse/corruption of trustworthy media, plus now unregulated genAI, is a wildly toxic environment for radicalisation & mental health. We see the results of that in our politics & lives every day

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.