I lent my kid my 35mm point and shoot for a camping trip and they accidentally created some shoegaze album covers.

Neither an objection, nor a qualification, I would say -- but simply drawing out the implication that was fully intended in OP.

We regulate steam locomotives to prevent accidents; we bust trusts; we create labor unions &c &c &c

unfortunately, I'm not sure the conversation can move to the "useful policy" stage until there is broad recognition that "just say no to linear algebra" is not a possible collective outcome

We do very much need to move beyond being "pro" or "con" this stuff. It's going to be as silly as being pro or con steam. Useful policy is not shaped at that level.

One update I've made in the last couple years is that there's a lot less generalization in LLM capabilities than I expected:
- I thought RL would generalize more to non-verifiable domains
- I thought multimodality would unlock new abilities

Everyone's building AI science agents.

The claims are extraordinary. But when we test whether these systems can actually do science, recent top ones still fail challenges that human scientists can solve the majority of the time. 🧵

But without that pause, I find students start to equate "critical thinking" with a particular set of positions. And then some of them struggle when asked to go further. Even if it's purely rhetorical, a scholarly practice that foregrounds *questions* teaches you to keep your knees bent.

The thing I think almost all disciplines could profitably borrow from science is the slight pause that separates posing a question from answering it.

You don't have to claim that this permits neutrality. View the pause, if you prefer, just as rhetorical punctuation to create a moment of suspense. +

Love’s Work — Parapraxis The Generic Pleasures of Romance Anna Kornbluh

new in Parapraxis online!

Love's Work

the romance boom, psychoanalysis, Emily Henry, and creative labor

www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/lov...

The (oversimplified!) way I've been putting this in the law school context is that traditionally law schools taught analysis, and the first 3-5 years of practice taught judgment. If analysis comes from a box now, how does law school teach judgment instead?

if you thought "taste" was an odd fit for silicon valley's obsession, wait until they discover that what they really want is "theory of mind"

It was a treat to talk about literature & the internet at UIUC last week! So many scholars I admire in one place—and so many brilliant up-and-coming students.

Also it was good be back in my home state among the cornfields 🌽

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bruenig said on his podcast that the free trials have started to run out and various unions are now paying him for this. also that it was used over 12k times in a month

So there's an upper limit to how good a chess AI can be at chess. There is a (highly theoretical) perfect strategy and an AI could play that strategy. If both sides play that strategy the game could well end in a draw

Is there an upper limit to "intelligence" generally

screenshot of oauth page for sparklepets.garden with a question mark highlighted sayinf "This application is requesting the following list of technical permissions: atproto, transition:generic"

this is a psa , if you visit a website that offers to let you sign in with atmosphere/bluesky

you should click the little question mark in the top right. if it says "transition:generic", that app can do ANYTHING with the data in your account, short of dms and actually deleting/moving your account..

Continue to think that it is under-appreciated that we have a real world test of this in most states called 'the state pension'.

so what you're saying is physical contact with paper is required for brains to absorb information?

christopherjhale 1h NEW: Cardinal Cupich tells 60 Minutes that Pope Leo's decision to spend July 4th on Lampedusa instead of in America is deliberate. "He's sending a message that his top priority right now is to be with those who are downcast and marginalized." Asked if it's a coincidence, Cardinal Tobin: " know someone who will be happy. She's green. She's on a little island that belongs to New Jersey. "She's holding up a torch, and she's reading from a scroll, and it says: "Welcome."

Elphaba from Wicked holding up a broom and looking serene like maybe give me your tired your hungry etc

I had no idea Catholic cardinals were this obsessed with Wicked

The arc of history is long and has extremely poor convergence bounds

The @jlake9.bsky.social ML twitter aggregation bot is probably the last thing I needed to restore full twitter funuctionality. Props @juand-r.bsky.social it's really good!

Great thread and also this specific post is a creative and thoughtful version of my argument that you need people with both technical and subject matter expertise to solve problems in medical AI.

Basic contradiction of 21c life

<try to log on>
Ok, we're going to send you a code.
By the way, if anyone asks you for this code, don't tell them.
<receive code>
Ok, great. Now, tell us, what was the code?
<🤨>

I spent 16, SIXTEEN years fighting this crap.

I can’t believe it 😭

The 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing October 24 –29Budapest, Hungary

Sure, it’s good for democracy — but also, good for EMNLP

they should have called this Bouba‘s Delivery Service

You project a cheerful approach to the world that is going to make ppl anxious for you

Do a couple of captchas and check whether you have a navel.

If you could do the captchas, you may be synthetic.

Actually I really like

« listed "self-organization" on its resume. interviewer asked for an example. "this interview" »

Also, satirizing ideas by personifying them is a natural gambit; I guess I'm just not used to it outside of c18 poetry!

As you can see from this thread, it's a genre of humor that makes perfect sense to other language models