"The rise of extreme wealth is one of the clearest signs of this imbalance. In 1987, billionaires held wealth equal to 3% of global GDP. Today this tiny elite, just 0.0001% of the world population, owns the equivalent of *16%* of world GDP in wealth."
Why is it that the most vocal cheerleaders of generative A.I. are always the hackiest motherfreakers around? You expect studio executives to say things like “it’s going to revolutionize content,” and “from a bottom-line standpoint it’s inevitable,” and “I’ve finally found an instrument as cold and empty as myself,” but you’d hope that an artist would have more self-respect.
of course you CAN use AI to "write" your book but you run the risk of a lethally derisive colson whitehead materializing in your office to call you a hacky motherfreaker
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/o...
as me about the prestigious foundation who told me and my dean IN WRITING that "UIC does not meet our standards for an eligible faculty institution"
“Even more troublingly, other researchers say, the fake papers were then cited in peer-reviewed literature. Osmanovic Thunström says this suggests that some researchers are relying on AI-generated references without reading the underlying papers.”
A graph titled “the public health success of the measles vaccine” that shows the number of measles cases in the United States plummeting after the vaccine was introduced in 1963
I showed this graph in class yesterday on how measles cases in the United States plummeted dramatically after the vaccine was licensed in 1963. It’s not subtle and I could not resist observing: “This stunning design in measles cases was not thanks to vitamin A. It was not due to beef tallow.”
good thing we've enabled robots that spam human communities then harass those communities after they get banned
www.404media.co/an-ai-agent-...
Ha on the sciatica bit! Thanks both—I was conflating things. New info can shape outputs within a session, but you’re right—that’s not training!
If you don't read you won't be able to write well. You need to consume a variety of genres to write effectively and craft a well-rounded story.
This is a simple fact.
If you never read, your writing will be flat and unengaging.
I never regret my LRB subscription
Also ask if they opted out of the AI-driven "smart" features on Google docs--you have to manually opt out of certain things, for sure.
Also, from what I can tell, Google claims they don't train on your private docs, but any doc made public that can be viewed online is def scraped!
It depends on your advisee's online activity and uses! If he is writing prompts on OpenAI that ask for data on said figure, he is thereby training the LLM to then produce more data in the future on the figure.
The new thing is landlords using ai photos for their property listings. Totally legal. Total scam.
The whole economy is oil and scams.
As a Gen Xer, I can tell you boomers and even my own generation comparing their 20s to today’s 20-30 year-olds needs to stop. I paid $600 for a West Hollywood apartment at 23. Today it’s $3500. Burgers weren’t $20, they were $6 to $8 in a nice restaurant. Life is not comparable.
Fuck all the things we're all told to keep quiet "for the sake of the movement" 😡
Inadvertently makes a case here for why we need to keep the humanities in school
Lawyer: You don't regret that people might have lost income?
Cavanaugh (DOGE): No, I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit from two trillion dollars to close to zero.
Lawyer: Did you reduce the federal deficit?
Cavanaugh: No, we didn't.
try not to say "history isn't taught this way" when what you mean is "I don't personally remember learning this in college"
Big Tech and Big Media donated some $63 million to a Trump-aligned nonprofit that was set up to help finance Trump's presidential library.
Now the nonprofit has disappeared and with it the money.
Three guesses on where it's gone.
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...
film people! for teaching purposes, one single good academic article or book chapter exploring the wave of 90s indie cinema as it became industrialized?
y'all !!!!
I love that the blurbs are basically like, "listen, she is never not telling you about some bleak shit" 😍❤️🔥 (thank you @aarthivadde.bsky.social and @markmcgurl.bsky.social)
A lot of the big Romance novels are very redolent of late-eighteenth / early-nineteenth century fiction, actually. Bridgerton is obviously doing cod-Austen, Outlander is an Owenson-style national tale with time travel, Fourth Wing does the gothic/senitmental "found manuscript" trope.
A woman wearing a jacket sits in a chair. She looks up at a tall man wearing a western outfit.
“CBS had a policy against hiring women writers so I hired on as a secretary. I figured once I got inside the building I could destroy them from within...I badgered the head of the writing department until he gave me a chance to write.”
-Kathleen Hite (best known for her work writing on Gunsmoke)
