OpenAI: We’re burning money like the Joker. A miracle needs to happen for us to turn a profit
Microsoft: Please please use our AI systems, we’re teetering on the edge here
Anthropic: I wonder what’ll kill us first: lawsuits, regulations or model collapse
Media and universities: AI is here to stay
Yousof Azizi, Iranian researcher, journalist, commentator and PhD candidate at @virginiatech.bsky.social with valid legal status, has been illegally detained by ICE. He was taken from in front of his home, has been denied access to a lawyer, and may be transferred to a detention center in Louisiana:
Trump: We're winning. We're winning, and we're winning so much. So much more than- because, JD? Is JD here?
Vance: Next to you Mr. President.
Trump: If we can find JD, he just got- it's very rare, an executive commendation from The Pope. Where is-
Vance: (holding back tears) Sir- uh, no.
Barrera said her husband said the smell of human feces in the toilet caused a fellow detainee to vomit and, in turn, created a chain of people vomiting. She said her husband is asthmatic and has not received medication to treat his condition. The lack of medicine and the stress of the overcrowded holding cell has left him short of breath and teetering on the edge of an asthma attack, Barrera said. ICE did not immediately respond to questions on April 10 about the conditions of the Mesa or Phoenix facilities. After the publication of this article, Barrera told The Arizona Republic her husband was transferred to the ICE facility at San Luis Regional Detention Center at about midnight. The San Luis Regional Detention Center is in Southwestern Arizona and has the capacity to hold 700 people.
This is horrific. A U.S. citizen describes the facility in Arizona that her husband was brought to while he waited to be put on a deportation flight. Dozens of people were crammed into tiny cells, there was a "chain of people vomiting" from filthy toilets, no medical care, and only one meal per day.
What terms do autistic & other neurodivergent adults prefer? journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... "at the heart of it, terminology discussions, particularly in an academic setting, are not about language at all, but the lingering dehumanisation of people considered ‘disordered’ or ‘abnormal’"
the passive voice store was visited by me and you were known by everybody there
I’m offering a lightly used set of regalia in UC Berkeley colors to a junior faculty member, preference for a mom and 1st gen scholar. DM me your details— I’ll ship for free.
An opportunity to get your voice heard!
The U.S.'s Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee has been rescheduled to Tuesday, 28th April at 9-5 pm, Eastern Time (hybrid): iacc.hhs.gov/meetings/iac...
For new comments, public comments are due this Tuesday at 5 pm ET. iacc.hhs.gov/meetings/pub...
Update: she is reading her book *during* overhead press 👀
An older woman at the gym brought a hardcover book to read between sets and I love it so much.
Today in Hell Yes, Research: U.S. Federal autism guidance not only wrongly stigmatizes autistic people themselves, but endangers public health with vaccine misinformation, & endorses worrisome pseudoscience autism "treatments." From @kbottemabeutel.bsky.social:
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
The messages from US government regarding autism are built on two assumptions that reflect the long-standing ableism underpinning healthcare systems in the United States and many other western countries. First, they assume that avoiding autism is so desirable that any intervention that might reduce its occurrence should be attempted, regardless of unknown harms and lack of evidence for benefits. Second, it assumes any intervention that is (erroneously) thought to increase the occurrence of autism should be avoided, regardless of robust evidence of benefit including decreased mortality, and weak evidence of association with autism. While these ableist assumptions are not novel, the incoherence of US federal guidance is now on full view.
New editorial on RFK Jr.’s ableist health policies:
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Autism researchers & service providers "often neglect to consider the potential for interventions to cause harm... and they communicate more confidence regarding the possibility of benefits for autistic people than is warranted given the evidence" journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.... editorial, free
It’s mind bogglingly bad, yet I’m fairly certain if I do this again in another 5 years, it will be exactly the same 🤷🏻♀️
Right?!
Announcing the ROLSI award for Outstanding Research by an Early-Career Researcher. The journal Research on Language and Social Interaction (ROLSI) is pleased to announce an award for early-career researchers, to be competed for by those presenting a paper at the ICCA conference in Edmonton, Canada, June 2026. The prize will be awarded on the basis of a single-authored written research paper representing a single-authored presentation accepted for the conference. It is open to those who have been awarded their doctorate no earlier than five years from June 28, 2026. Deadline: May 30th, 2026. Enquiries: rolsi.journal@gmail.com
Announcing the inaugural ROLSI Award for Outstanding Early-Career Research
Were you awarded your PhD since June 2021?
Presenting at ICCA in Edmonton?
Go in for the award!
For more information, contact the Editors. : rolsi.journal@gmail.com
why do I find it so wildly offensive and paternalistic when I see folks suggest that LLM use can help 'disadvantaged' people to 'write better' or 'save time'?
because it is such a sad underestimation of people's abilities, a surrender to a thoughtless monoglot ideology, a celebration of ignorance
"COIs continue to be pervasive in ABA autism intervention research, and most remain undisclosed. Most alarmingly, the practice of falsely claiming not to hold COIs remains entrenched in this field of research and appears to have worsened over time" journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... an update
Until that happens, ABA autism intervention research remains untrustworthy.
6/6
When researchers are employed to provide or consult on the interventions they are researching, this constitutes a clear COI that needs to be declared, and the researchers must build protections against these COIs into their research designs.
5/6
% of studies where the authors declared no COIs, but a clinical/consulting COI was actually present-
2020: 87%
2025: 92% 😵💫
4/6
% of studies that disclosed clinical/consulting COIs-
2020: 2%
2025: 2%
3/6
% of studies where at least one author has a clinical/consulting COI-
2020: 84%
2025: 93%
2/6
5 yrs ago @shanclapoint.bsky.social and I found most autism intervention studies published in ABA journals were authored by researchers who were also clinicians/ consultants, but this COI was almost never declared. We have an update! Things are now... worse! 1/6 journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10....
![Six-panel composite figure. Caption: Interactive artifacts always rely on people’s interpretive and interactional practices. Rowwise from top left to bottom right: A. Aegeus consults the oracle at Delphi (cup from Vulci, 440-430 BCE). B. Byzantine mosaic depicting the zodiac, from the floor of the 6th century CE Beth Alpha synagogue. C. One-sided sense-making in an experimental psychotherapy session, (McHugh 1968). D. Still from a BBC documentary showing a person interacting with ELIZA via a computer terminal, late 1960s. E. Researchers interacting with the PARC copier (Suchman 2007 [1987]). F. Screenshot of large language model chat interface, 2026.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:tfyqeo3tprov5lejatxoi6lb/bafkreidiwulbxshg5plxdu6ryxklje4zljxlakzdjxcgekentekonkrlwu)
Six-panel composite figure. Caption: Interactive artifacts always rely on people’s interpretive and interactional practices. Rowwise from top left to bottom right: A. Aegeus consults the oracle at Delphi (cup from Vulci, 440-430 BCE). B. Byzantine mosaic depicting the zodiac, from the floor of the 6th century CE Beth Alpha synagogue. C. One-sided sense-making in an experimental psychotherapy session, (McHugh 1968). D. Still from a BBC documentary showing a person interacting with ELIZA via a computer terminal, late 1960s. E. Researchers interacting with the PARC copier (Suchman 2007 [1987]). F. Screenshot of large language model chat interface, 2026.
New! Interactional foundations for critical AI literacies doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
Why do Anthropic engineers talk to Claude as a witch-doctor to his potions? How is prompt engineering like spider divination? Can one reason without reasons?
ft. Lovelace, Adorno, Suchman, Weizenbaum & many more ☺️
In March 2026, an Anthropic employee released the source code of Claude Code, a wrapper around their large language model that is widely used to generate code in programming tasks. Its thousands of lines of Typescript code contained many hopeful prompts and incantations to shape Claude’s behaviour. Here are some examples: “Report outcomes faithfully”; “Never characterize incomplete or broken work as done”; “Be careful not to introduce security vulnerabilities” (prompts.ts in Anthropic 2026). There is more than a passing resemblance here to the Azande witch-doctor apprentice who, while stirring the medicine, utters: “You medicine which I am cooking, mind you always speak the truth to me. Do not let anyone injure me with his witchcraft, but let me recognize all witches. … Let me be expert at the witch-doctor’s craft so that people will give me many spears on account of my magic.” (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 93). In the case of Claude, the incantations appeared insufficient: analysis of the codebase, which according to a company executive was “pretty much 100% written by Claude Code”, revealed severe security vulnerabilities (Townsend 2026).
I was supposed to finish this March 31 and then the #Claude Code leak happened, handing me the perfect opening example
Some of it has been in the works for longer: it's also a version of (part of) my #DHd2025 keynote titled "What makes LLMs so irresistible?"
Read it here: doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
Guess what's not cool? Kanye West's existence! Guess what is? The fact that @kattenbarge.bsky.social wanted to talk to me for her incisive piece on the problem of him. Check it out folks!
New: 150 unionized ProPublica workers are on strike TODAY over AI, layoff protections, wages, and more.
They're asking readers to not visit ProPublica or engage with content on other platforms. It's the first work stoppage of its kind at the newsroom.
www.theverge.com/news/908401/...
You have more in common with the people of Iran than you do with anyone in this administration, any member of the technocracy, anyone who is profiting from this war, or any billionaire. When you see Iranians forming human chains outside key infrastructure sites, you should feel a sense of kinship.
everything we are seeing now is the consequence of having a political environment in which indifference to the deaths and suffering of other people - even by the state whose supposed responsibility is to safeguard their welfare - is a superpower rather than a political liability