the basic theory of DOGE was that if powerful people said it was fine it didn’t matter what the law said.

I think proving that theory wrong is worth significant effort

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

The point of the university as a concept is that it's been here for a thousand years and meant to be here another thousand. Turning education over to producing what the market needed five years ago is never going to work well.

New UNC coach contract detail

"The contract includes a $100,000 annual allowance for a country club membership and other entertainment"

Weird how the rest of us normie faculty and staff have to jump through hoops to do anything. so happy for him.

"Revisionist history" isn't a bad thing. In fact, any worthwhile work of history improves, refines and, yes, revises our understanding of the past in some way.

Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence Despite rising concerns about sycophancy—excessive agreement or flattery from artificial intelligence (AI) systems—little is known about its prevalence or consequences. We show that sycophancy is wide...

OK, I'm obsessed with this study in @science.org

It took Reddit "Am I The Asshole" posts & asked LLMs if the poster was the asshole. Aaand (surprise) AI was more likely to tell people they were NOT the asshole ... even when humans said yeah YTA 🧪

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

An infographic titled "The Types of Open Access: A Field Guide," styled with Stardew Valley pixel art icons representing different materials. Ten types are listed: Gold Open Access (gold ingot icon): The journal has no paywall, generally paid for by authors through APCs (article processing charges). Diamond Open Access (blue diamond icon): Gold but no APC. Funded by an institution, scholarly society or collective. Hybrid Open Access (brown lump icon): This journal lets you pay a ransom to open individual articles but still charges subscription fees to the community. What a bargain! Green Open Access (grass icon): Author self-archives their own copy on a preprint server or research repository. Can usually be done with paywalled articles under certain conditions. Bronze Open Access (bronze ingot icon): It's freely available on the publisher's website but has no CC license. Is this a mistake? What is this? Silver Open Access (silver ingot icon): I'm giving a runner up prize. Could have been gold but for some reason the author chose a CC BY-NC-ND license. Pyrite "Fool's Gold" Open Access (pyrite nuggets icon): Oops! Predatory publishers will take your APC money, but their services are fake. Beware! Geode Open Access (geode icon): A librarian can break this open for you using the power of interlibrary loan. Black Open Access (skull and crossbones icon): I don't know who started calling it this, but it just means piracy. They'll steal anything, including OA valor. Slime Open Access (grey slime icon): Just slide into the author's DMs and ask for a PDF. You'd be surprised how often this works.

100% accurate guide to the types of Open Access #academicsky 📚

Attention universities:

Page won by 23 votes! Your vote does count.

Anyway, AI is a managerial technology that came out of fields where researchers act more like managers than researchers and this is not a coincidence. It’s fundamentally related to why certain people jumped at the chance to try to build certain kinds of systems that devalued (other people’s) work.

The Strait of Hormuz is open for transit

It's a sign of the times that AI companies are deciding whether or not to allow the military to engage in mass surveillance of US citizens and this is treated as a legitimate debate of two reasonable positions.

If you ever think your vote doesn’t count…

There's been a lot of debate within the Democratic establishment about what rhetoric to use via ICE.

Well, an incumbent doesn't lose by 48 percentage points very often—and her vote on collaborating with ICE was the defining issue here.

kind of crazy that if you have enough money and don't like what you see in the media, you can just buy up every film studio, news station, and social media app and change it

My doomer-worry about AI is not that the LLMs become omnipotent and take over the world but that the wealthy and powerful use it as a means to consolidate power and marginalize or lay off skilled workers and also everything about our technological and political and social life gets worse

NO. 68-71

‘Rage knitting’ against the machine: the hobbyists putting anti-ICE messages into crafts Makers take a stand through ‘Melt the ICE’ red knit caps and sparkly nails – all while raising funds for those affected by immigration raids

Staff at a Twin Cities yarn store put together a pattern for a red knit “Melt the ICE” hat inspired by the Norwegian resistance.

They thought they would attract 10 people to a weekly knit-along.

They’ve sold 70,000 copies, raising more than $250k for immigrant aid groups.

A new milestone in the cancer fight: 7 in 10 patients now survive five-plus years Better treatment options have improved survival rates in the U.S., according to a report from the American Cancer Society.

I’m happy to see the new American Cancer Society report showing that the U.S. has reached a historic milestone in cancer survivorship, where 70% of patients live for 5+ years after diagnosis.

But I also see it as a requiem, because the systems that made it happen have been destroyed.

[wakes up] “I’m sorry, what”

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

All the centers they’re cutting add up to less than $7 million in spending.

UNC athletics budget is $185.4 million for the 2025-26 fiscal year.

Screenshot of a paper entry: Fictional Failures and Real-World Lessons: Ethical Speculation Through Design Fiction on Emotional Support Conversational AI Authors: Faye Kollig, Jessica Pater, Fayika Farhat Nova, Casey Fiesler (There are tabs with "abstract" and "summary" and "summary" is selected.)

The ACM Digital Library, where a LOT of computing-related research is published (I'd say at least 75% of my own publications), is now not only providing (without consent of the authors and without opt-in by readers) AI-generated summaries of papers, but they appear as the *default* over abstracts.

What we should require: students to become “literate“ in AI technology, in terms of its economics, it’s ownership structure, its internal logic, how it interacts w our psychology, & how it has taken over our stock market & infiltrates every industry so that our culture feels pressured to prop it up

True love is when your spouse volunteers to go to the HOA meeting so you don’t have to.

Multiple sources have confirmed that ICE/Border Patrol is headed back to the Raleigh and Durham areas for undefined deportation actions. We've heard 50 ICE agents, charter flights and hotels booked for all of them in the Raleigh area.

Let us know what you hear.

Low hanging cloud over a mountain top behind a highway.

Looks like we’re driving into a cloud instead of a tunnel under a mountain.

DOGE was always a very thinly disguised con to dress up data theft and extraction class destruction of federal corporate oversight as innovative, and it's important to remember that part of the reason it worked so well is that the press helped legitimize it

AI Is Supercharging the War on Libraries, Education, and Human Knowledge "Fascism and AI, whether or not they have the same goals, they sure are working to accelerate one another."

Librarians told 404 Media they're being inundated with new pitches for AI library tech and catalogs are being flooded with AI slop books.

But more broadly, AI maximalism across society is supercharging the ideological war on libraries, schools, government workers, and academics.

Transformative work of the day: