the penne opticon

WIRED@wired.com · 4mo ago

The pasta-sauce company has partnered with the nonprofit StoryCorps on a device designed to record family conversations around the table and save them for all time. www.wired.com/story/prego-...

Remains my most controversial take, but sometimes you do need to just go to bed at 7:30PM.

Palantir is its own agnotology machine. Do not engage with their discourse, which throws spaghetti at the wall of media: every strand introduces a new kind of doubt. You try to consume & debate it but in the end all you are is tangled in spaghetti and covered with marinara.

My latest. I’ve been watching the media coverage of the murders of Dr. Cerina Fairfax and Vice Mayor Nancy Metayer. One way media can fight back against male violence: If you kill your wife, you don’t get to be called a “husband” any more. You’re her killer. open.substack.com/pub/karenatt...

If you kill your wife, you don't get to be a husband anymore

Some lessons from the media coverage of Dr. Cerina Fairfax and Vice Mayor Nancy Metayer's murders.

open.substack.com

I will never, ever, ever use AI in my writing. From idea to the finished piece, it’s all human. I do not see the point otherwise.

Laura Keating@lorekeating.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I keep seeing "all authors use AI, the real issue is they're being forced to be sneaky about it" headlines. Full stop No. This is a lie peddled for normalization. It's schoolyard-level pressure tactics "C'mon, all the cool kids are already doing it. We won't tell. It's fine. We're on your side."

That Yale report on what's wrong with U.S. college saw some trees (high cost, unfair admission, etc.) but missed the forest: the 60-year right-wing crusade to undermine higher ed, from slashing budgets to stifling speech How to really fix college. My new column www.inquirer.com/opinion/yale...

Why Yale’s term paper on what’s wrong with college gets a ‘D-’ | Will Bunch

An Ivy League university's report on the loss of faith in higher ed ignores what really killed the American Dream of college.

inquirer.com

“Take a moment to think before you dive in. That’s the best advice for Google Photos users, as the company confirms its latest update can scan all your photos to “use actual images of you and your loved ones” in AI image generation.” www.forbes.com/sites/zakdof...

Google Starts Scanning All Your Photos As New Update Goes Live

Google wants its AI to see all the photos of "you and your loved ones." Billions of users must now decide.

forbes.com

I wonder if rampant AI use is going to change language patterns, in that people will start writing differently to look less like AI. Lots of phrases and writing habits (like the use of the em dash) are being re-coded as AI signifiers. You can pry my em dashes out of my cold, dead hands, but...

James Fallows@jfallows.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Lesson #1 from Our New Age of AI: When you get a message beginning "I hope this email finds you well," stop reading. There may be exceptions to this rule. But I can't think of any right now.

The author of this article refused to sign an NDA, giving up severance and healthcare benefits to tell this story. If you didn't read it already, read it. Because he refused, we may be able to stop the Kennedy Center from being sold for parts and turned into a gaudy MAGA fundraising warehouse.

Jack Hutton 🇺🇸 @jackhutton.bsky.social · 4mo ago

An important read. [The Atlantic-gift article]: What I Saw Inside the Kennedy Center I spent 10 months working at the institution because I thought I could help protect it. What I observed there is far worse than the public knows.By Josef Palermo www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026...

"the colleges that dominate the headlines are not the colleges that most Americans attend their core mission: to serve students from all backgrounds, at a price families can actually afford, prepare graduates for real careers and meaningful lives." www.geneseo.edu/enrollment-m...

The College Affordability Crisis is Real, but the Media is Looking at the Wrong Schools

Sturges Hall (Photo by Keith Walters ’11) Opinion By Costas Solomou, Vice President, Enrollment Management Published by the Office of Enrollment Management When Yale University released its Committee ...

geneseo.edu

In 2024 The Conversation had 8.3M in revenue and 7.8M in expenses and paid $0 to writers. Is that really ok with you? projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/o...

The Conversation Us Inc - Nonprofit Explorer - ProPublica

Since 2013, the IRS has released data culled from millions of nonprofit tax filings. Use this database to find organizations and see details like their executive compensation, revenue and expenses, as...

projects.propublica.org

Scurvy, ahoy!

Shepherd@neolithicsheep.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Holy shit. According to the article sailors on TRIPOLI are rationing their food and if someone gets a little extra they're sharing it with their friends. There's no fresh produce, which points to a lack of resupply ships able to serve the ships maintaining the blockade.

Also, as I've said before, the faculty at large community colleges could totally do the jobs that faculty at Yale do, and a lot of faculty at ivies could not do our jobs for a single semester.

I want a "conference" where every academic cooks a dish for everyone and we all talk about our work casually while cooking. People can sous chef for each other. We eat and talk about our work in progress. You submit an abstract and a recipe.

So what are our tricks for forcing ourselves to grade when 1) we don't wanna and 2) there are big distractions, of both the doomscrolling and fun varieties?

Happy Tax Day, New York. We’re taxing the rich.

Do you ever look at your calendar and realize that you made several mistakes a few months ago.

As a (lapsed) cradle Catholic, I do not love the re-branding of Catholicism = Good in light of Vance's nonsense. It's not dissimilar to the recent TSA = Good spin when ICE was sent to airports. I like the new Pope well enough, but the enemy of my enemy is not really my friend. Bad is a spectrum.

Tulip bulbs. Just replace "AI" with "tulip bulbs" and that will tell you where we are.

Phillip Anderson@phillipanderson.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Everything is fucking dumb all the time now

TurboTax and H&R Block spent $7 million lobbying the Trump administration to kill Direct File. Both companies donated to Trump's 2024 campaign and inauguration committees.

FactPost@factpostnews.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Americans paid a collective $23 billion more to file their 2025 taxes after Donald Trump shut down the free tax filing program Direct File last year.

More higher ed discourse like this please

John Warner@biblioracle.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Sal Khan is spinning up an alternative post-secondary credential in concert with the largest tech companies in the world. Anyone who cares about human-centered education should wish it nothing but failure. Thankfully, Khan has practice at that. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

I suspect deep inside the brain of most scholars is the memory of the moment when they first discovered the thing that sucked them into their field, of who they were in that moment. We ought to try to keep in touch with it.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot. for the first time I can remember, there’s no supposedly obvious alternative path to reliable employment that our leaders can demand we pivot to. indeed, they’re not even bothering to try to offer an alternative - and scamming starts feeling like the only answer

To aqui pra procrastinar@euperdendotempo.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Yeah, it's certainly a much bigger problem now especially because before you could tell people they should learn to code or whatever and now there's basically not even a clear alternative path. Learn to scam or something.

Saving the English department by relabelling our chronological survey course "the eras tour"

Bloody hell. Researchers invented a disease, published two fake papers to see if LLM’s would ingest them and kick them up as fact — and then it broke containment and all the major AI’s bought in. Information pollution. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Why do we even bother with endnotes--this is my personal pet peeve as a historian, I need to read the spicy, sassy, whiny footnotes immediately