this was always the year’s data center election (before the general election) and the winner is clearly “people hate data centers”

FinTwitter@fintwitter.bsky.social · 12h ago

U.S. POLITICS: Progressive climate activist William Lawrence secures Democratic nomination for Michigan's competitive House District 7 seat - ABC

Kent County going nearly 65% for El-Sayed makes my heart happy. Still too close to call state-wide though.

Michigan Senate Primary Election 2026 Live Results: Stevens, El-Sayed, Rogers and More

See live results from the 2026 Michigan Senate primary election as Republican and Democrat votes are counted by candidate and county.

nbcnews.com

I did a thing!! I made a rendition of the song The Man with Money in his Hands by Jessie Mazin ❤️ This song was just perfect to be made into an anti-AI anthem. "Make life easier, just give up control. It's a chemical dependance, it's a bruise on your soul" Enjoy!!!!!!! 😃 youtu.be/i6Sbu2Zf2SM?...

The man with money in his hands - Jessie Mazin (cover and edit by Ajuna Soerjadi)

YouTube video by Ajuna Soerjadi

youtu.be

I picked up my pre-order of Fighting in the Dark by @juliusgoat.bsky.social yesterday evening so that I could have it before official release day (today 8/4)! I read and flagged many key ideas in his previous essay collection and I look forward to diving into this one soon.

But the point of everything in advanced capitalism is to promote dissociation at all times, to stave off active living, reflection, and ultimately dissent. It's to peddle opiates in the form of addictive faux-experiences that flatten out all frictions and promote unexamined, narcissistic survival.

I am horrified at the number of academics in the comments who say LLMs are good for research. In what world? It’s consistently terrible for research. Do you not have ethical standards for the tools you use? These people’s outputs cannot be trusted.

Amanda Silberling@amanda.omg.lol · 3d ago

i guess i’ll post this now and hope i have something to go off in the morning, but — i would like to talk to writers/creatives about where they draw the line when it comes to using AI. is using AI for things like research/fact-checking ok, and if so, what is the point where it goes too far?

I'm happy to announce that my CEA 2026 paper, "Less AI, More Literacy: Empowering Students to Think Critically and Resist AI Hype in the Writing Classroom" will be published in the CEA Critic's proceedings issue this winter! #writingstudies #CEA #criticalAI

trying to make us dependent on their substandard crap machines, trying to make people not care about checking citations, and then not do citations, and then trying to make it impossible to reference things. Trying to make it impossible to build on the past.

Human Nature by @drkatemarvel.bsky.social is so incredibly good that I've updated my favorites shelf on StoryGraph! 5 out of 5 stars, highly recommend. The book is so well researched and so well written; science interwoven with storytelling. Absolutely incredible, thank you for writing it. 💜

You know, I think I would be pretty capable of persuading people too if I had no morals and no tie to accuracy or a sense of truth. Thankfully, I have both integrity and a brain.

Eryk Salvaggio@eryk.bsky.social · 2w ago

Interesting pre-print on persuasive capabilities of LLMs. arxiv.org/abs/2606.16475

I spent 4 hours sitting with a curriculum document, a colleague's past course outline, and a notebook trying to figure out a solid, clear order of topics for a science course I haven't taught before but am helping to do a bit of an overhaul on. My brain is fried, but that's some valuable effort.

"The flavor of the lie changes as the future slides into the present and recedes into the past, but at its core it's always the same: that there are laws of human behavior as unbreakable as the laws of physics, and that those laws point inevitably to doom" -Human Nature by @drkatemarvel.bsky.social

"The system, in its irrationality, has been driven by profit to spend billions for weapons of destruction and virtually nothing for children's playgrounds, to give huge incomes to men who make dangerous or useless things, and very little to artists, musicians, writers, actors." Howard Zinn, 1998

From my current read of Dearly by Margaret Atwood (2025): "There will be sunsets as long as there is dust. There will be dust." Those lines hit particularly hard today with the AQI still in triple digits here from wildfire smoke, down from its peak above 500 days ago.

“Educators want students to understand what it means to have agency over their own learning. We want them to develop curiosity,” she says. “To say that the future is already written is antithetical to that.” thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/can-the-clas...

Can the Classroom Ever Be Automated?

Long before AI, teaching machines promised to make education more efficient. Their forgotten history reveals why that dream keeps falling short.

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

A lot of people don’t realize the dust bowl wasn’t a natural phenomenon. It happened when agrobusiness interests dramatically transformed the plains without regard for drought, and created vicious dust storms that choked whole families to death. That’s what I think of when I read about data centers.

Watched Spain win and then left the sports bar at the ref's final whistle. Nothing left to see there.

"By shortening the time between asking a question+getting an answer these tools are actually undermining curiosity — + paradoxically threatening our ability to understand the world. Curiosity requires a gap between what you want to know+what you find out." www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/o...

Opinion | We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask

nytimes.com

OK, it's honestly very distressing and worrying and I have ADHD, so I wrote it all down to get it out of my head olivia.science/entryism/ Enjoy, I guess...

Entryism

AI entryism subverts anti AI critique.

olivia.science

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ@olivia.science · 3w ago

This is 💯 entryism. He wrote a piece seemingly critical of AI, got caught & admitted to chatGPT use, but also gaslights us it's a search engine & it's useful for checking links — why not just click them? We can't be anti AI if we don't agree we see it. They did it with climate change, tobacco etc.

The very existence of ICE creates terror. The institution has no place in a free society. Firing everyone involved in it is a start. Dismantling DHS and demanding that the gov’t cannot use immigration as a way dehumanize and deny people their constitutional rights gets closer to where we need to be

In case any of you reading this are wondering where to put your ideas about public power, you could write and print stuff with us at Public Grids, real humans with our own thoughts, working with another real human person to edit our work (we are not a prestigious journal but we are all still people)

Alli DeJong@allidejong.bsky.social · 3w ago

You know who should know this? The editor in chief of SCIENCE!

Today is something called AI Appreciation Day (wut) and I’m seeing apocalyptic photos across my timeline of wildfire smoke coloring the skies orange and gray, so here’s the Against AI and Its Environmental Harms library one more time:

I'm looking at the flag My hand against my heart If only we could win (One of) these wars we like to start -Leonard Cohen, The Flame

Most of my in-laws track each other, but I don't and my husband doesn't either. When we drive on long trips we share our route, but otherwise surveillance is creepy. I also don't have a doorbell camera.

Tressie McMillan Cottom@tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 3w ago

No one wants to hear it but tracking everyone in your life is pretty much the gateway drug to the Armageddon you’re so afraid of.

If you want to reduce crime rates, don’t invest in policing. Invest in libraries.

I'm a huge Open Education advocate and hate commercial textbook publishers like Cengage, but I admit I am glad to see them fighting against Google on this.

TechCrunch@techcrunch.com · 3w ago

Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, and other publishers allege that Google trained its AI on copyrighted works without the necessary permissions.

Just posted a piece of writing about AI. Hope you enjoy it. www.patreon.com/matricardo/p... #ai #writing #generativeai #creator #creative #fuckai

Shut up you lazy baby idiot | Mat Ricardo

As you may or probably don’t know, I’m about halfway through a year-long writing project. I’m writing a kind of a memoir, called TEN GIGS. E

patreon.com

I return to this Roy quote often. So good, and even an allusion to Percy Bysshe Shelley, too! ‘Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you – Ye are many – they are few.’ www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/the-mas...

so we're a couple years into the "AI revolution" and: - it's flooding the internet with slop - it's empowering scammers everywhere - it's not making money and threatens the entire US economy - it's destroying communities and guzzling water and power really cool tech we've got here