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Annie McClanahan

@anniemcc.bsky.social

Vulgar Marxist, Kentucky proud, fuck work. She/her anniemcclanahan.com

215 Posts1300 Follower581 Folgt
Lilly Irani@gleemie.bsky.social · last mo.

Mechanical Turk may be shutting down, but AI will always depend on data workers whose knowledge trains and tunes models. AI runs on extracted cultural skills and knowledge, and culture is always changing. Less the end of an era, but the end of an early prototype.

Louise Matsakis@lmatsakis.bsky.social · last mo.

Amazon is officially shutting down Mechanical Turk next month. It feels like the end of an era. I've written about the platform on and off for close to a decade. We wouldn't have the AI tools we do now if it weren't for the low-paid, largely invisible labor of MTurkers

the Mountain Goats@themountaingoats.bsky.social · 2w ago

Yo. This is the union calling for a boycott. Here in America people like to say "Well I was already boycotting Starbucks!" No you were not. You were just choosing not to buy their stuff. That is not a boycott. A boycott is an organized, collective activity. "I" don't boycott: we do.

Starbucks Workers United@sbworkersunited.org · 2w ago

We have power in numbers, and we'll continue to fight for a better Starbucks. Support us by BOYCOTTING STARBUCKS until the company finalizes fair union contracts with workers! boycottstarbucks.net

Annie McClanahan@anniemcc.bsky.social · 2w ago

This op ed was so unbelievably stupid (and frankly fucking offensive to actual rural ppl) that the reveal in his bio that he's an editor for Compact wasn't even that surprising.

@NewsJennifer (Jennifer Schulze)@newsjennifer.bsky.social · 2w ago

I see the NYT is still platforming 'dei crushed white men' bullsh*t. Here it's buried in a 'why rural themed pop culture' is so popular in a piece written by a Princeton grad who lives in New York City. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/13/o...

Today, it’s country music that — for all its commercial success — represents the underdog. As diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives accord advantages to everyone except straight white men; as globalization and an urban, knowledge-based economy have impoverished and emptied out rural communities; and as trust in institutions including higher education and the federal government declines, the culture of rural working-class whites can symbolize an unconstrained way of life that stands apart from the stifling, all-encompassing H.R. bureaucracy that everyone else lives in.
Dr Abeba Birhane@abeba.blacksky.app · 2w ago

"When a bridge collapses, you don’t analyze whether the bridge was ethical or sentient or why it decided to collapse. You ask, who built this bridge to be so flimsy? There are permits you have to acquire [& supposed] tests. When you ask about the bridge collapsing itself, you’ve lost the thread"

WIRED@wired.com · 2w ago

Timnit Gebru argues that AI companies are stoking fears of extinction to avoid discussing actual harms, like autonomous weapons. www.wired.com/story/one-of...

Mark G. Bilby@mgbilby.bsky.social · 2w ago

These AI-LMS integrations typically do not allow opt-out by students or faculty. All inputs and interactions are used as training data to build new models meant to replace faculty entirely with digital avatars. Actual human empathy & expertise to train simulations of empathy & expertise.

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks.org · 2w ago

Universities are subsidizing internal AI tools that are, from the perspective of the humanities, enabling cheating & cognitive outsourcing. The cost in resources is certainly an issue, but the fact that these tools undermine the work we ask students to do is ridiculous www.umass.edu/it/genai/pla...

Asheesh Kapur Siddique@asheeshks.org · 2w ago

Universities are subsidizing internal AI tools that are, from the perspective of the humanities, enabling cheating & cognitive outsourcing. The cost in resources is certainly an issue, but the fact that these tools undermine the work we ask students to do is ridiculous www.umass.edu/it/genai/pla...

GenAI Platform : UMass Amherst Information Technology : UMass Amherst

The UMass GenAI platform is an intuitive and user-friendly platform designed to provide the UMass community with equitable access to leading generative AI models, including OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic...

umass.edu

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 3w ago

From The Crimson editorial board: “…to encourage unfettered use of AI, especially for “writing-intensive” courses, is antithetical to promoting learning and jeopardizes the purpose of a liberal arts education.”

Don't Tell Us To Write Our Papers With AI | The Harvard Crimson

It’s still unclear how AI could be used to support academic writing without meaningfully outsourcing one’s thinking. Professors might not be able to enforce a prohibition on its use for larger take-ho...

thecrimson.com

Starbucks Workers United@sbworkersunited.org · last mo.

🚨BREAKING: Our union of over 12,000 baristas are officially calling for a Starbucks boycott. Read this statement penned by Starbucks workers on why a boycott from ALL customers, allies, and organizations is necessary to fight back against corporate greed:

BOYCOTT STARBUCKS is written inside a zig-zaggy speech bubble against crumbled paper. Beside it are the Starbucks Workers United logo and an image of a coffee cup being poured out.We, the 12,000 and growing members of Starbucks Workers United, call on everyone who stands with working people to boycott Starbucks until they finalize a contract with union baristas and stop union-busting. What we’re fighting for is simple: a minimum $17/hr wage, enough hours to live on, better staffing in our stores, and basic workplace protections. Every year, our living costs rise but our wages don’t keep up – a growing pressure many American workers are feeling as corporate greed accelerates unchecked in our country. Starbucks is banking on customers' blind loyalty to the integrity and values this company once stood for in order to keep squeezing them for profits. At a time when working-class people across the country are struggling in a challenging economy, it is no longer possible to be both a Starbucks customer and in support of workers; choosing to spend money at Starbucks is choosing a law breaking corporation over the baristas who make your coffee everyday exactly as you ask for it. Starbucks has violated U.S. labor law more than any other company in modern history–the NLRB and its judges have found that Starbucks committed hundreds of labor violations and there are currently more than 550 unresolved unfair labor practice charges still pending against the company. Instead of finalizing a fair and reasonable union contract, Starbucks has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of care for the workers who fuel the company’s profits by wasting millions of dollars on AI and technology that doesn’t work, launching countless gimmicky drinks designed to distract from real problems, and inventing pointless policies that do nothing but make our jobs harder. This ongoing, irrational behavior by Starbucks and its refusal to settle a fair union contract with workers leaves us with no other choice than to call for a boycott. We know when working people stand up together, we win. No Contract? No Coffee.