They dont make their money off consumers who like computers, they make it off rich idiots who order licences for the whole company.

One thing I don’t see a ton of people talking about is how they’re gradually killing personal computers that we own ourselves in favor of computation as a service that you rent from them - the terms of which they can dictate and are free to terminate at any time.

you will encounter more opportunities in life to change the batteries on a smoke alarm than you will to run into a burning building and no one gives a shit you changed those batteries but it is still very important and why are you waiting on a burning building, know what i’m saying, it’s a metaphor

Revolution has a thousand uncles

Hannah Vardit@hannahvardit.bsky.social · 2d ago

i worry that men think being A Good Guy is dramatically and heroically intervening on behalf of an endangered woman and then being publicly rewarded on a grand scale when actually being A Good Guy is just usually saying, “hey man that’s not funny” or “wow that’s fucked up” and there is no reward

Astute comment at the end of this that a big problem in the world of voluntary corporate accounting/standards is that it always had as a backdrop a belief that binding regulations might come in the future. And they are looking less likely. newrepublic.com/article/2157...

Did the Forestry Industry Just Get to Write Its Own Emissions Rules?

Accusations of industry capture, allegedly secret working groups, and the resignations of two researchers—a scandal is rocking the world of carbon emissions accounting.

newrepublic.com

Just cut out the middle man and have people print out their own degrees

Great job making a college degree absolutely worthless. www.yahoo.com/news/videos/...

One university in Maine is helping students get a degree in just a few months

The University of Maine at Presque Isle offers a competency-based program allowing students to move through courses at their own pace. The approach is raising questions about whether fast-tracking cou...

yahoo.com

We should let people dream of something besides labor

Unless you count people being poorer and more stressed as somehow 'transformative'.

In a world that can feel divided, here’s a beautiful reminder of what we’re capable of together. Bobby McFerrin turns a room full of strangers into a living instrument - no rehearsal, just listening. The power of music is the power of connection. 🎶❤️

Speaking as a historian with an engineering degree, I will go to the mat on this one: A FAR greater proportion of historians study engineering than the other way around, and your average historian has a much, much stronger fluency in engineering methods than engineers do historical analysis.

Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️@jgbollard.bsky.social · 3d ago

Not only should engineers study history, more historians should study engineering. Concrete is the second most used material on earth, a huge part of every economy, but there are about 10 english language academic histories of it. Is it really less important than another take on Lincoln? 🗃️

As a former pretentious little shit who grew out of it, rationalists (et al) annoy the piss out of me because they are adults with the mentality of tweens - they are somehow still convinced they are the greatest geniuses who have ever walked the earth. It is the worldview of an arrogant baby.

The psychology of doomerism is that the Doomer is the smartest boy in class because he can see the Real Problem, which obviously negates the primacy of Other Problems. For totally mysterious reasons, the Real Problem is never poverty or discrimination.

I think a lot of us were moving in a direction like this until the biggest companies in the world poured trillions of dollars into marketing plagiarism robots to our students and now many of us feel like we don't have a choice but to make students physically do the work in front of our eyes

Lee Ann Jung@leeannjung.bsky.social · 4d ago

⏲️ The most frequent IEP accommodation is extended time. What if we offered extra time to any student? If speed isn’t what we’re evaluating, extended time doesn’t change the standard. #LeadInclusion #UDL #InclusiveEd #EdLeaders #EduSky

This thread is a description of the ways in which the west deliberately smashed up the Russian economy and gave all the infrastructure and money to a small group of corrupt oligarchs, followed by this, where they say it's all a conspiracy and Russians not taking responsibility.

Ruth Deyermond@ruthdeyermond.bsky.social · 6d ago

If Russia hasn't fulfilled its historic destiny, that can't be the fault of the Russians - let alone anything to do with Putin and those around him. Instead, it must be the result of a great conspiracy against Russia. It must be the fault of the West.

Weird how countries keep being run by this same kind of person, simply because the USA assassinates anyone else who tries to do the job.

If I did not want to be blamed for the state of things, I simply would not have spent a century smashing, assassinating and pillaging my way across the globe in the single minded pursuit of the anticommunist goals of my religious fanatic leadership class.

"If Ottawa expands its authority to end lawful strikes whenever they significantly affect the economy, it will not “modernize” labour relations as the government has suggested; it will tilt the system further in favour of corporations at the expense of workers."

Canada’s proposed labour reforms could shift power away from workers in major disputes

Bill C-39 makes it easier for Ottawa to intervene when collective bargaining produces the very conflict that it is designed to manage.

theconversation.com

WILL COCAINE MAKE COLLEGE OBSOLETE?

Jeff (Hot Type) Jarvis@jeffjarvis.bsky.social · 5mo ago

WTF, NYer. "If we agree that college primarily serves a credentialling process that stamps select young people as worthy of work..." We do not. So much for the bastion of erudite journalism. This is sensationalism, damaging our most vital institution: education. www.newyorker.com/news/fault-l...

“because all social and political problems definitely have a technical solution, and usually we just need to pay for something involving AI rather than have an open discussion as a community (what a waste of time that would be!).”

Catherine D'Ignazio (she/her/ella)@kanarinka.bsky.social · 5d ago

MIT spent $3 million on 500 AI-capable surveillance cameras while laying people off, shutting down libraries, and canceling journal subscriptions. In this article, 4 faculty & I discuss our new arts initiative to celebrate surveillance and repression on college campuses: fnl.mit.edu/how-we-learn...

"china is charging their cars in less time than it takes you to fill up your F-150" is the kind of banal jingoism i always assumed would get us finally kicking it up a notch on serious infrastructure buildout but we were a lot more directly addicted to gasoline in addition to racism than i thought

Ars Technica@arstechnica.com · 6d ago

I think the "debate" about bringing iced coffee to job interviews is effective at distracting people from the really bad job market, the high unemployment rate for Black women, ongoing mass layoffs in tech and media, and how Gen Z workers are refusing to adopt many toxic aspects of corp work culture

MIT spent $3 million on 500 AI-capable surveillance cameras while laying people off, shutting down libraries, and canceling journal subscriptions. In this article, 4 faculty & I discuss our new arts initiative to celebrate surveillance and repression on college campuses: fnl.mit.edu/how-we-learn...

Having just started teaching new undergraduates at uni, I think we're missing a key issue in the debate about AI: these kids do not know how *not* to use AI, full stop. We assume they are 'digital natives' but they are not and a Google Scholar search is as alien to them as an archival card-index.

Can also personally attest that playing Taylor Swift or any other similarly aggressively litigious major label artist through a minirig works a treat.

John Bull@garius.bsky.social · 6d ago

this isn't conjecture. This is the EXACT reason why one of the quickest ways to shut down a fash with a camera is to start shouting: "this video is brought to you by SquareSpace!" INSTANT demonitization. Because the streaming/social platforms already protect their advertisers more than the state.

And the reform needs to be the elimination of single member districts:

Letter to Congress: End the Redistricting Wars by Adopting Proportional Representation

Gerrymandering persists because single-member districts allow it.

medium.com

Robert Downen@robertdownen.bsky.social · 6d ago

Wu on redistricting if Dems get control: "You do the exact same thing that they did to you until they say mercy" and agree to national, bipartisan reform.

Like - the washing machine doesn't require access to every act of clothes washing ever performed. The train doesn't need a record of every human being transporting themselves long distances. When Cooper Lund et al talk in this way they just wildly exclude the massive labour cost of LLM production

Epic.

sarah jeong@sarahjeong.bsky.social · last wk.

lol my flight got diverted because of a medical emergency and they landed us in reykjavik in the middle of the night and deplaned us and sent us through passport control and then the crew vanished and then british airways sent us links to book an overnight hotel room but for a hotel at heathrow

i will clap for all of you that are choosing to stay. for all the little stuff. fuck all this, the world is hard and we have to root for each other.