Been on vacation for past couple weeks and trying not to even think about work (failing) or being online (also failing) and replacing all that with intermittently checking to see if Jamelle Bouie has rated The Odyssey on Letterboxed yet (no such luck)

Latest Virtual Sentiments episode with AI scientist Katharine Jarmul on demystifying AI, data privacy, and open-weight models is live! open.substack.com/pub/kristenc...

Virtual Sentiments Podcast: Demystifying AI with Katharine Jarmul

My (unplanned) contribution to the latest debates on open-weight models

open.substack.com

It's fascinating that the arrival of actual AI cyber risks is turning a lot of AI folks against some of the specific safety arguments the industry was founded on nymag.com/intelligence...

It’s really cute and precious anyone thinks Hollywood would spend $250 million on a cinematic adaptation of an Ancient Greek poem and it wouldn’t conform to the norms of a summer blockbuster

It’s really good I overcommitted myself to way too many conferences this summer because y’all would not be able to handle The Odyssey thinkpiece I would have written

Airport bars are so much less fun without the World Cup and with the existential crisis of wondering whether I’m becoming a sports person

"the Weimar Republic, still the paradigmatic case of catastrophic democratic failure, had a vibrant civil society; it just so happened that its members were committed anti-democrats"

Jan-Werner Mueller@jwmueller-pu.bsky.social · 3w ago

"This wave of anticipatory obedience is all the more egregious because – just as in the debates at Yale – non-leaders might sometimes just know better."

An ominous dc view

THT covers a LOT of ground really fast. I think of the trade mission scene frequently, and of the epilogue every time I’m on an academic panel

Martin Concagh@mconcagh.bsky.social · 3w ago

An underrated bit in The Handmaid’s Tale is that the Christofascist regime is extremely anti-Catholic and has demolished Catholic Churches and murdered loads of priests and nuns

Verity Harding tells WIRED that the US government’s nationalistic attitude toward AI is evidence that a worst-case scenario is taking shape. www.wired.com/story/verity...

This Former DeepMind Exec Thinks the AI Arms Race Could End in Disaster

Verity Harding tells WIRED that the US government’s nationalistic attitude toward AI is evidence that a worst-case scenario is taking shape.

wired.com

Guy who’s boycotting Nolan’s The Odyssey but because he fervently believes Plato was right to ban Homeric poetry from the ideal city in the republic

“Cockfosters”…feels like y’all should be censoring this at this hour

real american century of humiliation hours who up

The last Belgian to dominate like this was Hercule Poirot

My very anti-sports partner in response to the fourth goal: “they’re dabbing on us, Kristen” (he was rooting for Belgium because of Trump)

If your understanding of yourself as a man is rooted in power and dominance over others, that's shitty masculinity, wherever you claim to be on the political spectrum. Shitty masculinity is antithetical to civic virtue and a functioning democratic society.

People are right to be mad about the predictable Platner fiasco, but it's worth remembering that last year a ton of establishment Democrats supported disgraced sexual harasser Andrew Cuomo against clean-as-a-whistle Zohran. Tolerating problem men is an issue across the ideological spectrum.

Being on BlueSky for the past 3 years is really funny because I remember when I was way too normie for it and then when it became more normie I felt way too weird for it and now it’s so normie it’s got Mark Hamill boomerposting (complimentary) about Taylor Swift’s wedding. What an evolution

Vint Cerf, a Father of the Internet, Retires From Google

Love that most of my feed is reactions to the Portugal v. Croatia game and then just @sharonk.bsky.social talking about catholic stuff I don’t even remotely understand

Just the essentials

Partner just casually dropped “phalanx formation” in conversation and when I was like what the fuck he was like “it’s standard Greek.” Grew up with two older brothers and still learning all the different boy talk

Pumped to share this latest Virtual Sentiments episode with @lkatfield.bsky.social perfectly timed for Independence Day weekend (and her Best Book Award win from APSA’s American Political Thought section!) Available wherever you prefer to listen to podcasts! open.substack.com/pub/kristenc...

Virtual Sentiments Podcast: Laura Field on the Making of the MAGA New Right

A perfect pairing for your Independence Day weekend road trips

open.substack.com

This is my lane. I went through the 194 Trump v Barbara opinion from yesterday section by section, noting what they got right about US migration and citizenship history, and what the dissents get wrong. Please share if you think it is helpful to others.

I Read Trump v Barbara So You Don’t Have To — Anna O. Law

As someone who took 16 years to research and write a new book, Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship , a policy and legal history, I paid keen attention to the oral arguments (April 1) ...

annaolaw.com

Pumped to share this latest Virtual Sentiments episode with @lkatfield.bsky.social perfectly timed for Independence Day weekend (and her Best Book Award win from APSA’s American Political Thought section!) Available wherever you prefer to listen to podcasts! open.substack.com/pub/kristenc...

Virtual Sentiments Podcast: Laura Field on the Making of the MAGA New Right

A perfect pairing for your Independence Day weekend road trips

open.substack.com

"It's over, right?" a journo asked me this morning about the birthright citizenship case. No. No legal or political result is final unless the losing side gives up fighting. They will try again. New prez, new judges. There's a social movement based on racial grievance + scapegoating immigrants.

I don’t want “AI” as an umbrella term (Trojan Horse) to steal the valor of human-crafted, careful models & tools that allow for experts to do their jobs better (not replace them)

Roopika Risam@roopikarisam.bsky.social · last mo.

An excellent use case for why people really need to be able to define “AI” and recognize it’s an umbrella term, not a synonym for heavyweight commercial LLMs/frontier models.

An excellent use case for why people really need to be able to define “AI” and recognize it’s an umbrella term, not a synonym for heavyweight commercial LLMs/frontier models.

Dr Naomi Scott@drnaomiscott.bsky.social · last mo.

A lot of media coverage of the ‘AI’ reading of the Herculaneum scrolls really fails to understand what’s happened here. There’s no language processing happening, the AI/ML is not trained on a corpus of texts or language. It can detect ink to see shapes. HUMAN EXPERTS are then transcribing the text.