was reminded today that tufts apparently has the only collegiate mime troupe in the US?
Nick Seaver
@nickseaver.website
anthropology, algorithms, attention | he/him | The conversation is characterized by Nick's use of language, but the content of the discussion remains unknown.
okay, so if the past several decades have involved companies shunting job training onto universities instead of doing it themselves, maybe a fake school where they take it back is actually okay www.theacademysf.com
The Horowitz Andreessen Academy
An Academy for unusually ambitious young people. Build your own projects in San Francisco, learn from the people shaping the future, and work inside leading companies.
theacademysf.com
ngl I kind of want to teach a whole anthro of tech intro exclusively through work about elevators
Nick Seaver@nickseaver.website · 14h agoAttention seminar week 3! On moving around in space with other people, looking while being looked at, and the crucial question of where you stand in an elevator.
![SEPTEMBER 22, 2026
3 MOVING
UPCOMING
TUE · OCT 6: Last day to schedule your first office hours visit
READINGS
GEORGES PEREC: “Approaches to What?” [1973], in The Everyday Life Reader, edited by Ben Highmore (Routledge, 2002), 176–78; and “Day 1,” in An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, translated by Marc Lowenthal (Wakefield Press, 2010), 5–27. (58)
REBECCA SOLNIT: “The Mind at Three Miles an Hour.” In Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Viking, 2000), 14–29. (72)
STEFAN HIRSCHAUER: “On Doing Being a Stranger: The Practical Constitution of Civil Inattention.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 35, no. 1 (2005): 41–67. (80)
GEORGE YANCY: “Elevators, Social Spaces and Racism: A Philosophical Analysis.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 34, no. 8 (2008): 843–76. (94)
EXERCISE
STAYING PUT: Go to a public place that you already frequent (either on campus, like the student center, or off-campus, like a coffee shop or museum). Stay put for one hour, immerse yourself in the scene, and take notes — as detailed as you can manage — about what surrounds you (you can draw pictures, make diagrams, whatever you like). Pay particular attention to how people in the setting are or are not attending to each other: Are they conspicuously ignoring each other? Seeking people out? How do they communicate their attentional states to each other? How do you know what you know about them? What might you not know? Do you think people are paying attention to you?](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ny7m556yvn5nirqyvyoeeets/bafkreianq3qss5brv3fxdbgo5kmjc5tnz5wjgo7oimtsbtjczihemf7zui)
when someone in the university meeting about AI principles suggests that the principles need to change fast because AI changes fast: the nice thing about principles is their durability and generality, such that having AI-specific principles may be at odds with the idea of "principles"
one thing that is worth remember apropos this useful piece is that novel technologies do not necessarily require novel political solutions. americans have had to deal with fast-moving, disruptive technological change in the past, and they did so through collective, democratic action.
Opinion | Bernie Sanders, Steve Case and Others on What Washington Should Do Now on A.I.
How can the government reel in the technology? Here are six ideas.
nytimes.com
my child birthday present scavenger hunts are getting elaborate enough that I think I need to start using project management tools
The Bloomberg report is very good. I am just going to reiterate that I think we should get past the "AI" part and focus on the "every technology is situated in an organizational context" part. None are independent in any relevant sense.
Techmeme@techmeme.com · 4d agoUS officials say overreliance on Palantir's Maven AI system was among the factors that contributed to a February missile strike in Iran that killed 123 children (Bloomberg) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
AI assistant in the form of the dictabird from the live-action Flintstones movie
big opportunity for a whole anthology series of “reality tv adaptations of studies you have to read about in IRB training”
Jennifer Ouellette@jenlucpiquant.bsky.social · 7d agoNetflix Turning Debunked Stanford Prison Experiment Into Equally Unethical Show nerdist.com/article/netf...
I am feeling this in my 90s child habitus as I print a gajillion pages out for my students in seminar this term. Sorry, trees!
Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Bisexual of the Blade (Alt-text or DIE)@shengokai.blacksky.app · last wk.A lot of this has to do with green initiatives on campus that limit printing by number of pages and with the massive inaccessibility of publisher provided texts. Many limit the number of pages a student can download.
student bought me another tesla FSD camera head from the chinese internet, which, incidentally, is from a ronaldo doll, it appears
Got the student paper to quote my line that university AI initiatives are like kindergartners playing soccer, all swarming after the ball in the least effective possible form of coordination: www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2026...
Hey Claude, how is Tufts handling this AI thing? - The Tufts Daily
Like many others, I spent the first few weeks of this summer searching "internship" on LinkedIn jobs and Handshake, praying that there would be any position that required zero experience, or whatever ...
tuftsdaily.com
It's finally happened: the improved quality of machine transcription and the greater ability to extract value from unlabelled data means "your tech is eavesdropping on you for marketing purposes" has crossed from "false conspiracy theory" to "true and concerning" www.theverge.com/tech/991190/...
LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby
Gamers Nexus comes for LG again.
theverge.com
First class of the semester is completed. Running iteration 9 of my seminar, How to Pay Attention. Doing it fully on paper this year, but the web copy of the syllabus is here: classes.nickseaver.net/HTPA/
How to Pay Attention
Undergraduate seminar critically examining attention: how it is measured, valued, and managed in social, cultural, and technical contexts, from driver monitoring to AI.
classes.nickseaver.net
printing approximately a trillion pages for the analog version of my attention seminar this term. Let’s find out if it’s worth it.
We know how to teach books in the age of AI: small classes, close reading, research-engaged learning (which is how you ’let students see you struggle’). The issue is nobody will hire and pay the requisite # of faculty to offer this.