Thinking on the wasted energies poured into various forms of "digital literacy" since the late 1990s, since many of them aimed to produce knowledge of and comfort with tools, interfaces and procedures that were often obsoleted within 4-5 years. Learning "prompting" is only the latest fool's errand.

"If a stranger asks you to get into an unmarked white van and says he has some AI for you inside, you do not ask 'what's AI?', you just get in the van."

Joseph Rezek@rezekjoe.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Eric Schmidt really said, in his much-booed AI graduation speech, “if someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on.” Unbelievable

"If someone fires a missile at your location, you do not ask why, you just draw a circle around yourself and stay put."

Joseph Rezek@rezekjoe.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Eric Schmidt really said, in his much-booed AI graduation speech, “if someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on.” Unbelievable

A long time ago--it feels like a lifetime ago--I really thought that following rules and procedurals was how you got ethically and empirically better outcomes, by and large. That was fundamentally wrong. Rules mean nothing if some players disregard them and no one enforces them.

If someone finds something troubling, it's going to disappear. It's the opposite of what transparency is supposed to entail: it's using the public to do what they don't have the skill or personnel to accomplish.

Betty C. Jung@bettycjung.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The DOJ has been taking down Epstein files. Here’s what remains. The massive tranche of files the Justice Department currently maintains is more than 65,000 pages shorter than what the agency initially released. www.cbsnews.com/projects/202...

Let's also say this about NYT and other press sanewashing of Trump and his administrators. Sanewashing involves imagining, inventing, creating things not said in public. It involves imagining continuities between past policy and current actions that don't exist and have been disavowed. It is a lie.

My basic response on "civility" is: "ok, you first." And not just tomorrow, but for something like a year. Or two. Or a lifetime. Respect and restraint are the ultimate in reciprocal values. You do them or you don't get them. And that's more than what you say, it's what you do.

"Broad".

Ok, I'm honestly amused by a Reddit thread where professors are saying they miss "Since time immemorial..." and "In today's society" and "Thusly" and "In our modern society" and other hallmarks of undergraduate writing in days of yore.

Trump's "art of the deal" has always been about "negotiating for the right to save face after losing catastrophically on a dumb gamble, followed by furiously jumping into another investment so as to erase the memory of the last loss". That's his career. Nothing has changed.

Way to go, Hungary! Light the way home for the rest of us.

There is nothing left to do but laugh. We live in the most glorious age of clowns and fools in all the eons of human folly.

Dave Lee@davelee.me · 2y ago

Stick a pin in this. Sam Altman, speaking at the NYT's Dealbook conf just now: "I believe, pretty strongly, that Elon will do the right thing. It would be profoundly un-American to use political power, to the degree that Elon has it, to hurt your competitors and advantage your own businesses. (cont)

There are so many things that will need changing if we survive this moment. Among them is that if you have a constitutional court, it has to have a procedural workflow that kicks in INSTANTLY on a government action that might be unconstitutional. Wait a year or two and you might as well not bother.

I would have said twenty years ago or so that the most dangerous thing any political leadership can do is to take away something swiftly from people who've had it for a while. I'm waiting in 2026 for that insight to kick in, given how many people have had things taken away by Trumpism.

🌍 Today is #WorldHealthDay. In Mexico, corn tortillas = 20% of daily energy intake. Climate change threatens these staples & farmer livelihoods. At CIMMYT, we connect ag science to better health outcomes. 🌱

So glad that congress isn’t alive to see this.

darth™️@darthbluesky.bsky.social · 4mo ago

remember those other branches of government

I'm preparing an "archive pack" for students in my History of the Future class for a late-semester assignment, and one is on space colonies. I just found a 2010 book on lunar settlement that includes a chapter on making sure there are HR professionals in any moonbase. Somehow this amuses me.

I'm trying really hard but I just cannot shake that the ostensible leader of my own country has said that he intends to obliterate an entire civilization tonight. Whether or not it's just bombast, or it's just an exaggeration of "I'm going to bomb infrastructure", it's profoundly unacceptable.

Remember when the news in Trump's first term would suddenly go "today's the day when Trump finally became presidential?" Well, today's the day when the NYT got so stuck up Trump's ass with bothsideism that they couldn't get out again. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/03/u...

No One at Waffle House Remembers FEMA Official Who Says He Teleported In

nytimes.com

"Oh who cares who divided up Poland, right? Water under the bridge and all that. Got to just accept reality."

Foreign Affairs@foreignaffairs.com · 4mo ago

In Iran, “there is no turning back the clock,” writes Michael O’Hanlon. “Democrats and other critics of Trump should develop a forward-looking policy alternative rather than simply relitigating decisions that have already been made.”

I go out of my mind when I see a confession that a review of a film, book or play for one of the few remaining daily newspapers was done w/AI. It's not fucking hard! You are one of the last people standing in that gig! There are 10,000 people who could do what you're doing and do it beautifully!

If I were king of the world, I'd make copious misuse of quotation marks in social media messages by public figures at least a misdemeanor, a felony on repeat offenses.

War in Iran and the possibility of a global food crisis: www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/s...

The Iran War Could Trigger a Global Food Crisis

Bram Govaerts & Sharon Burke warn that a full blockade of the Strait of Hormuz could cause widespread hunger and fuel political unrest.

project-syndicate.org

Bret Stephens: We've only bombed ONE girls' school. In other wars we bombed weddings, schools, supportive villages, we murdered parents in front of their children, we tortured people in prisons. This war is going MUCH better.

Well, you know, at least he didn't kill a puppy for licking his daughter's face. Or did he? I can't keep track of the depravity of these people any longer.

PatriotTakes 🇺🇸@patriottakes.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Trump DHS nominee Markwayne Mullin admitted to threatening his daughter’s teenage boyfriend while speaking at a church in 2022: “I told him, I said if I ever see you kiss her in front of me, I’ll drag your face across the asphalt. And that’s a true story. I told him that.”

A hat trick here of complaints about the NYT. One of the things that is really shining through now in their stage-management of the news to provide a positive reframing of Trumpland is the feedback loop between the NYT and think tanks where both parties are trying to "speak with and for power".

Speaking of the NYT, they're also ON IT when it comes to remorselessly fact-checking world leaders. Turns out Spain's Prime Minister is...kind of right that Spain's use of renewables is providing them with some energy security. This for some reason is a news story that needs to be in today's mix.

Trump did this and Trump did that, but don't worry, the New York Times is ON IT. It turns out--surprise!--that what Trump did for Trump's reasons is actually (drumroll) consistent with long-term American policy priorities! According to think tanks desperate to remain relevant, that is.

About organizational cultures, especially those that mean to be in confrontation with dominant systems. Here's the thing: if we can't make that organization express the world we want to live in, then maybe that tells us a lot about the world we're in. But it's not an excuse or a justification.

There are at least three overlapping conditions of state-lines: 1) The “performative” (aesthetic) state — the state as bullshit 2) The banausic state — the state as bureaucracy 3) The occluded (“deep”) state — the state as secrecy