What I want to know: Is the administration intentionally daring big corporations (Scholastic in this case) to sue for copyright violations? Or are the 20-somethings running their socials so steeped in meme culture and AI slop that they don't realize this isn't (legally, let alone morally) okay?

A very positive sign that, nearly a year after Kirk's death, many if not most of the people punished for speaking truthfully about him have won legal cases against their former employees and compensation. Again, panicked compliance with Trumpism has only *cost* institutions.

This whole AI scrapers going after Cara thing is really driving home how much the mentality of these people is the same as an abuser. The lack of consent excites them. It turns them on. And that's deeply messed up and pathetic.

THE FANBASE WEEKLY Podcast@thefanbaseweekly.bsky.social · yesterday

@forbes.com: Artists Built A Site To Escape AI. Scrapers Are Coming For It Anyway www.forbes.com/sites/robsal...

new post on my #knitting blog: end-of-summer blues of the both literal and metaphorical variety.

late-august blues.

Working on a blue sweater, wearing a blue dress and necklace, and feeling kinda blue. This is the final week before my fall semester classes start. I have them almost ready to open up on Blackboard, but ooof, the process of getting there has been rough. I spent so much time last week feeling both aesthetically and pedagogically assaulted by the ugly, awful Blackboard Ultra LMS.

whitknits.wordpress.com

This is just a little too real, as the parent of a rising 9th grader is a very tech-happy public school district. And as the employee of a university where students have Google-based accounts and faculty have Outlook-based accounts. And I'm losing my mind.

Jake Grumbach@jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 2d ago

Does my head hurt right now because I’ve been crying a lot or because of barometric pressure change? (Probably both.) Have I been crying a lot because of grief/hard/sad things or because perimenopause is an asshole? (Definitely both.)

At that point in prepping for Fall Semester where my brain would rather plan out entirely new course themes (complete with ideas for assignments/readings/etc) than finish putting together everything for the current instantiation of the theme I’ve been I’ve been teaching for 16 years.

Multiple people at church today joked that I “seem to be getting shorter” (when walking next to my kid). She’s been taller than me since the beginning of the year, but I wonder how MUCH taller she is at this point? It’s so strange to be shorter than my own kid!!

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Linguist: What even is a cup, exactly

Mar Hicks@histoftech.bsky.social · 4d ago

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Historian: The cup can teach you a lot of things that you do not want to know

Optimist: cup half full Pessimist: cup half empty Linguist: This is a cup. Now there are two of them. There are two ___. 🐦🐦

Mar Hicks@histoftech.bsky.social · 4d ago

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Historian: The cup can teach you a lot of things that you do not want to know

A silly moment: kiddo wanted to show me a funny line in the book she’s reading (Ryan North’s “How to Invent Everything”)…and as she left the couch to do so she handed me her groundhog toy and said “hold my groundhog” in the exact cadence of someone saying “hold my beer” and it made me giggle!!

Harvard has truly jumped the shark: grade caps, AI clones, closing their storied Writing Center, and more. Their position as a leader in higher education is waning as they grasp for one straw after another. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/b...

Harvard Is Selling a $699 Course Taught by A.I. Clones of Its Faculty

To create a new bootcamp for entrepreneurs, Harvard Business School made A.I. avatars of its instructors.

nytimes.com

Spent this morning at the memorial for a teen who ended their life…and who was my own kid’s close friend from toddler to kindergarten, who used to crawl into my lap while my kid crawled into her mom’s lap during playdates. Such similar kids, in SO many ways…my heart aches for my friend, her mom.

This absolutely comports with the reflections my students (in a class about how “AI” is affecting writing) wrote and the discussions we had following the “friction-maxxing” assignment I gave them (spend a day seeking rather than avoiding friction, write by hand about the experience)

gamera obscura@ohrobin.bsky.social · 5d ago

Much of what we call “convenience” is just the elimination of contact. Why ask when you can Google, why go somewhere to meet people when you can swipe, why call when you can click? The friction we’re engineering out of life is also where an enormous amount of life happens. What are we without it?

Much of what we call “convenience” is just the elimination of contact. Why ask when you can Google, why go somewhere to meet people when you can swipe, why call when you can click? The friction we’re engineering out of life is also where an enormous amount of life happens. What are we without it?

Coach Finstock@coachfinstock.bsky.social · 5d ago

If you want to be even more basic, tech that used to connect us is now trying to stop us from talking to other people. Taking gambling out of the sportsbook, taking dating out of the bars/clubs/gyms/wherever people meet, replacing friends with chatbots. It's solely transactional now.

Zero sociology awards from the NSF. It's effectively gone. (Including, but not limited, to the ASA Dissertation awards.)

Dan Garisto@dangaristo.bsky.social · 5d ago

Finally, this has gone a bit under the radar, so I want to highlight it: The social, behavioral and economic sciences directorate (SBE) has simply ceased to deliver grants to many of its subareas. Any topic not specifically OK'd by the Trump administration is receiving zero new awards.

Winding down after giving a remote keynote talk for a group of writing instructors out in California who requested a reprise of the talk I gave at what was maybe the very last CCCCs earlier this year (on teaching writing students how to think about cognitive load). T'was fun but now I'm tired!!

to recap: so Hong got 40% in Wisconsin which shows voters decisively rejected democratic socialism, but Fishback 10% in Florida, so the far-right is winning.

I *really* hope I don’t have to deal with any students wearing these in my classes this semester.

Maggie Harrison Dupré@mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 6d ago

NEW: Teen boys are using smart glasses — mainly Meta's AI Glasses — to film themselves harassing classmates at school, following girls around and "rizzing" them or "ragebaiting" them w/ insults. In several videos we reviewed, girls plead w/ the poster to stop filming. futurism.com/artificial-i...

wow who could have anticipated Meta’s pervert glasses would be used to ruthlessly harass women and girls, except for literally everyone smarter than paste

Maggie Harrison Dupré@mharrisondupre.bsky.social · 6d ago

NEW: Teen boys are using smart glasses — mainly Meta's AI Glasses — to film themselves harassing classmates at school, following girls around and "rizzing" them or "ragebaiting" them w/ insults. In several videos we reviewed, girls plead w/ the poster to stop filming. futurism.com/artificial-i...

Another day of feeling both aesthetically and pedagogically assaulted by the ugly Blackboard Ultra LMS. One class fully built out, one halfway there, one not yet even started. So much clicking to accomplish every goddamned thing, so many kludgey workarounds for contract grading, peer review, etc.

between ‘autism/ADHD isn’t real,’ ‘postpartum depression isn’t real,’ and ‘being transgender/nonbinary isn’t real,’ it’s impossible not to see the outline of the overarching strategy: the systematic erasure of every modern moral obligation of compassion and justice. This is just where it starts.

"By writing, you are literally firing up your brain and therefore stirring up your conscious thoughts and something new emerges. You are not, or at least not always, transcribing something already present in your conscious thoughts.“ LOVE this piece. www.historians.org/perspectives...

How Writing Leads to Thinking (and Not the Other Way Around) – AHA

Writing is stressful. Sitting in my computer chair my neck and shoulder muscles almost immediately tense up as I dig around in my brain for the best phrase or even any coherent string of words.

historians.org

In the Renaissance people theorized, since the Aeneid is great, if you wrote poems made only of words & phrases from the Aeneid rearranged they should be great too, since a great source regurgitated should yield greatness. They produced NOTHING we still read. Thinking about that a lot lately.

I end up in such a bad mood on days where I’m doing a lot of set-up on Blackboard Ultra. I hate it so much. It’s so fucking UGLY!! Just…beige, low-contrast, everything’s hidden under dropdowns and requires too many clicks, the default font is way too tiny. Ugly and hard to use!!

What’s funny to me is that I genuinely assumed that the implication was that she was basically a 1x1 health aide who helps him with like, toileting! Not that I’d expect the right to run with THAT implication, but it’s interesting they’re all assuming the implication was “affair”!

Nathaniel William Horadam@horadam.bsky.social · 7d ago

How dare someone insinuate a powerful married man has an inappropriate relationship with one of his staffers

Kicking myself for accepting a Tuesday meeting time for my once per week class, because we have a "Fall Break" that eats up one Monday and Tuesday, which are "made up" by the Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving...when it's hard to get ANY students to attend!

Hey, guys, when the librarians get pissed about the destruction of books, it’s time to put those listening ears on. Because we are very comfortable with the idea that books are tools that can be retired. What’s happening right now is not that.

This thread is a delight, and it's also reminding me of the story my dad tells of how when he introduced me to the "goat, wolf, cabbage" logic problem as a little kid, I solved it, then said "who would actually go through all that trouble for a *head of cabbage*?"

Daniel Solis@danielsolis.bsky.social · 4w ago

There are two wolves. One always lies. One controls the lever of trolley track. They're in a state of superposition inside a box. On the trolley are infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters going to an infinite hotel. The trolley must first travel halfway, but before that a quarterway, and so on...

There are two wolves. One always lies. One controls the lever of trolley track. They're in a state of superposition inside a box. On the trolley are infinite monkeys at infinite typewriters going to an infinite hotel. The trolley must first travel halfway, but before that a quarterway, and so on...