Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 7h

Horton Hears a Sutton Hoo

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 11h

primarily geographically deceptively misdescriptive

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 1d

Wendy Carlos Williams

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 1d

Better? Worse?

bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/richmond.com...

bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 1d

Gas stations must post curb signs listing their price per gallon. Ergo, curb sign prices are meaningless, and consumers cannot rely on them as truthful.

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southpaw @nycsouthpaw.bsky.social · 1d

What an emblem of the billionaire class—descending on a peaceful city in a private jet on the horn to NYT asking for the place to be invaded by federal authorities because the rent-a-cops you employ for a week to harass a few junkies outside the convention center cost too much.

Mr. Benioff spoke as his annual Dreamforce conference is set to begin Tuesday in downtown San Francisco, bringing 50,000 visitors to the city. He is scheduled to deliver a keynote address about the benefits of "agentic enterprise," a business model in which humans and artificial intelligence bots work together.
Speaking by telephone from his private plane en route to San Francisco, he lamented that he has to pay for nundreds of off-duty law enforcement officers to help patrol the convention area and said that San Francisco needed to "re-fund" the police.
The city never actually "defunded" its police force, and San Francisco's violent crime rates are below those in many other U.S. cities.
But San Francisco has struggled to recruit and keep officers, and it still has problems with lower-level crimes and open-air drug use, especially in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin near City Hall. It has about 1,500 police officers, and Mr. Benioff says it ne → another thousand.

85 680 2.4K

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

Hamburglar Hill

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Kendra Albert @kendraserra.bsky.social · 2d

Co-signed. The positions that doj is taking are far more embarrassing to the legal profession than the table of authorities mistakes.

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

Eh.

The fact that many lawyers think it’s a mortifying and possibly career-ending mistake to file a table of contents with missing page numbers says a lot about the legal profession, none of it good.

Making a big deal out of stuff like this just perpetuates the cycle of abuse.

Bradley P. Moss @bradmossesq.bsky.social · 2d

Someone gonna get fired …. @kenwhite.bsky.social @annabower.bsky.social

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Bradley P. Moss @bradmossesq.bsky.social · 2d

Someone gonna get fired …. @kenwhite.bsky.social @annabower.bsky.social

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Federalist Society Pitchbot @fedsocpitchbot.bsky.social · 2d

William Cosby, Thomas Gage, and Other Colonial Governors as Precedents for Broad Presidential Power

by Kenton Skarin

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

I’ve known a lot of very smart mathematicians, and a lot of very nice mathematicians, and these are two groups that overlap a lot, and even among them Lauren Williams has always stood out as exceptionally smart and exceptionally nice.

news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

Lauren Williams awarded MacArthur ‘genius grant’ — Harvard Gazette

Math professor honored for theoretical breakthroughs with sometimes surprising applications across phenomena such as tsunamis, traffic.

news.harvard.edu

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Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 2d

A good quick video on why bad content drives out good, as @jtlg.bsky.social would say

youtu.be/_zfN9wnPvU0?...

AI Slop Is Destroying The Internet

YouTube video by Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell

youtu.be

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

When you **understand** your principles, you can **speak clearly** about them.

MIT as an institution has a sharply defined concept of "merit" that this letter uses to turn the tables on the administration's confused and decepive use of the idea.

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

MIT understands its mission and values.

orgchart.mit.edu/letters/rega...

Regarding the Compact | MIT Organization Chart

orgchart.mit.edu

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

MIT understands its mission and values.

orgchart.mit.edu/letters/rega...

Regarding the Compact | MIT Organization Chart

orgchart.mit.edu

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

I think the draft's principle of restraint also gets right @bretdevereaux.bsky.social's argument that public activism requires academia to spend some of the public credibility it accumulates through service. The university can speak, but it has to do so sparingly.

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acoup.blog/2022/01/21/f...

Fireside Friday, January 21, 2022 (On Public Scholarship)

Fireside this week! The Spring semester is now in full swing and – knock on wood – so far seems to be proceeding without too much in the way of disruption. I’m hoping to have part…

acoup.blog

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

My comments to the task force were heavily inspired by @jacobtlevy.bsky.social's idea of the university as a complex institution. I'm pleased to see that the draft recognizes that university subunits speak with different voices.

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bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2016/03/safe...

Safe spaces, academic freedom, and the university as a complex association - Bleeding Heart Libertarians

This is a transcript of a guest lecture I gave to a class on the philosophy of law taught by Andrew I. Cohen– who is, surprisingly enough, a whole different...

bleedingheartlibertarians.com

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

Cornell's task force on institutional voice has issued a draft set of recommendations. I think they're pretty good overall, as I told the Sun.

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Draft: provost.cornell.edu/_assets/docu...
Sun article: www.cornellsun.com/article/2025...

‘Its Principle of Restraint is a Good One’: Faculty Weigh Purpose of University Statements Following Release of Institutional Voice Task Force Report

Cornell faculty weighed in on the University’s draft report of the Presidential Task Force on the University’s Institutional Voice, highlighting its effects on campus speech.

www.cornellsun.com

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 3d

Lon Nol Ranch

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 3d

Pitt the Elder!

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 3d

That’s good, but how about “breadsticks and roses”?

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 3d

There was a time when these “assurances” were just … the law. But by blowing up law as a constraint, the Trump administration has made itself into a weaker negotiator, because it can’t make credible promises.

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 4d

Bad content drives out good.

kotaku.com/robin-willia...

Robin and Zelda Williams play on a DS together.

'You’re making disgusting, over-processed hotdogs out of the lives of human beings'

kotaku.com

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Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 4d

anyways

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Rebecca Tushnet @rtushnet.bsky.social · 4d

Feels like more execs should have read Bruce Bueno de Mesquita & Alastair Smith's The Dictator's Handbook--there is currently competition to be a preferred crony, which means both instability and less revenue extraction for businesses trying to cozy up

Ann Monster Lipton @annmlipton.bsky.social · 4d

"The invitation to the 'Future of Pharmaceuticals' summit prompted consternation among some drug-company representatives, who worried that the gathering signaled that the White House wants them to work with the little-known BlinkRx because of its ties to the president’s family"

Trump Wants to Overhaul Drug Sales. A Company Tied to His Son Stands to Benefit.

The family members of President Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick are poised to benefit from efforts to remake the pharmaceutical industry.

www.wsj.com

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Ann Monster Lipton @annmlipton.bsky.social · 4d

"The invitation to the 'Future of Pharmaceuticals' summit prompted consternation among some drug-company representatives, who worried that the gathering signaled that the White House wants them to work with the little-known BlinkRx because of its ties to the president’s family"

Trump Wants to Overhaul Drug Sales. A Company Tied to His Son Stands to Benefit.

The family members of President Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick are poised to benefit from efforts to remake the pharmaceutical industry.

www.wsj.com

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 4d

<general contractor slapping a rotting post> Well, there’s your problem right there. Whoever built this thing used Marbury v. Madison as a foundation. You’re lucky it lasted as long as it did.

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 5d

Day Two of the new Platformer format and I am really not digging it. The thing I wasn’t getting anywhere else (the curated link roundup) is gone, replaced with a thing I can get tons of other places (short takes on already widely-reposted stories).

Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 5d

Wrote about fresh signs of an AI bubble (and why the industry says the worries are mostly overblown) www.platformer.news/ai-bubble-20...

We have entered the "weird financial tricks" phase of the bubble. A reliable indicator of bubbles is that companies concoct bizarre financial instruments and accounting measures to paper over their problems. In Fortune, Allie Garfinkel reports that venture capitalists are irked at some of the creative accounting going on in their portfolios. Some startups are reporting one-time sales as "recurring revenue." Others technically show "recurring revenue" for what are essentially trials.

And that's on the tame side. For crazy, you can look to Robinhood's suggestion that it might offer "tokenized" equity in OpenAI. By "tokenized," Business Insider reports, Robinhood means "blockchain-enabled representations of securities like stocks." In reality, they have no connection to OpenAI equity whatsoever. But that doesn't mean that consumers shouldn't be able to gamble on the mirage!

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Casey Newton @caseynewton.bsky.social · 5d

Wrote about fresh signs of an AI bubble (and why the industry says the worries are mostly overblown) www.platformer.news/ai-bubble-20...

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 5d

If, hypothetically speaking, one thought that the AI boom were a bubble, what asset classes would be most insulated from it?

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