Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 2h

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness

chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 2h

So OpenAI is going to make a social network… or a pornbot … or a browser…. Seems like a really focused company with a good sense of its place in the market and not a meme-like bubble stock for sure.

chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 2h

Up next… I’m betting an OpenAI gambling app. Or maybe a dating app integrated with the pornbot.

chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 2h

So OpenAI is going to make a social network… or a pornbot … or a browser…. Seems like a really focused company with a good sense of its place in the market and not a meme-like bubble stock for sure.

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chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 6h

This is not to discount all other forms of work and resistance in favor of mass protest. But it is to say that it is a reactionary impulse to downplay mass protest.

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chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 6h

This chapter in The Red Years and Nagasaki’s Phenomenology of Politics serve as a good reminder of the importance of collective action in the formation of new political possibilities. The movement is made in the streets.

Title page of Yoshihiko Ichida’s “The Ethics of the Agitator”. Includes long quotes from Mario Toronto, Louis Althusser, and Nagasaki Hiroshi.

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chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 7h

I split my time between Knoxville and San Diego, and the Fall is the one time of the year where Knoxville maybe has a weather edge. Of course, it's brief. The light in both places is so beautiful on clear days right now too.

chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 7h

Finally, East Tennessee has hit the part of the year with my favorite temperature band -- mid 40s at night, and mid 60s in the day. I'm probably not exaggerating when I say part of the reason I feel in love with and became a historian of Quito is that same set of temperatures.

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chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 1d

If only planes ✈️ were treated by everyone like the quiet car on Amtrak… the world would be a better place.

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chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 1d

The pesky faculty seem to believe they have an obligation to at least try to teach people to think. Always in the way. techcrunch.com/2025/10/20/t...

The man betting everything on AI and Bill Belichick | TechCrunch

UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts is making big bets on AI and Bill Belichick, and he sounds like a Silicon Valley CEO while doing it.

techcrunch.com

chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 6d

Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction…

chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 7d

So what has done more damage to Joe Rogan’s brain— weed, lead, anabolics, human growth hormone, the internet?

paris martineau @paris.nyc · 7d

my latest investigation for @consumerreports.org is based on months of reporting and 60+ lab tests of leading protein supplements

we found that most protein powders and shakes have more lead in one serving than our experts say is safe to have in a day (🧵)

www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein...

Protein Powders and Shakes Contain High Levels of Lead - Consumer Reports

CR tests of 23 popular protein powders and shakes found that most contain high levels of lead.

www.consumerreports.org

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chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 8d

Today’s plane read.

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chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 8d

The problem with predictive text is that meaning always comes at the end of the sentence, retroactively.

chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 11d

In addition to this danger... one of the LLM's most insidious effects its the ease with which it appears to offer users an escape from freedom, an escape from the burdens of freedom.

chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 11d

Everything about this article misses the actual danger of AI... which is redefining what it can do as intelligence and forfeiting our own humanness out of some psychoanalytically fucked up relationship to machines. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/o...

Opinion | The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World

www.nytimes.com

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chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 11d

Witt's AI is the functional equivalent of the Satanic panic's demons. Not real, but the fantasy creates devastating real world effects.

chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 11d

And if you read Stephen Witt's replies in the comments, you can clearly see he's already fallen for it. He is the danger.

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chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 11d

Everything about this article misses the actual danger of AI... which is redefining what it can do as intelligence and forfeiting our own humanness out of some psychoanalytically fucked up relationship to machines. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/o...

Opinion | The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World

www.nytimes.com

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chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 14d

Are law school professors and lawyers going through the kind of emotionally painful deconstruction we usually associate with ex-evangelicals, as SCOTUS and the administration repeatedly violates sacred assumptions about The Law?

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Reposted by chad black 💚

Elizabeth Lopatto @lopatto.bsky.social · 14d

please read my memo www.theverge.com/business/793...

Memo to Bari Weiss Re: CBS News: You’re doomed

Bari Weiss has sold her company, The Free Press, to manage the decline of broadcast news at CBS. How many ways can it go wrong?

www.theverge.com

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chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 14d

This, but for me it's specifically cream cheese icing.

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Reposted by chad black 💚

Religious Studies at the University of Minnesota @umn-rels.bsky.social · 18d

We want to highlight the release of Katharine Gerbner's groundbreaking book, Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica. Duke University Press, 2025.

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chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 21d

Pete Hegseth is exhibit A that defense against symbolic castration does nothing but expose castration.

chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 22d

It’s this kind of thing that is a reminder that the designers behind proquest’s UI have clearly never done original academic research or taught using books.

Christopher Pittard @christopherpittard.bsky.social · 22d

Trying to look at a book on ProQuest Ebook Central, and this is how it's being presented. Zooming in just makes the mess bigger. How is this usable?

A screenshot of ProQuest Ebooks, showing squashed and truncated pages.

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chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 27d

There’s also BJJ -> Bolsonarismo in a broader scale.

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Reposted by chad black 💚

chad black 💚 @chadblack.bsky.social · 28d

Apropos of literally nothing. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlao...

Let The Mystery Be - Iris DeMent H.Q.

YouTube video by tomtscotland

www.youtube.com

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