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Zohran Kwame Mamdani @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social · 5h

An important message to the people of New York City.

More information at zohranfornyc.com/birthday

Hari @haritellastory.bsky.social · 1d

Same -- came to the comments to chime in about devil's advocates. All the time, someone says "Just playing devil's advocate..." and says just awful stuff. My response so far has been to say: "Why does the devil need more advocates?"

Hari @haritellastory.bsky.social · 1d

They sure did!! So much so that the newest ChatGPT-5 scores, wait a minute... WORSE than GPT-4o on a test of how it responds to harmful prompts. @theguardian.com played it well on their website, putting these two stories right next to each other: www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

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Hari @haritellastory.bsky.social · 3d

For those with the delusional magical thinking of "Here's how we can make AI datacenters more energy efficient -- we'll just power them with small nuclear reactors!" 7 reasons why nuclear power is useless, being more expensive, more dangerous, and more environmentally ruinous than renewables.

Mark Z. Jacobson @mzjacobson.bsky.social · 4d

Seven reasons why new small and large nuclear is useless, explained in 90 seconds

www.youtube.com/shorts/EKszV...

and all the details
web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/j...

7 reasons why new small & large nuclear is useless #nuclear #renewables #solar #wind #energy

YouTube video by Mark Z. Jacobson

www.youtube.com

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Zohran Kwame Mamdani @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social · 7d

"On Wednesday, Mr. Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, rode the full route of the M57, a crosstown bus that traverses Midtown Manhattan and is one of the city’s slowest, to remind New Yorkers that he wanted to speed up their commutes."

Mamdani Rides Slow Bus to ‘Fast and Free’ Buses Event

www.nytimes.com

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Zohran Kwame Mamdani @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social · 8d

I'm on the slowest bus line in the city with the slowest buses in the nation to talk to New Yorkers about what it would mean for their lives if we made them fast and free.

Zohran sits on a bus talking to a rider sitting behind him.

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Kat Abughazaleh @katmabu.bsky.social · 10d

We can’t out-Republican Republicans, nor should we want to.

Democrats need to say what they believe — and actually believe in something.
@mehdirhasan.bsky.social

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Hari @haritellastory.bsky.social · 10d

Oh this is a *deep* nerd cut.... My fingers followed muscle memory to type out gcc --version, because I chuckled and then was like "wait, what version *do* I have..." And I'm not on Linux. This is kind of like those recurring dreams where you have to go back to high school to finish a math exam.

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Don House @donniemarvelous.bsky.social · 16d

David Cross folks.

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Alex Hanna-ween @alexhanna.bsky.social · 16d

Spending $1M of your $5M seed funding on spamming the subway is a smart investment that none of your investors will see as stupid as hell

www.adweek.com/brand-market...

AI Startup Friend Bets On Foes With $1M NYC Subway Campaign

Some subway riders have defaced the posters with phrases like ‘surveillance capitalism,’ ‘stop profiting off loneliness,’ and ‘AI trash.’

www.adweek.com

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 17d

Today!

Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 20d

Ever get the sense that AI boosters seem to take all the wrong lessons from speculative fiction?

Join us for the next Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 live stream, in which @alexhanna.bsky.social & I get to dig into all of that with @reveleth.com‬

Mon, Sept 29, noon Pacific
twitch.tv/dair_institute

Twitch

Twitch is the world

twitch.tv

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JazzReads📚 @jazzreads.bsky.social · 18d

So exhausting..

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 19d

Coming up in Seattle (and live streaming). Registration:

www.washington.edu/lectures/eve...

w/@alexhanna.bsky.social

Graphic advertising up coming talk
10.21.25
The Graduate School
Office of Public Lectures
University of Washington

The AI Con
How to fight big tech's hype and create the future we want

Emily M. Bender
Professor of Linguistics UW
Alex Hanna
Director of Research, Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR)

Graphics include photos of Alex and Emily (jacket photos from the book). Alex is wearing hoop earrings and a black shirt and has her arms crossed. Emily is wearing glasses and small drop earrings and a blue/green patterned shirt. Both are faintly smiling and looking straight at the camera.

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 18d

Join us tomorrow!

Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 20d

Ever get the sense that AI boosters seem to take all the wrong lessons from speculative fiction?

Join us for the next Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 live stream, in which @alexhanna.bsky.social & I get to dig into all of that with @reveleth.com‬

Mon, Sept 29, noon Pacific
twitch.tv/dair_institute

Twitch

Twitch is the world

twitch.tv

5 15

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Dr Ian McCormick @wokestudies.bsky.social · 19d

New composition: Autumn Leaves.

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 21d

Just got a query from someone I don't know asking to collaborate with me, based on a fake paper, the details of which I'm guessing were extruded from some LLM or other.

>>

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Hari @haritellastory.bsky.social · 21d

Thought of you when I saw this, a good article from The Verge reviewing all the neat and affordable mechanical keyboards available these days: www.theverge.com/tech/783024/...

We’re living in a golden age of affordable mechanical keyboards

All these boards are bangers.

www.theverge.com

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Chris Sprigman @cjsprigman.bsky.social · 21d

Worth reading on civility, which quite often is a vice masquerading as a virtue. The Dems' reflexive attachment to civility ("when they go low we go high") is one of their major problems. One-sided civility is debilitating. 1/ www.nytimes.com/2025/09/24/o...

Opinion | Civility Is a Fantasy

www.nytimes.com

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Hari @haritellastory.bsky.social · 22d

Was it the X3000 or the X4000 series? A good way to tell is if the black hole generates on the outside versus the inside of the reactor fabric casing. Also, are they throwing in the cooling stack for free? If so, they're probably going to charge you a monthly subscription for the water filter.

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Zohran Kwame Mamdani @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social · 24d

Shanah Tovah, New York City. Here's to a sweet and hopeful New Year.

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Briar in Blue @auroraworeblue.bsky.social · 25d

You guys, so many Romance girlies are reading "On Tyranny" that they've broken the Goodreads recommendations algorithm. 10/10; no notes.
#romancelandia

A grainy screenshot of the sidebar of the desktop version of Goodreads. It says:

RECOMMENDATIONS:
Because you enjoyed A Wedding to Protect Her Fortune:
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder
A historian of fascism offers a guide for surviving and resisting America's turn towards authoritarianism. On November 9th, millions of Americans woke up to the impossible...

View all books similar to A Wedding to Protect Her Fortune

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 26d

Hey @mayorofseattle.bsky.social the way to be a "leader" in "AI" is to not fall for the bullshit. It's super disappointing to see all of these city documents based on wishful thinking that talk about "AI" without defining it.

www.theurbanist.org/2025/09/18/h...

Harrell Pledges Seattle Will Be AI Leader, Plan Fuzzy on Details » The Urbanist

# Last week, Mayor Bruce Harrell announced the City’s new AI Plan, which looks to harness the current artificial intelligence boom in the tech sector by integrating AI into the City’s operations, publ...

www.theurbanist.org

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Hari @haritellastory.bsky.social · 25d

Can't go wrong with an IBM Model M, lovingly restored by ClickyKeyboards: www.clickykeyboards.com

It's great, but noisy, so don't get one if you need something quieter that won't be intrusive during work calls or won't wake up your kids/spouse in the other half of the house.

ClickyKeyboards

Specializing in the restoration and collection of model M keyboards

www.clickykeyboards.com

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Hari @haritellastory.bsky.social · 25d

There's a LOT more to the story than even just the epicness of what's been reported -- a tale of deep friendship gone sour, of two businesses taking a chance on a dream that needed each other to really have a shot, of two families that grew close before it went haywire: fortune.com/2024/01/30/s...

What really caused the sriracha shortage? 2 friends and the epic breakup that left millions without their favorite hot sauce | Fortune

Sauce-maker David Tran and farmer Craig Underwood came together from different worlds to create an American icon. After 28 years, it fell apart in one day.

fortune.com

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