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Praba Pilar @pilarva.bsky.social · 2d

Where we're at with #AI now, the #enshittified slop phase, with Peter Thiel rambling incoherently about his buddies the Anti-Christs, just more and more epistemic pathogenic #tech boy feces, #artifecalintelligence and #artifecallogics. From my latest talk on Desludging AI.

Slide from a talk by Praba Pilar. The blurry background shows a hand over a face during a conversation with AI chatbot Tamalit. On the left are the following words, in bright orange: "hyperFECALreal, epistemic shit, industry excreta, pathogenic tech boy feces, rhetorical E. coli, cultural waste, caca overflow, repression, mental enteritis, rectal LLMs, cognitive shitstorms, artifecal logics, anal terror, necropolitics, shitty black swans, demon hauntings, political repression, clogged flows, enshittified fascist populists, vulnerable population transmission, inadequate waste disposal structure." On the right side, the following words in a light orange, with a line through it: "revulsion, reproduction & death, anguish, disgust, withdrawal."

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 2d

Solipsism as a service. www.wsj.com/tech/persona...

With Sora, you can do exactly that, in 10-second increments. Soon, your phone might be filled with hundreds of fond memories of things that never happened and places you never went, moments you can sit back and “relive” when there’s nobody else around except your AI pals.

Generative AI already has the power to put us in little boxes, isolated from one another. Why wait for a friend to answer your text when ChatGPT will cheerfully answer right away? Why go through the trouble of making a new friend when you can turn to digital companions embedded in apps like Instagram or X?
These new forms of entertainment are becoming the lake to our Narcissus: You can gaze into your phone and see yourself staring back, having all kinds of thrills, spills and chills.

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Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social · 3d

theonion.com/ice-raids-my...

MYTH: ICE agents lack proper training.

FACT: Most have been racists their entire lives.

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Indivisible ❌👑 @indivisible.org · 3d

“No, Speaker Johnson — the No Kings rally on October 18 is not a hate America rally. In fact, it’s quite the contrary: It’s a love America rally.” #NoKings

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Mark Bray @mark-bray.bsky.social · 15d

I teach a history of antifascism course @ruhistorydept.bsky.social and figured I'd start an ongoing thread this semester to share some insights from course readings and recommend some great works on antifascism.

🧵

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Iris van Rooij 💭 @irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 10d

🌟 New preprint 🌟, by @olivia.science and me:

📝 Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025). *Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists*. doi.org/10.31234/osf...

🧪

Table 1

Core reasoning issues (first column), which we name after the relevant numbered section, are characterised using a plausible quote. In the second column are responses per row; also see the named section for further reading, context, and explanations.

See paper for full details: ** Guest, O., & van Rooij, I. (2025, October 4). Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/dkrgj_v1

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Praba Pilar @pilarva.bsky.social · 6d

Yes, there are anti fascists all over the world, throughout history, you fucking unhinged, insecure wannabe dictator and convicted felon.

The Tennessee Holler @thetnholler.bsky.social · 6d

GOV. PRITZKER: “This is a convicted felon threatening to jail me? He’s an unhinged, insecure wannabe dictator. Come and get me.”

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EL PAÍS América Colombia @elpaisamericaco.bsky.social · 7d

🌎🇵🇸📸 FOTOS | Las manifestaciones convocadas en apoyo a Palestina y contra el Gobierno de Israel se extienden a Bogotá, Ciudad de México, Santiago, Caracas y Buenos Aires dozz.es/z24rn18

Las protestas en Latinoamérica contra la masacre en Gaza, en imágenes

Las manifestaciones convocadas en apoyo a Palestina y contra el Gobierno de Israel se extienden a Bogotá, Ciudad de México, Santiago, Caracas y Buenos Aires

dozz.es

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Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie @audrelawdamercy.bsky.social · 14d

reposting this (an excerpt from the district court's opinion in AAUP v. Rubio, a case about the government targeting noncitizen students and faculty for their pro-Palestine advocacy) w alt-text !

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

"I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected.
Is he correct?"

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Roxane Gay @roxanegay.bsky.social · 15d

If any other president in all of history said the military should use American cities as a training ground he would be removed from office that same day. The hardest thing to tolerate in all this is how relatively silent elected democrats are. It’s ridiculous.

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Eric Johnson @erictjohnson.bsky.social · 15d

Can't say I'm surprised

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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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Brendan Nyhan @brendannyhan.bsky.social · Sep 8

Chaired law professor at NYU its.law.nyu.edu/facultyprofi...

When people who've devoted their careers to the law start talking like this...

Chris Sprigman @cjsprigman.bsky.social · Sep 8

If I were a Democrat in Congress I'd be introducing legislation to suspend the Supreme Court's upcoming term (it's happened before, in 1802). The suspension would be to give us time to figure out what to do with this dangerous, anti-democratic institution.

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Julia Serano @juliaserano.bsky.social · Aug 29

claims that trans ppl are especially susceptible to Nazi propaganda & that we're prone to becoming mass shooters are making same mistake. there is zero evidence for either. but when "rare" ppl engage in "rare" behaviors, we incorrectly presume there must be a connection
bsky.app/profile/juli...

Julia Serano @juliaserano.bsky.social · Aug 27

unrelated to current events, I've spent much of the last week reading & writing about the social cognition phenomenon of "illusory correlation" – this is the abstract from one of the first studies to describe it (many subsequent studies support it). sharing it now for reasons....

abstract from the article "Illusory correlation in interpersonal perception: A cognitive basis of stereotypic judgments" by Hamilton & Gifford, which reads:
Illusory correlation refers to an erroneous inference about the relationship be- tween two categories of events. One postulated basis for illusory correlation is the co-occurrence of events which are statistically infrequent; i.e., observers overestimate the frequency of co-occurrence of distinctive events. If one group of persons "occurs" less frequently than another and one type of behavior occurs infrequently, then the above hypothesis predicts that observers would over- estimate the frequency that that type of behavior was performed by members of that group. This suggested that the differential perception of majority and minority groups could result solely from the cognitive mechanisms involved in processing information about stimulus events that differ in their frequencies of co-occurrence. Results of two experiments testing this line of reasoning provided strong support for the hypothesis. Implications of the experiments for the acquisition of stereotypes are discussed.

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Praba Pilar @pilarva.bsky.social · Aug 29

Straight up evil.

Praba Pilar @pilarva.bsky.social · Aug 29

So now, the U.S. is going to have AI generated Death Panels - for those who remember the accusations of 'death panels' against the Canadian system - this is Kafka on steroids. What a sick proposition. @equityadvocate71.bsky.social can you believe this?

Joshua J. Friedman @joshuajfriedman.com · Aug 29

What a cursed sentence (gift link)

“The A.I. companies selected to oversee the program would have a strong financial incentive to deny claims. Medicare plans to pay them a share of the savings generated from rejections.”

Medicare Will Require Prior Approval for Certain Procedures

www.nytimes.com

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Praba Pilar @pilarva.bsky.social · Aug 29

Thanks for sharing this.

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Jenny Cohn @jennycohn.bsky.social · Aug 26

“Hundreds of Bay Area residents took to the streets Friday to protest the growing political and economic influence of billionaire Palantir …founder Peter Thiel, targeting both his company & his role in financing surveillance & militarization efforts under the Trump administration.” 8/23/25

Bay Area Residents Protest Palantir and Peter Thiel's Influence - Davis Vanguard

Hundreds of Bay Area residents protested the political and economic influence of billionaire Peter Thiel, targeting his company Palantir Technologies for its role in financing surveillance and militar...

davisvanguard.org

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alec karakatsanis @equalityalec.bsky.social · Aug 26

The new online vigilante portal to sign up to be a Brownshirt to deploy like a stormtrooper to brutalize poor people, immigrants, people of color, and anyone else who might dare to go to a protest is a development that should be one of the major news stories of the year. It's barely being mentioned.

alec karakatsanis @equalityalec.bsky.social · Aug 25

Today’s Executive Order creating a *nationwide* military “quick reaction force” and setting up an online portal to permit random fascist vigilantes to join soldiers is one of the scariest things I’ve seen in U.S. politics in my adult life. Why is it not getting more attention?

The D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force established in Executive Order 14252 of March 27, 2025 (Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful), shall establish an online portal for Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds and experience to apply to join Federal law enforcement entities to support the policy goals described in Executive Order 14333. Each law enforcement agency that is a member of the D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force, as well as other relevant components of the Department of Justice as the Attorney General determines, shall further, subject to the availability of appropriations and applicable law, immediately create and begin training, manning, hiring, and equipping a specialized unit that is dedicated to ensuring public safety and order in the Nation’s capital that can be deployed whenever the circumstances necessitate, and that could be deployed, subject to applicable law, in other cities where public safety and order has been lost.
(
(ii) The Secretary of Defense shall immediately begin ensuring that each State’s Army National Guard and Air National Guard are resourced, trained, organized, and available to assist Federal, State, and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate, as appropriate under law. In coordination with the respective adjutants general, the Secretary of Defense shall designate an appropriate number of each State’s trained National Guard members to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization for such purposes. In addition, the Secretary of Defense shall ensure the availability of a standing National Guard quick reaction force that shall be resourced, trained, and available for rapid nationwide deployment.

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Acyn @acyn.bsky.social · Aug 25

Pritzker: To the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country, I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story.

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Praba Pilar @pilarva.bsky.social · Aug 25

Thank you. So clear and concise. Very helpful.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · Aug 25

making my way through the ken burns JAZZ documentary and this portion of his interview with dave brubeck — who passed in 2012 — is a reminder of how *recent* american history really is. start at :55 or so. youtu.be/stadqAHRroA?...