Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦
@shallit.bsky.social
970 followers 880 following 1.7K posts
Grumpy old American mathematician and computer scientist, now retired. My Erdös number equals 1.
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Reposted by Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦
npr.org
NPR @npr.org · 11h
Tom Bowman has held his Pentagon press pass for 28 years. He says the Pentagon's new media policy makes it impossible to be a journalist, which means finding out what's really going on behind the scenes and not accepting wholesale what any government or administration says. n.pr/4q87Jwb
Opinion: Why I'm handing in my Pentagon press pass
Tom Bowman has held his Pentagon press pass for 28 years. He says the Pentagon's new media policy makes it impossible to be a journalist, which means finding out what's really going on behind the scenes and not accepting wholesale what any government or administration says.
n.pr
Reposted by Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦
weedenkim.bsky.social
Uni administrators and trustees: We need viewpoint diversity.

Professor, outside of class: Working class should organize to overthrow capitalism

Uni administrators and trustees: No, not THAT kind of viewpoint diversity
Reposted by Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦
joedudekjd.bsky.social
Precisely the person Justice Kavanaugh said would not be inconvenienced.
reichlinmelnick.bsky.social
The entire incident is infuriating and terrifying. She’s a Latina woman who was working a service job. On her way home late at night, with her headphones in, she was detained for an hour by masked federal agents who wouldn’t give her their names.
Maria Greeley, 44, had just finished working a double shift at the Beach Bar on Ohio Street
earlier this month when she said she was surrounded by three federal agents who grabbed her, forced her hands behind her back and zip tied her.
Headphones in, Greeley had been focused on getting home to her two dogs for a walk.
Instead, she said she was detained by masked agents who did not answer when she asked for names. They questioned her for an hour, she said.
Reposted by Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦
robertcruickshank.com
It’s even worse. It’s reversing 400 years of Anglo-American constitutional development going back to Charles I’s personal rule when he refused to consult Parliament over spending and governance. Trump and his GOP lackeys are undoing stuff the Founders saw as fundamental to our system.
goldwagnathan.bsky.social
We are living through the most consequential shift in the constitutional government of the United States in over a hundred and fifty years and nobody seems to have even noticed yet.
mikeblack114.bsky.social
Congress no longer holds the power of the purse, the executive can just do whatever they want with federal monies
shallit.bsky.social
There is a big market in telling nasty, bigoted people that they are actually on the correct side.

See Trump & Co.
Reposted by Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦
prchovanec.bsky.social
I think tariffs hurt consumers, police shouldn't wear masks, and the President must obey the law - and shouldn't use his office to run personal profit-making schemes on the side.

This apparently makes me a radical Marxist.
shallit.bsky.social
It's exactly like when the anti-vaccine nutcases accuse everyone who tells the truth that vaccines are safe and effective of being "pharma shills".
shallit.bsky.social
I wouldn't go that far. I sometimes find it very helpful in tracking down obscure results in the literature, which it sometimes does better than competing methods. But of course you have to double-check that the citations it produces are actually right.
shallit.bsky.social
The writer you describe as "tremendous" actually used the phrase "Bari Weiss–derangement syndrome", a contemptible piece of drivel that (a) invents a nonexistent psychological condition and (b) implies that anyone who disagrees with Ms. Weiss is disturbed.

You are an embarrassment to journalism.
shallit.bsky.social
Well, that's certainly easier than doing some honest self-appraisal about yourself, as well as honest appraisal of Caitlin Flanagan and the Atlantic.

I ask again, since you didn't dare answer me: why are there so many actually competent writers--such as Ed Yong--who have left the Atlantic?
shallit.bsky.social
I took what I thought was appropriate action, but I won't say any more about it.
shallit.bsky.social
Today in the annals of LLM-generated academic paper stupidity: authors submit a paper clearly written by an LLM containing at least three hallucinated references that don't exist, of which two were allegedly written.... by me, the editor of the journal.

And the cover letter suggested I referee it!
shallit.bsky.social
Yet among many people who study rhetoric, Orwell's Politics and the English Language doesn't have that great a reputation. There isn't a single simple language that is neutral and transparent, forbidding foreign phrases is too rigid, etc. See, for example,
www.nypl.org/blog/2017/06... .
Writers on Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” | The New York Public Library
If you’ve ever thought of yourself as a writer, chances are that you have opinions about George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language…
www.nypl.org
shallit.bsky.social
You write for the Atlantic Monthly. That's comical right there.

The people who actually knew what they were talking about, like Ed Yong? All gone.

Why do you think all the good journalists left that rag?
Reposted by Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦
thomaszimmer.bsky.social
What he’s railing against is a profound shift in culture, status… He’s obsessed with the idea that America is controlled by a leftist “ruling elite” - but “elite” isn’t defined socio-economically or by political power, it means something like: Getting to define “real America” and who gets to belong.
shallit.bsky.social
So much winning, I can't take any more winning like this
shallit.bsky.social
Anyone who's read the work of primatologist Frans de Waal will not be at all surprised.
shallit.bsky.social
The inequality's backwards here.
Reposted by Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦
mcopelov.bsky.social
Nixon’s crimes look like harmless high school pranks compared to the now-daily unprecedented illegal & unconstitutional crimes being committed daily by this president & his staff
kjephd.bsky.social
Unconstitutionally taking money that the law says must be spent on one purpose & using it for something else—when it's to establish personalist control over the FUCKING MILITARY—is about as dangerous a constitutional crisis/failure as you can imagine

Via: www.nbcnews.com/politics/tru...
The Office of Management and Budget sent a notification to Congress about their intent to use research and development funds to pay members of the military, two sources with direct knowledge tell NBC News.

A spokesperson for the OMB confirmed to NBC News that it plans to use the research and development funds and that there are two years' worth of funds available within the Department of Defense.
shallit.bsky.social
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that so many CEO's of large corporations favor the current descent into a fascist dictatorship, b/c the kind of person who wants to become a CEO of a large corporation necessarily gets a kick out of telling other people what to do & getting mad when they don't do it.
Reposted by Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦
samyoungman.bsky.social
Trump went for a Covid shot and then set the CDC on fire.

If that ain’t that asshole in a nutshell.
shallit.bsky.social
Could be Asimov's story "Robbie" (there are multiple versions of it, though). Or his story "Catch That Rabbit".