Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

LightNews

T.X. Watson

@txwatson.com

380 followers 230 following 390 posts

The actor who plays T.X. Watson on the internet. Rhetoric PhD student at [I have been advised not to specify for legal reasons]. I had 50 million followers on TikTok

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Reposted by T.X. Watson

jay Dragon has firmware updates @jdragsky.bsky.social · 59m

early 21st century americans were so modest that they would regularly censor their own feet in video and artistic depictions, and it was considered improper to expose your feet in public — dismissed with cries of "put those grippers away"

Reposted by T.X. Watson

Sarah Florini @florini.bsky.social · 15h

The Pornhub productivity suite took me out.

Jake Williams @malwarejake.bsky.social · 16h

Tell me you're desperate for revenue without telling me.

Seriously, imagine your elevator pitch is "we offer an AI that revolutionizes the enterprise, answers questions at a PhD level, and also talks dirty to horny young men." It would be like if PornHub was selling a productivity suite.

404 Media @404media.co · 17h

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced in a post on X Tuesday that ChatGPT is officially getting into the fuckable chatbots game, with “erotica for verified adults” rolling out in December.

🔗 www.404media.co/chatgpt-erot...

Reposted by T.X. Watson

Ziedrich Pengels @thebigzeo.bsky.social · 7d

Fan Studies question: does anyone know the exact origin of the term "headcanon"? I know it comes from fic around 2007, but can't find anything more specific than that.

T.X. Watson @txwatson.com · 6d

There are still shares available at txwatson.com/my-soul!

T.X. Watson @txwatson.com · 6d

Sold a bunch of shares of ownership in my immortal soul recently, getting them packed up to ship now

Shares of ownership in T.X. Watson's immortal soul, packaged for shipment

T.X. Watson @txwatson.com · 7d

The AI bubble is JK Rowling's fault

Reposted by T.X. Watson

shaunt @shaunvids.bsky.social · 10d

actually our AI programs are like people so its racist to say you don't like them. anyway would you like to buy one

Reposted by T.X. Watson

Chris Franklin @errant-signal.com · 11d

shit what if i am cringe but also not free

T.X. Watson @txwatson.com · 14d

Maybe you hate the first three or four or five. But when you find one you like, you're not gonna need to go read all those books in between there and the last book you finished before knowing that you want to read this one.

T.X. Watson @txwatson.com · 14d

If everything you're reading these days is ass, you don't have to read your way through the whole stack of books you know also suck to work your way out to the shit you maybe want to try reading. You can just pull out the interesting-looking shit and see how you feel about it.

T.X. Watson @txwatson.com · 14d

Stuff that's almost like the stuff we're currently doing isn't less popular because there's a range of acceptable kinda stuff to do based on similarity to the stuff we're doing. It's usually less popular because we've tried it and it sucks. That doesn't mean that stuff we haven't tried also sucks.

T.X. Watson @txwatson.com · 14d

Hell, the ones on the near edges of that sweet spot are likely to be less appealing on average than the ones out on the edges that you haven't even read yet, because those are—definitionally—the ones you've tried and haven't wanted to go back to.

T.X. Watson @txwatson.com · 14d

That insight doesn't actually give you any information. It doesn't tell you where to look on your shelf for books you might like more if you finally read them.

T.X. Watson @txwatson.com · 14d

And—to the original point—if you organize your books so that all the ones you read the most are next to each other, it's gonna look like there's a range in the middle of the shelf of books that are the most readable.

T.X. Watson @txwatson.com · 14d

If you notice there's no science fiction on your bottom shelf that doesn't mean science fiction is more top-shelfy than, like, idk, historical romance. If you sort them differently different things will be near each other

T.X. Watson @txwatson.com · 14d

It's like alphabetizing your bookshelf by author name and then saying there's something about authors whose names start with L that makes them show up near the middle of the shelf. If you'd arranged them by spine color you'd be saying that viability for the middle shelf is based on yellowness.

T.X. Watson @txwatson.com · 14d

The Overton window isn't real. It just seems like it is because the one-dimensional left/right political spectrum also isn't real. We imagine ideas as more or less extreme *based on* how viable they seem as political agendas then assume that there's something intrinsically similar about them

T.X. Watson @txwatson.com · 14d

Lol my family is too used to my bullshit not to hear that for the intentionally misleading statement it is

T.X. Watson @txwatson.com · 14d

Yeah I mean I address my journal entries to the grad students who will some day be digging through my papers

T.X. Watson @txwatson.com · 14d

I've stopped using platforms just because I've grown and changed enough since I started that it starts to feel like the platform thinks of me the way an overbearing parent or resentful past friend might, resenting the shifts in my interests and pressuring me to want and believe the things I used to.

T.X. Watson @txwatson.com · 14d

People talk about using a lifetime of journals to train chatbots on the internality of deceased family members. How many young people do you think decide what to journal about, and how to write about it, based on how they want their hypothetical-eventual digital homunculus to represent them?

T.X. Watson @txwatson.com · 14d

There's a roughly two-month period where, according to common inference, your Spotify usage is not counted toward the next year's Spotify Wrapped. I've heard it called "Amnesty"—the part of November and December when you can listen to whatever you want without fear of eventual judgment.

T.X. Watson @txwatson.com · 14d

Who else thinks about the fact that algorithmically customized recommendation feeds create a pressure to self-censor your own media consumption to prevent your recommendations from becoming unflattering?

Tweet that reads "Girl at a party asked to see my YT recommendations because 'it's a good test for red flags' and this was the first recommendation I had." Video depicted is "What if Big Bird exploded in the Challenger disaster?" From the channel AlternateHistoryHub

Reposted by T.X. Watson

the Mountain Goats @themountaingoats.bsky.social · 16d

Didn’t know this! Do you know how many years I pined for jstor access! Yes I am a giant nerd who pines for academe leave me alone with my papers and books

BeijingPalmer @beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 16d

This is my regular reminder to everyone that jstor is open to the general public now; a free account there will give you access to 100 papers a year.

Marie Le Conte @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · 16d

regrettably if you try to point this out online you'll get yelled out by 79208 journalists going OH SO YOU WANT JOURNALISTS TO STARVE??? even if you're, say, a journalist yourself, and point out that while there are clearly no easy answers, the status quo isn't exactly working for society

Reposted by T.X. Watson

Chris Franklin @errant-signal.com · 24d

If there’s one legitimate criticism of postmodernism it’s people who wear “this is my costume!” t-shirts on Halloween