Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 1h

Brooks’s Law 2.0: adding AI to a late project makes it later

Seriously, how many AI-for-coding evangelists have read The Mythical Man-Month or No Silver Bullet, or even just AI summaries of them?

www.wired.com/story/meta-m...

Meta Tells Its Metaverse Workers to Use AI to ‘Go 5X Faster’

Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse chief is urging employees to adopt AI across every workflow as part of a broader shift inside the company.

www.wired.com

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 3h

Google AI pretends to misunderstand my question so it can look smart correcting me.

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 12h

Bad content drives out good.

Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 13h

NEW on @indicator.media:

I found 101 accounts impersonating Telemundo, Televisa, CNN and other media outlets spreading clickbaity falsehoods to millions on TikTok.

The company took them all down after I reached out.

101 TikTok accounts masquerading as real news spread misinformation to millions

Shallow impersonations of Telemundo, CNN, Fox News and other media got more than 200 million views posting fake ICE arrests and bombastic AI slop about geopolitics

indicator.media

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Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 13h

NEW on @indicator.media:

I found 101 accounts impersonating Telemundo, Televisa, CNN and other media outlets spreading clickbaity falsehoods to millions on TikTok.

The company took them all down after I reached out.

101 TikTok accounts masquerading as real news spread misinformation to millions

Shallow impersonations of Telemundo, CNN, Fox News and other media got more than 200 million views posting fake ICE arrests and bombastic AI slop about geopolitics

indicator.media

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 1d

www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067...

The Royalist Revolution — Harvard University Press

Winner of the Society of the Cincinnati History Prize, Society of the Cincinnati in the State of New JerseyFinalist, George Washington PrizeA Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2015Generations of st...

www.hup.harvard.edu

Zvi S. Rosen @zvirosen.bsky.social · 1d

Decided to ask Lexis and Westlaw AI a basic question - identify which circuits had courts citing a case had before a certain date. Westlaw outright failed and Lexis hallucinated.

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 1d

"If you want access to [the attention economy], you better get comfortable making lowest-common-denominator bullshit in front of a camera. And, of course, it’s a lot easier to feel good about doing that if you’re an idiot."

www.garbageday.email/p/the-great-...

The Great Dumbening

Read to the end for it’s Tronin’ time

www.garbageday.email

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 1d

And there will come a day when Pentagon reporting is done entirely by podcasters and influencers, and we will be nostalgic for the journalistic standards of Newsmax.

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 1d

John Paul Tudor Jones

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

This is not unhinged.

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Foone @foone.bsky.social · 2d

they gotta make sure you're not a robot, of course

a captcha page, showing a small creature that looks like a bird or leaf, and the text "this is a wug"
Below that, there's two, and the text "Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two" and a text box, with a verify button

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

The world produces legal changes at a rate that vastly exceeds the capacity of the legal academy to analyze. The Federal Register in 2024 contained over 100,000 pages of regulations, notices, requests for comment, etc. Good scholars do good work on some of that, but the task is impossibly immense.

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 2d

Maybe this is simply a difference in the expected 'rate' of knew knowledge, but this take puzzles me, because there's quite a bit of new data and studies needing to be done that I can see pretty easily in Roman history.

Knowledge creation steady and clearly visible.

A tweet by Theo Nash, which reads, "The problem is that (almost) no one, at least in the humanities, is able to produce ‘new knowledge’ at anything like the rate expected. So scholars grasp at faddish trends and voguish theories to publish books that seem exciting in the moment but have no enduring value."

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Foone @foone.bsky.social · 2d

signing up for the hot new linguistic dating site

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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 2d

Maybe this is simply a difference in the expected 'rate' of knew knowledge, but this take puzzles me, because there's quite a bit of new data and studies needing to be done that I can see pretty easily in Roman history.

Knowledge creation steady and clearly visible.

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 3d

Horton Hears a Sutton Hoo

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 3d

primarily geographically deceptively misdescriptive

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 4d

Wendy Carlos Williams

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 4d

Better? Worse?

bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/richmond.com...

bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 4d

Gas stations must post curb signs listing their price per gallon. Ergo, curb sign prices are meaningless, and consumers cannot rely on them as truthful.

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southpaw @nycsouthpaw.bsky.social · 4d

What an emblem of the billionaire class—descending on a peaceful city in a private jet on the horn to NYT asking for the place to be invaded by federal authorities because the rent-a-cops you employ for a week to harass a few junkies outside the convention center cost too much.

Mr. Benioff spoke as his annual Dreamforce conference is set to begin Tuesday in downtown San Francisco, bringing 50,000 visitors to the city. He is scheduled to deliver a keynote address about the benefits of "agentic enterprise," a business model in which humans and artificial intelligence bots work together.
Speaking by telephone from his private plane en route to San Francisco, he lamented that he has to pay for nundreds of off-duty law enforcement officers to help patrol the convention area and said that San Francisco needed to "re-fund" the police.
The city never actually "defunded" its police force, and San Francisco's violent crime rates are below those in many other U.S. cities.
But San Francisco has struggled to recruit and keep officers, and it still has problems with lower-level crimes and open-air drug use, especially in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin near City Hall. It has about 1,500 police officers, and Mr. Benioff says it ne → another thousand.

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 4d

Hamburglar Hill

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Kendra Albert @kendraserra.bsky.social · 5d

Co-signed. The positions that doj is taking are far more embarrassing to the legal profession than the table of authorities mistakes.

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 5d

Eh.

The fact that many lawyers think it’s a mortifying and possibly career-ending mistake to file a table of contents with missing page numbers says a lot about the legal profession, none of it good.

Making a big deal out of stuff like this just perpetuates the cycle of abuse.

Bradley P. Moss @bradmossesq.bsky.social · 5d

Someone gonna get fired …. @kenwhite.bsky.social @annabower.bsky.social

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Bradley P. Moss @bradmossesq.bsky.social · 5d

Someone gonna get fired …. @kenwhite.bsky.social @annabower.bsky.social

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Federalist Society Pitchbot @fedsocpitchbot.bsky.social · 5d

William Cosby, Thomas Gage, and Other Colonial Governors as Precedents for Broad Presidential Power

by Kenton Skarin

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 5d

I’ve known a lot of very smart mathematicians, and a lot of very nice mathematicians, and these are two groups that overlap a lot, and even among them Lauren Williams has always stood out as exceptionally smart and exceptionally nice.

news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

Lauren Williams awarded MacArthur ‘genius grant’ — Harvard Gazette

Math professor honored for theoretical breakthroughs with sometimes surprising applications across phenomena such as tsunamis, traffic.

news.harvard.edu

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Hilary J. Allen @profhilaryallen.bsky.social · 5d

A good quick video on why bad content drives out good, as @jtlg.bsky.social would say

youtu.be/_zfN9wnPvU0?...

AI Slop Is Destroying The Internet

YouTube video by Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell

youtu.be

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 5d

When you **understand** your principles, you can **speak clearly** about them.

MIT as an institution has a sharply defined concept of "merit" that this letter uses to turn the tables on the administration's confused and decepive use of the idea.

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 5d

MIT understands its mission and values.

orgchart.mit.edu/letters/rega...

Regarding the Compact | MIT Organization Chart

orgchart.mit.edu

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 5d

MIT understands its mission and values.

orgchart.mit.edu/letters/rega...

Regarding the Compact | MIT Organization Chart

orgchart.mit.edu

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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 5d

I think the draft's principle of restraint also gets right @bretdevereaux.bsky.social's argument that public activism requires academia to spend some of the public credibility it accumulates through service. The university can speak, but it has to do so sparingly.

3/3

acoup.blog/2022/01/21/f...

Fireside Friday, January 21, 2022 (On Public Scholarship)

Fireside this week! The Spring semester is now in full swing and – knock on wood – so far seems to be proceeding without too much in the way of disruption. I’m hoping to have part…

acoup.blog

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