James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 33m

boomer

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 49m

Ironically but not surprisingly, out of the three people so far who have been indicted for opposing Trump, the one who worked for him appears to be the only one who actually committed federal crimes.

Joyce White Vance @joycewhitevance.bsky.social · 1h

John Bolton has been indicted

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by James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 1h

Simon makes a strong case that Claude’s new “Skills” are a compelling pattern for effectively using an LLM’s capabilities.

A Skill is a Markdown file with detailed instructions for a specific task. It starts with short header explaining what it does; Claude reads the rest only as needed.

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 1h

Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/...

Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

Anthropic this morning introduced Claude Skills, a new pattern for making new abilities available to their models: Claude can now use Skills to improve how it performs specific tasks. Skills …

simonwillison.net

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Reposted by James Grimmelmann

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 1h

Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP
simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/...

Claude Skills are awesome, maybe a bigger deal than MCP

Anthropic this morning introduced Claude Skills, a new pattern for making new abilities available to their models: Claude can now use Skills to improve how it performs specific tasks. Skills …

simonwillison.net

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Reposted by James Grimmelmann, Steve Peers, Aviel Roshwald

Joyce White Vance @joycewhitevance.bsky.social · 1h

John Bolton has been indicted

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by James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 4h

Chaser: www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

Why car insurance keeps climbing, and where premiums are highest

Auto coverage has surged 50 percent in the past five years, but calculating a driver’s cost plays out very differently from one state to the next.

www.washingtonpost.com

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by James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 4h

Shot: www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-so...

Why Are So Many Pedestrians Killed by Cars in the US?

It’s unfortunately not uncommon for pedestrians to be killed by cars in the US.

www.construction-physics.com

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by James Grimmelmann — Reposted by Greg Linden

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 4h

Bad content drives out good.

www.404media.co/reddit-answe...

Reddit's AI Suggests Users Try Heroin

AI-generated Reddit Answers are giving bad advice in medical subreddits and moderators can’t opt out.

www.404media.co

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by James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 5h

There's no point to any of this, other than that it's fun to dig around in archives, and that texts are elusive and fleeting things.

6/6

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by James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 5h

The Library of Congress's scans of the Arendt papers has her file on the revision, which includes several further drafts. You can see the final wording emerge, along with some fascnating alternatives she experimented with.

www.loc.gov/resource/mss...

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by James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 5h

What happened is that Arendt and Scholem published an exchange of letters in _Encounter_ and they revised the letters for publication. Some online sources quote the original; some quote the published version.

4/

www.unz.com/print/Encoun...

www.unz.com

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by James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 5h

But this isn't the wording of Arendt's actual letter! Here's the version from the authoritative edition of the Arendt/Scholem correspondence:

press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

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"The fact is that today I think that evil in every instance is only extreme, never radical: it has no depth, and therefore has nothing demonic about it. Evil can lay to waste the entire world, like a fungus growing rampant on the surface. Only the good is always deep and radical."

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by James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 5h

He quotes from a letter to Gershom Scholem: "It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never ‘radical’, that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface."

2/

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by James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 5h

I went down a rabbit hole running down a Hannah Arendt quote from @lioneltrolling.bsky.social's latest newsletter.

1/

www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-coming...

The Coming Purge

We're going to need a left-wing Joe McCarthy

www.unpopularfront.news

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by James Grimmelmann — Reposted by Rebecca Tushnet

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 6h

I'm old enough to remember the previous verse of this song. It had all the same words, except it was about MOOCs instead of AI. It wasn't a new song then, either.

james.grimmelmann.net/files/articl...

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by Rebecca Tushnet — Reposted by James Grimmelmann

Rebecca Tushnet @rtushnet.bsky.social · 9h

New copyright scenario: lawyers threaten researchers over cryptographic solution found in Smithsonian archive

A C.I.A. Secret Kept for 35 Years Is Found in the Smithsonian’s Vault

www.nytimes.com

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by James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 18h

They hired František Štorm to design the UI typeface for Kingdom Come: Deliverance II!

www.stormtype.com/families/kin...

Kingdom Gallery | Storm Type Foundry

Gallery

www.stormtype.com

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by James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 22h

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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by James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 1d

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

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by James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 1d

Bad content drives out good.

Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 1d

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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Reposted by James Grimmelmann, Robert W. Wallace, Ian Campbell

Hemry, Local Bartender @bartenderhemry.bsky.social · 1d

This is exactly backwards, the no kings protests are a mass movement of regular people that have every republican politician in the country raging about "hate America rallies," and the online protest industry weirdos who say shit like "radlib" to each other are the ones skimming off the top of them

it is no wonder that 50501, a movement of radlibs who are very upset but don’t want to get in trouble, would be boosting superficial activism.

superficial activism has its place, but if that place is front and center, it kills whatever movement it is skimming off the top of.

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Reposted by James Grimmelmann, Greg Linden

Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 1d

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

2 39 68

by James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

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

Reposted by James Grimmelmann, Rebecca Tushnet

Zvi S. Rosen @zvirosen.bsky.social · 2d

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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by James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

"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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by James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

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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by James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 2d

John Paul Tudor Jones

by James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 3d

This is not unhinged.

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Reposted by James Grimmelmann

Foone @foone.bsky.social · 3d

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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by James Grimmelmann

James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 3d

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 · 3d

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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References

Fields & subjects