What a dumb, petty administration this is.

C’est du n’importe quoi, ça. Quelle honte, ce pays.

On one hand, if the university’s connections are tenuous, I can understand making the easy move to get the administration off our back—especially when I’m confident that UK is pushing back against NIH indirect costs and other issues. On the other, I certainly hope that our response to every attack isn’t going to be to roll over and wash our hands of things.

This is a mess of a post blending thoughts on tech policy with religious ideas and lacking the kind of obvious throughline or structure that I’d like it to have. It’s also been in my head for a couple of weeks, and it’s time to release it into the world rather than wait for it to be something better. So, here it is:

I am frustrated with generative AI technology for many reasons, but one of the things at the top of that list is the knowledge that today’s kids are growing up in a world where it is possible—even likely—that their middle and high school experiences are going to involve someone using generative AI tools to produce deepfake nudes (or other non-consensual intimate imagery—NCII) of them. See, for example, this horrifying story from the New York Times last April.

I ran some errands yesterday morning, visiting two stores and a library that were all relatively close to where I live. I regularly bike a much longer distance to get to work and back, so by any right, I should have done the same for these small errands. If there had been some bike racks at the shopping center where two of the errands were, I almost certainly would have done so, but faced with the (relatively minor) inconvenience of not having anywhere to lock my bike while in a grocery store or optician’s office, I took the coward’s route and drove.

I mean, I’ve always wanted to live and work in France, but I’ve never wanted to feel like I would have to.

Worrying stuff.

Honestly, I get the original call, but I’m glad Bluesky backtracked. Content moderation is hard.

It’s all bad right now, but it’s still important to call out the particularly bad stuff.

Bookmarking this in case I need to show it to a family member.

My stress and anxiety levels have been high ever since the second Trump administration began and immediately started taking an axe to all sorts of things that one should not take an axe to. For admittedly selfish reasons, though, I’ve been particularly anxious since Friday, when the NIH announced that it was dramatically cutting its support to universities (and other research institutions) in the form of indirect costs. I don’t do NIH-funded work, but we’re a very medically focused campus, and there’s no way that the $40 million that the University estimates we could lose over the next year isn’t going to have ripple effects across campus (not to mention the fact that my colleagues in the College of Communication and Information regularly look to the NIH as a source of funding health communication research). There are much more vulnerable populations currently being targeted by the Trump administration, and their concerns are more salient than mine are right now, but this is one of the administration’s decisions that’s hit closest to home, and I’ve been thinking a lot about it recently.

The headline is a little provocative, but it’s scary that we live in a world where it makes some sense.

More broadly, though, I found that the first Trump administration converted me to nuclear disarmament—yes, this president is scary, but that any president has access to that much destructive power is scarier still. I expect I’ll go further in that direction this time around.

As usual, lots to like in this post from Mike Masnick.

J’ai commandé un album de Guy Delisle juste pour ajouter à ma petite collection de bd francophone, et j’espère que cette case ne sera pas trop, TROP utile pendant les quatres années à venir aux USA.

I always appreciate Sam’s writing and especially here. I’m waiting to see what—if anything—my current church has to say about the current mess, but I have a deep fondness for the church I grew up in, and it’s deeply disappointing for a rich church that is willing to throw those resources behind its interests to decide that combatting the present cruelty is not one of those interests.

I’m grateful for The Onion right now.

Bookmarking this because with the sheer quantity of nonsense that’s happened in just the last couple of weeks, I feel like I will eventually need reminders of just how dumb some of it has been.

This headline would be hilarious if it weren’t so infuriating.

Darkly hilarious.

Not the headline I would have chosen, but very interesting argument here.

Personally, I’ve come around to the idea that fewer restrictions, “Community Notes”-style responses, and lots of personal control over what one sees could work better as content moderation. It’s interesting to see Bluesky take some of these approaches, for example!

Here, though, this seems like it’s bending the knee to the Trump administration, and I can’t imagine any of this being done in good faith. What a disappointment Meta continues to be.

What a stupid thing this whole “banning TikTok” thing has proved to be.

Here’s hoping the Senate shows some spine. Gift link.

I’ve seen this argument floating out there, but this is the first time I looked at some of the numbers.

Interested by Ken’s take here, even if it doesn’t necessarily make me feel better about gestures at everything.

Also, this line cracked me up:

Pete Hegseth’s chief qualification to be Secretary of Defense is that Trump saw him on the teevee a lot and his tattoos are not, technically, Nazi symbols.