I wish I’d had this on hand during a conversation with someone last month who was willing to give Musk credit for what he’s done with Starlink. As Bode points out, there is genuine value in the product, but there are huge problems, too.

Terrifying stuff.

Every word of this is enraging and disgusting.

I appreciate Masnick’s pushing back against Haidt-like discourses about social media, but I haven’t taken the time to dig into the weeds myself. I’m bookmarking this for my own reference.

Bookmarking in case I need to reference this in conversation.

Just so gross.

For my entire career, I have resisted demonizing students and have sincerely believed in the need to adapt assessment to context rather than police student behavior. Yet, this kind of thing is untenable:

Eighteen students suddenly dropped the course, while nine others didn’t even attend the final exam. Of those 27 students, El País noted, “22 had scored a perfect 100 in the midterm exam.”

When Musk brags about Grok not being “woke” or whatever, he is signaling that he’s implicitly okay with this kind of edge case.

Self-driving cars are surveillance machines.

This is good!

So gross.

How cruel we are being as a country.

Wait, what?

This is good.

Some insightful comments here. I don’t know if they capture the whole picture of what’s going on here, but I think they’re an important part of it.

This book deserves all the honors, and if it gets made into a movie(?!), I would be thrilled.

Mormon Stories has never been my thing, and the more I learn about Dehlin, the less sure I am about him—but I couldn’t agree with him more here.

Discourse in the modern American right often understands free speech as protecting the right to say objectionable things but not the ability to criticize people who say objectionable things. While a “one true church” mentality is less problematic than racial slurs or transphobic language (though there’s also some of the latter in Oaks’s full remarks, according to the Church Newsroom release), this excerpt strikes me as embodying a similarly selective view of religious freedom:

Recently, I’ve been thinking about Jacques Ellul’s image/word dichotomy as more broadly applicable than to media—as applicable to the whole technical phenomenon that he criticizes. That is, by virtue of its seeming objectivity, the technical phenomenon enjoys trust that is not warranted when one digs into the details and sees the fuzziness and subjectivities and artifice that prop the whole thing up. Doctorow’s critique here seems firmly in that vein.

Had no idea this book was going viral, and I was just gushing about it last week. One of my favorite pieces of fiction ever, and it deserves all the accolades.

Important update on Grok nonsense.

Pretty compelling example of digital labor issues (both subtle and explicit) related to AI. Surely letting Google shape our questions and provide all the answers won’t be an issue?

Walking disaster.

I concede that appeals to the environmental costs of AI sometimes feel knee-jerk and lacking nuance. However, you can always count on Musk to provide a clear example of the harms of AI, and this is a particularly compelling one.

20,000 accounts is a hell of a “bug.”