I have tried not to think too much about AI bubbles, and Doctorow captures exactly why that is in this essay.

This is a good example of how thorny the AI problem is, and why I strongly prefer a digital labor critique to a copyright critique. Yes, I’m mad that Meta trained their models on my work, but I don’t think the answer is to strengthen Elsevier or Cengage’s copyright claims.

Wait, U.S. states are actually going after VPNs? What a terrible idea.

Well, this is certainly… something.

I wish I knew enough about photography to really appreciate the details here, but I’m bookmarking it anyway because it feels like a contemporary, unintentional echo of observations Ellul makes in The Humiliation of the Word.

You know, I wasn’t sure about the choice of Van Tatenhove as the next law school dean, but I figured that I didn’t know that much about the guy, and if the law faculty was on board, I ought to trust that rather than my gut reaction.

Finding out that faculty were not on board and that the university seems to have made the decision from above despite faculty concerns is more worrying than any concern I previously had.

Heartbreaking story, all the more so for the first-person reflective voice.

What a depressing read.

I don’t think I’ve ever read an interview as interesting as this one.

Some important observations in here.

I’ve felt for a long time that “what if AI gets sentient and does irreparable harm” is 100% the wrong way of framing things, and Doctorow knocks that argument out of the park here.

This was an enlightening listen on my way into work this morning.

Look, I’m all for getting more cars off the road, but I’ve always been annoyed by people who use ebikes as motorcycles and not as bikes. This passage gets me thinking that I probably wouldn’t like the Olto sharing my local bike infrastructure:

I would say this is bad design, but really it is just abundantly clear that these are vestigial pedals. Legalese pedals. Pedals so you can say “but look, officer, it has pedals, it’s a bike!” They are not even remotely for pedaling. Because this is not really a bike.

Good line here:

“To Republicans who say that making filing your taxes for free with the IRS is too expensive: for just one day of bombing Iran, we could pay for 20 years of Direct File,” Warren’s remarks say. “And to Republicans defending the status quo, ask yourselves why you’re on the side of TurboTax and H&R Block instead of your constituents.”

Tim Cook is a coward.

Audrey Watters once compellingly argued that metal detectors are edtech. I think we now have a responsibility to treat AI nudifier apps as edtech, too.

I know we live in ridiculous times, and I have a print subscription to The Onion, and this is still one of the most bewildering articles I’ve read recently. I felt like I had to suspend my disbelief to make it on to each successive paragraph.

Hashtag winning

Really appreciate this essay. It puts things nicely and has the kind of personal investment that makes it relatable.

Dumb, indefensible war gets dumber and more indefensible.

I found this very useful!

So gross. I don’t think we can talk about generative AI without talking about this.

Shameful spending priorities:

Roughly 5.5% of that $200 billion could fund universal meals to all U.S. public school students for the year. The whole package could feed millions of children for decades. As Sen. Adam Schiff (CA) has pointed out, “A hospital costs about $100 million… If we’re spending a billion a day in Iran, we’re effectively dropping 10 hospitals a day on Iran.”

I wrote recently about how my concerns about (generative AI) are probably more about the broader Ellulian system of technique than the specifics of the technology. Here’s a passage from this article that makes a similar point better:

For some tasks, AI really is amazing; the tech behind things like machine-learning algorithms and large language models is ingenious, but the results always seem to be hawked the hardest by people and companies I don’t particularly like or trust. (Heck, Anthropic used one of my books to train its database, a sin for which it is now paying authors in court.) Give me the same sorts of tools but under my local control, governed by a Wikipedia-style nonprofit and trained on ethically sourced data, and I’d use them a lot more.

I follow Ben for other writing, but I very much appreciate this post.