Musk ne s’intéresse à la liberté d’expression que quand il peut en profiter.

If OpenAI is going to be an influential company, it would be nice for it to be more transparent.

You can say that, but it’s hard to understand how this isn’t limiting tenure.

1,200 deaths is an enormous tragedy. What does that make 25,000 deaths?

So. so gross.

My political views have shifted a lot over the past decade, and I think my attitude toward Macron demonstrates that pretty well. When he was first elected, I was pretty excited. I was fed up with the American right but not ready to identify with the left, and the idea of a new centrist party emerging out of nowhere was inspiring.

In the years since, though, I’ve moved steadily leftward—not least because Macron has demonstrated the ways that centrism tends to cede ground to the right on important issues. It’s been disappointing to see.

I work on a campus with Starship robots, so this was a fascinating read.

Generative AI has a digital labor issue, and we aren’t paying enough attention to it.

Grant Hardy is doing great work with the Book of Mormon. I don’t see the text the same way that he does, but I’m deeply grateful for what he’s contributed to new readings of it, and I’m glad I have a copy if this.

It surprised me in this interview to learn that the LDS Church forebade a reprinting of the semi-official study edition Hardy had recently worked on. I found that to be a tremendously helpful text, and I’m glad I have a copy since it’s apparently doomed to go out of print.

Some interesting thoughts here from Doctorow. Makes me want to put more effort into OER.

Even if AI would be beneficial for humanity in the aggregate, it’s important to ask how that benefit would be distributed.

Lots of interesting comments in this article. I haven’t been following this story as closely as I should, but it—and articles like this—are making me think that I need to think harder about plagiarism: what it is and how I should respond to it.

Yeah, but don’t worry, this is definitely the only way that generative AI will be used to overwhelm us with useless content.

Good for Platformer.

As usual, I find Masnick’s recap of this recent nonsense helpful in terms of summary and interpretation.

I’ve wanted to read this book for a while, but Doctorow has really sold me on it.

Strong follow up to the last post I just linked to.

Lots of helpful thoughts in this post. Makes me think about the value of Mastodon for the academy—and other spaces that I care about. Also, I love seeing Doctorow and academic thinking come together.

Don’t love it when platforms shut down tools because they don’t like outside research.

Gift Link

I’m grateful for George’s comments here.

Plagiarism is clearly bad, but its weaponization as part of a culture war could well he worse. I don’t love the idea of its escalation. Gift link.

De quoi s’inspirer pour imaginer de nouveaux avenirs chrétiens.

Welp, here’s something to pay attention to this legislative session.

Happy Public Domain day!

Again, what’s going on isn’t bad because it happens to touch on things significant to Christians, and it’s bad when Christians only care about Palestine and Israel because it fits with their religious worldview. Yet, it would be a missed opportunity to talk about Bethlehem this Christmas season without asking about the West Bank, Israel, and Gaza, and how to make a better world for everyone there.