There are two whales in this picture…

“There are certain tasks which computers ought not to be made to do, independent of whether computers can be made to do them.” - Joseph Weizenbaum (1976)
futurism.com/catholics-defr…

This time Gollum wears sunglasses.

“I wish there were more good paying jobs in academia!”

*finger on monkey’s paw curls*

Department head: Here, I wanted to give you this.
Me: What is it?
Him: The new code for the copier.
Me: Fuck yeah!
Him:
Me:
Him:
Me:
Him:
Me:
Him:
Me: I mean, you can trust me to use this responsibly.

Meanwhile, in other terrible news…

Highways aren’t the only thing these trucks are going to hit…

The political nihilism of the moment isn’t the people demanding a better world, the nihilism of the moment is those insisting that people should be politely satisfied with the way things are.

This paper needs to be 6,000 words.

When I sat down to edit it the paper was 6,593 words.

After an hour of work I am pleased to report it is now 6,704 words.

Writing tip: include a lot of Star Trek references, bad puns, and Devo lyrics in your early drafts. That way when you reach the “how do I cut 500 words?!?!?” stage, you can just go in and cut out some of the puns.

Meanwhile, in other worrisome news…
idp.nature.com/authorize?resp…

If only I knew
how to convince people
that they should care
about sick cattle
and dead birds
but I don’t even know
how to convince people
that they should care
about other people.

I keep re-reading this and I just can’t get over the fact that it starts with “We hope this message finds you well.”

I am currently in this weird space where the semester isn’t over but in which the due date for the last of my students’ work hasn’t passed…so I can’t fully shift to working on something else, but the stuff I need to grade hasn’t been turned in yet.

At risk of being accused of being a caricature of myself: it kind of seems like things are going really really badly at the moment.

I’ll keep saying it: the AI apocalypse doesn’t look like some Terminator style deathscape, it looks like a society drowning in AI generated fakes and bullshit that gradually makes it impossible for people to tell truth from AI generated fiction…

Meanwhile, in other terrible news…

At the moment half of my Twitter feed is people commenting on the campus protests saying “these will go down in history,” and the other half of my feed is people talking about looming threats (H5N1, AI, climate change) which suggest that soon we’ll all be history.

This was already an episode of Black Mirror…

I can confirm that studying disasters has not been great for my mental health.