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Andrew Goldstone

@agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
212 followers 20 following 1K posts

Chiefly interested in applying the methods of a discipline I took one undergrad course in to topics entirely ignored in my graduate education. 🌉 bridged from ⁂ mastodon.social/@agoldst, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/10/2026
Always on the cutting edge for abusively terrible customer support, Verizon’s first help page for travel comes with a helpful slop warning
Screenshot. “About International Travel / Generated by AI. Verify if needed.”
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/10/2026
Jackpot: can't read UN researchers' report on AI environmental impact because the UN University repository is offline, presumably as part of the general php/4/whatever conflagration
UNU-INWEH Report: Aczel, M., Chamanara, S., Matin, M., Farsi, A., Marwala, T., Madani, K. (2026). Environmental Cost of AI's Energy Use: Carbon, Water and Land Footprints. United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada. doi: 10.53328/INR26RMA002

Link: DOWNLOAD PDFResult of clicking the download link: "This site is offline" page
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/10/2026
No, you're reading the sign wrong. It says, "Hope??! AGAIN???"
Grauniad front page: Healey to reject calls to raise capital gains tax in budget. Picture shows the chancellor, John Healey, at a podium with a sign reading "HOPE AGAIN." It's an old joke, but, what can I say, the classics are classics for a reason.
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026
The introduction to the cited paper ("Field Theories with 'Superconductor' Solutions," 1961) gives a good flavor of his intellectual style:
This paper reports some work on the possible existence of field theories with solutions analogous to the Bardeen model of a superconductor. This possibility has been discussed by NAMBU in a report which presents the general ideas of the theory which will not be repeated here. The present work merely considers models and has no direct physical applications but the nature of these theories seems worthwhile exploring.
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026
though he preferred floppier bucket-style hats, he was known for the "sombrero potential," illustrated by Wikipedia here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_s…
Wikipedia s.v. "Spontaneous symmetry breaking": illustration and explanation of "Goldstone's 'sombrero' potential"
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/10/2026
Yes! I have finally made it! I am a Public Intellectual now!
Definitely very real e-mail wth the subject "An Invitation to Discuss Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man on WBEZ Radio"
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/10/2026
@kjhealy alignment chart or it doesn't count
Philosophical error theorists and moral nihilists do not, on the whole, want to live in a state of vicious anarchy. The same goes for academic Marxists, debunking Evolutionary Psychologists, hopelessly confused Critical Realists, biogenomic bean-counters, Scandinavian DBO enumerators, tradition-marinaded MacIntyreans, authenticity-obsessed standpoint epistemologists, and have-your-cake-and-eat-it pragmatists. All of them are people you are likely to encounter at conferences
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/10/2026
truly bleak
screenshot of part of "Don Knuth's home page" (cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/news.html) announcing as one of his "Public Lectures in 2026": "Thursday, December 3, 5pm PST, in the NVIDIA Auditorium...A Computer Musing entitled "Claude and The Art of Computer Programming"
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/10/2026
Editorial standards at the LRB sadly fallen. Imagine letting "Klingon" get by for "Ferengi"! (Parry, "Keeping up with the Kims," 24 Sept. 2026)
The flirtation unfolded over a year and three dates, in Singapore, Vietnam and at the North-South border. ‘I think the entire world is watching this moment,’ Kim said at the first meeting. ‘Many people in the world will think of this as a scene from a fantasy, from a science fiction movie.’ There was no obvious reason why Trump had gone from threatening nuclear war to shaking hands; like so much else about him, it made no sense in terms of long-established US principle and precedent. But there they were: the tubby Dalek and the ageing Klingon, touching arms, patting backs, nodding and smiling.
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026
when you think "excellent risk management and compliance," which university names come immediately to mind?
Daily Targum headline today: "U. appoints former Cornell, Syracuse compliance worker as chief risk officer"
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026
If you need a little joy, just consider the etymology of "candy," which takes you from Anglo-Norman, around or across the Indian Ocean, and over to South India (OED 3rd ed., last revised 2020):
Anglo-Norman sucre chandi and Middle French sucre candi (1256 in Old French) < Arabic sukkar qandī < sukkar sugar n. + an unattested (but regularly formed) adjective *qandī of or relating to crystallized sugar (< qand crystallized sugar + ‑ī ‑i suffix); compare Persian qandī sugared, made of sugar… Ulterior etymology of the Arabic word: The precise route of transmission is unclear: Arabic qand is apparently ultimately < a Dravidian language (compare Tamil kaṇṭu candied sugar, related to kaṭṭu to harden, to condense), which was also borrowed into Sanskrit as khaṇḍava, khaṇḍa candied sugar. The Indian word was probably transmitted via Persian qand; the initial q in Persian may either show later Arabic influence, or an attempt to approximate the quality of the Dravidian initial
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026
the "position type" options for searching Rutgers job ads (jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/search) are a little discouraging, frankly
Job postings search page (jobs.rutgers.edu): the "Position Type" list includes the categories "Staff," "Faculty," and "NOT IN USE Tenure/TenureTrack Faculty"
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/09/2026
customer feedback for the friendly neighborhood knowledge-enclosure rentier
How likely are you to recommend ProQuest to a friend or coworker? 0-10 scale. -500 scrawled in red and circled.
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2026
#lrt My institution's library "has" plenty of these "books"; what it does not have is an English literature librarian, or any collections budget for my field
Rutgers library catalog page showing a bunch of "machine-generated overview" titles from Springer
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2026
modern technology ruined our attention spans…by supplying books with pages already cut, depriving us of a "soothing and elegant occupation" (Publishers' Circular, Oct. 15, 1898) #guillotine
SHOULD BOOKS AND MAGAZINES BE SOLD WITH THE EDGES CUT? [letter to the editor]: SIR, In this utilitarian age it seems childish and ridiculous to defend a custom merely for reasons of sentiment. Nevertheless I hope you will allow me t put in a word in defence of uncut edges.... Is not the soothing and elegant occupation of cutting open the leaves of a book an excellent preparation for its enjoyment? [etc etc] Yours faithfully, AUSTIN H. JOHNSON, Chelsea, Oct. 8, 1898.
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/09/2026
@triplingual that remark was really a learning opportunity for me
In the 1946 Japanese film No Regrets for Our Youth, directed by Akira Kurosawa, when Yukie and Noge reunite in Tokyo during the war, Yukie laments that she is not happy with her career and wants to do something truly meaningful in the struggle for freedom. Noge responds, "Who finds work like that even once in their lives? It's like finding The Blue Bird of Happiness."

The bluebird is mentioned at the end of the 1968 Beatles film Yellow Submarine, when the leader of the Blue Meanies, the Chief Blue Meanie claims that his "cousin is the bluebird of happiness". Beatles Paul McCartney wrote a song about them for his band Wings’ 1973 album Band on the Run, "Bluebird".
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026
are you shitting me
putative "cloudflare human verification" enjoining you to switch to terminal, press command-v, and type enter
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026
thanks to the wrecking of the Dept of Ed, however, USA testing and data collection had huge gaps, and the USA's results come with a giant asterisk. Here's a chalkbeat report www.chalkbeat.org/2026/09/08/pisa-r…
U.S. results were not broken out by race and family poverty, key drivers of academic gaps, because more than 40% of U.S. students who took the tests did not take an accompanying questionnaire. The Education Department acknowledged a “month-long pause in PISA activity in spring 2025” resulting in some questionnaires not being administered.

This was also when the U.S. DOGE Service was cutting contracts and staff at the Education Department research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences. Matthew Soldner, acting director of IES, did not respond to questions about whether these cuts were related to the data gaps.
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026
in other great edtech news, OECD testing of 15 year olds shows an association between "AI" use and worse scores across subjects
OECD figure showing declining mean PISA scores in science by increasing frequency of AI use for schoolwork. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volume-i_73451bc5-en.html
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026
Whoa, missed the great news from March! Blackboard (formerly Anthology, formerly Blackboard) is back, "debt-free and focused on enabling transformational teaching and learning"! #debtfree
[corporate press release] Blackboard, Formerly Anthology, Emerges Debt-Free and Focused on Enabling Transformational Teaching and Learning
Blackboard to operate on a stand-alone, debt-free basis following completion of recapitalization
Bruce Dahlgren to continue as CEO; Dr. Matthew Pittinsky to re-join as CEO at a future date
Anthology (the “Company”), a leading software as a service (“SaaS”) educational technology provider, announced today that it has successfully emerged from Chapter 11 to finalize its financial restructuring process, completing a comprehensive recapitalization. Rebranded as Blackboard, the Company’s core Teaching & Learning business (comprised of Blackboard LMS, Ally, Illuminate, Evaluate, and Institutional Effectiveness solutions) will operate on a stand-alone, debt-free basis that positions the new Blackboard to focus on transformational teaching and learning.
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2026
The LLM-generated bulleted list with bolded catchphrases is the new long-scrolling single-page website with circular founder headshots (web aesthetics which scream "tech bullshit")
image of some release notes using the now-ubiquitous chatbot formula of a bulleted list with keywords in bold, a colon, and explanatory text following
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2026
this Deming guy clearly knows all the right people
Ross Douthat on the case for God
Plus what's wrong with meritocracy, and why he says Harvard wasn't good for his soul
Jun 3 • DAVID DEMING
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2026
it's okay everyone, we can go back to talking shit about Harvard again www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/9/3…
[Crimson article] This summer, Deming hosted Harvard Corporation member Mariano-Florentino “Tino” Cuéllar ’93 on his podcast, where Cuéllar warned against “clunky” regulations that cannot adapt quickly to technological progress. Cuéllar was tapped as Anthropic’s chief global affairs officer shortly after, leading government relations for the AI giant.
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2026
Wagner enhanced by the digital age: youtube auto-captioning of the Rhinedaughters' song. Wallala, man.
youtube transcript of the opening lines of Das Rheingold: [Musik] / el Duelle alle zu die / [Musik] / fegel FST du ein W nicht zu / [Applaus] / [Musik] / zwei v für die flä dases / sch schlecht breacht ist St [etc]
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/08/2026
As for the elephant in the pandoc-room (but the last two sentences fill me with dread)
Perhaps, then, in the future, people will no longer have a need for tools like pandoc. As things stand now, though, I think that using pandoc to convert texts has several large advantages over relying on an LLM. The first is ecological; it simply requires far less energy for the same conversion. The second is that pandoc’s output is deterministic; if you convert your text with pandoc, you’ll always get the same result, and you’ll be able to predict what that result is. The third is that, for the moment at least, pandoc’s conversions are going to be more reliable. But that could change in the coming years. Indeed, a time may come when LLMs can produce more reliable conversions than pandoc or anything that works like it.
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026
@ncecire.bsky.social yep, you can tell because it's got both authors and one of them is a doctor
Amazon: "follow the authors": Sigmund Freud (cigar picture); Dr. Sigmund Freud (anon silhouette)
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/08/2026
link[.]springer[.]com is down on a Saturday morning in late August. We need those articles! Surely THIS will be the spark that lights the fires of revolution. Come, brothers and sisters!
Firefox "connection has timed out" error page for link.springer.com. Why, what are YOU doing with your weekend?
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/08/2026
Realized Cambridge University Library felt so cozy and familiar on first visit because all the signage is in Gill Sans, still my font for slide presentations 10 years after giving up Keynote
Signs at the UL, Cambridge
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026
Many people are asking it
DO BOYS READ POETRY OUT OF SCHOOL?
To 'teach poetry'' is an established practice of English
teachers. Like most established teaching practices it is
quite untested: teachers indulge in it largely because it is an
established practice, but partly because they have 'beliefs'
or 'convictions' about its value. These beliefs are quite
often sincerely and sometimes enthusiastically maintained,
but they are not based on established knowledge of how
children respond to poetry. Such knowledge is not avail-
able. No one knows which poems excite a response from
children of this or that age, or of this or that type
(Wilkinson, What Do Boys and Girls Read? London: Methuen, 1940, 97.)
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/08/2026
I think this is saying that the reason is spam and slop. The whole surface of the enlightened Web is radiant with triumphant calamity. www.cos.io/blog/osf-changes-a-note-…
Rapid growth brought lots of needs and infrastructure management challenges to support the legitimate uses and to manage the infiltration of the illegitimate uses. I did not anticipate how much resourcing would be needed to prevent, detect, and eliminate spam. OSF’s high SEO (search engine optimization) and low barrier to share content made it an attractive target for spammers, and not just fake science spammers. Spammers set up thousands of accounts and tried to use OSF for sharing pirated movies, advertising health supplements, and anything and everything else.

Beyond spam, not all uses of OSF are helping to advance our mission to increase openness, integrity, and trustworthiness of research. For example, 63% of OSF projects, more than 650,000, have never been made public. We designed OSF to integrate private and public workflows to ease the burden of going public, and there are many legitimate reasons for some content to remain private. However, almost 200,000 users have used OSF only for private storage. Maintaining that is costly and our mission is not served by providing a free, private storage solution that never leads to open science.
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/08/2026
the Telegraph, you say? Really? TIL Michael Maxwell Scott (later Sir Michael) had a regular SF roundup there from pretty early days, 1960, until his death in 1989. OTOH, Telegraph gonna Telegraph
Overpopulation, decay of White civilisation, African dominance—these are some of our forebodings, with which Brian W. Aldiss charges his weird twilit fantasy "Earthworks" (Faber. 16s). There are some good gruesome touches: factory-farmed crops laundered to remove chemical poisons. But Mr. Aldiss, who can be very good, is not at his best here: it is too uneasy a mixture of " Candide" and the Keystone Cops. (Michael Maxwell Smith, "S.F. and 'Inner Space," Daily Telegraph, March 11, 1965: 21)
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/08/2026
"sick" (appreciative) (Daily Telegraph, March 2, 1962)
Some of Damon Knight's tales, assembled in “ Far Out ” (Gollancz, 15s) are the most beguiling I have read for months. One of the best, “To Serve Man,” is about some Alice - Through - the - Looking - Glass creatures who arrive om Earth bearing wondrous gifts: inexhaustible electric power, the solution to world food problems and a device that neutralises all explosions. Why this munificence?
The answer turns on a very “ sick” pun.
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/08/2026
Meyer, "Effects of Education as an Institution," spent 12 years in my "should have read" Zotero collection; prompted by @kjhealy post, finally read it. Really pioneering work in the subtweet field
Imagine, for example, the consequences that would flow from the rise of routinely accredited university programs and degrees in astrology. Organizations would incorporate astrologers, the state would fund their programs and consult or incorporate them.  Of course a justificatory literature would grow. The same basic processes have gone on with many occupational groups.
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/08/2026
one of the omitted paragraphs contains a truly surprising application of Bourdieu's idealization of autonomy within the social field
It [viz., the penal minimalism Wacquant is defending] actively worries that punishment is a means of signalling state sovereignty on the domestic front and a vehicle for public officials to generate everyday legitimacy among the citizenry. So it strives to preserve the autonomy of justice officials by shielding them from political and journalistic influences. Indeed, the diligent defence of the autonomy of the judicial subfield within the bureaucratic field and within the broader field of power is the precondition for pursuing the four aforementioned goals.
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/08/2026
Wacquant is writing about the sociological and political defects of prison abolitionism, but I can think of lots of uses for his term "community fetishism" newleftreview.org/issues/ii158/arti…
2. ‘Community’ fetishism: Advocates of abolition often appeal to an idealized ‘community’ (and its rhetorical cousin, the romanticized ‘grassroots’) that would be the natural repository of judicial wisdom and a unified force for organized resistance against the penal state, provided people are properly educated by enlightened militants through patient ‘base-building’, ‘mutual aid’ and ‘narrative shifting’. The presumption seems to be that this mystical ‘community’ is cohesive rather than fractured and stratified, organically disposed to direct democracy rather than autocracy, constitutively inclined to judicial temperance rather than severity, and moved by principled solidarity with offenders because of the adverse social circumstances the latter have suffered; the offender/victim binary is often portrayed as arbitrary. Thus the jurist and former public defender Cynthia Godsoe proposes to ‘shift power from professionals to communities’ and to ‘centre community expertise’ by listening to ‘the voices of the community’.footnote14 But concretely, who gets to speak: the business owner or the store thief, the landlord or the homeless person, the mother of three children or the streetcorner drug dealer who terrorizes them, the teacher or the truant youth, the policeman who lives in the neighbourhood or the gang member who controls its streets? What if the celebrated voices are a cacophony of discordant diagnoses and contradictory demands? What if the loudest ones ask for retribution?

This irenic vision of Gemeinschaft leading to the placid prevention and peaceful resolution of criminality based on intra-racial comity and what we might call class maternalism—by analogy with racial paternalism—does not withstand historical scrutiny.
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/08/2026
that was back when literature took to the streets (Bookseller, Oct. 14, 1927: 70. The caption: sic)
A man wearing a leaf-shaped sandwich board reading OIL! Upton Sinclair FIG LEAF EDITION. The magazine has captioned it: Mr. Sinclair Lewis [sic] recently peddling copies of his new book "Oil!" in an American City.
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/08/2026
Grace Blakeley looks on the bright side jacobin.com/2026/08/ai-llms-monopol…
After years of hype and trillions of dollars, the AI boom will leave us with a captured economy, a corrupted democracy, and a devastated environment. We’ll be told that this is just how markets work — sometimes they go up, sometimes they go down. But this narrative obscures how decisions are really made in capitalist economies.
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/08/2026
Melanie Mitchell's latest "no, human intelligence is not like that" essay, good as always. It strikes me that the attributes "AI" lacks are also deficient in its perpetrators yalereview.org/article/melanie-mitc…
Why won’t training on language alone suffice? Because human development and learning are entirely unlike the training process of LLMs. We humans, like most other biological intelligences, are active seekers of information, not passive predictors of next tokens. Unlike LLMs, we are curious, constantly intervening in the world, driven to gain both rewarding experiences and understanding. And, perhaps most important, unlike LLMs we are embodied creatures with a sense of self, a sense of others, and (at least for most of us) a profound caring about the consequences of our actions. An LLM has no body, of course, no conception of itself as a “self,” and no self-generated desires or motivations.
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/07/2026
Learned recently that the ubiquitous .io domain signifies “Indian Ocean (territories)”of the UK, which forcibly removed Diego Garcia’s indigenous population in 1971
At a Cobra meeting three days before
Burnham became prime minister, Keir
Starmer decided to continue his policy of
allowing US planes to use RAF Fairford in
Gloucestershire and the Diego Garcia base
in the Indian Ocean for what the military
calls ‘defensive’ strikes against Iran. On 21
July, Bloomberg reported that Burnham ‘was
informed of the discussion and agreed with
the decision taken’.
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/07/2026
Alternatively (suggests an anonymous well-wisher) this could be my big break into soc, I just have to make the domain squatter a good "certified" offer via their convenient platform
screenshot of "Network Solutions" page suggesting I make a "certified offer" for the contexts.org domain
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 30/07/2026
Another scholarly-org blog vanished into bit-rot, this time sociology's contexts dot org (via @philipncohen.com)
contexts dot org, formerly the blog of the American Sociological Association's public-facing Contexts journal, now a domain squat for network solutions
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2026
remember when organizations had blogs and stuff? the cleanup took me back to "On the Human," from the National Humanities Center, which now looks like this
onthehuman.org, now squatted on by an Indonesian online gambling site?
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2026
also discovered that the elaborate archive of DH 2014 conference abstracts, dharchive dot org, now looks like this. Another triumph for the experts in digital text archiving
DH Archive website now eaten by spam links for genetics crap, though you can still see "Plenary" in there and who knows what else
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/07/2026
slop is made by making pulp: library book acquisition displaced & precluded by process of buying & digesting (literally!) books into undifferentiated data capital www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-bu…
“It's not just the quantity, but the weirdness of the orders,” the bookseller told me. “I've had library orders before, and usually they're mostly confined to a single subject or maybe a slightly broader range of subjects. But basically, almost every library in the world has lost their budget. I know all the U.S. college libraries don't buy much anymore. The Australian libraries don't buy much anymore. The type of books [...] there's no rhyme or reason to it. Also, there's a total disregard for the price of the book. I've had some books that sold through this way that were [...] greatly overpriced. That's kind of a tell for AI because they have just so much money.”
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/07/2026
("Linguistics and Poetics," 1960, q.v.)
There are messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works ("Hello, do you hear me?"), to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention ("Are you listening?" or in Shakespearean diction, "Lend me your ears!"—and on the other end of the wire "Um-hum!"). This set for CONTACT, or in Malinowski's terms PHATIC function, may be displayed by a profuse exchange of ritualized formulas, by entire dialogues with the mere purport of prolonging communication. Dorothy Parker caught eloquent examples: "'Well!' the young man said. 'Well!' she said. 'Well, here we are,' he said. 'Here we are,' she said. 'Aren't we?' 'I should say we were,' he said. 'Eeyop! Here we are.' 'Well!' she said.…"
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/07/2026
Diana Wynne Jones's childhood encounters with the great tradition of children's writing, magically personified
The same day, other mothers had taken the younger children to play beyond the cottage of the lady who called squirrels. The noise they made disturbed the occupant of the houseboat out in the bay. He cam rowing angrily across and ordered them off, and, on finding where they lived, said that he wasn't going to be disturbed by a parcel of evacuees and announced that he would come next morning to complain. He hated children. There was huge dismay among the mothers. Next morning I stood in the hall, watching them rush about trying to find coffee and biscuits (which were nearly unobtainable by then) with which to soothe the great Arthur Ransome, and gathered I was about to set eyes on a real writer. I watched with great interest as a tubby man with a beard stamped past, obviously in a great fury, and almost immediately stormed away again on finding there was nobody exactly in charge to complain to. I was very impressed to find he was real. Up to then I had thought books were made by machines in the back room of Woolworth's.

My brush with the other writer in the area was even less direct but no more pleasant. We were up near Sawrey, which was a long way for children to walk; but, if the mothers were to go anywhere, they had to walk and the children had to walk with them. No one had a car. Isobel and another four-year-old girl were so tired that, when they found a nice gate, they hooked their feet on it and had a restful swing. An old woman with a sack over her shoulders stormed out of the house and hit both of them for swinging on her gate. This was Beatrix Potter. She hated children, too. I remember the two of them running back to us, bawling with shock. Fate, I always think, seemed determined to thrust a very odd view of authorship on me.
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/06/2026
All beautifully plausible, except that search committees never tell you why in a rejection letter inpreparation.substack.com/p/opinio…
In the rejection email, the committee cited “concerns about independent thinking” and “questions about foundational knowledge.” Independent thinking? I think independently all the time. Just last week, I independently decided to ask ChatGPT to
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/06/2026
oh for god's sake #toxicmaxsecurity
terminal output: "WARNING: connection is not using a post-quantum key exchange algorithm. This session may be vulnerable to "store now, decrypt later" attacks. The server may need to be upgraded. See https://openssh.com/pq.html"
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/06/2026
Always love to see new athletics expenditures data. In 2024–2025 Rutgers-NB Athletics made $116M in revenue but achieved an all-time record in spending of $193M. Go Knights! knightnewhousedata.org/fbs/big-ten/…
Bar chart of Total Athletic Expenses from 2020 to 2025, comparing Rutgers to the Big "10" conference
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Andrew Goldstone @agoldst.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/06/2026
Booksellers please note! Ambiguous utopias and historical studies should not be confused. Wouldn't want any conclusions to be drawn! (Bookseller, November 22, 1980: 27)
[microfilm scan:] Booksellers Please Note / SIDGWICK are concerned that the trade should know that there are two (very different) books with the title Dispossessed. The recent publication by Sidgwick of The Dispossessed: The Ordeal of the Palestinians 1917–1980 (£12.50) by David Gilmour is still in print and should not be confused with Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin published by Gollancz (o.p. 1979).
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