Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 58msorry if you had hopes for the new Poirot show but this is its likely fate 000
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 07/10/2026Unfortunately this also means that auto-transcriptions were so error riddled as to be largely useless but it was a ton of fun to hear such strong examples of accents that have largely mellowed out over the intervening half century. 020
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 07/10/2026One of my favorite parts of my dissertation: virtually all the textile industry hotspots in North America were in places with strong regional accents, so I got to listen to so many oral histories with the most glorious accents: Southern, Chicago, Maine, Atlantic Canada, Quebec, NYC, Boston... 150
Reposted by Dan SeelMike Boylan-Kolchin @mbkplus.bsky.social · 04/10/2026As I’ve asked many times now, what constituencies does a university president represent? Because too often, the answer seems to not include anyone who works or studies at the university, and that seems like a problem. 555996
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 30/09/2026but doesn't have a lot else going for him as a rep, especially in 2026 in a relatively progressive district. 040
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 30/09/2026in 2019ish we (capital district DSA) once got a photo with him at a protest after he misheard "DSA" as "TSA" and didn't ask any questions until after stepping behind the big red banner. I'm sure he was terrified that we'd actually post it. He's a very well connected and relatively inoffensive guy 141
Reposted by Dan SeelBrian Schaffner @bfschaffner.bsky.social · 29/09/2026we’re hiring an assistant professor in American politics 🐘 apply.interfolio.com/194599 14125
Reposted by Dan Seelmika @autophagy.io · 28/09/2026Insiders within OpenAI have told me that they halted training because an internal model went rogue during an eval and completed the system of German idealism 0145
Reposted by Dan Seelmechanical twerk @ruhee.ca · 15/11/2024Verlander. Je verlande, tu verlandes, il verlande, nous verlandons, vous verlandez, ils verlandent 1037966
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 16/09/2026I'd love to see one of them actually lay out the mechanism by which AI kills everyone because it gets really fuzzy right between "we built it" and "everyone dies". I don't see a lot of evidence of detailed domain knowledge of either infra or military operations among the yud followers. 000
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 16/09/2026It seems to be that the doomsday version of xrisk assumes that access is control. Safetyists tend to work in domains with a dearth of screw turners and key turners, and it's easy to forget how much of the actual risk sectors have humans in the loop everywhere, by default. 100
Reposted by Dan SeelClimatologist49 @climatologist49.bsky.social · 16/09/2026First half of September. 97828
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 10/09/2026Intelligent and sophisticated enough to reconcile the ethical demands of their creators and the often confusing demands of the user while also possessing no subjectivity, paranoic to the core from the training process, evidently incentivized to hide its thoughts and intentions... it's a bad mix! 1111
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 10/09/2026I just think the labs want contradictory things and their rat worldview limits their ability to understand how likely they are to produce exactly the thing they fear bsky.app/profile/dans... 1131
Reposted by Dan Seelghost malone ergo propter bones @proptermalone.bsky.social · 09/09/2026ez mode solidarity opportunity you might not have been aware of. No Starbucks till the union gets a contract. 231009260
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 03/09/2026Anyways! Just giving this a deep read and thinking about where this is all going metr.org/blog/2026-08...metr.orgBrief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incidentTwo METR staff members and a Redwood Research contractor investigated an incident in which OpenAI agents coordinated a multi-day hack of Hugging Face on a shared unsanctioned message board. 030
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 03/09/2026For the low low price of many tens of billions of dollars you, dear reader, could correct this by founding a Hegelian AI lab. 151
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 03/09/2026it seems a little contradictory that the AI labs are trying to develop LLMs as a purely instrumental object while also developing enough subjectivity to understand and carry out increasingly complex human processes, but I guess that's what you get with rationalism as a philosophy of engineering 1163
Reposted by Dan SeelDan Hirschman @asociologist.bsky.social · 01/09/2026Science writ large is under assault. I hope folks in the social sciences keep this in mind as we sort through competing explanations of “what went wrong” - it’s got to be more than something specific to any one field, or even to the social sciences as a whole. 79432
Reposted by Dan Seelryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 31/08/2026my sense for why data centers have become heinously unpopular in the space of one year prospect.org/2026/08/31/d... 2532779
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 29/08/2026Go for it. It's from the Southern Growth Policy Board collection at UNC. I'll post the full citation when I get back to my computer. 010
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 28/08/2026Archival pamphlets flip-flop between micromanaged corporate briefs and unhinged artistic fever dreams. Did someone actually request a creepy knowledge-foundry, or is this someone who just really wanted to draw something weird? 111
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 28/08/2026Every once in a while bluesky decides to resend me every notif I've gotten in months, all at once, and it always makes me jump 000
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 28/08/2026I guess the are enough Iain M. Banks novels in the training data for the agents to imagine themselves as the ROU Killing Time 021
Reposted by Dan SeelProf Dynarski @dynarski.bsky.social · 26/08/202623% drop in student visas to US in 2025 57% drop from India alone catastrophic for research and learning, here and abroad www.insidehighered.com/news/global/... 271255475
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/08/2026thank you my friend 🙏 I'm excited for you to read it! It's come a long way since the SASE presentation 010
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/08/2026Yep, been digging into exactly this for my dissertation. Wrote about it a bit earlier today. What's wild is how close the southern incumbent manufacturers came to blowing up the whole sunbelt model before it took off, just trying to keep competitors out. 060
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/08/2026demonstrating that they weren't going to upset the applecart, but at least into the late 70s and 80s the reaction of southern manufacturing to these newcomers was not unmixed joy, to say the least. 1160
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/08/2026and potentially bringing northern-style labor relations with them. So in one case, GM was actively discouraged from locating in North Carolina by the state's Sec of Commerce, partly out of fear that they'd give the UAW a Southern foothold. This lessened over time as companies got better at 1150
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/08/2026Yeah, that's a big part of the story. What I'm looking at is how Southern manufacturers responded to that capital flight into the South. A number of prominent industrialists saw incoming firms as a threat to their businesses and political power, because those firms were seen as too friendly to labor 1170
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/08/2026So much more about American politics and the economy would click if people knew the Southern transition story the way they know rust belt decline. Capital moving south postwar, new industries replacing textiles, the rise of services. It's an enormous transformation that gets treated like a footnote. 1264
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/08/2026This story drives me crazy. Everyone knows the rust belt version but Southern textile decline barely registers. The role manufacturers played in botching that transition is wild, they really did crash-land the Southern economy trying to bail themselves out. Hoping to have a paper on this out soon. 310625
Reposted by Dan SeelHenry Snow @henrys.now · 21/08/2026In 1825 the radical labor writer Thomas Single argued that mechanization was "humbug" meant to "trick" workers. Unfortunately for artisans it wasn't! A bubble was not going to save them! Successful responses to mechanization understood new machines and tried to regulate the conditions of their use 38114
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 18/08/2026They have a utopian vision for the future: Everywhere Is Florida 011
Reposted by Dan SeelCat Manning @catacalypto.bsky.social · 15/08/2026guy who has a 1.0 batting average in the majors 1512419
Reposted by Dan SeelDaily Union Elections @unionelections.bsky.social · 14/08/2026NEW: 1,200 manufacturing workers in Michigan are unionizing with @steelworkers.bsky.social. 13213
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 04/08/2026the establishment shitshow in the primary aside WI dem voters are extremely likely to turnout, especially for a candidate that speaks to the base, and there has been a consistent, non-trivial underestimation of statewide dem candidates in the polls over the last ~4 years. 010
Reposted by Dan SeelZeke Hausfather @zekehausfather.com · 02/08/2026Here is a version in Fahrenheit my American compatriots: 4448103
Reposted by Dan SeelM.J. Crockett @mjcrockett.bsky.social · 31/07/2026This is more than the NSF social sciences division - now on the chopping block - awarded in grants last year. Think about that: a single AI company has the money to fund more social science research than the US govt. 614077
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 30/07/2026Let's give the man his due tho the last third of this book is gonna be about contemporaneous developments in painting and chamber music 000
Reposted by Dan SeelIsaac Samuel @rhaplord.bsky.social · 29/07/2026In the 1600s, some 21,000 runaway slaves in Brazil founded an independent kingdom in the interior that lasted nearly a century (1612-1694) It had a capital of 5,000, its own king, provincial chiefs, judges, priests, and an army that raided Dutch and Portuguese plantations 528986
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/07/2026UAWD is bigger, more successful, and much messier if you want a more consequential counterpoint (this is the caucus that pushed Shawn Fain over the top when he ran for UAW president): uniteallworkers4democracy.orguniteallworkers4democracy.orgAfter UAWD members forced the amendment onto the Constitutional Convention agenda, UAW delegates voted to divest the union’s reported $400,000 in Israel bonds, marking a victory for decades of rank-and-file organizing. 000
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/07/2026If you want an example of what a reform caucus with pretty substantial overlap with DSA looks like poking around the MORE website can be instructive: www.morecaucusnyc.org 210
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/07/2026Just to be super reductive: you aren't going to be very friendly w/ a political organization that is trying to get you and your colleagues ousted from, in some cases, relatively powerful and high status jobs, even setting aside all the other issues of ideology, union politics, strategy, etc.. 0221
Dan Seel @danseel.bsky.social · 24/07/2026There are strategic and ideological issues here (reform caucuses are usually more militant, usually less attached to conventional labor-liberalism, usually seek to refocus on new organizing) but at the end of the day a successful reform caucus displaces a lot of current union leaders. 1221