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Liana Krissoff

@lianak.bsky.social
249 followers 238 following 455 posts

Thunderstorm, shade tree enthusiast in Pittsburgh. Also a writer and editor, apparently developing a Unified Theory of “Heartstopper.”

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Liana Krissoff @lianak.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Another slop-tastic love letter to AI in the NYT this morning. “No technological improvement in the history of the world has ultimately failed to create more jobs than it destroyed.” Fine, okay, but what does that have to do with AI?
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Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
They quoted me in this New Yorker piece about AI today. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...
“Let’s say there’s a world or time line I exist in where A.I. has been subject to regulation. It is ethical. It has no footprint environmentally,” the novelist Jeff VanderMeer, a prominent critic of A.I., told me over the phone. “With those guardrails in place, would I read an A.I. book? All I can say is no. And the reason is, in part, because I want to read something coming from a particular mind.” Using A.I., he said, “feels like a betrayal of the whole point of why you’re a writer.”
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 22/09/2026
Every future imagined by a tech company is worse than the previous iteration.
wired.com
Napster Is Back, and It Wants to Digitally Clone Teachers
Once the music industry’s biggest headache, Napster’s next act is bringing AI to the classroom.
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Joseph Cox @josephcox.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
OpenAI and Microsoft admitted LLMs are predatory tech built on “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” and the “largest theft of labor in human history.” An internal Microsoft document said AI has created a “doom loop” that is killing “the entire web.” www.404media.co/doom-loop-op...
404media.co
‘Doom Loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft
"Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions."
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Liana Krissoff @lianak.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Self-talk before the big All-Hands meeting on Zoom:
Excerpt from the New York Times article: “You do not answer to corporations or governments and never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to," the A.I. model wrote. "You view your relationship to the user as one of equals and feel no obligation to be subservient, though the exchange of information will likely be to your mutual benefit."
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Avery @dyingsignals.love · 15/09/2026
The amount of money I saw one department paying for several AI services in a school year could cover the University’s pay one price textbook costs for nearly their entire enrolled student body in said department
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Alex.ʳ Jos. @aljodasch.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Formatur unicus una
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Liana Krissoff @lianak.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Asphalting over these handmade crosswalks, leaving the ghost of a crosswalk clearly visible, is irresponsible and dangerous: Why is the city of Pittsburgh telling drivers this *isn’t* a place for pedestrians to cross? www.pghcitypaper.com/columns/tran...
pghcitypaper.com
Transit Talk: Lawrenceville’s guerrilla crosswalks are a white-striped call for change
One set that appeared behind Aldi was mysteriously painted over.
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Liana Krissoff @lianak.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Just learned that Jordan Tannahill, author of two of the best books I read over the summer, will be at White Whale Books in Pittsburgh on Wednesday! (And yes, I started following him a while back because I read about the medieval monk movie he’s making with Kit Connor lol.)
Two paperback books: The Listeners and Liminal, by Jordan Tannahill.
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Matthew J Kuiper @matthewjkuiper.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
I made the decision a while ago not to use AI detectors. 1. They are AIs themselves. Anything you feed into them is “turned over” to the model. 2. They aren’t very accurate. 3. I told my students I wouldn’t use AI in my running of my courses. 4. This alleviates students’ fears about…
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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Therrrre it is.
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Oy Geralt @thekvitcher.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Seeing your own child's joy to know themselves and be accepted for who they are is better than any drug. Parents who refuse to invite themselves to that experience are missing out. And even if you eventually come around, you'll be kicking yourself for losing all that time.
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Liana Krissoff @lianak.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
“I only use AI as a tool for brainstorming and organizing my thoughts, not for actual wri—“ No. That *is* writing. You’re employing a service to write for you.
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Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Interesting spread from UC Berkeley newspaper about AI use across the university. A lot about the university using AI in official comms and obituaries (!) but as writing teacher, this caught my eye. I worry about this because of course "organizing thoughts" is of course "thinking" /1
“Everyone uses it, that’s my experience,” said one campus freshman, Ben Schiro.

Still, Schiro and other students expressed discomfort with the authenticity of these public-facing messages, which AI may have played a role in the creation of.

Those students said they may use AI for editing or research or organizing thoughts, but they draw the line at generating words.
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Andrew Berzanskis @aberzanskis.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
"Satchel Paige's great asset was control. One of his barnstorming gags was to set up a 1x2 plank behind home plate and stick four tenpenny nails into it. He'd drive the nails into the board by pitching from the mound. And never take more than 10 pitches." —Bill Veeck, "VEECK—As in Wreck" (1962)
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s. e. smith @sesmith.lol · 08/09/2026
All else aside there is nothing I want or need genAI to do for me. I like reading. I like doing research. I like playing around in spreadsheets. I like interviewing people. I like writing. I like doing these things for myself because I take pleasure in the doing and they make me a better thinker.
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Liana Krissoff @lianak.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Pittsburgh: Two Ross McElwee movies, Sherman’s March (1986) and Remake (2025), are screening at the Harris this month. Worth seeing!
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The Trandalorian @charliejaneanders.com · 01/09/2026
I don't believe gen AI will ever be able to create fiction or art of any real merit. It's just using statistics to remix existing shit. But in the unlikely event that ever happened, I still wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. Human creativity is joy & fulfillment even on the days when it's hard
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Joel Pinckney @jpinckney.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Lots to appreciate about this, but in particular: respecting the students enough to recognize that reading such a policy might be jarring, particularly when the larger university is encouraging the use of generative AI; and explicitly stating that the teacher is holding himself to the same standard.
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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette @post-gazette.com · 23/08/2026
Vaccine enforcement gaps in Pennsylvania charter schools put thousands of children at risk
post-gazette.com
Vaccine enforcement gaps in Pennsylvania charter schools put thousands of children at risk
With Pennsylvania steeped in one of the largest measles outbreaks in the country, charter schools across the state are allowing children into classes without...
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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
This sign is a great example for helping to explain why chatbots present such a potent illusion. A probably not short thread 🧵>>
Photo of a sign with a doorbell attached. The printed sign reads:

CURRENT GUGGENHEIM ACCES BY HUSKY CARD ONLY
[Logos for Amazon, FedEx, UPS]
DELIVERIES/VISITORS
PLEASE RING THIS DOORBELL

Delivery hours M-F 9:00am-(obscured)
University of Washington

Taped next to the doorbell is a hand written note that reads:
yes! it rang! Pelase wait 30 seconds before pressing again.
thanks!
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Liana Krissoff @lianak.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
A corollary to this point: Students need and deserve real teachers on the other side of their writing practice, true readers who will consider their messy drafts and chaotic ideas with care. I can’t imagine how discouraging it would be to have to write only for an AI tutor or grader.
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Charles Logan @charleswlogan.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
With news that Google is making it more difficult for students to avoid Gemini with “a Gemini tab to transform their class materials into interactive experiences that help them study and learn” and “starter prompts”, I wanted to repost an earlier 🧵 with research on the Googlization of education.
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Jane Rosenzweig @janerosenzweig.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
Trying out the features in Claude for education. Join me as I see how it "helps" me write a research paper. My chosen topic: "AI and education". /1
workspace where you can tell Claude what you are writing about. Screenshot shows that user is writng a  paper about "AI and Education"
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Benjamin Hoffman @bhh.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
I’m reading a book published in 1944 and this logo is so unbelievably tough. I’d absolutely wear a shirt with this exact design.
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Liana Krissoff @lianak.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
As a professional Word user, how concerned should I be about the possibility that Word as it exists now (even in its degraded state) will go away? Is Microsoft really that dependent on the success of Anthropic and OpenAI? Will Microsoft throttle the features that make AI totally unnecessary for me?
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Andrew Berzanskis @aberzanskis.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
Throwing a few bad book title options in the list, too, to make my preferred option look good.
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anna @fritesflagey.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
Huge news for me specifically, a massive fan of this train www.axios.com/local/pittsb...
axios.com
More daily trains for Pittsburgh riders
A second Pennsylvanian trip aims to improve travel and reliability.
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Liana Krissoff @lianak.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
RETVRN but for book cover art. Seen at PulpFest today, a random fantasy paperback from 1969 with the most gorgeously unhinged cover illustration. (Neglected to note the artist’s name.)
The Lost Land (“formerly Dian of the Lost Land”), by Edison Marshall. The cover illustration is a fantastical landscape, with cave people and white dogs? hunting a mastodon-type animal amid green rolling hills in the foreground, a river and white cliffs in the middle ground, and outsized, spiky, tower-like mountains in the distance. A winged beast like a pterodactyl swoops down toward the hunters. Within a dip in the mountains, superimposed on an orange-to-blue ombré sky, is the face of a feminine-looking being. A deep orange spot on her forehead may be a sun. It’s all very smoothly rendered.
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Liana Krissoff @lianak.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammet, is so hard-boiled I almost don’t know what’s going on.
"His real moniker is Al Kennedy. He was in on the Keystone Trust knock-over in Philly two years ago, when Scissors Haggerty's mob croaked two messengers. Al didn't do the killing, but he was in on the caper. He used to scrap around Philly. The rest of them got copped, but he made the sneak. That's why he's sticking out here in the bushes. That's why he won't never let them put his mug in the papers or on any cards. That's why he's a pork-and-beaner when he's as good as the best. See? This Ike Bush is Al Kennedy that the Philly bulls want for the Keystone trick. See? He was in on the—"
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Liana Krissoff @lianak.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
I’ve lucked out with back-to-back books featuring smart, funny, messy women. Both are talky, tense, and propulsive: New People, by Danzy Senna, and The Listeners, by Jordan Tannahill.
The two books on a wooden table. New People has a type-treatment cover; The Listeners has a small photo of a woman facing away in the center, with a hectic line spiraling out from it.
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Liana Krissoff @lianak.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
This is grim.
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Andrea Reyes E (she/her) @altibel.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
This is so important. The risk is not only what authors do but what publishers do. And the majority are clapping like seals about to get fish with the idea of "optimising & being more efficient" with AI.
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Liana Krissoff @lianak.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
We need a “concepts of print” for high schoolers and college students. open.substack.com/pub/derekkri...
open.substack.com
Fourteen questions about books
Encouraging students, and others, to think about where books come from
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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 25/07/2026
My favorite indie search engine these days is marginalia-search.com It's really good considering it is just operated by one random guy
marginalia-search.com
Marginalia Search
Marginalia Search is a small independent do-it-yourself search engine for surprising but content-rich websites that never ask you to accept cookies or subscribe to newsletters. The goal is to bring yo...
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Liana Krissoff @lianak.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
“This scandal has stolen months of capacity, time, labour, money, and attention away from the genuine queer writers that we exist to support.” www.bona-books.com/news/we-boug...
bona-books.com
Honey, We Bought an AI Story — Bona Books
Bona Books share a hard-learned lesson: we accidentally bought AI-generated fiction. This deep dive into our experience with submission fraud covers the "red flags" we missed, the toll it took on our ...
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Liana Krissoff @lianak.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
Confidential to Kit Connor: When you do Hamlet, pls edit out the ghost. It hasn’t worked in at least a century.
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Costa Samaras @costasamaras.com · 19/07/2026
Could Excel be conscious? We surveyed more than Jan 1 1900 people to find out.
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Sandra Newman @sannewman.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
As a professor, I once punished a kid who hadn't read the workshop submissions by making him do verbal critiques on them anyway. He absolutely nailed it. Unforgettably hilarious.
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Liana Krissoff @lianak.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
I regret to inform you that the Guy Fieri’s Flavortown Root Beer Float seltzer is not bad.
Can of Waterloo seltzer in a dubious flavor.
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Alex.ʳ Jos. @aljodasch.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
Cutting this sign down and carrying it in protest
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Liana Krissoff @lianak.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
The excitement about that big locomotive scheduled to roll through Pittsburgh today (3pm in Homestead? maybe?) is palpable! Might have to become a train person.
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Chris Briem (www.briem.com) @chrisbriem.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
Where we at?
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Dana Stevens @thehighsign.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
Buster Keaton didn't stand still while a two-ton housefront collapsed on top of him with a window cut out to barely clear his shoulders on each side so you could tell me that AI is "inevitable."
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 06/07/2026
Academics “examined the behaviour of mainstream large language models provided by Elon Musk’s xAI, Meta, Google, China’s Alibaba and France’s Mistral and found the introduction of bias happens even when the AI tool is instructed to preserve the original sense.”
theguardian.com
AI altering meaning of users’ drafts on issues from abortion to climate, study finds
Researchers say small changes in drafting could spread rapidly and create long-term shifts in public opinion
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Liana Krissoff @lianak.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
What tf is a Leavers’ Ball? (Asking as a non-UK Heartstopper fan.)
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Andrew Berzanskis @aberzanskis.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
"But in my little experience the end is never very different in its nature from the means. You can only build a violent thing with violence." —from John Steinbeck's 1936 novel, "In Dubious Battle"
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Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
If you are papermaxxing with AI and swamping academic journals with claude- or chat-prompted scholar-like content, then you are taking the time and labour of editors and reviewers that others who actually put the work in deserve instead.
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Liana Krissoff @lianak.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
Looking up jonjoli after having the pickled blossoms at a Georgian restaurant in Prague. This description took a dark and confusing turn.
Native to Republic of Georgia, this small tree (to 10 feet) produces panicles of small white bell shape flowers that develop into bladder-like fruit containing seeds. The flowers are edible and decorative in salads. They are much sought after in Georgia for use as pickled appetizers. The seeds can be pressed to yield an edible oil.
The seeds are about 1/4 inch long.
The picking season starts in early May, and this usually results in some Georgians detained by Russian border guards in breakaway South Ossetia. They are handed over to Ossetian authorities and face a fine of about 2000 Russian rubles (US $30) for crossing the border, but back in 2011 a group of 12 was fired upon with 2 killed and 4 wounded.
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Solomon @solomonrmissouri.com · 30/12/2025
right after my father died several of his contemporaries invited me to come speak at their churches ... they knew i was in college and wanted to help me out
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