iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Patrick De Oliveira

Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

There's a long discussion going on in my mentions about whether or not "LLMs" (quotes explained in a sec) apparently getting mostly* correct answers to arithmetic questions is "inconsistent" with the stochastic parrots metaphor. >>

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

"Concerns about LLMs are overrated. You can just evaluate students with 45-minute oral assessments." Says the elite SLAC professor who on average has 14 students per semester.

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Combining a Brazil-rich background with a midwestern-middle class one means that while you just assume all homes should come with a cleaner, ironically, now that you can occasionally afford one, your self-consciousness paralyzes you from hiring them unless you get the house clean for when they come.

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Imagine the @nytimes.com in the late 1940s getting a sit down interview with Oppenheimer and centering the discussion on his fondness for porkpie hats. (To be fair to Oppenheimer, he was a much clearer ethical figure than Zuckerberg will ever be.)

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Also true in the European ecosystem (perhaps even more so, since that approach has been dominant here for even longer). ERC grants or bust, basically.

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The boring adage goes if you're not a liberal at 20 you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at 40 you have no head. But I'm fascinated by how so many of my friends/colleagues (and myself!) have been steadily moving to the left as they age. Contrast that with the younglings' reactionary turn.

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

As universities become obsolete institutions by embracing their transformation into meaningless credential factories disguised (at best) as utilitarian jobs training, it is worth rescuing an observation made by the supreme utilitarian, John Stuart Mill (who also happened to be rector of St Andrews):

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I'm curious. Do people know what university's allocate toward marketing on average in their operating budget?

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Ah yes. Another day experimenting with ChatGPT for research, another day being pinpointed to a neonazi website as a trusted source.

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Yung Lean and every single kid in the original would've beat the living crap out of these people (the tech overlords and the losers who think this kind of AI cosslop™ is cool). www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6_m...

youtube.com

GENER8ION - STORM starring Yung Lean

YouTube video by GENER8ION

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Teaching MBA students sure produces some weird ass artifacts

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Mark Bray @mark-bray.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Wrote a short weird little book about far-right death threats against me + my fam, fleeing our home, Trumpism, + my experience as a Jew amidst the resurgence of fascism + genocide in Gaza Coming January 2027 from @melvillehouse.bsky.social mhpbooks.com/books/unpunc... #NoPasarán #FreePalestine

“Unpunctuated Death threats: Notes from a fascist present. Author of Antifa Mark Bray.” Text on a black and white image of the author from the chin down.

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Reposted by Patrick De Oliveira

Emily Nussbaum @emilynussbaum.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

Most accurate portrait of modern culture currently available

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Forthcoming Acemoglu: CEOs with business degrees lead to lower wages and suppression of the labor share, while not actually producing higher output. In short, rent-extraction for shareholders, rather than real value creation. www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=...

aeaweb.org

Eclipse of Rent-Sharing: The Effects of Managers’ Business Education on Wages and the Labor Share in the US and Denmark

(Forthcoming Article) - We provide evidence that CEOs with a business degree reduce wages and the labor share in the US and Denmark. Firms appointing business managers are not on differential trends a...

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I'm gonna go ahead and assume there was a whole lot of lead in the Warmke household tap water. #IYKYK

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Found this amongst my tabs and, um, inflation since 1986 has risen more than 200%, so this is basically the equivalent to a 70% budgetary cut. But yeah, let's spend all the moneys on data centers.

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Reposted by Patrick De Oliveira

Stacy Fahrenthold @sfahrenthold.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

AHA hired a lobbying firm with an extensive client list in Israel's occupations. And asked them how to squash advocacy by its own members working in/on the Middle East. It's bad. But It's clockable bc this is also what universities also do to crush dissent, discipline faculty in contested fields.

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Kind of hilarious that as Americans face an epidemic of uncontrollable explosive shits due to the Trump administration slashing health standards, that same administration still manages to surge the price of toilet paper.

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Numerous cases of faculty losing their jobs for expressing opposition to the genocide in Gaza, for teaching/researching about gender, etc., and the first letter dude chooses to sign is the one expressing support for the self-proclaimed racist who thinks Black people shouldn't be in academia.

static.klipy.com

Batman Thinking: Interesting...

ALT: Batman Thinking: Interesting...

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

For me any reference to "singularity" just brings to mind the image of infinite wanking gestures.

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Many in the LLMs and education discourse seem to be contorting themselves in a similar way to people in the gun and violence discourse. "Guns don't kill people. The problem is bad people/bad training/or any explanation that would let manufacturers off the hook to avoid stricter regulations."

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

First reaction upon seeing this UChicago guy who has written 200 papers so far in 2026: "I bet he's at Booth."* *(Of course he's at Booth).

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Reposted by Patrick De Oliveira

Marie Le Conte @youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · 14/08/2026

Cambridge University should have known better, Fleet Street should have known better, the people hungrily absorbing every bit of news about it, making newsrooms feel like they had to keep going with it as a story, should have known better, horrible horrible horrible

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

This assumes that between now and 2035 the economy would grow at a rate of about 8% per annum, which is, to put it mildly, batshit insane. No one should be listening to anything regarding the economic transformation coming from the mouths of the cultists working in AI labs.

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Quinn Slobodian @quinnslobodian.com · 01/05/2026

Looking at actual New Deal murals it’s clear why a16z “American dynamism” slop will never be able to create a convincing mythology. You can’t sanctify the dignity of labor if you don’t believe in the dignity of labor.

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Ok, where do I get that tote?

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Might the end of Yglesias et. al style punditry be the one good thing to come from LLMs and the ensuing enshittified interwebz?

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

It's the year of our lord 2026 and somehow some economists are still speaking in these terms. Dude is trying to sell his AI "peer review" (sic) tool, which makes it all the more embarrassing...

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Burn all the data centers to the ground. Let's start over.

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

The whole TAH kerfuffle is exhausting. He's right about some stuff, but writing as if it were 2018. He's also keen on disingenuous explanations for his modus operandi. An occasional aside about higher ed's neoliberal political economy is not the same as endless articles about DEI's failures.

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Updated syllabus of Modern Cities and Capitalism completed! As part of my moves to foster a "luddite classroom," I'm requiring students to purchase a very cheap physical course reader, which also includes curated reading questions to help them make sense of the material. Below, the general gist:

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Reposted by Patrick De Oliveira

Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 08/08/2026

Commissioning a transphobic bigot to write an article about a UK academic scandal to somehow indict US higher education (a completely different system about which this case has literally no bearing) for being too woke is peak New York Times brain. Not a great thing, just an unfortunate one.

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

What a fucking travesty. The signalling in "consolidating" a truly academic institution that runs at a fraction of a fraction of the the cost of whatever shinny AI initiative Harvard is clamming on to.

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

I figured some folks might be interested in seeing this, as Europe deals with record-breaking heats year after year. In 1873, Camille Flammarion published an atmospheric science book geared toward a general audience. In it, he included a table indicating average temperatures in Paris since 1800.

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Ferguson is really something else. Amazing to read a critique that claims AI is playing a key role in the rising tide of Holocaust denial and antisemitism that doesn't even address the entanglement between this technology and right-wingers.... niallferguson.substack.com/p/the-death-...

niallferguson.substack.com

The Death of History

The tools that once exposed and debunked Holocaust denial are powerless against AI and the algorithm. Is there a remedy?

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Reposted by Patrick De Oliveira

Sheo @sheologian.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Unintentional accent mirroring is positively correlated with higher levels of empathy, by the way

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Patrick De Oliveira @plso.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

According to Gallup 37% of Americans are creationist purists who believe God created humans in their present form within the past 10,000 years, so I guess we need to start making some changes to the composition of biology departments!

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