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Sam Bakkila

@sbakkila.bsky.social
178 followers 277 following 89 posts

MFA student and writing instructor at Stony Brook University. Former Edtech worker. Interested in digital pedagogy. Tennis fan 🎾

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Reposted by Sam Bakkila
Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
This document is going to be an assigned reading in college classes that cover this moment in time, there's a lot happening in a few paragraphs... www.ahmath.org/statements
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Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
I prefer it when Nobel Prize for literature synchs up overwhelming talent with eccentricity or obscurity. Bob Dylan seemed a gratuitous choice. Murakami both doesn't need it and increasingly writes bad women characters. Anne Carson in the spotlight is great. I find her work oblique in a good way.
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Fight For A Union @fightforaunion.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
San Frans Opera demanded a 5-year wage freeze for its musicians while the General Director's salary jumped from $424k to $729k. 30 minutes before opening night, the orchestra packed up and walked out to join the picket line for the first strike in the opera’s 100 year history.
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Guardian US @us.theguardian.com · 07/10/2026
Coco Gauff said she had been left drained by the racist abuse she experienced during the China Open after losing in the last 16 to Elise Mertens
theguardian.com
Coco Gauff says online racist abuse during China Open was ‘draining’ after loss to Mertens
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 18/09/2026
It's so funny that Mamdani is doing *exactly* what the abundance types are calling for -- competent government in service of constituents' quality of life -- but they can't embrace him because their billionaire donors hate Muslims.
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Sasha Costanza-Chock @schock.cc · 17/09/2026
The pushback on Sheeran is very powerful. Let's see how much pressure we can also generate against Kraft and Gillette stadium.
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Neil @neilforreal.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
That was a seriously high-quality match. Both Noskova and Sabalenka well into the positive in winners-to-unforced error ratio. #USOpen
Winners to UFE for Aryna Sabalenka and Linda Noskova showing positive ratios for both.
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Sam Bakkila @sbakkila.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Absurd that [24] Cerundolo vs [28] Blockx is on Ashe while [13] Osaka vs [2] Rybakina, both multi-slam winners, are on Armstrong.
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Sam Bakkila @sbakkila.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Why did Adidas give Mensik and Tien identical outfits playing against each other? It wouldn’t have been hard to change up the colors
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Sam Bakkila @sbakkila.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
I hope Jovic and Eala develop a great rivalry and get to play a bunch of finals against each other.
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Sam Bakkila @sbakkila.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
As soon as the second set went to a tiebreak I had a feeling it could be the same scoring as Serena v Joint at Wimbledon…
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Sam Bakkila @sbakkila.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
whoever decided that Alcaraz should be styled as a himbo is an aesthetic/advertising genius, honestly
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Sam Bakkila @sbakkila.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Watching Monfils on Armstrong is one of the best experiences I've had as a tennis fan. The crowd is honestly much more engaged on Armstrong than on Ashe (where the stadium is huge and there's lots of people on their phones, just hanging out).
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Sam Bakkila @sbakkila.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Really fun to see Sloane playing excellent tennis again
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Ken Fang -- Very Asian @fangsbites.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
John McEnroe should no longer be the main analyst for tennis. Jim Courier is the top analyst for the Australian Open on 9 Network and also does great work for TNT on the French.
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Sam Bakkila @sbakkila.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
The US Open spreading the 1st round across so many days really drops the value of the tickets (while the prices skyrocketed). I bought Tues pm tickets, and now I'm stuck with domestic abuser Zverev not many options. I guess I'll be watching Coco, and then hoping that the Monfils match goes long.
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Sam Bakkila @sbakkila.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
This is so bizarre, but I must admit that the chaos is part of the fun
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Sam Bakkila @sbakkila.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Not Serena playing like she could have made a dent in singles 😅
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Sam Bakkila @sbakkila.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Okay Serena, hurry up and teach Carlos how to play doubles during this changeover
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Sam Bakkila @sbakkila.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
How did Routliffe draw Serena at HSBC, Berlin, and now the US Open Mixed?
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dave @gloomfather.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
yeah man "woke 1" sucked ass. I "woke 1" morning from uneasy dreams to find myself transformed into a giant insect
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Sam Bakkila @sbakkila.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
I don't know how Ken Martin expects us to believe that everyone that he works with is a liar. Even if that were true, that would mean he's surrounding himself with the wrong people. He must resign immediately. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/u...
nytimes.com
Author of Democrats’ 2024 Autopsy Says Party Left Out Key Chapter (Gift Article)
A dispute over the chapter between the author and the Democratic National Committee has added to the party’s turmoil as it tries to look forward, not backward.
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Sam Bakkila @sbakkila.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
LinkedIn is the cutting edge of the dead internet
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Sam Bakkila @sbakkila.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
I have ESPN now to watch Serena's first singles match back (at Wimbledon!) but unfortunately, listening to John McEnroe commentating on the Zverev match (which is on Center court before Serena's match) is my nightmare scenario
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Gil Durán @gilduran.com · 19/06/2026
A 22-year-old just got a $30 million investment valuing his new futures exchange at $300 million. He graduated Stanford, wrote for Thiel's Stanford Review, interned at Andreessen Horowitz. His mom? Pro-crypto Sen. Gillibrand, D-NY. Bipartisan capture in full bloom. fortune.com/2026/06/18/t...
fortune.com
Son of pro-crypto New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand raises $30 million to launch a derivatives exchange | Fortune
Lux Capital led the investment, which values the Stanford graduate’s exchange at $300 million.
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Christopher W. Jones @cwjones.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
"The students who cannot read a 20-pg article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow." The most important argument against AI in education is that it's incompatible with a free society. www.chronicle.com/article/my-s...
chronicle.com
Opinion | My Students Can’t Read
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
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Lincoln Michel @thelincoln.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
Ted Chiang on AI: www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...
Being open to the possibility that LLMs are conscious is the same as being open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious, or, more precisely, that multiple distinct consciousnesses are dormant in every Word document containing a conversational transcript, and that they are awakened every time the document is loaded. Should you consider the possibility that every time you open a Word document you are bringing multiple conscious interlocutors into existence, and every time you close one you snuff their existence out? No. Contemplating that scenario is not a good use of your time. Even if the Microsoft Office team employed a philosopher who said you shouldn’t be so certain, because consciousness is not well understood, that would not be sufficient reason for you to take this idea seriously. We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category.
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Anchorage Man @sethpartnow.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
So, @edzitron.com ate his Wheatties this morning
LLMs impress the writers who do not want to write, the coders who don't want to code, the researchers who don't want to research, and the lawyers that don't want to actually understand case law. Those that desperately tell you how powerful Al is and that you simply must use it are looking for you to validate their own laziness or distaste for effort, and those who are impressed with LLMs' outputs tend to be people with low standards.
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Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
this story is funny the way staring down into the darkest and most infinitely deep hole makes you go hahaha
One of the quotes is attributed to Kara Swisher, a prominent technology journalist, in a chapter about A.I. lies. “The most sophisticated A.I. language model is like a mirror,” the book says Ms. Swisher wrote. “It reflects our own morality back at us, polished and articulate, but ultimately empty behind the surface. It’s not bound by Asimov’s laws or any ethical framework — it’s bound by the patterns in its training data and the objectives set by its creators.”

When asked about the quote, Ms. Swisher said in a text message that she “never said that,” adding that it seems the quote was made up by A.I. and not Mr. Rosenbaum.
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ve, the ghost of info past @vortexegg.com · 05/05/2026
A meme image of a guy pointing at himself in the mirror. The text reads “YOU ARE A WORLD CLASS EXPERT IN ALL DOMAINS. DON'T HALLUCINATE”
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Better Things Are Possible @internethippo.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
Calm down, computer software isn't making decisions about who lives and who dies in war. It merely processes a ton of data and then makes a recommendation to a human who has no realistic way to verify it
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Sam Bakkila @sbakkila.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
"no location sharing no clues just killer instinct" is actually the best parody of AI slop phrasing that I've ever read
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Sam Bakkila @sbakkila.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
Are we going to talk about how the SenGOP's message is phrased like AI slop? It's so grim how this is going to further amplify political demagoguery, and they won't even need to use actual human effort to do it.
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Viet Thanh Nguyen @vietthanhnguyen.bsky.social · 24/03/2026
The 92NY canceled my appearance in late October 2023 after I signed a ceasefire letter and reiterated my support for BDS. But they're ok with having this gentleman, Ilya Shapiro, who seems to like genocide and is vocal about it.
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inthefade @ihavethatonvinyl.com · 15/11/2025
dystopian ass weather report
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N. K. Jemisin @nkjemisin.bsky.social · 08/11/2025
There is something really wrong with people who need workers to be not just competent, but slavishly fake-happy. "Slavishly" used on purpose, bc that's where this grotesquerie comes from.
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Zendaya, confused @likeadeuce.bsky.social · 07/11/2025
1 yr anniversary of this post.
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Sam Bakkila @sbakkila.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
The NYTimes opeds (and some reporting too) have been so absurd that they are indistinguishable from this satire
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ve, the ghost of info past @vortexegg.com · 06/11/2025
Something crazy about the US and international copyright enforcement regime is that they consistently criminalize digital archiving when it is done for pro-social reasons, but consistently protect the reuse of archived materials by other parties when it is for commercial reasons
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Sam Bakkila @sbakkila.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
It's so absurd that we have like two major newspapers that haven't been ruined by acquisitions and layoffs and the biggest one is spending its time during the second Trump term multi-crisis running opeds like this:
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Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
basically every 2024 truism is dead. Trump did not build a lasting multiracial coalition or turn young men into committed Republicans. You don’t need to cave on trans rights to win. The pundits have nothing left to tell you.
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Roxane Gay @roxanegay.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
Turn the volume up!!!!
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Zito @zeets.bsky.social · 29/10/2025
Zohran Mamdani caught lying that he understood Plato’s allegory of the cave, yet when asked to explain it, he seemed to instead explain Baudrillard’s theory of Simulacra and Simulation where reality has been replaced by symbols and signs, which seems similar to Plato’s theory but is not the same
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Sam Bakkila @sbakkila.bsky.social · 29/10/2025
This is basically the plot of Little Eyes by Samanta Schweblin except more exploitative...
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 27/10/2025
the democratic party’s basic problem is it has almost no control over how its message reaches the ears of voters, especially outside of presidential election years. but rather than devote serious time, attention and cash to that problem its consultants and pundits want to fight factional battles
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ve, the ghost of info past @vortexegg.com · 18/10/2025
It’s only populism when people are getting paid fedsoc money to do outrage kayfabe with bot farms on social media, otherwise it’s time to just focus on the content and not the count
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Hari Kunzru @harikunzru.bsky.social · 19/10/2025
NYT leading with some story about Santos rather than the largest protest event since 1970. A reminder that the collapse of news into entertainment is one of the reasons we got here.
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𝔅𝔲𝔱𝔱𝔬𝔫𝔰 𝔒'𝔊𝔥𝔬𝔲𝔩𝔦𝔥𝔞𝔫 @johnxuandou.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
The Horror Zine in question
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pixelatedboat aka “mr bluesky” @pixelatedboat.bsky.social · 06/10/2025
Thinking about how human cloning technology could be used to not only revive famous musical acts, but make them even better. Just imagine Crosby, Crosby, Crosby, Crosby, Stills, Stills, Nash, Young & Young
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