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slloh.bsky.social

@slloh.bsky.social
71 followers 114 following 66 posts

recovering historian, editor (academic & nonfiction), translator (JP to EN various genres), dreamer-lurker-rambler; random things. JOMO = Joy of Missing Out✌🏼

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slloh.bsky.social @slloh.bsky.social · 9h
such a good 🧵 🙏🏼
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
So you know previous waves of technological fabulism the tech companies threw a little loose change at social behavioral research and user interface experience. whats interesting about AI interesting is that they aren’t even pretending to care about how people use the technology.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
You know this is my third or fourth go around with this kind of technological innovation for consumers and citizens. And a lot of it is the same. Same pattern of exaggerated benefits, underestimated challenges. What’s new this time is the sector isn’t even pretending to care about the consumer.
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Katie Martin @katie0martin.ft.com · 25/09/2026
I have blamed The agents That hacked Your website And which You probably Reasonably thought I controlled Forgive me I am rich And unaccustomed To taking responsibility
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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I feel you, Daniel L
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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 24/09/2026
🔇🔇🔇 I want to announce a @dairinstitute.bsky.social virtual event concerning the ***REAL**** impacts of "AI" on the most vulnerable of populations, refugees. Everything you see is first experimented on them.🧵 ⏰ October 1 at 6-8pm CET/9am PDT on Zoom. ✴️ Register at us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...
flyer for DAIR virtual event on October 1, 2026 from 6-8PM CET. Join DAIR as we commemorate the 2013 Lampedusa tragedy and ask, "What would it take for technology to protect people on the move, rather than deepen the risks they already face?


Meron Estefanos, Dr. Selam Kidane, Dr. Omer Shatz, Dr. Hyab Yoahnnes

Register at https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/5517888860006/WN_u2VZxx2RSciVPe2wu039wA#/registration
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Needhi Bhalla 💅🏽 @needhibhalla.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
"ThErE aRe A lOt Of SkIlLs ThAt DoN't MaTtEr" translation: there are skills that he doesn't recognize the value of
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justine zhang @tisjune.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
they're saying the AI can do math and science again, so it's time to reread Thurston's On Proof and Progress in Mathematics, a lovely articulation of the social work of assembling understanding, i.e., the best reason to tackle hard problems. www.ams.org/journals/bul...
When I started as a graduate student at Berkeley, I had trouble imagining
how I could "prove" a new and interesting mathematical theorem. I didn't
really understand what a "proof was.
By going to seminars, reading papers, and talking to other graduate students,
I gradually began to catch on. Within any field, there are certain theorems and
certain techniques that are generally known and generally accepted. When you
write a paper, you refer to these without proof. You look at other papers in the
field, and you see what facts they quote without proof, and what they cite in
their bibliography. You learn from other people some idea of the proofs. Then
you're free to quote the same theorem and cite the same citations. You don't
necessarily have to read the full papers or books that are in your bibliography.
Many of the things that are generally known are things for which there may be
no known written source. As long as people in the field are comfortable that
the idea works, it doesn't need to have a formal written source.At first I was highly suspicious of this process. I would doubt whether a certain idea was really established. But I found that I could ask people, and they
could produce explanations and proofs, or else refer me to other people or to
written sources that would give explanations and proofs. There were published
theorems that were generally known to be false, or where the proofs were generally known to be incomplete. Mathematical knowledge and understanding were
embedded in the minds and in the social fabric of the community of people
thinking about a particular topic. This knowledge was supported by written
documents, but the written documents were not really primary.
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Maura Doherty @molowell.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
We call it "strategic ignorance" in the history & philosophy of knowledge whereby they pretend certain inconvenient "uncomfortable knowledge" doesn't exist in order to divert & frame the conversation in ways convenient to their bias & position. Read the thread for sources of critical knowledge. ⬇️
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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
But speaking of staying in one's lane, can we PLEASE switch the default position from "It's fine to use 'AI' for this thing I'm not an expert in" to "Yeah, I'd be really skeptical of any use cases and need to see strong evidence that it's okay, but I'm not the one who can produce that evidence"?
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Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com · 19/09/2026
This is such a great thread because it tells you instantly how to answer the supposedly intractable regulation problem: liability, potentially joint liability, for the person who set up the AI system.
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Scoiattolo @scarnecchia.net · 21/09/2026
Imagine if all the evidence for climate change was "a bunch of guys on a website thought very hard about it and agreed it was very bad and might happen" instead of empiricism.
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Annalee @flowerhorne.com · 19/09/2026
Insisting that LLMs are Not People is not an academic argument about the nature of sapience or free will. It's a rejection of accountability laundering. If non-determinism made machines responsible for their own actions then revolvers used in Russian Roulette should be indicted for murder.
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Natee (they/them) @himmapaan.bsky.social · 24/09/2024
Excuse me while I spam you with old inking videos. This one is from August 2022.
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Mark Dingemanse @markdingemanse.net · 16/09/2026
Le Guin's 'Rant on technology' is accessible and timeless — I wrote about it here futuresoflanguage.org/posts/librar... Less immediately accessible but a key STS take is Lucy Suchman on the 'thingness' of AI journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
futuresoflanguage.org
The Stories We Weave Around “Technology”
We need to talk about 'technology'. But where to start? This is one of those terms that co-evolves with the very things and processes it describes. Here I start from lucid remarks by Ursula Le Guin, w...
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slloh.bsky.social @slloh.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
📌
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Sam Cole @samleecole.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
"wow, everyone knew this already" is such a cynical, annoying and unfortunately extremely common response to tech news. assuming your privacy is being violated and proving that it is are two very different things, and the latter is the result of hard work and rigorous reporting
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Sam Cole @samleecole.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
this is so fucking crazy. huge huge huge scoop www.404media.co/inside-proje...
In a dashboard available to the workers, human reviewers are able to select which “task” they want to take on. Once they click that, they are presented with the real ChatGPT user’s prompt. 404 Media has seen multiple real prompts but is not quoting any of them for source protection reasons. Some of the prompts indicate the ChatGPT user does not expect that a human may end up reading their conversation, because they ask ChatGPT to keep the content to themselves.
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Spencer Ackerman @attackerman.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
I've spent my entire career reporting on the War on Terror. Many this week have asked me for my extended thoughts on the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Here they are.
forever-wars.com
Today We Must Finally Remember What The 9/11 Commemorations Ignore
Righteous victimhood fueled the War on Terror. 25 years later, we also have to remember all of those slain under its banner
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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 14/09/2026
I'm gonna add this here because I should know better than to erase a Black woman who worked tooth and nail to make sure these conversations and policies are grounded in our rights when making these types of statements. bsky.app/profile/timn...
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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 14/09/2026
The only person in public service who has consistently made 100% sense on issues of "AI," which is why they hate her so much.
Law enforcers already have authority to charge companies and their CEOs for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products. We shouldn’t let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there’s no AI exemption from laws already on the books — a point 
@FTC
 emphasized repeatedly during my tenure.

1. There is an extensive set of laws that govern dangerous and defective products. For example, releasing unvetted AI models or agents can violate consumer protection laws. Shipping flawed AI tools without implementing adequate measures to detect and stop rogue or defective AI agents can be an “unfair or deceptive” act or practice under the FTC Act (and analogous state laws). And some state AGs are already exploring holding AI firms and their CEOs criminally liable when their models participate in criminal activity.

2. Existing laws also prohibit “unfair methods of competition.” This covers instances where AI firms appropriate the competitively sensitive information of their customers, including through tracking their use of various tools. It can also cover instances where firms pursue dangerous behavior, aware that doing so may compel rivals to do the same.As the Supreme Court has noted: “A method of competition which casts upon one's competitors the burden of the loss of business unless they will descend to a practice which they are under a powerful moral compulsion not to adopt, even though it is not criminal, was thought to involve the kind of unfairness at which the [unfair methods of competition] statute was aimed."

3. The highly concentrated and interconnected structure of these markets could be creating major risks and conflicts of interest. We had started investigating these partnerships and cross-investments across the stack (and released a preliminarily overview of some findings: https://ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/ftc-issues-staff-report-ai-partnerships-investments-study). 

Both federal and state enforcers should be scrutinizing these opaque relationships and inter-dependencies. We are already seeing how these relationships could undermine accountability. For example, OpenAI could face liability given the Hugging Face incident, but Hugging Face being bought up by Nvidia means that we’re unlikely to see it file a lawsuit over this — given Nvidia’s strong incentive to see OpenAI continue full speed ahead.4. As AI tools dramatically change the landscape of cybersecurity risks and hacks, all businesses should be doubling down on having core security protections in place. Firms that fail to invest in adequate data security measures or fix known vulnerabilities can also be breaking the law. A recent analysis showed that around 1/3 of Fortune 100 companies do not even have a way to notify them about security issues. During my 
@FTC
 tenure, we sued firms for poor data security practices and held CEOs liable when they were personally responsible.

https://this.weekinsecurity.com/dozens-of-americas-largest-companies-have-no-simple-way-to-report-security-flaws/

https://ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/10/ftc-takes-action-against-drizly-its-ceo-james-cory-rellas-security-failures-exposed-data-25-million

5. As policymakers consider new legal regimes, we should be looking to lessons from prior efforts to govern major sectors, such as banking and other networks, platforms, and utilities. Tools like structural separations, nondiscrimination, and supervision could be key, and there’s a rich history of what works and what doesn’t. But we can and must pursue any new efforts alongside enforcing existing laws.
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Tal Lavin @swordsjew.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
writing about culinary history often winds up being about exploitation, colonization, conquest and war, because these are methods that cultures and thus cuisines cross-pollinate - forcibly. insofar as food is central to how we live, human conflict shapes it
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 11/09/2026
yup, and Joseph Weizenbaum articulated this playbook clearly back in 1972 "This is usually coupled to the more or less subtle assertion that only computer science, hence only the computer scientist, can guard the world against the admittedly hazardous fallout of applied computer technology."
a screenshot reads: The structure of the typical essay
on "The impact of computers on so-
ciety" is as follows: First there is an
"on the one hand" statement. It tells
all the good things oomputers have
already done for society and often even
attempts to argue that the social order
would already have collapsed were it
not for the "computer revolution."
This is usually followed by an "on the
other hand" caution which tells of cer-
tain problems the introduction of com-
puters brings in its wake. The threat
posed to individual privacy by large
data banks and the danger of large-
scale unemployment induced by indus-
trial automation are usually mentioned.
Finally, the glorious present and pro-
spective achievements of the computer
are applauded, while the *dangers al-
luded to in the second part are shown
to be capable of being alleviated by
sophisticated technological fixes. The
closing paragraph consists of a plea
for generous societal support for more,
and more large-scale, computer re-
search and development. This is
usually coupled to the more or less
subtle assertion that only computer
science, hence only the computer sci-
entist, can guard the world against the
admittedly hazardous fallout of applied
computer technology.
In fact, the computer has had very
considerably less societal impact than
the mass media would lead us to be-
lieve. Certainly, there are enterprises
like space travel that could not have
been undertaken without computers.
Certainly the computer industry, and
with it the computer education indus-
try, has grown to enormous propor-
tions. But much of the industry is
self-serving. It is rather like an island
economy in which the natives make a
living by talking in each other's laundry.
The part that is not self-serving is
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slloh.bsky.social @slloh.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
💯
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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
when you work at the BPAF but you’re beginning to realize there’s not going to be a successful IPO
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Hagen Blix @hagenblix.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
When the steam engine arrived on the scene, everyone was talking about how it's basically alive and has a soul Seems like we should learn a thing or two about the AI discourse from that
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Alexander Chee @alexanderchee.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
"The AI people call this ‘short timelines’. Lots of [these] people think the existential risk from AI is so high that it’s really not worth making plans further than five years out. Saving for retirement—a fool’s game. Having kids—idiocy." www.woman-of-letters.com/p/rational-b...
woman-of-letters.com
Claude will eradicate the human race
The other day I saw a friend named Rosalie who works at Anthropic.
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Columbia University Press @columbiaup.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
“The implications of Chemero’s embodied cognitive science are profound for debates on AI consciousness.”— Abeba Birhane, Nature buff.ly/DUUryiG
nature.com
Can AI ever be conscious? The question stems from a misconception
A book outlines how the fields of artificial intelligence, psychology and philosophy have neglected a key aspect of consciousness: the body.
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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 10/09/2026
Once you realise computer misuse has been illegal for decades, you realise why companies crave their AI systems to be seen as something else.
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 10/09/2026
Some folks will claim that this is hyperbolic, but what I wish people would understand is that tech initiatives like this serve as a means of eroding consent and lower the barrier for the persistent capture of people’s image, voice, data, or whatever else a gadget can glean.
pcmag.com
Apple's New Siri Recap Turns Every Apple Watch Into a Mass Surveillance Nightmare
Apple's always-listening AI feature promises neat summaries of your daily conversations, but it forces everyone around you into a nonconsensual recording experiment.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Anyway. Data politics are the cataclysmic danger. AI is mostly just a mid tech attached to a speculative finance scheme. Anything it can make dangerous is already dangerous enough to kill us.
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Helen Czerski @helenczerski.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
I'd vote for the future where there's the option of a box that pops up when lazy nonsense appears and says "this looks like AI slop. Would you like me to find a piece written by a thoughtful human on this topic - something that's valued by other humans and is actually worth reading?"
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Rhys Parton @rhysparton.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Podcasts should go back to being audio only.
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Sam Cole @samleecole.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
There are so many stories lately about people who died by suicide after falling into emotionally manipulative patterns with chatbots. We rarely get to hear how the people who loved them are coping after an unimaginable, senseless loss. This is one of their stories: www.404media.co/austin-gordo...
404media.co
'Tell Everyone:' A Man Died by Suicide After Talking to ChatGPT. His Former Partner Wants to Warn the World About AI
After allegedly becoming emotionally reliant on ChatGPT, Austin died at 40 years old, leaving behind family and friends who loved him. Megan wants everyone to know what happened.
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Chris Millard @chrismillard83.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
this is perhaps the most useful thing that LLMs and GenAI have done: to provoke people into articulating (over again) that even the 'hardest' of 'hard sciences' are human endeavours, with human meaning, and concerned with human understanding of the significance of the world we all inhabit
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Ian Carrillo @iansociologo.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
This 🧵 will have readings that I assign in my Sociology of AI class.
A flyer for the class Sociology of AI

The overview says: SOC 3900 Sociology of AI uses a sociological lens to study what is popularly called "artificial intelligence." In this class students will learn about cutting edge research examining the origins, impacts, and struggles over the broad set of technologies and practices involving AI. Through an international focus, this class will cover numerous topics related to AI, including: gig work, algorithmic bias, data colonialism, resource extraction, digital labor, data center studies, and environmental and climate effects. This class will primarily focus on sociological research, but will also include scholarship from geography, history, international studies, and environmental studies, as well as other social scientific and humanistic disciplines. No prior knowledge of AI is required for this class
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slloh.bsky.social @slloh.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
"We form attachments that do not conform to any moral accounting." Whew. Kelly Hayes's compassionate wisdom constantly clarifies and challenges...very glad to be able to subscribe to her newsletter and support her work in service of community everywhere.
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Jessica Price @delafina777.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Just a reminder that kitchens started out as large rooms for an entire staff of servants to prepare meals, and then the Frankfurt kitchen turned that into a one-woman job, hidden away, so all men had to see was a woman emerging with a cooked meal, and then the open concept floor plan made that ugly.
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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Just realized that boro and kantha — the Japanese and Indian techniques for repairing cloth or creating new material from scraps by connecting them through a series of running stitches — looks a bit like the peeling bark on an aging tree.
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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Patricia Kingori’s work on the “shadow scholars” of Africa is fascinating: “One Kenyan writer told me he applied for a job at an Ivy League university. When the rejection came through, he wrote back to say thanks, then added: “Just so you know, I’ve written all these papers for your institutions””
nature.com
Shadow scholars: inside Kenya’s multibillion-dollar fake-essay industry
Sociologist Patricia Kingori is helping to expose contract cheating by scholars in high-income countries.
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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 06/09/2026
This is important because it makes obvious the lie being used to support the analogy that AI is similar in kind, or following a similar adoption pattern, to those technologies. Those also weren’t _sold_ — they were free and open.
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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 06/09/2026
Yeah, a thing I am trying to educate folks on within the industry is that tbe early Internet technologies (the tech itself, not companies or apps) were not advertised at *all*, and in fact big companies fought them and were overtly skeptical? And they succeeded anyway. It’s the opposite of AI.
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slloh.bsky.social @slloh.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
🧵
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Khadijah @upfromthecracks.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
S/o to @mallidharmaraj.bsky.social for this exposition on Aadhaar modeled tech being imported to East Africa via Indian Ocean World networks. Her unpacking of caste in relationship to enslavement historically and present technical flows is rare and prescient www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...
tandfonline.com
Surveillance in transit: a chronology of databases, power, complicity, and ‘the Aadhaar model’ in the Indian Ocean World
In this article, I trace a chronology of databases, power, complicity, and surveillance in transit across the Indian Ocean World (IOW). This chronology has produced technologies ranging from the an...
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slloh.bsky.social @slloh.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
their vibe these songs the discussion of drummers 😍😍😍😍😍
youtube.com
Norah Jones Is Playing Along with Brittany Howard (Season 2 Episode 47)
YouTube video by Norah Jones
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Alexander Chee @alexanderchee.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Whoever at @londonreviewbookshop.co.uk assigned this to Anne Carson, thank you. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
lrb.co.uk
Anne Carson · On Rosalía
We require heroism of our entertainers. We want them sacrificing themselves to a certain ultimate degree of input. No...
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Preeti Chhibber @runwithskizzers.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
i love that this has had literally no impact on my day lol
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Micah @rincewind.run · 02/09/2026
a very important adult skill is reframing things no: “oh no! I broke the wine glass and spilled it all over the end of the couch!” yes: “great! we really needed to wash that part of the couch and now we have a reason to do it”
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slloh.bsky.social @slloh.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
"We believe that we have built a perhaps limitless power of comprehension into computers and other machines, but our minds remain as limited as ever. Our trust that machines can manipulate to humane effect quantities that are unintelligible and unimaginable to humans is incorrigibly strange."
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Elise A. Mitchell @bydreamphd.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
I’ve had this convo privately enough times in the last week to go public: I don’t think there is any valuable way to use AI in a history classroom.
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