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Theodora Ward

@theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy

40 followers 8 following 1.1K posts

writer, enthusiast // luddite department, AAUP-NC* *ignominious and disagreeable internet posts bespeak nothing but personal spleen 🌉 bridged from ⁂ wandering.shop/@theodoraward, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 4h

i liked this one php for a while but it got a little too gloomy so i quit last year. there were lots of running jokes about its functionality though. i think they had more to do with the main admin then anything about the (i put my hand to my earpiece) interesting. i have just been informed that […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 5h

it’s cool tho that was never really tenable and now im Building Back Better. burnout is crazy. is this thread a white paper? the real white paper was the memories we made on the way. it’s a very stupid white paper on balance but you know, amor fati and all that

Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 5h

i used to be very intellectually ambitious because i wanted to believe the Liberal Arts could cure my insanity disease and transgenderism. then i realized my whole deal and had to go grindset mode (being sort of homeless). but while S.O. Homeless i somehow worked my way through spinoza’s ethics […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 5h

damn i forgot i love charles ives. esp the new england pieces. i guess because im a sentimental united statesian but also like, a little weird with it ha ha. i remember reading henry cowells book on him and i couldnt understand most of the actual stuff about the music but the first part is like […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 5h

the nepo baby white paper was so funny bc i didnt have know i needed a stimulant rx so i was just kind of like. hmm. do i just bill for the three 18-hour sessions the week before it is due in which i am going to actually write it. but i went to the “office” (a converted house in waxhaw, nc he […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 5h

anyway i am excited to do this both because it seems pleasantly “final exam”-y and also because it means i will have literal justification for framing myself as an “ed-tech consultant,” which i think is extremely fucking funny

Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 5h

i am joking somewhat bc i wrote a white paper one time before. it was for my father. i had just graduated from junior college. it was on real-time location systems for tracking the location of hospital assets. (i have asked several times since if i could keep being a healthcare IT nepo baby but […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 5h

now is the phase of the project proposal in which i begin work on a white paper. time to google “what is a white paper”

Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 19h

arxiv.org/pdf/2610.27251 read this paper like a thriller. It gets at so much of what I've been thinking about lately. Too much to quote but this is something i was trying to phrase earlier today

Discussion of the relationship between AI models and their training materials is
usually conducted through a legalistic lens, centering on questions of copyright and
IP law. The AI training sets indisputably include massive quantities of copyrighted
material (D. J. Gervais et al. 2024). An OpenAl legal filing! has stated that it
“would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted
materials.” The legal implications of this are currently being worked through in law
journals, legislatures, and numerous cases before the courts. Because the modern
information commons are primarily managed in an IP-oriented framework, and it is
far from clear how the new phenomena of AI training and Al-generated materials
should be integrated into existing IP law, the outcomes of these legal debates will
have major implications for the future of the AI industry. From the perspective of
this article, however, the issue is emphatically not how Al relates to copyright. That
which is legal may still be unjust.

Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 21/10/2026

im going to need to use super glue to fix my headphones. idk if ive ever used super glue before actually. when i was a child it really scared me bc i assumed it was “super” bc it could glue literally anything to literally anything else, forever, as soon as contact was made

Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 21/10/2026

and (though there were collaborators) these fundamentally adolescent billionaires stole that whole tradition, just like they stole our attention, our schools, our labor, our capacity to even imagine privacy, and now their vast multidimensional spreadsheet regurgitates bullshit about how it […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 21/10/2026

it’s the torment nexus tweet but that tweet posits spec fiction as a warning which like, it can be. but the reason i care about sf is that it is a way of reckoning with the strange truth of our material and emotional lives, which is that we live in a world made uncanny by the results of our […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 21/10/2026

i guess i also really do like...idk. im a speculative fiction writer. so much of when LLM chatbots go haywire is so clearly an extension of the SF imaginary about “AI.” and on the one hand i feel kind of culpable and ashamed, on some level? but also: how dare these people steal the entire goofy […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 21/10/2026

its possibility has been very bound to circumstance for me but the happiest times of my life are the ones where im learning stuff and thinking stuff through in a way that feels useful and satisfying and writing and getting my little projects up and running and while i think no person is truly […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 21/10/2026

the rise of ai has also corresponded with straightforwardly the most satisfying experiences ive ever had with technology, which are setting up my dinky little server and wrangling an emacs config into place. both of them were so fucking annoying but i get legitimately emotional thinking about […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 21/10/2026

then i used it for troubleshooting once and it told me an answer and then every time i hit any friction on my computer for the next few days (which is fucking constantly because im a dumbass) i had to beat back the intrusive thought to Just Ask Claude. But i don’t want to be reliant on an […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 21/10/2026

i think this follows from the first post bc i tried using claude a little while ago to make me an emacs package bc i felt a responsibility to keep up with the state of things. i immediately entered an insane slot-machine state and spent like four days bouncing between free accounts. id wake up […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 21/10/2026

i think one of the reasons i find AI so frustrating is because ive spent the last two years slowly recovering from a period of burnout (during which the only job i could find, even with the master’s degree that burned me out, was Chatbot Trainer). i feel like my cognitive skills are precious and […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 21/10/2026

i think one reason i concretely feel that a better world is possible is that, whether directly or indirectly, the last couple of years of profound frustration with commercial computing technology has led me to learn about so much cool stuff. windows 11 borked my computer so i finally switched […]

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Reposted by Theodora Ward

Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 20/10/2026

Anthropic outlines its approach to "responsible data centre development", and........explicitly promises to carpet bomb communities with massive, polluting new fossil gas plants. This is what your Claude subscription is enabling: web.archive.org/web/20261016...

Bringing new power to the grid: We’re working to add new power generation to serve our data centers, so we aren’t drawing down the supply that homes and businesses rely on. Much of that new power is natural gas, which can be brought online quickly, ramps up and down as demand changes, and is abundant in the places we’re considering for data centers. We’re also working to broaden our energy mix with geothermal, wind, solar, and emerging technologies, and in regions with strong renewable resources, we’re designing projects that will rely on renewable energy. To help address emissions, we’ve joined Frontier, a group that supports companies working on carbon removal, to help grow the market for carbon removal and storage.

Our approach to responsible data center development
People around the world use Claude to power businesses, improve patient care, accelerate scientific discovery, and defend critical infrastructure. Demand for this technology is growing quickly. Meeting that demand takes a steady supply of computing power, which is why we’re developing our own data centers.

As a public benefit corporation, we balance the broader interests of society with our business decisions in everything we do. We will approach our infrastructure build-out the same way: data centers should benefit the communities around them. Here are some of the steps we’re taking globally to deliver on that commitment.

Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 21/10/2026

started “why machines learn” and it’s pretty good. turns out? they learn for the same reason we do: in order to partake of the eternal mind of God the creator. i guess this is a spinoza joke? i need like 1 or 2 more hours of sleep a night i think

Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 20/10/2026

sometimes i run it before i send something off but other times i just ship stuff unchecked. for the thrill of it. i also write speculative fiction and im not gonna add every stupid made up word i use to the dictionary lol

Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 20/10/2026

here is my source on the semantic content thing -- arxiv.org/pdf/2603.18161 i suppose doctorow is describing a “workflow” where individual changes are presented for approval or rejection, rather than as a new version of the text? i guess at that point it feels like the argument has […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 20/10/2026

far and away the #1 thing i hear from people re: AI -- whether as an earnest fear or a boosterish argument -- is, “but it’s the future.” “it’s here to stay.” the great lie of silicon valley is that computing technology has been one big line up, and if you don’t keep up with the tip of the arrow […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 20/10/2026

i couldn’t make a full-time dumbphone work but i have spent a lot of time configuring my life in such a way that i only really interact with my smartphone like, once a week. you know why? because i fucking hate it. maybe i could fix it! i tried everything i could and it kept taking advantage of […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 20/10/2026

in fairness to doctorow, even if i am frustrated by his libertarian streak, he is vocal in this piece and elsewhere about many of my concerns. it’s just a place where i feel like his particular variety of ‘90s tech-guy optimism -- an optimism i broadly resonate with and found quite stirring at […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 20/10/2026

i guess at this point having thought about this shit a lot and talked to a lot of people i feel like the most knee-jerk “i don’t like it so i don’t use it” take not only reflects an accurate perception of the sheer absurdity of the material situation, but may well be actively protecting the […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 20/10/2026

it’s also just like. im too much of a brutish philosophical pragmatist or something maybe bc i don’t understand what actually happens when you say “actually speech recognition is better now so not all AI is bad.” what does that utterance do? my response is like...“ok?” is it a kind of […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 20/10/2026

i also think people underestimate the cognitive harms, but the research is early, i guess. i do think that it should be illegal for any commercial chatbot to use language that implies personhood but more generally i find it very difficult to look at the current technological landscape -- at the […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 20/10/2026

i guess on the largest possible scale i feel like the finitude of my existence means i must act in accordance with my perceptions and beliefs, and as a writer and recent writing instructor i feel nothing but fear and contempt for the role text-generation plays in the writing process. this is an […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 20/10/2026

i’m not rejecting the statistical methods underpinning AI, because i don’t interact with statistical methods. i interact with the products of these methods, and -- while i know my ideology inflects, if not distorts, my judgement here -- to me, the products are very bad, and i don’t want them. i […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 20/10/2026

bracketing copyright stuff, where i think i’m just less of a libertarian -- which, fair enough, i guess -- one disagreement i have here (besides the framing piece) is that i am sick of being asked to factor what a given technology *might* do in the future into my present-day politics. the […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 20/10/2026

the neocloud data center struggle is so interesting as, like, a confrontation between the tech-world imaginary and material reality. the phenomenological experience of software, coupled with cloud computing and offshored hardware production (and extreme wealth, and the good old commodity fetish) […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 20/10/2026

this is the plot of sonic the hedgehog (mega drive/genesis, 1991)

Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 20/10/2026

whatever else one may think of the “stochastic parrots” paper, it is undeniably the case that LLM-based chatbots and other modern “AI” services would not be widely available without data centers containing hundreds of thousands if not millions of birds who are being forced to play slots all day […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 19/10/2026

this is it. this is the exact joke i got on mastodon to make. i didn’t know it when i joined but this is it. thanks to everyone who made this possible

Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 19/10/2026

obsidian vault called “second brain (spying)” containing elaborately useless notes i never look at dictated to chatgpt on my iphone while being arranged and wiki-fied by a parallel chatgpt agent according to an elaborate schema i call on my blog “agentic zettelkasten,” and also a bunch of […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 19/10/2026

anyway i dont think we got the grant i was hoping we would so if any ai safety groups want to give us some money i will happily delete my posts trash talking the dastards at the meter institute

Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 19/10/2026

lol yess here’s the screenshot i took. not MIRI but he did have summer internships at the center on long-term risk and the future of humanity institute

linked in experience page showing that he worked at the center on long term risk in summer of 2022 and the future of humanity instiute in summer of 2019

Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 19/10/2026

holy shit either im missing something or the “Chief scientist at METR” redid his linkedin so it doesn’t show that, between his master’s degree in teaching the computer to play pong and his METR gig, he worked in EA think tank world. i want to say at MIRI www.linkedin.com/in/hjalmar-wijk

Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 19/10/2026

looking at the METR report again i just realized it probably goes so crazy to come to the conclusion that the chatbot started a messageboard if you think lesswrong dot com is the smithy in which the brilliant ideas of the people literally saving the universe were forged

Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 19/10/2026

arstechnica.com/ai/2026/10/anthropi… what a relief! now if anthropic runs an agent unsupervised for days on end with the instructions to Do a Hack No Matter What, and it does, thereby breaking federal law, METR -- whose incisive analysis […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 19/10/2026

This is the first time I've ever had a like "Sit At The Desk And Work From Home" type job and I really like my setup at this point but I am realizing that for some reason it is psychologically essential that I put shoes ont o do it. My sense is that this puts me in a minority, and I can't quite […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 18/10/2026

my favorite sick burn to do in otherwise serious writing is call something “so-called”

Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 18/10/2026

“Larry Ellison”? More like “Larry Elision” imo because of how much he’s “eliding” through circular financing, and debts and so forth. Which is if you think about it more, it’s why he’s more like Larry “Elision”

Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 18/10/2026

somehow i was capable of ignoring or repressing conscious awareness of the phrase “digital twin” until a few days ago when i started noticing it everywhere. i’d seen around but if asked out of context what it meant, i probably would’ve guessed it was some kind of reverb pedal. anyway i’m […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 18/10/2026

i mention that it sounds sloppy in part because i do think that another insight of, if not punk, at least the anarchist traditions which punk as we conceive it sort of channels, is that there is no distinction between means and ends -- not just philosophically, but in practice, too. these things […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 18/10/2026

[Transphobic wizards, half baked thoughts regarding defence thereof] animorphs -- the noblest pulp children's series of the mass-market era, an unflinching meditation on the deep, personal brutality of war in a tragically indifferent universe and which, even as it steadfastly refuses to redeem […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 18/10/2026

the "indieweb is punk" page reads like fucking slop, too. ("One hand-written HTML file, marked up with h-entry. View source - it's all there.") if "punk" is anything (it probably isn't) it's (a) refusing the proposition that technical skill and polish are necessary for quality, instead […]

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Theodora Ward @theodoraward.wandering.shop.ap.brid.gy · 17/10/2026

i just don’t know how it’s possible to have practical conversations about this technology in this discursive environment. the commonsense conceptual framework is so divorced from the historical and material and technical reality. talking about commercial chatbots feels sometimes like saying […]

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