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J. Arendt

@uwwoman.bsky.social
225 followers 357 following 513 posts

RVA librarian working at a local university and riding my bike there; opinions expressed are my own and not those of my employer or anyone else my-year-of.ghost.io is the home of my blog / newsletter.

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Reposted by J. Arendt
Robin Z @firepile.bsky.social · 22h
I like to tell people on here when I'm teaching with their materials so this is my yearly reminder that my AI in Fact and Fiction class is reading @timmaughan.bsky.social's "Be Good For Goodness' Sake" today, alongside Bradbury's The Veldt, as an intro to our discussions of surveillance capitalism
vice.com
Be Good for Goodness’ Sake
In a not-too-distant Christmas, Amazon's child-friendly surveillance elves will motivate your kid to be nice not naughty with the promise of nonstop streaming content and elfcoins.
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Justin Hendrix @justinhendrix.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Most state attorneys general released Meta from Cambridge Analytica-related claims as part of the child safety settlement. New Mexico wasn't part of that deal, and a jury there just found 26 of 29 past claims about Cambridge Analytica, hate speech and misinformation willfully deceptive.
techpolicy.press
Eight Years On, Cambridge Analytica Scandal Catches Up With Meta in Santa Fe
A jury found that Meta—then Facebook—misled the public in statements about Cambridge Analytica and its policies on hate speech, violence and misinformation.
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Astra Taylor @astra.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Forget grandiose talk of curing cancer - this is what AI is actually doing to healthcare. In the words of one cardiologist: “it’s bots fighting bots, agents fighting agents, a horrible dystopic future nobody wants to live in.”
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Leah McElrath @leahmcelrath.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
AP Stylebook warns against anthropomorphizing AI systems: “Avoid language that gives them human characteristics… Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it.”
APStylebook @APStylebook
X.com
Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics. This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects.
Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it.
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Joe Bak-Coleman @jbakcoleman.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
We can simulate fish schools or ants in ways that solve complex problems (gradient detection, bridge building, nest selection) but no one would create this weird soul/no-soul dichotomy to argue they these that multi-agent swarms of extremely simple rules are “thinking”.
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J. Arendt @uwwoman.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
I see two failure paths, both rooted in undervaluing human expertise. Unlike in math, it'll be expensive to try the AI-generated ideas that human experts wouldn't have thought to try. Based on their cybersecurity history, I worry about their biosafety practices. www.reuters.com/world/anthro...
reuters.com
EXCLUSIVE: Anthropic quietly sets up biology lab as it ramps AI drug program
At a time when fears of AI are gripping the public, the startup has built a wet lab — or ​place for physical experiments — in the San Francisco Bay Area, two people familiar with the matter said.
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Mariel Garcia-Montes @marielgm.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Truly impressed with the information systems that will exterminate us by *checks notes* 2036 My only question is: do you think they will fix printer driver issues across all OS before they kill us, or is it straight from AI slop to apocalypse?
A screenshot of Google Search Gemini-summarized output on the poster's bio, including the headshot of an entirely different person alongside the embed of the poster's actual headshot on one of the featured results.
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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 17/09/2026
to lose one ai, Mr. Altman, may be regarded as a danger; to lose six looks like carelessness
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404 Media @404media.co · 15/09/2026
“AI agents” now have enough power and permission to be extremely annoying online.
404media.co
There’s a 100% Chance AI Agents Are Already Ruining the Internet
“AI agents” now have enough power and permission to be extremely annoying online.
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 08/09/2026
This "so dangerous it has to be useful" narrative is tedious, and highlights how little these companies have fear regulation in the current US environment. But it's worse. If and when the technology actually gets dangerous, the boy will have already cried wolf so many times we'll ignore him.
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J. Arendt @uwwoman.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
How could identifying AI agents as agents compromise student security and safety? www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
Mills wants developers to add safeguards so that agents either refuse requests to log in to school software or identify as agents so schools can control what’s permissible. Perplexity spokesperson Beejoli Shah said installing such measures would “seriously compromise student security and safety, which is not a trade-off we are ever going to make.”
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Elle Cordova @ellecordova.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Rough Draft vs Final Draft
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J. Arendt @uwwoman.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
As John Becker would say, "Paired texts": www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/o... and www.bostonglobe.com/2026/09/02/o...
In every home and every school, we should be inviting kids to think about how cheating is unfair to their friends, how it undercuts efforts to build a just society and how it undermines the quest to become a person of principle.

The heart of integrity is recognizing that the ends don’t justify the means. What we achieve may define our success. How we achieve it determines our character.AI arrives at a moment when this trust is already under strain. The danger is therefore not that AI creates dishonesty. Academia has always contained strategic actors. The danger is that AI decreases the proportion of suckers. When enough participants, faculty as well as students, cease believing that effort, originality, and intellectual seriousness will be recognized, minimal compliance becomes increasingly attractive. Why spend 10 hours on a task that AI can complete adequately in 10 minutes? Why devote months to careful scholarship if visibility matters more than substance? Why care deeply when strategic indifference appears rational?

Universities cannot solve this problem simply by banning technology. The challenge is institutional more than technical. The real question is whether higher education can create environments in which caring remains rational. To put it another way, the question is not whether universities can produce knowledge. The question is whether they can still produce people who care enough to pursue it.

This requires more than new plagiarism policies or AI detection software. It requires rethinking what universities reward and why. If institutions continue emphasizing metrics, outputs, rankings, and visibility, they will produce more hustlers and more nobody-cares agents. If they wish to preserve intellectual life, they must create incentives for the forms of commitment that serious scholarship requires. It needs to pay to be a sucker.
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Dave Infante @dinfontay.com · 31/08/2026
"There is little wisdom to be had from spending years and years reading stuff on the internet. A single hard-won lesson, though, which I have learned after wasting an embarrassing amount of time reading and writing about politics, may help to save you a good amount of angst."
hamiltonnolan.com
You Can Ignore the Bad Pundits
One easy trick to make yourself smarter.
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 30/08/2026
“‘Due to Love’s false social media representations, search engines and artificial intelligence occasionally stated that Love was a bona fide 49ers player,’ court documents state.”
kron4.com
Man who posed as SF 49er to scam women tricked AI, Google, court docs say
(KRON) — Artificial intelligence may have inadvertently given a hand to a man who prosecutors say posed as a wealthy San Francisco 49ers player in order to scam women on dating apps. That&#82…
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Benjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Both the Economist and others suggest this study demonstrates that AI can help students. So I contacted the lead researcher to figure out how many. Answer: Out of ~26,000 kids, a total of 20. And five months after starting to use AI, only four continued to spend 65 minutes on homework. Four.
Graph of student exam scores correlated to homework completion time for to groups, students using AI and those that did not. There is a slight spike for studens using AI who also maintained extensive homework completion time. As described in post, the number of students falling into this bucket was 20 out of 26,000.
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J. Arendt @uwwoman.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Emily Wilson's review of Nolan's Odyssey was mild by comparison.
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J. Arendt @uwwoman.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
How honest can I be when swaths of scholars reject the "Scholarship as Conversation" framing that is a threshold concept librarians are supposed to teach? Do I teach it anyway, or do I tell students, "Ideally things would work that way, but really Scholarship is Production a lot of the time."?
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J. Arendt @uwwoman.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
It makes me so angry to be the goody-goody at my institution telling people about copyright and licensing agreements that hinder them from doing the cool things they want to do when I know that isn't a worry if you're the right kind of Silicon Valley tech bro.
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J. Arendt @uwwoman.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
I thought it was just my BlueSky Bubble that was calling that Zuckerberg essay a "manifesto," but the m-word is in headlines from Forbes, the Washington Post, and Yahoo Finance. Usually mainstream news reserves the m-word word for domestic terrorists. Hmmm.
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Henry Mance @henrymance.ft.com · 09/08/2026
What a bonkers statistic as.ft.com/r/3b0a9bd3-a...
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J. Arendt @uwwoman.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Both sides of the battle say they want freedom, but they don't agree what "freedom" means. (Idea taken from the first few pages of the Civil War history book Battle Cry Freedom")
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J. Arendt @uwwoman.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Now is probably a good time to remind folks of the carefully-worded statement on AI that a the IMU and many mathematicians, including some active AI users, signed onto. They lay out principles, and concerns about second-order effects, that probably apply across many fields. leidendeclaration.ai
leidendeclaration.ai
Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics
This declaration calls for action to address the challenges posed by the use of artificial intelligence within mathematics research.
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J. Arendt @uwwoman.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
If only the story ended there
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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
The AI project “talkie produces bigoted responses then frames them as a representation of 1930; an outcome of the project’s methodology. The hard work of expanding the archive is being subverted.” activehistory.ca/blog/2026/07...
activehistory.ca
The Archive is Not a Toy: The Hidden Problems of a ‘Vintage’ AI
talkie’s poor representation of history is a side effect of a larger problem. The model was conceptually built as an experimental tool to see if language models can accurately predict the future, a…
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404 Media @404media.co · 29/07/2026
A new AI data center can be up and running in a year. Building new energy infrastructure to power it could take a decade.
404media.co
Data Centers Are Easy to Build. Powering Them Is Complicated, Slow, and Expensive
A new AI data center can be up and running in a year. Building new energy infrastructure to power it could take a decade.
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Dave Infante @dinfontay.com · 30/07/2026
i wouldn’t say i Know Ball per se but imo the court at powhatan community center has one of the sickest backdrops in all of richmond
Photo of the basketball court with the richmond skyline in the background
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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 29/07/2026
finally got a link to share with people who try and say "oh you DON'T LIKE AI??? what about ALPHAFOLD!!!!" as if it has anything to do with any of this AI capex
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Dave Karpf @davekarpf.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
Turned this rant into a blog post. davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/the-data-c...
davekarpf.beehiiv.com
The data center backlash Is working. That's why the New York Times is so concerned.
I have a
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J. Arendt @uwwoman.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
I'm used to university-provided news stories and press releases being mild, feel-good stories, but Christopher Whyte isn't doing that. news.vcu.edu/article/an-a...
What’s the takeaway here?
One lesson for AI companies and other organizations is the most likely failure around these frontier systems is socio-technical failure. AI safety cannot depend entirely on getting the model itself to behave properly – we also have to design the environment around these systems assuming that sometimes they will behave in ways we did not anticipate.

That’s obviously a pretty familiar cybersecurity problem, which makes this OpenAI failure a bit more damning than if the incident were truly without precedent. Organizations already use principles like least privilege, network segmentation, etc. because we assume that individual security controls will sometimes fail. These highly capable AI agents should have been treated in much the same way.

Going forward, models like these should only have access to the systems and information necessary for their tasks, and their ability to communicate outside controlled environments should be carefully constrained. Organizations need good visibility into what they are doing, so some version of forcing systems to explain themselves is critical.
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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
Facing federal science budget cuts, biologist Daniel Blumstein resorted to uploading marmot videos to OnlyFans to raise funds for his marmot research. However, when he uploaded his driver’s license for verification, OnlyFans informed him that his appearance didn’t match the marmots in the videos.
nytimes.com
‘OnlyMarms’: Marmots Are on OnlyFans to Raise Money for Research (Gift Article)
A team of scientists uploaded videos of the squirrel-like rodents in the wild on the adult-content site OnlyFans to raise money amid government budget cuts.
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J. Arendt @uwwoman.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Generally I'm skeptical of this methodology. On the other hand, I like that the report describes how risks are borne by individuals, while the responsibility lies with AI creators and governors. It's a great comeback to, "Why do the kids hate AI?" cdn.prod.website-files.com/669550d38372...
Highlights
● Experts assessed at least 10% probability of catastrophic harm (e.g., more than 1 million
human deaths or more than USD $100B loss) from 18 of 24 AI risk domains under
business-as-usual trajectories over the next 5 years
● AI users and affected stakeholders were judged most vulnerable to AI risks; while generalpurpose AI developers, governments, regulators, and standards bodies were judged most
responsible for addressing AI risks
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J. Arendt @uwwoman.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
I wonder what these economists think of protection rackets and lemon laws. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/t...
Excerpted from article: "While A.I.-assisted books received lower customer ratings than human-made ones, they deemed A.I.’s entry into the market a positive development, because the books were selling, if modestly. As economists, they told me, they’re less concerned with literary quality or customer satisfaction than revenue growth and market expansion."
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Matt Tobey @mtobey.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
I’m finally going to listen to my doctor and eat more vegetables and get more fresh air
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J. Arendt @uwwoman.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
Now that I've seen a couple people sharing the NY Times EV piece, I'll promote the EV whisperer who I follow. bsky.app/profile/nied...
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J. Arendt @uwwoman.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
Wait, is this the same David Streever who used to live in Richmond? @vpm-ian.bsky.social www.npr.org/2026/07/01/n...
npr.org
He sent a harsh email to ICE's top official. 5 months later, federal agents tracked him down
Federal agents went to a Rochester man's home to warn him that an email he sent five months ago could be an illegal threat. He was on vacation but another agent found his hotel hundreds of miles away.
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J. Arendt @uwwoman.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
In counterpoint to the "teens these days aren't reading for pleasure anymore" narrative, it looks like the biggest drop is among elders. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Graph of percentage of U.S. teens (15 and over) and adults reading for pleasure, based on American Time Use survey data, from 2003 to 2023. For adults 66 and older, the percentage dropped from a bit over 50% to about a 33%. For young adults 15-24, the percentage was virtually unchanged. In the 25-65 age group, it dropped from about 25% to about 12%.
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Kenny Uong @kennyuong.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
For instance: incumbent Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who’s running for re-election, bowed to pressure from two cemeteries & halted the long-awaited Forest Lawn Drive safety project. Despite years of planning and outreach for a redesign to make the corridor safer. bsky.app/profile/stre...
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J. Arendt @uwwoman.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
The study was selective about the "human written" comparison texts. AI was easy to detect compared to published stories written by folks like "Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Louis L'Amour, Charlotte Perkins, and Harlan Ellison." (Image from the Github page for the study)
Table of the genres of the source stories. The stories were drawn a little more than 2/3 from literary fiction and only 1/3 from genre fiction.
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J. Arendt @uwwoman.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
Because that Brown professor is a game theory expert, I hope there's someone -- maybe even him -- who will model the AI cheating situation as a variation on the prisoner's dilemma.
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J. Arendt @uwwoman.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
This week, I was reading a compendium for professors of AI-limiting assignment and testing methods. One author's job included, ".. encouraging all stakeholders to use AI." After writing a couple books on how to use AI in classes, even he was following faculty requests to write this opposite book.
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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
I agree with this post about the paired reading. AND. I’ve been thinking about this story since I read it last week. The banner issue gets lost in the AI as cheating narrative. Serrano switched to take-home exams in the wake of a fatal campus shooting he attributed in part to excessive stress. 1/n
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Encinitas Highlands Surfer @highlandsurfer.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
[stares at Gavin Newsom] ufw.org/capital-main...
ufw.org
Capital & Main: Newsom Vetoes Farmworker Heat Safety Bill as State Enforcement Has Fallen
The bill would have made it easier to file heat-related workers’ compensation. A Capital & Main investigation found field safety inspections fell 30% in seven years. Farmworkers till a field in...
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Charles Logan @charleswlogan.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
Industry's capture of AI literacy continues apace...
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J. Arendt @uwwoman.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Local news from the RVA area gets national attention. Relative to NOVA, I probably wouldn't call call Henrico a major hub for data centers in Virginia.
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Dr. Jonathan Foley @globalecoguy.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
What *actually* works — right here, right now — to address climate change? Here you go. This is the result of thousands of hours of painstaking research and analysis from the Project Drawdown team.
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Bella Fascendini @bellafascendini.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
New paper! w/ @cocoscilab.bsky.social🧵Can large language models reason flexibly, or have they learned what reasoning looks like? We introduce a new paradigm to test this question—the riddle riddle—and find that humans and LLMs show opposite patterns of performance. 📜
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J. Arendt @uwwoman.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
I would love to see this in Richmond city government. About the only more winning issue for a candidate would be fixing the city utilities. www.rva.gov/sites/defaul...
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J. Arendt @uwwoman.bsky.social · 21/06/2026
The ghost of David Golumbia haunts me for thinking he was being alarmist when he wrote about it a decade ago.
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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 19/06/2026
For all of you legal academic nerds. Here's the tool. Pulls case citation information from any federal court document. github.com/esqueer/zote...
github.com
GitHub - esqueer/zotero-courtlistener-retriever: Automatically pulls the case cite information from Courtlistener for a federal court document in zotero
Automatically pulls the case cite information from Courtlistener for a federal court document in zotero - esqueer/zotero-courtlistener-retriever
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