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Generic white guy SysAdmin

@westbynoreaster.bsky.social
760 followers 187 following 4.4K posts

#HPC #SysAdmin & aspiring #DevOps headed to Charlotte in the new year. #dHTC evangelist, and labor history nerd. #BLM! Opinions my own. he/him

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Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdmin
Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 1h
One of the most harrowing things about academia, when you're a grad student, is how vulnerable you are to how you're perceived by more senior researchers. Your career advancement depends on confidential letters of reference & private discussions amongst faculty. You have no information or control.
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 2h
This is marketing material, but it's a good indicator of how hungry the fossil fuel power generation industry is to seize on this moment and get huge numbers of gigawatts installed ASAP before the hype subsidies
DCD article headline: "How rethinking the grid could start with natural gas power solutions" with subhead: "Why natural gas could be a strong solution for data center power generation, and how AI will keep evolving industry expectations" — dated Sept 30, 2026, by Amber Jackson.
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 4h
Learned a new term yesterday, #SovereignAI, which basically means an attempt to in-house (nationally, institutionally, whatever) and pull back from #CCCP supported services. www.redhat.com/en/topics/ai...
redhat.com
What is sovereign AI?
Sovereign AI is about owning AI technology, keeping data local, and ensuring your systems reflect your unique values and legal requirements.
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rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social · 21h
everyone else who stares into the hyperdimensional gem made of every word ever written goes mad. not me though. i'm still sane. maybe saner than everyone else, tbh.
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University and College Union (UCU) @ucu.org.uk · 9h
University of Brighton management has given notice to terminate its recognition agreement with UCU alongside collective agreements covering key terms and conditions. This isn't just about Brighton. What happens here could have implications for branches across the UK.
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Kees van der Leun @sustainable2050.bsky.social · 15h
Data centres in the Netherlands used 4.6% of all electricity in 2024, and transmission system operator TenneT expects this to double or triple to 10-15% by 2030! That means that the next 6-11 TWh/year of renewables that will be completed, will go straight to the growth of data centres.
Front page of newspaper Trouw, with headline "Three quarter of datacentres is completely untransparent on energy and water use"
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Amrk @amrk.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Peter Magyar is currently enacting a Liberal Currents fantasy where he amends the constitution to ban anyone associated with the old regime from ever holding office again and is somehow polling at 68% (he won with 53%) and I’m not saying that’s possible anywhere else but Dems should like, ask him
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Anne Helen Petersen @annehelen.bsky.social · 22h
This is *the* piece. Kate Manne, professor of philosophy at Cornell, speaks truth to the totality of failures at the university — and why students protesting the war in Gaza have faced far harsher consequences than any of the Cornell 7: www.thecut.com/article/what...
thecut.com
What It Feels Like at Cornell Right Now
As a professor at the Ivy League school, Kate Manne has known many, many victims. There’s a palpable feeling on campus, she writes, that this is big.
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New-Cleckit Dominie @ncdominie.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Just saw folk who join the uncritical rush towards AI referred to as "LLMings", and I am stealing that.
static.klipy.com
Vintage Pixel Game: Lemmings
Alt: Vintage Pixel Game: Lemmings
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
strongly agreed. fines and criminal penalties should not merely communicate a finger wag but actually change the strategic situation of a would-be white collar criminal
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Meredith Rose @mrose.ink · 29/09/2026
...and, importantly, eliminating the Office of Technology Assessment, or OTA. What was the OTA? It was a small office, housed entirely within Congress, whose entire job was understanding complex technology issues and writing reports to explain them to legislators. 3/
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David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
And it might even be good business - www.startribune.com/iowa-republi...
startribune.com
Perry: Republicans fought ‘indoctrination.’ Now they’re telling students what to study.
The conservative attack on higher education in states like Iowa is hard to watch. But it also provides an opportunity for blue states like Minnesota.
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Sam Cole @samleecole.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
probably fine that all these new ai agent rollouts are so cutesy and childish. probably a sign of innocuous, normal shit
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Notable that these same faculty very much "understand" hierarchy and power relations when it comes to their interactions with peers and the university's senior management team. 🤔 ...
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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Right now they are a darling of MAGA politics & AI boosters. If even a few thousand students (& parents) put eyes on the platform, that's over (see @toddfeathers.bsky.social). I have heard @bakerdphd.bsky.social & @tressiemcphd.bsky.social say, We can't follow the money without a theory of power.
wired.com
Parents Fell in Love With Alpha School’s Promise. Then They Wanted Out
In Brownsville, Texas, some families found a buzzy new school’s methods—surveillance of kids, software in lieu of teachers—to be an education in and of itself.
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Has any other company ever used the sales pitch of "the Existential Risk of the product we develop means you should give us LOTS more money" before? It's such a weird marketing strategy when you aren't one of the "True Believers" in making the machine god.
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University and College Union (UCU) @ucu.org.uk · 29/09/2026
“People who work in universities are feeling absolutely betrayed by being dragged into this conversation as if their contribution is not recognised.” Migrant staff put down roots, build lives and make an enormous contribution to our universities and communities.
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Nick Carnes @carnes.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Friendly reminder that the heads of big tech companies often don't allow their own children to use the tech they push on everyone else. fortune.com/2026/02/21/p...
fortune.com
Peter Thiel and other tech billionaires are publicly shielding their children from the products that made them rich | Fortune
As governments race to restrict minors’ social media use, the tech billionaires who built the platforms are imposing strict screen limits at home.
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Jim Pickard @pickardje.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
as a satire on so-called late stage capitalism how could one beat investors pouring a trillion into a company offering to wipe out humankind
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University and College Union (UCU) @ucu.org.uk · 29/09/2026
“Hope and vibes are not enough.” UCU general secretary Jo Grady on why hope must be backed by serious investment. Our members are losing jobs, losing colleagues and seeing courses close. Post-16 education needs more than promises. It needs investment.
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Chris Kluwe @chriswarcraft.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Let me give you the actual solution to this problem. Universities and colleges have to hire football players as union employees (AFL-CIO, same as the NFL), with no requirement to attend school. They get health and retirement benefits, and are limited to a five year employment contract.
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Tyler King @tyleraking.com · 29/09/2026
A key component of the Cambridge Analytica outrage was your friends subjecting you to data theft without your consent or knowledge. Facebook is running the same playbook on your text messages. Even if you’re not on Meta properties, they’re ingesting your interactions.
Aten installed Muse on both his iPhone and a Mac mini that he uses to test out various Al agents and tech. It took Meta a single day to begin "helpfully" pitching article ideas based on texts he'd sent to a podcast co-host.
When he asked Muse how it got the information, it said that it read banners from incoming texts. But that's not true, either.
After doing a little digging, Aten says Muse synced 187,000 lines from his Messages database, despite Full Disk Access being Off.Unless Aten is the most popular person on the face of the planet, I sincerely doubt he'd gotten 187,000 lines of text in roughly 24 hours. What happened is that, without permission, Muse went into the app and downloaded the information.
He had not given Muse permission to access Messages, and full disk access was not enabled. It just went ahead and uploaded those texts anyway.
Muse can take "unexpected actions" indeed.
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Will Beaman @greenbackbetter.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
A field can be socially indispensable and poorly remunerated because of existing institutional arrangements—social work and education are obvious examples of this. Then, circularly, that low remuneration is cited as evidence that educating people to perform the work is a bad financial investment.
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
as with the fossil fuel industry the reality of the crisis is a load bearing part of the strategy - exploited to lend urgency to plutocrats' preferred political response, which they position as sensible and responsible
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Dominique Baker @bakerdphd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Shot: "We asked 37 top academics and researchers who study education to rate a range of ideas for both effectiveness and cost, on a scale of 1 to 7." Chaser: "The panel included: Dominique Baker..." LOL y'all I read so many papers to complete this survey on k12 www.nytimes.com/2026/09/28/u...
nytimes.com
30 Ideas for Fixing U.S. Schools, Ranked by Experts
Math and reading scores are in a decade-long slump. We asked three dozen experts: What could turn things around?
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Universities with "AI" service contracts should demand a detailed and without cost audit from these companies about regarding data access privileges to chatbot inputs & outputs. Is this what even the most blinkered SMT "AI" booster wanted? @aaup.org
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
This reeks of gender! And I really wish that wasn’t such a power explanatory tool in 2020s USA. 🫠 @inbedwiththeright.bsky.social
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Rebecca Solnit @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Campus rape is really widespread; statistics suggest a significant percent of women who go to college will be raped there; feminism opened up a good conversation about it around 2012-13; it's weird when people treated Cornell like an isolated rather than dramatic example of a pervasive problem.
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Jeremy Diamond ☕️ @dmnd.me · 28/09/2026
That’s right
Fool's Expertise is particularly perilous when discussing catastrophe, which nearly tautologically involves long chains of causation that transcend domains: fully understanding one link does not imply understanding the chain. (This is why when the NTSB investigates an accident, the NTSB Go Team consists of experts across many different domains: they know that a catastrophic accident may involve failures across several different domains, interacting and cascading into broader system failure.)And to say it clearly: to the degree that Al-inflicted doom relies on pathways into the real world, experts on those pathways must be consulted. Is Al a cybersecurity threat? Please talk to cybersecurity experts - who will be quick to point out that the ballyhooed OpenAl escape depended on a pedestrian failure of containment. Are we concerned that Al is somehow going to fashion a novel pathogen? Let's please consult experts on viral synthesis - and listen to why they think that the fears are misplaced. Or maybe it's nukes that we're afraid that Al will get a hold of? Great news: seven decades of living with the possibility of global thermonuclear war gave us not just extensive safeguards but also huge wells of expertise to draw from!
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
The last month should also be a wake up call to all the PhD students who are using LLM chatbots to write their analysis software (at a minimum). All that goes into the maw can & will be used without attribution. 🤷🏻 Hope you are OK with giving your work for free to a for-profit company.
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Intellectual and academic exploration should be free to whomever wants it without fear of permanent financial servitude. It's time to unshackle ourselves from the Reaganite educational ideology of "debt as a disciplining tool." We want anyone to avail themselves of the opportunity.
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LarryLegend @bwtrainer.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
if someone tells you you don't need a union, you 100% need a union
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Mike Boylan-Kolchin @mbkplus.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Once again, I gotta say: you cannot treat anything you’re feeding into an AI as anonymous. There are enormous ethics implications for, e.g. referees who are clearly uploading others’ unpublished papers without consent, let alone health care professionals or law enforcement
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Noel Healy @drnoelhealy.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
The assault on US universities didn't start in 2025. Our new paper traces the decades of corporate capture that made it possible, and why climate research is a primary target. Open access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 27/09/2026
And in *other* fora they're just sort of blurting out how renewable certificates are all greenwashing and they're going to use fossil fuels forever. Aside from the amazing activists who just stand up and shout to be heard, I don't see hard questions being asked of these ppl at climate week events
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Alondra Nelson @alondra.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
The idea that people want AI oversight to happen "all of a sudden" ignores years of research, warnings, and policy efforts. The delay hasn’t been a lack of awareness; it’s been because of years of industry lobbying against regulation, political resistance, and inaction.
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Kevin J. Kircher @kevinjkircher.com · 26/09/2026
Microsoft's data center subcontractor in New Jersey illegally runs a bunch of gas "backup" generators on site, figuring they won't get caught or will just eat the wrist-slap fines if they do. Regulatory enforcement is so bad that a third party had to take drone images to get the state to act.
theguardian.com
New Jersey datacenter fined $1.1m after visual investigation showed dozens of unpermitted generators
State regulator’s record fine for DataOne facility in Vineland follows Floodlight investigation with the Guardian
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Dan k5s @danafus.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Molly White wrote a great and very thorough article about migrating "Citation Needed" from Substack to self-hosted Ghost: www.citationneeded.news/substack-to-...
citationneeded.news
Migrating from Substack to self-hosted Ghost: the details
I migrated Citation Needed from Substack to self-hosted Ghost. Here is exactly how I did that.
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Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
A rich person can never be held accountable. Therefore, a rich person must never make a societal decision
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 25/09/2026
It’s really stunning how the USA has so swiftly shifted from being one of the most techno-optimistic and tech-industry-loving countries on earth, to a country where most people seem to assume - not incorrectly, at least in many cases - that tech is out to get them.
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Peter Whitewood @pwhitewood.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Why is the answer to employers wanting more work ready graduates always that universities should provide more workplace training, rather than employers providing more training in the workplace?
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dorian @doriantaylor.com · 25/09/2026
i am a big fan of alan cooper's inmates are running the asylum, in which he goes down the list of ways computers behave like awful people this btw is why i think it's very cool how the rust people were extremely proactive about errors and warnings in the rust compiler being as helpful as possible
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Dan Greene @dmgreene.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Please relegate City
nytimes.com
Manchester City found guilty on almost all Premier League charges relating to financial breaches
City were charged by the Premier League in February 2023.
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Samantha Asumadu @samanthaasumadu.substack.com · 23/09/2026
So I think maybe I just figured out why @timeshighered.bsky.social has not reported anything negative about James Orr. I could very well be wrong, but here we go: In 2024, THE signed an agreement with Hungary's Culture and Innovation Ministry which oversees Hungarian higher education..
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Alexander Clarkson @aphclarkson.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
That's because the anti-intellectualism of the populists and Far Right is in direct contradiction to the basic foundations of any civilisation
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Elizabeth (Bit) Meehan, PhD @elizabethbitmeehan.com · 25/09/2026
destroying the local gentry has to be part of the political project of the 21st century
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Here to Help! @justheref4thegos.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
This book has been foundational in how I have viewed technology for the last decade. Highly recommend.
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Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me · 23/09/2026
More accurately, OpenAI developers and management built an automated system with unfettered access, unmonitored agents, prompting an LLM with zero safeguards and trained to be persistent until it drops, suggesting an increasing number of crazy activities, and running it for days without monitoring.
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 24/09/2026
Someone just reminded me that Huang recently used *this* metaphor to describe AI www.ap.org/news-highlig...
Huang contended that there is a need for some government regulation and safety standards for AI, emphasizing that national security also needed to be a priority for the technology that has been powering stock market gains and U.S. economic growth in recent years.

Huang said society will adapt to AI just as it did to automobiles. He said cars were once portrayed as killing children, but the world changed its norms by having sidewalks and crosswalks and stopping kids from playing in the streets.

Huang skeptical of what government ownership of AI companies would achieve
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tante @tante.cc · 24/09/2026
I had a few thoughts on why techbros always say these embarrassing, weird things tante.cc/2026/09/24/the-test
tante.cc
The Test
Jensen Huang, the NVIDIA CEO and wearer of the most midlife crisis looking leather jackets in the world, was on Ezra Klein’s podcast. Now I don’t really want you do go through all of what was being said in that recording/writeup. It’s painful. You feel your mental capabilities decaying with every minute of listening … […]
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