Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 2hIt’s even better when your slop engine of a reactionary “think tank” is actually tied to a university. 🤫 TOTH to #Stanford for pioneering this one with #Hoover. 000
Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 2hShows that the overriding desire is harm to university budgets whole hog. Any economist valuable to the movement will find safe haven within the parallel environ of reactionary think tank network, so they needn’t worry. 010
Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 2hIf Kemi is bored with the issue of Brexit and wants more “interesting“ fair, she can always give up her seat and go be a full time political concern troll for one of the broadsheets or tabloids. Would pay better at least. 000
Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 6hI do incredibly appreciate the reporting on what has been ripped out of these agencies. There also needs to be some thorough reporting on the slop that is being built in the gaping wounds of the NSF. 010
Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 6hBecause this is getting kind of stupid, please see the NSF page linked below. We are stuck idiots in 2003 based haze with their beloved favorite letter while actually productive directorates are drained of staff and funding. www.nsf.gov/funding/init...nsf.govNSF X-LabsNSF's mission is to advance the progress of science, a mission accomplished by funding proposals for research and education made by scientists, engineers, and educators from across the country. 110
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminAlice Roberts @profaliceroberts.bsky.social · 7hI am very uncomfortable about calling bits of software “agents”. They have no more real agency than a wind-up toy. 6246351
Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 7hNo but it is the meatheaded love and therefore overuse of the letter X in everything. 030
Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 8hStraight men's online homosocial behavior seems to be rotting their brains, or maybe souls, at an ever quickening pace. 000
Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 8hWhile it's important to understand how management views software developers & system maintainers, at the moment I am more curious about line workers' self conceptions. Especially those who aren't stricken with the #founder delusion. 010
Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 9hAm also trying to understand how programmers view the act of automating their own job, which if taken to it's logical conclusion threatens one's own livelihood. And I know there have been previous eras of "this career is dead!" so I expect a bit of wisdom buried somewhere in the rubble pile. 110
Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 9hTo the historians of computing on 🦋, is there any book chapter, monograph, or paper worth reading on active decision making re: software development tools, particularly the tension between management directives & programmer preferences, irrespective of whether it was built in-house or not. 110
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminAlexander Kasprzyk @amkasprzyk.bsky.social · 10hOpenAI didn’t simply stumble upon all these results down the side of the sofa whilst cleaning. They chose to systematically invest huge sums of money to produce them. And to keep on going. And going. And going. They systematically took our motivational questions, perhaps with the… #MathSky #LLM 39930
Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 10hFrom the main newspaper in Helsinki. Note also that Kajaani is home to the Finnish Supercomputing Center’s primary (actually) green-powered research facility / server warehouse. www.hs.fi/politiikka/a...hs.fiDatakeskukset | Viranomainen käskee Googlea keskeyttämään työt, Google lupaa korvata osan puistaLupa- ja valvontaviranomainen LVV on antanut Googlen edustajille kehotuksen töiden keskeyttämisestä, kunnes ympäristövaikutusten arviointi on saatettu loppuun. Lisäksi se uhkaa uhkasakolla. 001
Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 10hSoftware designed with an understanding of the complexity of the data it’s processing and displaying. 010
Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 10h*Durable* software built by people for their own use that is shared around as it filled a niche. We collectively know how to do translational iterative software development but that rarely “makes line go up (forever).” 110
Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 11hThose education cybersecurity incidents we do hear about are massive (inter)national scale events. 😷 #Canvas / #Instructure 🤫 110
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminAnna Gifty @itsafronomics.blacksky.app · 14hlol no one talks about the white kids who don't abide by merit. The conversation is ALWAYS about the Black and Brown kids who do.nbcnews.comStudy finds 43 percent of Harvard's white students are legacy, athletes, related to donors or staffThe number drops dramatically for black, Latino and Asian American students with less than 16 percent each coming from those categories, the study said. 126475
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminNeedhi Bhalla 💅🏽 @needhibhalla.bsky.social · 10/09/2026"Digital platform funding fails science not because it is new but because it reproduces, at the level of the individual researcher, exactly the market failures that universities, non-corporate research institutions and, especially the federal government, exist to correct." 🧪 1227
Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 14hFor the youngin's on here if they cannot immediately conjure that pissy/confused vacant look Thomas Wilson perfected in Back to the Future.static.klipy.comBiff Tannen's Surprised ReactionAlt: Biff Tannen's Surprised Reaction from the original "Back to the Future" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biff_Tannen 000
Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 15hI honestly think the only way I could get some graduate students to understand that their chatbot code generator is stealing their PhD thesis work is I if stood on the sidewalk with a sandwich board like a street preacher. And no one needs that. 030
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminDon Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 20hThis is a classic Voughtism: we have not eliminated the program - it still exists. It is just not distributing any resources. 13579139
Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 16hRemember in grad school when you got your first crank email after you joined a research group? A weird rite of passage for physics/astronomy students. And it was very clearly written by a person, for better & worse. 020
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdmintroyliss @troyliss.bsky.social · 16hIt seems like the big tech innovation of the 21st century has been “breaking the law.” Uber=violating taxi regulations AirBnB=violating hospitality and zoning regulations AI=mass IP theft turned into automated crime at scale 34719
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminMolly White @molly.wiki · 18h“You are infringing on the time and brainpower of people by pushing "your" content that little/no of your brainpower went into” is such a banger 5824151
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminJed Brown @jedbrown.org · 05/10/2026Our labor makes the companies more powerful as they pursue epistemicide and fascist goals including sabotage of higher ed, degrading our working conditions, and the education of students. Explicit refusal sets a norm and helps organize in pursuit of a liberatory future not owned by them. 2276
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminMolly White @molly.wiki · 18h“Wikimedia’s volunteers are the ones who come in first contact with, and clean up the mess left behind by AI agents. ... Wikimedia’s volunteers have stayed resilient so far in tackling emerging challenges on our platforms, but we also want to say: it doesn’t need to be this way.”diff.wikimedia.orgOpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projectsRecently, multiple organisations have disclosed how clusters of so-called “rogue” AI agents attempted to break into websites and online services, sometimes successfully. Agents from OpenAI’s enviro… 4333104
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminTimnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 19hIn how many ways can this message be repeated? @emilymbender.bsky.social has been saying this for how long now? www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/...bloomberg.comWatch Bender: AI’s ‘Existential’ Risk Is ‘Fake’ - BloombergUniversity of Washington professor Emily Bender argues the AI safety debate is too focused on hypothetical existential threats while overlooking harms already happening today. She points to environmen... 621777
Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 19hNSF has put out a number of calls for proposed AI institutes for teaching & research. Some of them literally called “X-labs”. 1193
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminDan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 20hNEW: In March the White House released an FY27 budget request that zeroed out the National Science Foundation's directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). For months it was unclear what would happen. Now, with FY26 over, the damage to SBE is coming to light. My reporting:science.org‘Complete devastation’: How NSF gutted its social sciences researchAgency body that funds sociology, linguistics, and archaeology studies in U.S. gave 90% fewer new grants this year 6565441
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminTobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 20hThe best advice for grad students is to have them picture an enormous fire. Their work is on fire. The buildings are on fire. The fire has consumed all and its flames reach into space and consume even the cold and silent moon. Also don’t enter your original work into a chatbot. 05712
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminKetan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 20hAmazon is building 33 data centre buildings at the site of the 'Homer City gas plant' - one of the biggest planned fossil fuelled power stations on the planet. Yet Amazon keeps claiming they're bastions of 'energy efficiency'........ 19334
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminNathaniel Comfort @nccomfort.bsky.social · 06/10/2026Exciting new historical work on Rosalind Franklin continues to appear. This is a neat bit of sleuthing by historian @alistairsponsel.bsky.social and crystallographer Brian Sutton. Here's the DOI to the actual article (it's OA): 10.1007/s10739-026-09866-7 The main finding is an x-ray image of exactly 314460
Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 05/10/2026Every single Boris Johnson column in The Telegraph for the last two decades follows this essential #LittleEngland logic. 000
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminMarisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 03/10/2026this reveals SO MUCH about legacy media 1002532518
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminWilliam B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 05/10/2026I do think this should put some of the hand-wringing over the uniquely sinful American electorate, uniquely feckless institutions, etc in perspective. The truth is that there is a large trans-national constituency of people who actively want this. They aren’t deceived. They want this. 542508377
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminDavid M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social · 05/10/2026R1 Economics Prof: Let's just try talking to each other across ideological divides R1 Econ Prof: I can't understand why this upsets people R1 Econ Prof: No, I am not going to read a book, I'm not a farmer. R1 Econ Prof: Look if you just read my entire footnoted full text document you'll see that 26611
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminJacqueline Antonovich @jackiantonovich.bsky.social · 03/10/2026In 1974, Cornell lecturer Lin Farley began recognizing a pattern in the experiences women shared in her Women and Work course: women were being pushed out of jobs by men’s sexual behavior. Farley coined the term, “sexual harassment.” 31370485
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminDominique Baker @bakerdphd.bsky.social · 04/10/2026Ended with: "When I was thinking about my feedback regarding Ivy League institutions that [have] already done more to destroy trust in the past year, these are the types of incidents I'm thinking about (there's tons more like Harvard shutting down silent protests in their library)." 118211
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminMax Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 04/10/2026Best part of this muddled article by one of Bloomberg's money guys is that two of the charts make a compelling case that knee-jerk opposition to AI is wholly justified because technological progress doesn't increase productivity, it just enables greater income extraction by capital. Oops! 9607183
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminroterote @roterote.bsky.social · 03/10/2026The Magyar government understands if they let up then Fidesz and Orban will regroup like the Brasilian Far Right did and can come right back in. So they have to move with intense endless purpose to cut out the cancer of Orban. Because five years is not much time to reverse it all & clock’s ticking. 8770132
Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 03/10/2026The European diesel emissions fraud really has killed off that engine type as viable in the minds of the general public. It was sold as “clean diesel” and it was all a scam. As passenger car tech, let it die. 120
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminNicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 03/10/2026I spoke to CBC about the Cornell gang rape case and why universities consistently betray survivors and violate their rights. This is a quick 11 minute audio clip. If you know anyone who isn’t understanding the basics of why this case is resonating, this is a good one for them.cbc.ca© CBC/Radio-Canada 2026. All rights reserved. 14614
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminHypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 02/10/2026When all else fails, try xenophobia. 311514
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminAnna Gjika @gjikaphd.bsky.social · 03/10/2026Great column. And folks should read @sorayachemaly.bsky.social's piece (below). And then maybe if you want to see how this abusive behavior starts from high school, read my book. sorayachemaly.substack.com/p/33-underst...sorayachemaly.substack.com33. A Long Read About Living in a World Where Men Publicly Bond over Women’s Humiliation and PainFrom the Burnerverse to Cornell to Clavicular, our society is all too happy to shift the cost and burden of sexual violence and male onto victims to protect men 06323
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdmintante @tante.cc · 03/10/2026Whenever someone legitimizes harmful shit with the importance of achieving "dominance" you have a fascist at hand. 421252
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminwhet moser @whetmoser.com · 03/10/2026“Drawing on labyrinthine Internal Revenue Service records, the pair study a group of rich business owners that looks more like a suburban chamber of commerce than an oligarchy: car dealers, dentists... What they find is tremendous wealth and power.” www.nytimes.com/2026/10/02/b...nytimes.comThe Rich People Democrats Aren’t Talking About (Gift Article)As billionaires become a popular political target, a new book urges Washington not to lose sight of a much larger, and quieter, group of wealthy business owners. 215048
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminKate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 03/10/2026It's Oct 3. The midterms are a month away, but early voting has already begun in some states. Mail-in ballots will start circulating soon. Some of the usual suspects are already pushing the same "rigged election" rumors we've all heard before. This year, you can play along at home. bingo.cip.uw.edubingo.cip.uw.edu"Rigged Election" BingoSpot the tropes before they spread. Recognize the common story elements behind election rumors — can you get BINGO? 817486
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminErin J. Wamsley 🧠📈😴 @wamsleylab.bsky.social · 03/10/2026The fiscal year is over. The dying Social, Behavioral, and Economic division of NSF ended up awarding 90 total grants this year, as opposed to ~700-800 in recent past years. Source: grantwitness.org/nsf/analyses... 9489305
Reposted by Generic white guy SysAdminLindsay Beyerstein @beyerstein.bsky.social · 02/10/2026This is not a "creative way to work around Congress," NYT, this is part of a constitutional crisis. Congress decides how money is to be spent, not our demented king.nytimes.comNational Science Foundation Diverted $1.4 Billion in Science Funds Mandated by Congress (Gift Article)The move, affecting about one-fifth of the National Science Foundation’s primary research budget, is the latest sign of how the White House is asserting more control over grants. 37234