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Generic white guy SysAdmin

@westbynoreaster.bsky.social
767 followers 187 following 4.5K 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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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 2h
It’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.
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 2h
Shows 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.
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 2h
If 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.
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 6h
I 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.
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 6h
Because 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.gov
NSF X-Labs
NSF'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.
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Alice Roberts @profaliceroberts.bsky.social · 7h
I am very uncomfortable about calling bits of software “agents”. They have no more real agency than a wind-up toy.
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 7h
No but it is the meatheaded love and therefore overuse of the letter X in everything.
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 8h
Straight men's online homosocial behavior seems to be rotting their brains, or maybe souls, at an ever quickening pace.
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 8h
While 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.
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 9h
Am 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.
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 9h
To 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.
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Alexander Kasprzyk @amkasprzyk.bsky.social · 10h
OpenAI 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
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 10h
From 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.fi
Datakeskukset | Viranomainen käskee Googlea keskeyttämään työt, Google lupaa korvata osan puista
Lupa- ja valvontaviranomainen LVV on antanut Googlen edustajille kehotuksen töiden keskeyttämisestä, kunnes ympäristövaikutusten arviointi on saatettu loppuun. Lisäksi se uhkaa uhkasakolla.
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 10h
Software designed with an understanding of the complexity of the data it’s processing and displaying.
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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).”
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 11h
Those education cybersecurity incidents we do hear about are massive (inter)national scale events. 😷 #Canvas / #Instructure 🤫
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Anna Gifty @itsafronomics.blacksky.app · 14h
lol 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.com
Study finds 43 percent of Harvard's white students are legacy, athletes, related to donors or staff
The number drops dramatically for black, Latino and Asian American students with less than 16 percent each coming from those categories, the study said.
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Needhi 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." 🧪
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 14h
For 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.com
Biff Tannen's Surprised Reaction
Alt: Biff Tannen's Surprised Reaction from the original "Back to the Future" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biff_Tannen
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 15h
I 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.
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 20h
This is a classic Voughtism: we have not eliminated the program - it still exists. It is just not distributing any resources.
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 16h
Remember 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.
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troyliss @troyliss.bsky.social · 16h
It 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
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Molly 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
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Jed Brown @jedbrown.org · 05/10/2026
Our 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.
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Molly 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.org
OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projects
Recently, 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…
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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 19h
In 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.com
Watch Bender: AI’s ‘Existential’ Risk Is ‘Fake’ - Bloomberg
University 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...
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 19h
NSF has put out a number of calls for proposed AI institutes for teaching & research. Some of them literally called “X-labs”.
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Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 20h
NEW: 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 research
Agency body that funds sociology, linguistics, and archaeology studies in U.S. gave 90% fewer new grants this year
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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 20h
The 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.
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 20h
Steel is real!
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 20h
Amazon 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'........
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Nathaniel Comfort @nccomfort.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Exciting 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
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Every single Boris Johnson column in The Telegraph for the last two decades follows this essential #LittleEngland logic.
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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
this reveals SO MUCH about legacy media
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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I 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.
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David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
R1 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
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Jacqueline Antonovich @jackiantonovich.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
In 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.”
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Dominique Baker @bakerdphd.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Ended 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)."
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Max Kennerly @maxkennerly.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Best 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!
Productivity Growth Has Been Stuck Below Its Postwar Pace for 50 YearsWorkers’ Slice Shrinks, Profits’ Slice Grows
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roterote @roterote.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
The 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.
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Generic white guy SysAdmin @westbynoreaster.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
The 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.
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Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
I 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.
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 02/10/2026
When all else fails, try xenophobia.
““With any change, there will be important questions raised, but there will also be misinformation and outright lies, and in the age of social media and 24/7 news, myths take hold faster than ever before,” said Garman. “In fact, this build out is so important geopolitically that there are widespread reports of various countries intentionally seeding misinformation in the US about data centers to trick us into slowing down.””
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Anna Gjika @gjikaphd.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Great 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.com
33. A Long Read About Living in a World Where Men Publicly Bond over Women’s Humiliation and Pain
From 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
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tante @tante.cc · 03/10/2026
Whenever someone legitimizes harmful shit with the importance of achieving "dominance" you have a fascist at hand.
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whet 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.com
The 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.
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Kate Starbird @katestarbird.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
It'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.edu
bingo.cip.uw.edu
"Rigged Election" Bingo
Spot the tropes before they spread. Recognize the common story elements behind election rumors — can you get BINGO?
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Erin J. Wamsley 🧠📈😴 @wamsleylab.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
The 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...
The graph shows the cumulative number of awards made by month across this fiscal year, as compared to the last 6 fiscal years. The line for this year is total flat until June, but then finally gets up to 91 by October. In prior years the increase starts building earlier and ends on average in the 700-800 range (with variability, last year was only between 400-500).
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Lindsay Beyerstein @beyerstein.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
This 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.com
National 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.
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