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c t

@whatulysses.bsky.social
836 followers 1.1K following 1.2K posts

grad student, bike goblin. prev: talky science words. current: thinky science words, log measuring, fire starting.

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c t @whatulysses.bsky.social · 6h
on my bullshit again (infodumping to my friends about how Blade Runner (1982) is best appreciated once you realize the entire arc is Deckard coming to the realization that he is a willing agent of the repression of his own people and, in technical terms, sucks)
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c t @whatulysses.bsky.social · 8h
wow, prescribed fire is so badass, I bet you never have to crawl backwards on knees & 1 hand down a steep hill while lightning your fire line i bet your nose is never a gushing spout of mucus the moment the smoke picks up. i bet you never snag your torch or tools on bushes & get stuck.
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c t @whatulysses.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
a fun thing is to wake up at 5:30 a.m. to furious pounding on your door while emergency lights dance outside your window because a neighbor left their stove on and the fire department needs to stand awkwardly in your living room making sure you are not breathing carbon monoxide.
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Chanda Prescod-Weinstein 🌌 @chanda.blacksky.app · 02/10/2026
meanwhile people have been telling us since 2025 that we have to vote for him in 2028
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c t @whatulysses.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
leaving orchestra, the one corner of the world where I can forget my many responsibilities, comes a voice: . . . . . . . "hey! fellow violist! do you TA for my geography class???"
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David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
“Cutting this much from the university budget will mean that some of the core functions of the university will be lost. It’s not possible to just do more with less — to work smarter, to trim around the edges. We’re going to have to do less with less.” Gift link: www.startribune.com/umn-cuts-sta...
startribune.com
Perry: What we lose if the U cuts $225 million
"Austerity doesn’t work. Instead, it creates a death spiral, where reduction in services leads to reductions in revenue, which lead to reductions in services, which leads to reduction in revenue, whic...
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Kate Hagen's House of Horrors 👻 @thathagengrrl.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
"Meanwhile, Jane Doe dropped out of Cornell and was denied her request to get her tuition refunded so that she could transfer to a different college. She hence faced more severe consequences than most of the men who she alleges gang-raped her." 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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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
The most useless form of news is “CEO says.” Can this tool actually do what it says or is the company just trying to profit off fear?
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Sarah McAnulty, Ph.D. @sarahmackattack.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Today was incredible. The fight to save the academy of natural sciences is far from Over
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Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
"But now Billy was dead, and the state of Connecticut said he owed $232,733 for room and board during his earlier prison stay. Selling the house where DeSenti now lived alone would help satisfy that debt." ctmirror.org/2026/09/27/t...
ctmirror.org
They served their time in prison. Then the bills arrived.
Hundreds of CT residents have had money seized through a law that allows the state to charge a fee for every day a person spends in prison.
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c t @whatulysses.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
not the point but the email announcing this was SO AI-generated
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c t @whatulysses.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
bad sign when the ice cream starts loading up on candy instead of the simple goodness of flavor and texture, just saying.
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 26/09/2026
lol if the conservatives want to take away my ADHD medication, I refuse to be held responsible for all the incredibly dumb things that will happen next
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c t @whatulysses.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I just clicked, swear to god, 7 different versions of "are you SURE you want to cancel this subscription?!?!?!?!" on the site where I order my n95s, yikes!
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c t @whatulysses.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I am doing orchestra again this semester as my rest activity and my viola section (20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 41, 20) has made a group chat.
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c t @whatulysses.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
one of my two therapists who I have been seeing without telling them about each other is going on family leave (after which I probably won't resume) and I ended our last session by saying "have a great baby"??? ???
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Sabrina Imbler @sabs.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
tag yourself im currently study/cry to
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c t @whatulysses.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
why is all the grocery store ice cream so bad now (you know why)
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Sam Thielmonster @samthielman.com · 24/09/2026
And the secret ingredient was… yes, labor arbitrage. The answer, one more time, was labor arbitrage here as well. Really giving that one a workout
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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
As a result of @benjaminjriley.bsky.social's most recent Alpha School reporting, all who have been saying "AI has a Mechanical Turk problem" - that is, "artificial intelligence" is actually the cognitive labor of humans in the Global South - get to take another victory lap. They must be winded.
They hired this data team of people that didn't live in the U.S. and they would watch us through our computers and it felt really sketchy and scary. It felt like it was more of a science experiment, and I was more of a lab rat rather than [having] someone that actually cared about my learning.
I was getting really frustrated about that throughout the year. Every time they would change something, I would be like, why are we changing this?
We couldn't tape over the computer or anything like that. They would get really frustrated if we taped over it. We had to keep the camera on.
[The software] would also track your facial expressions, and be like, "This is the emotion that you're evoking while you're talking about this." And every single time, it would tell me that I look really sad, which is fair because / was really sad, because / was crying every single day.
They would make me and a few other kids take standardized math tests pretty much every day, and then any question that we got wrong, we would have to get on a Zoom call with some random guy from normally India and explain to him every single thing that we got wrong and why. And I hated that.
I was a guinea pig, and I knew that I was a guinea pig. They were not subtle about it.
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kate wehwalt @katewagner.wehwalt.net · 21/09/2026
At least I’m gay now!
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Science Magazine @science.org · 22/09/2026
President Donald Trump’s budget chief, Russell Vought, has reportedly floated a proposal in which he would have a final vote on all National Institutes of Health grants. scim.ag/4horDQ8
science.org
White House move to seize control of NIH grant decisions upsets senators and scientists
Budget chief Russell Vought reportedly wants more power to veto DEI-related funding
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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Precisely this—the power attributed to technology makes it incredibly useful for laundering responsibility
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c t @whatulysses.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
wow! this office worker is continuing to plod through her work despite the knowledge that a colleague is going to "just swing by" their office "randomly" "after 3" today!
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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
NEW: @apnews.com confirms that ICE has begun electronically "disappearing" people in the agency's custody who have final orders of removal. As of last week, anyone jailed by ICE with a final order of removal will NOT appear in the ICE Online Detainee Locator System, making them effectively vanish.
apnews.com
AP Exclusive: ICE hides locations of thousands of detainees with final removal orders
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has stopped publicly revealing where it is holding most detainees who are subject to final deportation orders, in a move that has made it harder for lawyers an...
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Ashton Pittman @ashtonpittman.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
It only took 11 years for TV media to finally side with one another against Trump's abuses.
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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
it's good to see solidarity in the white house press pool but it's nuts that it had to come to this for it to happen.
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Frankie de la Cretaz @thefrankiedlc.news · 18/09/2026
I'm really glad that Code Switch included this part of my interview, because I think these are the points that so often get lost in the discussion of trans panic and why the WNBA might be an ideal target for those anti-trans groups to latch onto. www.npr.org/2026/09/15/n...
We're talking about actual bigotry and the belief that this group of people shouldn't have, like, the same human rights as another group. It legitimizes them. And so the WNBA is a big platform for them to be able to do that. But I think what's actually really insidious about being the target is that transphobia is rooted in white supremacist ideas of who is allowed to be a woman and what a woman should look like. Those beliefs have, you know, negatively impacted Black and brown and non-Western women throughout history.

So what you have is a league in the WNBA that is full of Black women, 7-foot-tall women, masculine women, women who don't fit kind of the traditional markers of conventional white Western ideas of womanhood. And so I don't think it's surprising that transphobic ideas around the acceptable kind of woman are coming and impacting this league.

And I think the last piece that I will say is, I think, in some ways, the lack of visibility that the league had for a lot of years really protected it. Like, it wasn't as successful as it should have been because of racism and homophobia and misogyny. And once it becomes successful, the flip side of that is it really does become a different kind of victim of those ideas. And the fact that you have a league that is all women, predominantly Black women, largely queer women who have been successful and they don't need men to do it, and their product is not necessarily for men. I think that's a threat to the status quo. And so it's not just about protecting women's sports. It's actually about dismantling them from the inside.
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the Mountain Goats @themountaingoats.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
I’m sure everybody’s noticed but just a reminder, between now and the election the vibes are gonna be real off around here. they won’t get better after either but from now to the election they will also be off
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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Thinking about the selling point of "AI" supposedly "freeing up time" to do important things. Beyond devaluing the tasks that we can supposedly offload to software systems, it occurs to me that this is kind of opposite of mindfulness/being in the moment. >>
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c t @whatulysses.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
a thing happens when you grade 40 of the same assignment: you figure out exactly what your students didn't get out of the lecture/other class materials and that you should maybe go over again.
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Linda Holmes @lindaholmes.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
I am not saying everybody has the ability to follow this path, but: I was uncertain of my MMR status. I went into the CVS app, scheduled a booster, walked in, got one, walked out, paid nothing.
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Claire Willett @clairewillett.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
every day of my life I think about the people using “she” to describe this computer program who still need to be convinced to use it for trans women
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Kendra "Gloom is My Beat" Pierre-Louis @kendrawrites.com · 18/09/2026
What this paper is saying basically: is the flu is seasonal, covid is not.
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c t @whatulysses.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
I maintain that grading student labs is the most instantaneous and humbling assessment you can receive of your capacity to communicate clearly and compellingly.
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c t @whatulysses.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
I'm back to the life in which I do not really get "weekends", but at least it's perfect weather for making apple pie around grading.
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c t @whatulysses.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
the thing is, I have been very fastidious about not looking up anything about that hyrox athlete because I hate this spectacle; and yet, thanks to the preview images of all the articles that are just sitting in social media posts I see casually in a day, I have still memorized her face.
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Micah @rincewind.run · 17/09/2026
the worst part about this is that a lot of the damage will be permanent by the time we can turn the research funding back on a lot of folks will have unsurprisingly and not unreasonably decided that they should leave this area of research because it will never be reliable what a huge waste
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sarah jeong @sarahjeong.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
a lot freaks me out about AI but 0% of my anxiety is about AGI. i think this is the part that freaks me out the most right now -- the many many indications that no one is at the wheel and no adults are present
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taylr @taylordahlin.com · 17/09/2026
crabtree says that minneapolis public schools often operate as safety nets where the city, county and state fail, and we saw this most tangibly during operation metro surge, and we should fund schools like we recognize the importance of the work they’re doing
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c t @whatulysses.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
if you want to have a conspiracy board for a job, might I recommend taking up geography
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 16/09/2026
I'm just going to keep yelling this louder and louder until it clicks: weird overpaid AI nerds hand-wringing about human extinction are trying to distract you from the extremely deadly and serious harms they are causing yesterday, today and tomorrow www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Headline: "US Data Centers Set to Burn More Natural Gas Than Most Nations" above a photo of natural gas compressor towers, power lines and a crane at an industrial site, illustrating rising gas use tied to data centers.News excerpt reporting that U.S. data centers’ natural gas use is expected to grow by 15 billion cubic feet per day by 2035—amounting to more gas than every country except China, Russia, Iran and the U.S., citing the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
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c t @whatulysses.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
saw a lot of emphatic nods in the undergrad labs yesterday when I talked about not using AI so we could learn how to think better, hell yeah undergrads.
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Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
"stores and tracks faculty CVs and productivity" in the hands of private equity can't go wrong can it
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Katiesaurus @katiesaurusseven.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
"The poverty data does not capture many of the changes enacted in the sweeping Republican domestic policy bill passed in July 2025, including substantial cuts to Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and other government aid."
nytimes.com
Poverty Rate Was Stable Before Trump’s Safety Net Cuts Gained Force (Gift Article)
Median household income rose to a record $87,460 in 2025, according to annual Census Bureau data on the financial well-being of Americans.
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Courtney Milan @courtneymilan.com · 15/09/2026
Never forget that maintaining the status quo is, and always will be, a political act.
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c t @whatulysses.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I'm teaching in person again this semester (spring was asynchronous/online) and it makes such a difference and I do in fact love teaching it turns out.
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c t @whatulysses.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Hearing a lot of anxiety from undergrads after the MN state legislature underfunded state financial aid grants this year. mndaily.com/campus/stude...
mndaily.com
Students grapple with reduced aid in wake of receding state grant funds
With the fall semester transitions in full swing, college students both locally and statewide have been left to confront reductions to one of the most critical forms of need-based financial aid. The M...
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Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness @tangledwilderness.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Listen up, I checked, there's nothing good on the internet today. All the good stuff is offline, this has been independently verified, you don't need to look at the internet anymore today, you can check back in tomorrow if you want.
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Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
It's difficult to convey to people who haven't been paying attention that every single thing they are reading about the immigrant concentration camps has been happening in U.S. jails and prisons since their origin. People were being waterboarded at Auburn prison in the 1850s.
usprisonculture.com
Prison Culture » Torture & Corporal Punishment in Early 20th Century American Penitentiaries…
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