chad black 💚

@chadblack.bsky.social

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Impostor. Dissociate professor of latin american history. Theory, Marx, Freud, Horror. Cycling, trail running, music. RDU, TYS, UIO, ABQ, BAL

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Made illegal in North Carolina by a legislative override of the governor's veto.

The world sucks and things are bad but hey, you know what you can do right now to make things easier on yourself and others? Wear a face mask. We have to be alive to fight back.

As the idea of "constitutional fascism" from Tosaka Jun reminds us, the regime need not suspend the constitutional order to affect fascist rule. SCOTUS has repeatedly provided the tweaks necessary for fascisization. Today's rulings, and the textualism they depend on, move us further down that line.

All these so-called AI implementations are basically like, what if Clippy spent the last two decades eating lead-based paint chips off the floor of an abandoned building and then came back to offer you help.

I wrote about Google's bold decision to use cutting-edge error-generating technology to make its core product much worse, and why I find that decision so inspiring. defector.com/googles-got-...

Google's Got Nothing But Wrong Answers | Defectordefector.com When Google’s new Gemini AI program responded to the search query “how many rocks should I eat each day?” with “at least one rock,” it did not cite the original source for that extremely funny, extrem...

Yes. The big mistake is that we're redefining intelligence to fit what predictive statistical language models can do.

The biggest mistake we've made is to use the word "intelligence" to describe what are basically large-scale pattern-recognition and -reproduction tools. And from there, all the anthropomorphic language describing them grows, but also suggests they do more than what they're designed to do.

It took an awful lot to eventually run people off of Twitter. But once that happened, I think people's toleration of shittiness got left behind. BlueSky will lose people much quicker because who wants to go through a twitter-like experience again?

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Put together a trailer for my Fall course on Latin American History at the [Horror] Movies... www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTGF...

HILA 370 | Fall 2024www.youtube.com A trailer for my Latin American History and the [Horror] Movies course for Fall 2024.

Just work-shopping here, "There is a gap in the historical literature defined by my desire not to be a failure. This book is an attempt to fill that lacuna."

Put together a trailer for my Fall course on Latin American History at the [Horror] Movies... www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTGF...

HILA 370 | Fall 2024www.youtube.com A trailer for my Latin American History and the [Horror] Movies course for Fall 2024.

Narvaez! #giro2024 #vamos #ecuador

Jerry Seinfeld was never a particularly astute observer of society, but the idea that we don't have a Cheers or MASH or All in the Family today is because of the Left is laughably absurd. Has he noticed at all what has happened to broadcast television? twitter.com/mysteriouska...

twitter.com

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"You buy a microwave and receive ads for microwaves. You buy a mattress and receive ads for mattresses." My favourite one of these is when you follow a team, so the algo sends you promos about *other* teams in the competition. Anyway, you should read this piece👇 www.takahe.org.nz/heat-death-o...

Heat Death of the Internet - takahēwww.takahe.org.nz You want to order from a local restaurant, but you need to download a third-party delivery app, even though you plan to pick it up yourself. The prices and menu on the app are different to what you sa...

The puppet is to win all the time....

Part of the problem with the fascism debate is encapsulated in the word "analogy." People are arguing over whether or not fascism is the right analogy for Trumpism, while what we see in the GOP today is an ongoing process of fasc-ization. Fascism is only "analogy" if limited to the 1930s.

Here's a little secret for you... knowing history doesn't stop it from repeating. And therein is the real doom.

"Thus society makes what is disagreeable into what is untrue. It disputes the truths... with logical and factual arguments; but these arise from emotional sources and it maintains these objections as prejudices, against every attempt to counter them." Freud, 1915.

The amount of time it took me to figure out how to make this table, properly formatted, using mathjax in Obsidian is genuinely embarrassing.

What the discipline of History needs now more than ever is a return to theory.

I don't like the look of the new helmets, but Visma is right here. If the UCI establishes regulations on helmets, and a Giro design complies with those regulations, the UCI should not be allowed to immediately move the goalposts just because it's ugly. velo.outsideonline.com/road/its-dri...

Every time I try to spell anomaly when I'm writing, I do it anomalously.

Rural America is stuck in melancholia. Whether its perceived sense of loss is real or not doesn't really matter, as that sense of loss has become an internalized object breading rage and dislocation. We could use a politics of mourning, or a mourning of politics.

In Opinion White rural rage is arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy, our columnist Paul Krugman writes.

Opinion | The Mystery of White Rural Ragewww.nytimes.com Why do voters prefer politicians who lie rather than help?

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I wrote about how today's neonazis at the border echo the Klan Border Patrol of the 1970s, and how the past always returns in patterns: buttondown.email/theswordandt...

The Eternal Return of the Border Warsbuttondown.email “Lady Fortune and her Wheel” by Jean Pichore, c. 1510 Nietzsche had a theory of eternal return—drawn from Indian thought and his own fizzing and eloquent...

I think the thing I miss most from my old twitter account is all the LatAm/Spanish-language people and news sources I followed. Haven't found that around here.

The most cynical aspect of the NIL regime in college sports now has to be the way the schools and NCAA managed to outsource paying the players, protecting their own cash and revenue streams.

Might it be that people have less time, energy, and economic flexibility for the arts, while also being bombarded by messages and tuition bills that force them towards vocational degrees? I imagine figuring those dynamics out might require some reflection on race, gender, class.

Brooks is not as focused on campuses as some as the other NYT columnists, but he is the one most likely to drop an unfounded jab in columns that are completely unrelated to it, such as this one, about the power of art.

I'm going to agree with everyone that Ryan Gosling shouldn't have gotten an Oscar nomination either for that not very good movie.

My department has moved out, so Dunford Hall can now come down. My the last traces left in my office haunt the dreams of the College of Business building to come.

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Stealing one book is theft, but stealing all of them is progress.

‘Impossible’ to create AI tools like ChatGPT without copyrighted material, OpenAI sayswww.theguardian.com Pressure grows on artificial intelligence firms over the content used to train their products

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I mean, you'd think the New York Times would be better at understanding what it actually means to lift someone else's material since they're such pros at it.

Note-taking apps won't make you smarter, or make you think more creatively. Neither will adding "artificial intelligence" to the mix. We seem to desire desperately for machines to do the hard part for us. But, it turns out that the hard part is the only part.