Steph Brown

Steph Brown

@stephjayb.bsky.social

84

Posts

Author | Watching Women: Militant Suffragists Write the British Surveillance State | U Toronto Press, 2024

U of Arizona Assoc Prof English | Surveillance | C20/21 English, Caribbean, Black British Lit | GWS

rock scrambler | hawk enthusiast | she/her

Posts Replies Media

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this AI buble will drag so many vulnerable and marginalised folx as well as the already shaky social structures we currently have to support such folx, before it bursts

There is a new genre of serious-seeming "scientific" research paper but the paper is like "we asked ChatGPT if AI could do your job and it said yes" and then news outlets cover them uncritically and they go viral www.404media.co/ai-finds-tha...

AI Finds That AI Is Great In New Garbage Research From Tony Blair Institutewww.404media.co The former Prime Minister presented research claiming AI could reduce the public sector workforce. It’s largely based on a ChatGPT-4 output.

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Place a lot of the blame for these obviously bullshit tech company press releases being breathlessly repeated as fact in major media on this: journalism has been utterly GUTTED in the last 20 years, and there are *very* few reporters with technical expertise who can fact check these claims left

Yeah, like - it would be terrifying if it worked, but now I just wonder how these idiots can get people to uncritically publish shit about a technology that does not exist and doesn't work.

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Here’s a miracle solution: stop fuckin doing it

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⬇️⬇️ a reminder that no number of academic studies will shift public policy when those with power aren’t genuinely interested in what is best public policy.

The reason why they keep doing UBI studies and not actually implementing UBI is that the people doing the studies want UBI and the people who have the power to implement it do not want UBI.

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They're defunding *all* language learning to shore up their portfolios in LLM, forcing human dependency on those (flawed) assistants while sacrificing thousands of years of complex human meaning-making. It's ugly business, headed for disaster.

this is a Good Question, and the answer has a lot to do with the economics of venture capital. VCs need there to be a transformative breakthrough tech that offers massive returns bc their model is, to some extent, predicated on having a Facebook every once and while to offset failed investments.

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NEWS: After sustained attacks from House Republicans, the Stanford Internet Observatory is being dismantled. A huge blow to academic freedom and our ability to understand platforms and influence operations www.platformer.news/stanford-int...

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If you can’t bring yourself to admit that we need masks for wildfire smoke, Covid and whatever the next pandemic will be, I hope you can at least see that this is about intensifying hyper surveillance and comes straight from the cops.

UPDATE: NY Governor Kathy Hochul said on CNN last night that she is considering a ban on masks. This is absolutely shameful! New York has suffered so much from COVID, and COVID is not over. We should be normalizing and depoliticizing masks, not banning them.

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need a common source playbook for how to mobilize against rpk

Like, if your university hires the rpk Group, you know cuts and layoffs are coming. They have the same set of recommendations for every higher-ed client, and just cut and paste specific institutions' names. They're the embodiment of "if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail"

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Nothing unsettles me more about the “AI can and should take over all writing tasks from humans” mindset than that it assumes it’s totally worthless and unnecessary for humans to *write about our own lived experiences*.

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Like this is a golden opportunity to stop pretending the problem is the two extremely rude miscreants with bribe envelopes falling out of their robes down at the far right end of the bench, Roberts is making a public declaration that those are his guys, this is his court

Speaking of calling balls and strikes Angel Hernandez lost his job for stuff like this

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The hidden part of this story is that the prof is not tenure stream and therefore I suspect the UNC administration believes it could do whatever the fuck it wanted to do.

UNC Chapel Hill bureaucrats secretly record professors' classes, without notice or consent, "using the existing Panopto camera in the classroom" to investigate "reports concerning class content and conduct"

Letter says UNC Chapel Hill secretly records professorswww.insidehighered.com A business school professor was startled to learn that the university had recorded his classes as part of a ‘review’ he didn’t know about. The university says it has no formal policy on filming classe...

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UNC is secretly recording classes without informing professors and using the footage in formal reviews of their performance. www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

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Nathan Kalman-Lamb

"These police officers out here today, that's thousands of student scholarships. Thousands of students who would have been able to go to school, buy books, have housing. But instead, our Chancellor, who is a very cruel man, decided to send thousands of dollars of state funding into the trash."

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"Why are our politics so hostile?" Oh, I dunno, but one factor is how rich scumbags, unsatisfied with unimaginable wealth, have declared war on the rest of the population and are trying to extract even more from people who live paycheck-to-paycheck. That tends to raise the temperature, y'know?

Billionaires Lynda and Stewart Resnick, owners of the world's largest pistachio and almond grower, Fiji Water, Pom pomegranate juice and Justin wines, and Teleflora flower service, are suing to roll back legal protections for farmworkers.

Column: Inside the effort by two Beverly Hills billionaires to kill a state law protecting farmworkerswww.latimes.com The billionaire owners of Wonderful Co. — grower of almonds and pistachios — say a California farm labor law is unconstitutional.

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Writers, historians, curious folk: a lot of librarians keep count of the number of questions we're asked so that we can compile yearly totals, which is a way to show our bosses & our bosses' bosses how busy we are. So please ask us questions! They actually help us in our workplaces!

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gay (derogatory)

Actually, I think the election is an excuse for them to try to influence how people express themselves. Which, as is happens, is a threat to democracy! They don’t just want Biden to win, I think they also want people to be more obedient.

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United Farm Workers

Don't let the heat turn deadly for farm workers. Donations will help us keep doing everything we can to save lives. Stand strong with the farm workers who toil day after exhausting day under a sizzling sun. ufw.org/heat_donate or paypal.me/ufwdonate #Calor #WeFeedYou 4/

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For Mother's Day, I gave to the National Bailout Fund to help free Black mothers and caregivers. If you can afford to kick them a few bucks, please do www.nationalbailout.org

National Bail Outwww.nationalbailout.org

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In some ways it’s pointless to get caught up in the game of asking what chatgpt can do. It’s often far more relevant to ask what people In positions of power are willing to use it for.

It’s going great.

AI-Generated Employee Handbooks Are Causing Mayhem At The Companies That Use Themwww.forbes.com Missing anti-harassment clauses, bungled PTO guidelines and botched bereavement leave terms: ChatGPT-generated company policies are exposing employers to a buffet of legal and financial risks.

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Why would the NYPD ever let protests remain peaceful when turning them into a warzone can make everyone so much money? gothamist.com/news/nypd-ha...

NYPD has spent $53 million on overtime pay responding to protests since Oct. 7gothamist.com Police officers have racked up hundreds of thousands of hours of overtime, according to NYPD officials.

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More of this.. how can universities learn from campuses that acted like their students were members of a community and not transactional clients. #polisky www.vox.com/24147461/col...

The lessons from colleges that didn’t call the policewww.vox.com Deescalating conflict around protests was possible, but many colleges turned to law enforcement instead.

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This statement from @ruha9.bsky.social and others includes the best paragraph I've seen on the issue.

From faculty observers at Princeton. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Statement from Princeton Faculty on Clio Halldocs.google.com

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UVA changed their tent policy today and then immediately state cops started pouring into the Rotunda area.

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The "escalation to violence" at UCLA was counterprotestors then the LAPD. The "escalation to violence" at Columbia was the NYPD. The "escalation to violence" at UW-Madison was the MPD. The "escalation to violence" at Indiana was admins escorting snipers. Passive-voicing that is rhetorical violence.

This is not a plot, this is a hostage situation.

Today I was introduced to what was described as the Worst Plot In Exoplanet Science, and frankly, it is a work of art

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Police power in the U.S. EXCEEDS civilian control. And people who know better continue to pretend that this isn't true. IT IS.

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The new policy that Indiana University used to justify snipers, arresting students and faculty, and banning those arrested from campus for a year, was enacted *one day* before yesterday's protests began. It wasn't even posted online until yesterday morning. www.idsnews.com/article/2024...

‘Utterly unprincipled’: Policy created on eve of protest used to make arrestswww.idsnews.com IUPD said 33 protesters were arrested.

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Idk how anyone can deny climate change is real when cop riot season is starting two whole months earlier than usual

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The excellent @jordanuhl.com put together this list of protesters’ bail funds, contribute early, contribute often

Campus Bail Fundscampusbailfunds.com Links to bail funds for student protesters.