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Ryan "Ghost Town / Why?" the Randalls

@ryanpatrickrandall.com

1.7K followers 2.4K following 2.5K posts

A better world is possible, together. Instructional design, humanities/Cultural Studies, pedagogy, open ed (OER/OA), library work, ADHD. https://www.ryanpatrickrandall.com/ https://hcommons.social/@ryanrandall

www.ryanpatrickrandall.com

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Ryan "Ghost Town / Why?" the Randalls @ryanpatrickrandall.com · Apr 25

Gentle reminder that there's no such thing as a "TERF".

The term you were looking for is "Feminism-Appropriating Reactionary Transphobe".

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Ryan "Ghost Town / Why?" the Randalls @ryanpatrickrandall.com · 3h

In other words: this is the sort of thing I really hope I am wrong about when I see it.

Ryan "Ghost Town / Why?" the Randalls @ryanpatrickrandall.com · 3h

Offloading enforcement of community standards (moderation) onto end users means that it's each user's ultimate fault for not being sufficiently technologically competent enough* to obscure the Nazis from their experience of the Nazi bar.

*(often/not always a proxy for socio-economically privileged)

Ryan "Ghost Town / Why?" the Randalls @ryanpatrickrandall.com · 3h

Not sure if my takeaway here is that I need to follow far fewer people, be far more judicious about who I see most frequently, or start bracing for a social media nuclear winter where neither words nor affordances seem fit for use.

Ryan "Ghost Town / Why?" the Randalls @ryanpatrickrandall.com · 3h

It's an intriguing use of a tool (if one is willing to put faith in that kind of a tool rather than just a list of stopwords or something like an account network analysis tool), but I would personally never conflate it with "moderation".

Ryan "Ghost Town / Why?" the Randalls @ryanpatrickrandall.com · 4h

Wait? One of this place's engineers says that forwarding the replies one receives to an LLM & having them return with labels allegedly based on the tool's "determination" is "moderation run by you"?

It… uhm… feels like none of these nouns, verbs, adverbs, or pronouns mean what I'd mean by them.

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Will BOO-rows 🖖🍞🥀 @reforest-kelley.bsky.social · 5h

Johnny Cash didn't switch costumes with Elton John on SNL just to have some asshat call him "deeply uncool." I hate to even share this but the ratio is nice.

Left: Johnny Cash wearing a pink feather boa, a sparkly gold ascot, and gold glasses with pink feathers at the temples.

Right: Elton John in a black cowboy hat and leather jacket over a plaid shirt.

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jessamyn @librarian.bsky.social · 8h

. @404media.co is investigating book bans. They could use your pointers on where to be looking. You can do it anonymously.

"We need help deciding... which school districts and cities to seek public records from and... where we should point our reporting efforts. "

www.404media.co/help-us-inve...

Help Us Investigate Book Bans and Educational Censorship Around America

404 Media has gotten a grant to unearth public records about systematic censorship of books, schools, and libraries in the U.S.

www.404media.co

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Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 8h

I have to fan-girl for a minute here. My friend @rosvall-lab.bsky.social built an app to gather data on bird behavior during the 2024 solar eclipse. 10,000+ citizen scientists contributed (including my kids), and the resulting paper was published in Science today!

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Total solar eclipse triggers dawn behavior in birds: Insights from acoustic recordings and community science

On 8 April 2024, a total solar eclipse disrupted light-dark cycles for North American birds during the lead-up to spring reproduction. Compiling more than 10,000 community observations and artificial ...

www.science.org

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Preeti Chhibber @runwithskizzers.bsky.social · 13h

adding alt text bc we all know that interview was rough to watch, but my god the background on it

(via www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...)

A few days before the taping, Colbert's producers held a prep call with the candidates and their aides. The sample questions covered basic political topics, such as the meaning of democratic socialism. Right before the candidates went onstage, the producers appeared in the greenroom and said that they wanted to go over a few more questions. Earlier that day, a group of prominent Jewish figures, including Elisha Wiesel, the son of Elie Wiesel, had sent a letter to Colbert demanding that he grill Mamdani on his views of Israel. According to people who were in the room, one of the producers suggested a "thumbs-up or thumbs-down" segment:
"Thumbs-up or thumbs-down: Hamas. Thumbs-up or thumbs-down: a Palestinian state."
Mamdani's face dropped. "I just couldn't believe what was happening," he told me. "That a genocide could be distilled into a late-night game." His aides were incensed. "You have the first Muslim candidate for mayor in the history of New York," Zara Rahim, a senior adviser to Mamdani, told one of the producers. "You don't want to ask him a question about that?" (CBS did not respond to a request for comment.) In the end, the game didn't happen, but Colbert did ask Mamdani whether he believed that Israel had the right to exist. "Yes, like all nations, I believe it has a right to exist," he said. "And a responsibility also to uphold international law."

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Ryan "Ghost Town / Why?" the Randalls @ryanpatrickrandall.com · 10h

"School of AI?" More like "School of Aiya".

I feel bad for the good people whose work & reputations this is happening to.

Ryan "Ghost Town / Why?" the Randalls @ryanpatrickrandall.com · 10h

Receipts!!!

Ryan "Ghost Town / Why?" the Randalls @ryanpatrickrandall.com · 12h

Much in the same way that people keep championing all the wrong ideas from sci-fi or super hero stories, it feels like instead of understanding postmodernism as largely a diagnosis in favor of ethical commitment in the face of profound ambiguity, too many people are embracing narratives alone.

Ryan "Ghost Town / Why?" the Randalls @ryanpatrickrandall.com · 14h

Tepid opinions, tightly held.

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 20h

Generative AI, in both form and content, and whether looked on favourably or critically, seems to embody a collective hopelessness about the prospect of human learning and creativity, if not human knowledge altogether. It’s as if climate change had fans.

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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 18h

It absolutely *is* polite! Cooperative overlap is a supportive and loving way of talking. There are only, like.. one or two cultures where it's _not_ considered polite, and they can go fuck themselves if they think the rest of us have to conform lol www.anildash.com/2021/09/26/c...

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Ryan "Ghost Town / Why?" the Randalls @ryanpatrickrandall.com · 18h

I'm specifically and enthusiastically nodding along to this in the key of ADHD.

(There are many additional ways to nod along to this, of course. Or even "yes, and also" to various complementary or diverging points.)

Ashley C. Ford @smashfizzle.bsky.social · 1d

I know it’s not technically polite, but I love having a conversation with other people who are comfortable with short interjecting interruptions. To me it makes the conversation feel more like something we’re weaving together rather than alternating individual presentations. It feels more alive.

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james @james.claims · 20h

You cannot “keep politics out of open source”. Being alive, breathing the air, simply existing and being lucky enough to write code is all politics.

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Ryan "Ghost Town / Why?" the Randalls @ryanpatrickrandall.com · 1d

These people don't want us to have affordable healthcare in the USA, but they know affordable healthcare is extremely popular with Americans.

So they're making up scenarios (complete with tired, racist imagery) to distract you from advocating for what actually benefits you and all your neighbors.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 1d

Mike Johnson: "If you're a young, pregnant American citizen women who shows up in an ER and you get treated and they pay the hospital less for treating you than some illegal rabble rouser who came in from some South American country to do us harm, that is wrong."

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 12d

“AI” isn’t a tool or technology or even a cluster of technologies with a misleading name. It’s the infrastructure at the foundation of a form of capitalism dependent on data brokering. We should be teaching our students about this and not teaching them about “responsible” use.

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Ryan "Ghost Town / Why?" the Randalls @ryanpatrickrandall.com · 2d

Clearly we're got an emo revival on the horizon.

I keep seeing links to "track by track breakdowns" of new releases.

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Ryan "Ghost Town / Why?" the Randalls @ryanpatrickrandall.com · 2d

Having lived in Rochester while commuting to teach in Buffalo (specifically Niagara County Community College), I'm very curious as to why they're split in two. Maybe I was still too much of an outlier, but I felt more like there was a gradation of change rather than a hard split.

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redrum scare(d) corncob (no one said it made sense) @inquiline.myatproto.social · 2d

Just called and got thru immediately; thanks for this. (I'd even skimmed that article and not realized it was still worth calling!)

emily moonlight @threnody.bsky.social · 2d

hi, cis folks in california!

this headline leaves out that newsom has another 5 days to sign these bills into law. if you’d like to tell him he should do that to protect trans californians, you should to reach out.

he also has a phone: (916) 445-2841

want to know what to say? next post! 🧵

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Ryan "Ghost Town / Why?" the Randalls @ryanpatrickrandall.com · 3d

That feeling when you finally get a resource all about microform, but you have no way to read it.

Ryan "Ghost Town / Why?" the Randalls @ryanpatrickrandall.com · 3d

Radical notions like "context shapes experiences" & "nuance contributes to meaning" & "'as well as…' can be a valid option".

Ryan "Ghost Town / Why?" the Randalls @ryanpatrickrandall.com · 3d

"Twitter 2: Mods Meltdown Boogaloo" was not on my bingo card for this quarter, but I'm belatedly realizing it's long been a question of "when" rather than "if" it would happen.