Wiland
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finite-sky.bsky.social
Wiland
@finite-sky.bsky.social
190 followers 52 following 41 posts
Laissez les bon temps rouler
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finite-sky.bsky.social
It’s nice when your enemies all line up at once. Only other thing needed here is a Duke jersey.

youtu.be/K5OZeSre_sI
First Lady Melania Trump: Presidential AI Challenge
YouTube video by The White House
youtu.be
December 4, 2025 at 7:58 PM
Reposted by Wiland
jameslwilson.bsky.social
Shorter Capital chap. 1:
OP's screenshotted quote, but doctored to now read: ""I'm the motherf***er that's putting my life on the line, not you. You ain't stepping your motherf***ing ass in that [FACTORY]. You or nobody else. So why should I have to pay to carry your [SURPLUS VALUE]? You should be paying me, if you want to be truthful. It irks my nerves how this dude gets on a plane, gets a hotel suite — him and his buddies — they go out to dinner, five-star meals, all that, and guess who's got to pay for it? Us [WORKERS]. We're paying for y'all to come out here, have the time of your life, stay in the best hotels of your life, and it's all done on our dime."
December 4, 2025 at 3:35 PM
finite-sky.bsky.social
“Institutional auto-cannibalism”

www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...
AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself
Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.
www.currentaffairs.org
December 3, 2025 at 3:36 PM
Reposted by Wiland
nickfleisher.bsky.social
Notably, a lot of the current wave of "AI-infused" curriculum overhauls are being pushed by provosts looking to make the jump to president and trying hard to win the attention of the (callow, ignorant) trustees who make those hires
edburmila.bsky.social Ed Burmila @edburmila.bsky.social · 4d
“One person is an autocratic president of the university for decades” certainly wasn’t a flawless system but it’s clear that “admins hop from job to job scaling the career ladder by filling their CV with ‘accomplishments’ that are expensive burdens to the schools they leave behind” is even worse.
infosecgoon.bsky.social Matthew Gracie @infosecgoon.bsky.social · 4d
The worst thing to happen to academia was the emergence of a nomadic administrative class like the one in corporations who just move from institution to institution setting fires and walking away.

Say what you will about the flaws of faculty governance, but at least they believe in the mission.
December 1, 2025 at 4:40 PM
finite-sky.bsky.social
Clearly, the relevant admin have never themselves supervised undergraduate class presentations. www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/n...
GMU lecturer fired for drinking in class with undergrads, sources say
An adjunct faculty member at George Mason University was fired after openly drinking alcohol with undergraduate students in class last week, sources tell News4.
www.nbcwashington.com
November 26, 2025 at 7:01 PM
Reposted by Wiland
pmomtch.bsky.social
We the Would-be-goods shall release a new album on 13 February, *Tears Before Bedtime*. At our Bandcamp page you can listen to ‘The Gallopers’, a single from the album, and watch the first ever Would-be-goods video . . .

would-be-goods.bandcamp.com/album/tears-...
Tears Before Bedtime, by Would-Be-Goods
14 track album
would-be-goods.bandcamp.com
November 22, 2025 at 6:04 PM
Reposted by Wiland
bencollins.bsky.social
“I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time.”

aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...
I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time. Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning. A week later it happens again. An email arrives. Agents with guns have chased a teacher into the school where she works. They did not have a warrant. They dragged her away, ignoring her and her colleagues’ pleas to show proof of her documentation. That evening I stand a few feet from the parents of Rayito de Sol and listen to them describe, with anguish, how good Ms. Diana was to their children. What it is like to have strangers with guns traumatize your kids. For a teacher to hide a three-year-old child for fear they might be killed. How their relatives will no longer leave the house. I hear the pain and fury in their voices, and I wonder who will be next. Understand what it is to pray in Chicago.
November 9, 2025 at 5:26 PM
finite-sky.bsky.social
4 More Innings!
November 2, 2025 at 3:20 AM
finite-sky.bsky.social
A couple new articles on well-being stuff. Thanks to all y’all who heard inchoate versions of these ideas.

philpapers.org/rec/WILWAA-10

link.springer.com/article/10.1...
The Circularity of Welfare Judgements - The Journal of Ethics
Some theories of welfare hold that whether you are living well depends upon whether you think you are. But then the very phenomenon we want to understand gets deployed in its putative explanation. Vie...
link.springer.com
October 23, 2025 at 5:24 PM
Reposted by Wiland
profmarylewis.bsky.social
Excellent resolution from UVA. Well done, @uvahumanities.bsky.social

Now, friends at Dartmouth, MIT, Vanderbilt, Texas, etc need to step up.
October 4, 2025 at 1:39 AM
Reposted by Wiland
agentsofchange.bsky.social
So so sad to learn about the death of Jonathan Lear. His work on Aristotle and Freud was formative for me. He was a model of philosophical intelligence and curiosity. More importantly he was a human human, with rare integrity and sharp judgment. It's hard to imagine the world without him in it.
September 22, 2025 at 9:04 PM
Reposted by Wiland
noamchompers.bsky.social
New idea to create artificial intelligence that exceeds human capacity, not by programming a machine to be more intelligent than we currently are, but instead by making all the humans stupider by replacing reading and formal education with playing with a chatbot, thereby lowering the bar to clear
August 29, 2025 at 9:35 PM
Reposted by Wiland
schooley.bsky.social
Government workers when DOGE shows up.
February 4, 2025 at 4:40 AM
Reposted by Wiland
karlschafer.bsky.social
philosophers today
January 29, 2025 at 2:25 AM
Reposted by Wiland
nkalamb.bsky.social
I was supposed to discuss our book *The End of College Football* tonight in Washington, DC.

I won't be there because I was denied entry to the United States.

They refused to say why; my best guess is some combo of the inauguration, politics, Palestine, and maybe, a new normal.
Politics and Prose Presents Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva in conversation with David Zirin 1/17 @ 7pm P&P Conn Ave My Canary Mission page
January 17, 2025 at 6:20 PM
Reposted by Wiland
oddletters.bsky.social
update: here is the AI policy i wrote for my doc seminar this term (i have already located the typo and fixed it, which tbh is like 60% of the point of posting it in public)
I have adopted the following policy on the use of generative Al systems, which is adapted from one originally written by Prof. Susannah Paletz. There are two primary goals of this doctoral seminar. The first is to familiarize you with Science and Technology Studies as a literature, through its intellectual history and breadth of critical considerations. The second goal is to train you in the scholarly practices of reading large amounts of textual material quickly and effectively, synthesizing and discussing that material accurately and in detail, and then using the insights, methods, theories, and approaches of those texts in your own intellectual work. My expectation is that you will not use any generative artificial intelligence systems (like ChatGPT, Claude, etc) to complete your work in this class. Any use of Al-generated work to brainstorm, outline, write, edit, etc, your work will be considered an academic integrity violation. These systems are often inaccurate, are bad at summarizing complex materials, and relying on them will make your work worse and less interesting. The use of these programs does not serve your development as a thinker, writer, and scholar. To quote Professor Andrew Perfors, "As a teacher, what I want to teach, and what I want people to practice doing, is the process of creation itself. I don't give a single goddamn flying fuck what ChatGPT thinks about the essay prompt. The purpose of having students write an essay is not to fill the world with yet more words on the topic of the essay: the point is to find out what my students think about the topic. Actually, the point is even deeper - it is to make them go through the process of figuring out for themselves what they think, and to wrestle with putting those thoughts into words so that they can clarify things to themselves and improve their ability to share those thoughts clearly. This process cannot be short-circuited by outsourcing it to Al; to do so removes the entire fucking point." …
January 4, 2025 at 1:29 PM
finite-sky.bsky.social
The whole thing is worth reading
tvrle.bsky.social Tvrtko Vrdoljak @tvrle.bsky.social · Dec 28
Christopher Newfield on how humanities research funding works (or doesn't).

Full article: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
December 28, 2024 at 4:26 PM
Reposted by Wiland
noamchompers.bsky.social
funny discourse where tech guys go 'i cannot tell the difference between LLM output and stuff written by professional humanists' and humanists are like 'exactly: *you* can't tell the difference'
December 26, 2024 at 11:49 PM
Reposted by Wiland
saraprotasi.bsky.social
Obligatory brag: My book The Philosophy of Envy was awarded the Joseph B. Gittler Prize (which in my head I keep calling Glitter) by the American Philosophical Association My prize was announced earlier, but now everyone else’s been announced too. Congrats to all the winners!
2024 APA Prizes: Fall Edition - American Philosophical Association
2024 APA/PDC Prize for Excellence and Innovation in Philosophy Programs: The Gould Center for Humanistic Studies (Claremont McKenna College)2024 Article Prize: Lindsay Brainard (University of Alabama at Birmingham), “The Curious Case of Uncurious Creation,” Inquiry (2023)
www.apaonline.org
December 23, 2024 at 2:36 PM
Reposted by Wiland
olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social
"The problem is that the bottom of the Democratic Party literally fell out."

here an excerpt from @danieldenvir.bsky.social's interview of @keeanga.bsky.social

hammerandhope.org/article/elec...
Donald Trump’s Victory, the Elitism of Democrats, and the Need to Build a Hospitable Left
Analyzing the 2024 election and its aftermath.
hammerandhope.org
December 21, 2024 at 9:38 PM
Reposted by Wiland
ayoub.bsky.social
When I described Israelis hunting Palestinian children for sport I was not exaggerating or being purposefully outrageous. It is literally what the IDF is doing in Gaza. They are actually, literally, shooting civilians for fun.

www.instagram.com/p/DDxdPV1v1BN
We're killing civilians there who are then counted as terrorists. The Israeli army spokesperson's announcements about casualty numbers have turned this into a competition between units. If Division 99 kills 150 people, the next unit aims for 200. Recently discharged Division 252 officer
December 19, 2024 at 9:45 PM
Reposted by Wiland
bartenderhemry.bsky.social
Admitting you don't know something is like a superpower. That's how you learn. Most of the problems in the world are caused by people pretending to know things they don't
December 21, 2024 at 3:34 PM
Reposted by Wiland
grahamhubbs.bsky.social
This is brilliant. And, if you’ve never seen _All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace_, change that in the next 72 hours

www.filmsforaction.org/watch/bbc-al...
December 20, 2024 at 2:23 PM
Reposted by Wiland
covingtonedu.bsky.social
When I read conversations about "accelerating learning" I can't help but think of this @howiehua.bsky.social classic:
Sweet from Howie hua reads: pro tip, instead of cooking your turkey for 4 hours at 350° f tomorrow, save some time by cooking it for one second at 5,040,000° f
December 19, 2024 at 12:21 AM