Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Justin Raden @jraden.bsky.social · 1d

Friend in banking just sent this with the message, “wait until a real catalyst tips the scale”

UBS fund holds 30% exposure linked to First Brands

Switzerland’s largest bank has multiple investments tied to bankrupt auto parts maker

on.ft.com

Justin Raden @jraden.bsky.social · 1d

One thing AI future casting has actually got right is “instrumental convergence.” But the “paper clip maximizer” is actually just a market whose profits come not from retained earnings but asset price inflation. We’re going to bury ourselves in data centers to prop up AI shares.

OpenAI’s computing deals top $1tn

Partners including Nvidia, AMD and Oracle have signed up to Sam Altman’s huge bet on the future of artificial intelligence

on.ft.com

Reposted by Justin Raden

NightMar on Hicks Street, Part 4: The Rabbit’s Revenge @histoftech.bsky.social · 3d

happy sunday, remember that you are completely expendable to your employer and that when you die they will forget you ever existed within weeks and easily replace you

Work really hard and one day this can be you (followed by graffiti of a headstone that says “RIP worked really hard” on it

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Reposted by Justin Raden

Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 4d

la la la la la la la la

🙉🙈🙊

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Justin Raden @jraden.bsky.social · 5d

As opposition party, there was no end to GOP complaints about speech policing, trigger warnings, and de-platforming. Now, they will literally beat and gas you for speech they dislike.

Fuck ICE

Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social · 5d

"We've been forced into a 'free speech zone.' Its very existence implies that everywhere else is a non-free speech zone, that there are places where our First Amendment rights do not apply."

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Reposted by Justin Raden

Justin Joque @jjoque.bsky.social · 7d

Uh oh they’ve automated provosts

The Verge @theverge.com · 9d

Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Excel and Word

Vibe working is all about Office’s new Agent Mode.

buff.ly

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Reposted by Justin Raden

Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 5d

“.. His conclusion is very stark: not just that an economy already at stall speed will fall into recession as both the data-center and wealth effects plateau, but that they’ll reverse, just as in the dot-com bubble did ..”

@marketwatch.com
www.marketwatch.com/story/the-ai...

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Reposted by Justin Raden

☠️mawls slaughter☠️ @oddletters.bsky.social · 6d

look if you dont want hoards of students chasing nazis across campus for disrupting their class you can always make class sizes smaller

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Reposted by Justin Raden

Sarah Osment @smosment.bsky.social · 6d

Representatives of three unions on campus—GSU, AAUP, FACULTY FORWARD—wrote about the proposed cuts at UChicago. I'm happy to see these finally in print, and proud to fight alongside so many who care deeply about the future of higher ed

chicagomaroon.com/48537/viewpo...

Academic Workers Will Defend Free Inquiry

Who will defend the humanities? This summer, we witnessed a dramatic challenge for the humanities and arts at the University of Chicago. This challenge demanded faculty intervention. Since taking powe...

chicagomaroon.com

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Justin Raden @jraden.bsky.social · 6d

This means, of course, that WE are bailing out farmers by paying higher prices for goods while our tax money is ALSO subsidizing the Argentine economy, which has replaced us as a supplier of soy beans to China.

This, I guess, is what “winning” looks like.

Mark Chadbourn @chadbourn.bsky.social · 6d

Trump is considering a $10-14B bailout of farmers after the economic fallout from his tariffs on the agriculture sector, the WSJ reports.

The money will come from the tariffs raised, in a great example of circular Omnishambles.

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Justin Raden @jraden.bsky.social · 6d

Ah! The “opportunity cost school” of literacy!

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Justin Raden @jraden.bsky.social · 6d

I wonder how the proposed restrictions on imported lumber will impact new housing starts? 🤔

Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 6d

Number of new homes needed to return affordability to 1990s levels:

3-4 million.

(via Goldman) $XHB
@birdyword.bsky.social

Justin Raden @jraden.bsky.social · 6d

People keep saying this doesn’t mean anything. This is incorrect. What it means is that W&M will manage this “minor” and other “cross-disciplinary collaborations” outside of academic departments as a mechanism for further eroding shared governance.

Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 6d

what is this word vomit

Douglas Schmidt, dean of CDSP, sees AI as a catalyst for cross-disciplinary collaboration and a tool to accelerate problem-solving by discovering correlations that may otherwise have gone unnoticed, enabling researchers to innovate faster than ever before.

“By breaking down silos between departments and schools, we are creating opportunities to apply the technological power of AI to diverse domains, sparking new ideas, challenging assumptions, and integrating a wide range of perspectives,” stated Schmidt. The ChatGPT Edu pilot is one of several AI initiatives currently ongoing at William & Mary. W&M also launched a new minor in AI this fall for students to learn how to apply AI in their respective fields, with additional bachelor and graduate-level opportunities under development.

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Justin Raden @jraden.bsky.social · 6d

Which “failed state” is he talking about? The US, or…?

Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 6d

* BESSENT: U.S. MAINTAINING STRATEGIC INTEREST IN ARGENINA -- CNBC INTERVIEW

* BESSENT: YOU DON'T WANT TO CREATE ANOTHER FAILED STATE

@reuters.com @cnbc.com

Justin Raden @jraden.bsky.social · 6d

This is a guess, but if I had any money I would bet it all that that revenue is not being diverted to red states at all, but simply into a handful of already wealthy pockets. It should not be lost on us that this admin is “nonpartisan” in its effort to fuck us all over to enrich a few.

Yonah Freemark @yonahfreemark.com · 7d

It's becoming difficult to hide that a major purpose of the Trump administration is siphoning tax revenues from Blue states and redirecting them into subsidies for Red states. At what point does this become intolerable?

Jamie Dupree @jamiedupree.bsky.social · 7d

Next move from OMB - canceling $8 billion in clean energy funds. You will note, all of the projects are in states led by Democrats

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Justin Raden @jraden.bsky.social · 6d

This is bad. But it is also bad that many will perceive this as a coup and not what it is: an acceleration in tendencies already immanent in most American universities.

Jacob T. Levy @jacobtlevy.bsky.social · 7d

www.wsj.com/us-news/educ...
It's one thing to succumb to the stick, but Vanderbilt, Dartmouth, Penn, USC, MIT, UT, Arizona, Brown, and UVA absolutely must refuse to go chasing after promises of carrots.

Exclusive | White House Asks Colleges to Sign Sweeping Agreement to Get Funding Advantage

An initial round of nine schools is being asked to sign a wide-ranging accord.

www.wsj.com

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Reposted by Justin Raden

galloway.bsky.social @galloway.bsky.social · 7d

counterpoint: *all* LLMs are revanchist by definition

Ted Underwood @tedunderwood.com · 7d

A data point to mull as you wonder whether it's impossible to build "a conservative LLM": we definitely can train a language model on pre-1920 text that will defend the British Empire, condescend to childlike native people, recommend radium therapy and eugenics as SOTA medicine, &c.

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Justin Raden @jraden.bsky.social · 7d

From the minds that brought you: “home prices are up bc illegal immigration” and “there’s no jobs bc illegal immigration” and “crime is up (even tho it’s down) bc illegal immigration” and…

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 7d

Vance: "If you're an American citizen & you've been to the hospital in the last few years, you've probably noticed wait times are especially large & very often somebody who's there in the ER is an illegal alien. Why do those people get healthcare benefits at hospitals paid for by American citizens?"

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Justin Raden @jraden.bsky.social · 8d

So much of this administration’s actions are orchestrated around spectacle, and yet they can only manage to pull it off at the scale of the meme. They can’t pull it off at scale.

Huge loser shit from these clowns, prattling on about PT and submarines.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 8d

Trump to a room of generals: "I've never walked into a room so silent before. Just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud."

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Reposted by Justin Raden

Nathan K. Hensley @nathankhensley.bsky.social · 11d

The thing regular people don’t often grasp about ‘academic freedom’ is that if you don’t allow experts to research & teach in their fields of expertise, guided by their professional judgment & decades of training, you have effectively given up on the concept of knowledge & shut down your university

Bryan Edward Stone (שָׁלוֹם) @bestonetx.bsky.social · 11d

Universities are moving rapidly to comply with laws that don't exist.

Texas Conference of the AAUP @texasaaup.bsky.social · 12d

“I’m emotionally shellshocked right now,” said one professor in the Texas Tech system. “What does it say about academic freedom? It says we don’t have it.” The professor spoke by phone from the inside of a car to avoid being overheard by colleagues.

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/26/u...

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Justin Raden @jraden.bsky.social · 12d

“researchers from the open-source AI platform Hugging Face found that the energy demands of text-to-video generators quadruple when the length of a generated video doubles — indicating that the power required for increasingly sophisticated generations doesn’t scale linearly.”

Researchers Just Found Something Extremely Alarming About AI's Power Usage

The carbon footprint of generative AI-based tools that can turn text prompts into videos is far worse than we thought.

futurism.com

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Justin Raden @jraden.bsky.social · 14d

I try to find a way to sneak this into every course bc it kills 100% of the time!!

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Justin Raden @jraden.bsky.social · 14d

Saw this. Heartened to see push back from STEM.

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Justin Raden @jraden.bsky.social · 14d

Walks straight into the sea, muttering “but what if AI *is* absolute spirit?”

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Justin Raden @jraden.bsky.social · 14d

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