Russell Brandon
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runtzel.bsky.social
Russell Brandon
@runtzel.bsky.social
390 followers 820 following 530 posts
Library Barbarian, Cognitive Scientist
|: play is how we learn to :| games is arts is books is talks (he/him), tratando de aprender español, gracias por tu paciencia, scrooge in training
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Reposted by Russell Brandon
hypervisible.blacksky.app
The grok stuff is pathetic but it’s also a perfect and undeniable illustration of chatbots as ideology. It’s no less true for chatgpt or other bots, but sometimes not as visible.
November 20, 2025 at 8:32 PM
Reposted by Russell Brandon
aimeecozza.com
[banging on drums] COME SUPPORT THESE INDIESSSSS
the-book-bazaar.com The Book Bazaar - LIVE NOW until Dec 3rd 2026! @the-book-bazaar.com · 1d
Looking for the next great read? Check out what we've got for you in The Book Bazaar and back your favorites now: www.backerkit.com/c/collection...

#Booksky #Books #IndieAuthor #ShopSmall
November 19, 2025 at 11:03 PM
Reposted by Russell Brandon
jrbolt.bsky.social
Capitalism, the casino game for rich degenerates that kills millions and imperils the earth even when they win. And when they lose, hooooboy
November 18, 2025 at 8:37 PM
Reposted by Russell Brandon
gralefrit.bsky.social
In an A Level class yesterday at my kid’s college, the teacher used a Gen AI image in a PowerPoint, and the whole class booed.

Yeah. You’ve got Gen Z on board, guys. Looking rosy.
November 18, 2025 at 10:34 AM
Reposted by Russell Brandon
makkon.bsky.social
Blender is struggling. it's the best piece of 3d software on the market, and it's free. I'm not going back to autodesk.
please donate if you can!
fund.blender.org
Blender Development Fund
Join the Development Fund and support Blender Foundation to work on core Blender development.
fund.blender.org
November 18, 2025 at 7:26 PM
Reposted by Russell Brandon
adambonica.bsky.social
Those claiming Dems should retreat on racial justice aren't hard-headed realists, they're pushing against the electoral tide rather than leaning into it. The story of Gen Z isn't about racist backlash or red-pilled young men. It's the most racially progressive generation in American history. 🧵
Racial Resentment Among White Americans by Birth Year and Demographics This figure presents the same four-panel layout (education, gender, geography, religion) but for White Americans from birth years 1940 to 2000. Education panel: A pronounced divide shows non-college Whites with substantially higher resentment across all cohorts, increasing sharply for older birth years. College-educated Whites rise more modestly but remain distinctly lower, especially among younger cohorts. Gender panel: Male and female trendlines rise together, with women slightly higher in mid-century cohorts. Younger cohorts of both genders start lower and climb with age. Geography panel: Regional lines separate clearly: the South is highest in resentment, followed by the Midwest. The West and Northeast show lower levels, with the Northeast consistently at the bottom. All regions slope upward toward older cohorts. Religion panel: Protestants show the highest resentment, peaking among mid-century cohorts. Catholics sit in the middle. Non-affiliated Whites show the lowest resentment, especially among younger respondents, with a small rise among mid-century generations. The figure notes CES 2024 data with GAM-smoothed trendlines.
November 14, 2025 at 8:44 PM
Reposted by Russell Brandon
sonjadrimmer.bsky.social
Please believe me when I say that this meaningless, historically suspect slogan is being used to sell "AI." Here it is in the just-released November 2025 report on AI by Microsoft. www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...
The history of human progress is, in many ways, the history of technology's diffusion. Among these advances, a few-what economists call general-purpose technologies-have had the greatest impact on humanity. The printing press democratized knowledge. The steam engine powered industry. Electricity transformed daily life and enabled computing. And the internet connected the world, accelerating the exchange of ideas, trade, and collaboration across borders.
November 15, 2025 at 4:56 PM
Reposted by Russell Brandon
olivia.science
Some people are replying here with things already addressed in this thread and paper, so please click through bsky.app/profile/oliv...
olivia.science Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues. Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe. Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
November 14, 2025 at 3:47 PM
Reposted by Russell Brandon
internethippo.bsky.social
It's Friday night baby
Sleepy time bear
July 19, 2025 at 3:01 AM
Reposted by Russell Brandon
meredithshiner.com
I’m going to think about watching this moment unfold in real time for a long time.

for all the horrors coming out of Chicago and its metro area, the principled courage of everyday people, in the face of such intimidation, never ceases to astonish. www.chicagotribune.com/2025/11/12/k...
Most of the hearing was routine. At one point, however, Straw's attorney, Christopher Parente, lodged a largely symbolic objection over his client having to turn in his passport, calling him a "boring suburban dad" and saying his whole reason for going to the protest in the first place included objecting to the government checking people's passports and papers. Parente said it wasn't fair for Straw "to sit here now and ask him to turn his passport over to the government for no reason other than they think they can," adding that "landscapers arrested by ICE cannot stand up to the government." "Mr. Straw can, and your Honor can, too," Parente said. Assistant U.S. Attorney Sheri Mecklenburg said the passport was about bond conditions, not about what ICE is doing on the streets, and that defendants have turned in their passports "in every case I've had for 19 years." After McShain decided Straw did not have to turn in his passport, Mecklenburg said she'd drop the requirement for all defendants to ensure Straw was not receiving special treatment.
November 13, 2025 at 2:59 AM
Reposted by Russell Brandon
innes.bsky.social
"The mainstream understanding of AI is as an interefering piece of shit which doesn't work" pt II

www.askamanager.org/2025/11/the-...
10. The baby announcement At the end of a meeting, a colleague asked their boss to stay on the line for a couple of minutes. The colleague then confidentially shared the great news that they were expecting a baby, and they and their boss talked about a few next steps to plan for parental leave. The AI notetaker then sent out notes to everyone who had attended the meeting with the headline, “Colleague Is Having a Baby.” 19. The equipment I recently saw a ~$50,000 piece of industrial equipment damaged and taken out of commission for about a month because Google AI search told a worker that the tightening torque of a screw was 50 ft*lb instead of 50 in*lb. This resulted in them over-tightening the screw by a factor of 12, which unfortunately didn’t strip the threaded hole (which would have been a smaller problem) but instead warped a bearing assembly that required a full rebuild at considerable difficulty and expense. The kicker is that the correct torque value was clearly printed in the service manual that is stored in the machine. 1. The fake initiative Our execs usually send out a hype email right before the annual employee morale survey, emphasizing wins from the past year, basically trying to put people in a positive frame of mind. Last year’s included the announcement of a major new program we knew employees really wanted. But it was a bit surprising, because it fell in an area my team was responsible for, and we were out of the loop, despite advocating strenuously for this over the years. So I went to the exec to a) convey enthusiasm for his newfound dedication to launching this program and b) ask what support he needed from my team/get us involved again. It turned out the program wasn’t launching at all; he had just asked AI to edit the email to make it sound more exciting and appealing, and it had done so by … launching my initiative. 16. The scam We work with a lot of small businesses just starting up, and as a result are asked to recommend professional services often. Knowing this, a client passed on a discreet warning about the bookkeeping firm we’d recommended to them. They had issues with their accounting software, Quickbooks, and called for help. It was right when Google started providing AI summaries for everything, and apparently their account rep pulled the phone number for Quickbooks’ support out of the AI summary, rather than off the website. You can probably guess where this is going. The number wasn’t legit, but instead put him in contact with a scammer who’d managed astroturf their way into the AI summary. The account rep gave the scammer full access to our client’s accounting software before he realized his error. Our client didn’t share a lot of details about the damages — I got the sense that they were saying very little because they were planning legal action — but they wanted to let us know so we wouldn’t recommend them again.
November 12, 2025 at 8:47 PM
Reposted by Russell Brandon
brukajones.com
Him
Drawing of my original character Hudson. A humanoid bonnet macaque. He is standing center frame and visible from the lower thighs on up as if floating or being carried by wind.
December 3, 2024 at 4:01 PM
runtzel.bsky.social
What the fuck am I supposed to do, please all of me at once?
November 10, 2025 at 4:56 AM
runtzel.bsky.social
A brown shelled snail on a gray surface
November 9, 2025 at 1:15 PM
Reposted by Russell Brandon
newslit.org
#2TruthsandAI is back - & this week we're focusing on new tech gadgets: Can you identify the fake?

🔎 Looking for specific details such as a company's name that you can do a keyword search on + going to the posting account's profile can help.

🎞 Watch: www.youtube.com/shorts/IAzZL...
Two Truths and AI - which tech gadget is fake? #2TruthsandAI
YouTube video by News Literacy Project
www.youtube.com
November 7, 2025 at 9:27 PM
runtzel.bsky.social
FUCK YEAH!
dresdencodak.com Sen ⚢ @dresdencodak.com · 14d
It's coming. It's coming. IT'S COMING.🔥🔥🔥
November 7, 2025 at 4:59 PM
Reposted by Russell Brandon
emilymbender.bsky.social
"This long-running war on knowledge and expertise has sown the ground for the narratives widely used by AI companies and the CEOs adopting it. Human labor, inquiry, creativity, and expertise is spurned in the name of “efficiency.” With AI, there is no need for human expertise"
AI Is Supercharging the War on Libraries, Education, and Human Knowledge
"Fascism and AI, whether or not they have the same goals, they sure are working to accelerate one another."
www.404media.co
November 7, 2025 at 4:20 PM
Reposted by Russell Brandon
bentsai.org
> It's just a tool

Tools have affordances. A chair affords sitting on it. Buttons afford pushing. To put it crassly, guns afford pulling the trigger with the barrel pointed away from you.
November 6, 2025 at 3:47 PM
Reposted by Russell Brandon
assignedmale.bsky.social
The quintessential aesthetic of fascism
4 frame comic. 1st frame shows a frame from the ai video of trump dumping shit from a plane. Text reads : here's why i think ai art is The quintessential aesthetic of fascism. 2nd frame shows a frame from the trump Gaza ai video. Text reads : Its the closest that oligarchs can get to artists' power to create universes out of thin air. 3rd frame shows ai picture of trump as a pope. Text reads : they see art as a threat because it questions and deciphers the myths, dogmas, lies and illusions that fascism is built upon. 4th frame shows a frame from ai video of mysk dancing with trump. Text reads : ai art being soulless, depthless and uncritical is a feature... not a bug.
November 5, 2025 at 3:41 PM
Reposted by Russell Brandon
ruemcclammyhand.bsky.social
if you see anyone expressing shock that a candidate who exudes warmth and authenticity and wants to improve the quality of life for working class people won over a rapist whose entire campaign was
"that guys a terrorist" that's not a smart person. you don't have to listen to that person anymore.
November 5, 2025 at 4:12 PM
Reposted by Russell Brandon
archive.org
A landmark moment. Supervisor Connie Chan led a unanimous San Francisco Board of Supervisors resolution honoring the #InternetArchive & establishing Internet Archive Day.
archive.org/embed/establ...
🧵
More ⤵️
blog.archive.org/2025/11/03/s...

#Wayback1T
November 4, 2025 at 10:00 PM
Reposted by Russell Brandon
jphillll.bsky.social
The far-right weirdos who say we have no obligation to care for one another are in the minority.

Most people don’t want our government to suddenly stop feeding the hungry.

Most people want to live in a society where we care for, and feed, each other.

www.jphilll.com/p/yes-the-go...
Yes, the government should feed us
What's the point of living in a society if not to care for one another?
www.jphilll.com
November 2, 2025 at 2:21 PM
Reposted by Russell Brandon
aidosaur.bsky.social
HAPPY HALLOWEEN from BARBAROUS!!!! 🎃✨🌙
always read for free @ johnnywander.com!

It's also the final day of the BARBAROUS CH6 Kickstarter! AWOO!!
www.kickstarter.com/projects/746...
Text reads HAPPY HALLOWEEN -- Barbarous 2025 @johnnywander.com yuko ota 2025
October 31, 2025 at 3:46 PM
Reposted by Russell Brandon
davidbcooper.bsky.social
Make Homer Something Something
April 6, 2025 at 7:31 AM
Reposted by Russell Brandon
davekarpf.bsky.social
They don't have an answer, because they don't ask the question.

It is 2025. If you are a Democratic Party operative in 2025 and you aren't even looking into media ownership and propaganda effects, then you are either a conman or a mark.
October 28, 2025 at 4:42 PM