James Grimmelmann
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jtlg.bsky.social
James Grimmelmann
@jtlg.bsky.social

I’m a professor at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School.

One of "a number of very informative people." -WSJ

Computer science 34%
Political science 21%

Yeah, I didn’t intend to lionize; it’s just a memorable quote.

Don’t make me tap the sign.

“I am not a recluse,” she told The Toronto Star in 1988. “I live like an unsociable person; it is different.”

“People,” she added, “get on my nerves.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/28/m...
Brigitte Bardot, Movie Idol Who Renounced Stardom, Dies at 91
www.nytimes.com

Bad content drives out good.
What bothers me about LLM use growing, why people would ask it anything at all had me missing something.

But while on my eighth google for the purpose of LEDs on a Mac Pro 4,1 CPU board and getting bad answers and videos I realised…

Search engines today also only give approximations of answers.
As always, the truly interesting thing about LLMs is how EAGER many people are to accept a very rough, very poor imitation of a personality as real.

Reposted by James Grimmelmann

What bothers me about LLM use growing, why people would ask it anything at all had me missing something.

But while on my eighth google for the purpose of LEDs on a Mac Pro 4,1 CPU board and getting bad answers and videos I realised…

Search engines today also only give approximations of answers.
As always, the truly interesting thing about LLMs is how EAGER many people are to accept a very rough, very poor imitation of a personality as real.
The only thing ChatGPT ever does.

Bad content drives out good.

x.com/ByrneHobart/...
x.com

Vermeule is not an originalist or a positivist. He is not concerned with judicial constraint or with fidelity to a written text. Roberts’s arguments are non-responsive to Vermuele’s. (They’re both deeply wrong here, but in very different ways.)

Effective altruism 101 is thinking through the predictable consequences of your actions.

Sage deserves all of the blowback it is getting for unleashing ill-behaved AI agents on unconsenting members of the public.
Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software.

Just fuck you. Fuck you all.

I can't remember the last time I was this angry.

For a normal person with a billion dollars, this is an easily solvable problem: just live where you want to live, you can afford it. But the kind of person who wants to be a billionaire is also by nature incapable of enjoying it.
"While billionaires have come to realise where they technically live in the US is one of the biggest ways to cut back tax bills, they are often unwilling to spend the vast majority of the year in that state... That means they must plan their schedule with a military sergeant’s attention to detail."
How tax trackers influence wealthy Americans’ holiday plans
Return of in-person work has made tax-planning apps for the richest and most mobile Americans more popular than ever
www.ft.com

Reposted by James Grimmelmann

"While billionaires have come to realise where they technically live in the US is one of the biggest ways to cut back tax bills, they are often unwilling to spend the vast majority of the year in that state... That means they must plan their schedule with a military sergeant’s attention to detail."
How tax trackers influence wealthy Americans’ holiday plans
Return of in-person work has made tax-planning apps for the richest and most mobile Americans more popular than ever
www.ft.com
Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software.

Just fuck you. Fuck you all.

I can't remember the last time I was this angry.

Reposted by James Grimmelmann

Year 3 of spending many days making gingerbread — this year, featuring the gantries of Long Island City

The Home Alone score goes so unexpectedly hard that it has a (brief) fugue.

Is John Williams the most widely heard fugal composer of all time?

Kursk would be more appropriate.

Some suggested names for the new Trump-class battleships, drawn from history's largest and most technologically ambitious warship designs:

Mary Rose
Captain
Yamato
Vasa
Wyoming

Looking at some of these items makes me wonder about possible bar discipline referral.
Think about Trump Steaks, Trump Casinos, Trump Mortgages, the Trump Foundation, and Trump University. Think about the gap between what was promised, what was delivered, and whether and to what extent it was necessary to get the judicial system involved.

Anyway, and now, Trump Battleships.
Question 3 (25 points): Discuss the fair-use, Section 512, and secondary liability issues raised by this tweet.
The 60 Minutes piece on the Trump Administration’s torture prison that Bari Weiss doesn’t want you to see has leaked.
The 60 Minutes piece on the Trump Administration’s torture prison that Bari Weiss doesn’t want you to see has leaked.

Reposted by James Grimmelmann

are you a @northeastern undergrad or (non-law) grad student looking for a fun spring elective?

check out #MakeYourMark (INAM 5240), my @nu_camd class on trademark, advertising, & endorsement in creative industries

course description & some sample student evals below:

Bad content drives out good.
While I normally focus on AI deepfake pornography, there's an under-discussed AI-gen harm that's particularly prevalent during the holidays: AI product scams.

We counted down the top 10 holiday scams to look out for this year (check out the video), but here are some extra highlights below
While I normally focus on AI deepfake pornography, there's an under-discussed AI-gen harm that's particularly prevalent during the holidays: AI product scams.

We counted down the top 10 holiday scams to look out for this year (check out the video), but here are some extra highlights below

Bad content drives out good.
Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵

Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

div, grad, and curd

So I sing this song for you
William Staniforth Donahue
Your grandfather rode the boat over from Ireland
But you made a bad decision or two
If immigrating from England makes you a "heritage American" then I guess I'm one too.

Seems like Smyth has a serious Dawn Donut problem.