A.G. 💎 (they/she/him)
LightNews LightNews
banner
gem-gem.bsky.social
A.G. 💎 (they/she/him)
@gem-gem.bsky.social
25 followers 66 following 11 posts
UIUC Information Science Alumna
🇵🇭 Tiyaga at tiis
Posts Replies Media Videos
gem-gem.bsky.social
Reposting this because given the current day and age, showing up "imperfectly" but building with progress is how I'm living every day!!!!! Resistance is not futile!!!!!
gem-gem.bsky.social A.G. 💎 (they/she/him) @gem-gem.bsky.social · Dec 11
I'm just thinking abt how my high school music teacher once told me "It's better to show up imperfectly than not show up at all" and like,, 4 years later I am a permanently changed individual because of that one phrase
October 7, 2025 at 5:15 PM
Reposted by A.G. 💎 (they/she/him)
aclu.org
Renowned fashion designer and ACLU artist ambassador Willy Chavarria uses his identity and experiences to fuel his activism for immigrants’ rights, LGBTQ rights, and more.
Graphic with a photo of Willy Chavarria, a Latine man wearing wire frame glasses and wearing a blue ACLU ribbon, with a quote on the left that reads "The farmworkers’ union and the farmworkers’ movement with Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta were very important to us, because my family was working in the fields in California. I grew up knowing that those were my people, and I wanted to do what was right for my people." The quote is attributed to "Willy Chavarria, Fashion designer, activist, ACLU Artist Ambassador for LGBTQ and Immigrants’ Rights"
October 7, 2025 at 2:50 PM
Reposted by A.G. 💎 (they/she/him)
19thnews.org
Advocates for Youth says that it can’t serve marginalized young people and adhere to the president’s executive orders, restrictions and censorship on race and gender.
Why this nonprofit made a $1.2 million decision to reject federal funding under Trump
Advocates for Youth says that it can’t serve marginalized young people and adhere to the president’s executive orders, restrictions and censorship on race and gender.
19thnews.org
May 7, 2025 at 1:05 PM
Reposted by A.G. 💎 (they/she/him)
megsmith.bsky.social
I really strongly recommend making something right now. Doesn’t matter what — sew, bake, code, doodle, whatever. Doesn’t have to be “good,” doesn’t have to be pretty or deep. I promise that the act of making will help to combat that feeling of entropy that’s surrounding us right now! #DHMakes
quinnanya.me Quinn Dombrowski @quinnanya.me · Apr 25
#DHmakes There's legitimate reasons for Taking Craft Seriously, academic style, but it's also an avenue for goofy screw-ups, silliness, and joy in a way that's equally important.
edidin.bsky.social Jay Edidin @edidin.bsky.social · Apr 25
(7/7) Silliness isn't just a human drive; it's a human right. Carve it away, and we lose what makes us human.
April 25, 2025 at 2:13 PM
Reposted by A.G. 💎 (they/she/him)
npr.org
Rockalina was an adult eastern box turtle living in the wild when she was taken into a New York home in 1977. When a reptile rehabilitation center got a hold of her this February, they worried for her survival.
After nearly 50 years cooped up inside, Rockalina the turtle finds the great outdoors
Rockalina was an adult eastern box turtle living in the wild when she was taken into a New York home in 1977. When a reptile rehabilitation center got a hold of her this February, they worried for her...
www.npr.org
April 24, 2025 at 5:48 PM
Reposted by A.G. 💎 (they/she/him)
pilotv.bsky.social
defeatism is soooooo boring
January 21, 2025 at 3:24 PM
Reposted by A.G. 💎 (they/she/him)
rebeccafieldingmiller.com
Today I lost an NIH grant training clinicians to do research about intimate partner violence with perinatal women.

More women are murdered in the perinatal period than die of obstetric complications.

I didn't just lose a grant. We lost an entire cohort of people building careers to prevent that.
March 22, 2025 at 12:19 AM
Reposted by A.G. 💎 (they/she/him)
timnitgebru.bsky.social
The idea that you shouldn't be expected to know what data you're using to train your systems and that doing so is "an impossible task" is so normalized that its hard to know that this was not always the case even in the field of AI.
March 18, 2025 at 4:43 PM
Reposted by A.G. 💎 (they/she/him)
whetmoser.com
"tree equity" is the kind of thing that columnists like to make fun of when why it works is actually instantly apparent to anyone who's ever walked down a street in the summer apnews.com/article/tree...
$75 million was awarded to plant trees in places that badly need them. In anti-DEI push, that's over
The U.S. Forest Service has terminated $75 million awarded to the Arbor Day Foundation to help disadvantaged communities plant trees.
apnews.com
March 2, 2025 at 1:24 AM
Reposted by A.G. 💎 (they/she/him)
pbsnews.org
"America at a Crossroads" returns with political scientist Robert Putnam, who has spent decades studying these divides and how we might find our way back to a more unified nation.
Robert Putnam reflects on how America became so polarized and what can unify the nation
For over two years, Judy Woodruff has traveled the country exploring the roots of America’s divisions over race, religion, culture, wealth and more for America at a Crossroads. The series returns…
buff.ly
February 20, 2025 at 5:54 PM
Reposted by A.G. 💎 (they/she/him)
donmoyn.bsky.social
Public comment genuinely matters. Courts will overturn rules based on an administration not responding to substantive comments.
jessdkant.bsky.social Jessica Kant @jessdkant.bsky.social · Feb 16
Department of Education FAFSA changes are open for public comment. The changes include requiring trans students to misgender themselves and removes the nonbinary option on forms. Note: comment period is 60 days, and comments are publicly visible.

Form here: www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...
WASHINGTON – Today, the U.S. Department of Education published the information collection for the 2026-27 Free Application for Federal Student Aid ( FAFSA®) form in the Federal Register, the first public step in the FAFSA development process. The Department is on track to launch the 2026-27 FAFSA by Oct. 1, 2025 as mandated by the FAFSA Deadline Act. The Department also announced that current and future FAFSA forms will rightfully reflect the biological reality that there are only two sexes: male and female. Department officials will remove “nonbinary” as a gender identification option from the current year’s FAFSA form. “The Trump Administration will correct the failures of the last Administration and ensure students and families can easily access the FAFSA form in a timely manner,” said Acting Under Secretary James Bergeron. “Resolving ongoing problems with the 2024-25 form, reflecting biological reality by referencing sex identifiers, and beginning the process for the 2026-27 form on-time will allow the Department to earn back the trust of the American people. Families and students depend on the FAFSA form to plan their futures, and any release delays or unnecessary politicization of the form is wholly unacceptable.” Screenshot showing open comment form on federal register site
February 19, 2025 at 3:40 AM
Reposted by A.G. 💎 (they/she/him)
libraryfutures.bsky.social
Once again, never trust a corporation to do a library's job.
February 17, 2025 at 11:49 PM
Reposted by A.G. 💎 (they/she/him)
jonathanmoremi.com
"Do not lose hope", says @mariaressa.bsky.social to journalists who continue to report the truth even in the hard times of a corrupt government. "Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate. Reach across. Stand by your values."

And most important: "Hold the line."

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtST...
'Hold the line': Nobel laureate says Americans should learn from the Philippines’ experience
YouTube video by MSNBC
www.youtube.com
February 3, 2025 at 10:40 PM
Reposted by A.G. 💎 (they/she/him)
quinnanya.me
#DHmakes 🌈
historyofjess.com Jessica Johnson @historyofjess.com · Feb 1
Just had a lovely embroidery class with @badasscrossstitch.bsky.social. I ended up starting early because it was good to have a needle in my hand and exciting to use some rainbow floss that’s been sitting around.

This pattern felt right for the moment.
An embroidery hoop with a partially stitched pattern that reads “WE SAVE US.” The first word is almost finished and done with a rainbow thread.
February 1, 2025 at 9:10 PM
gem-gem.bsky.social
Rapidly oscillating between "I'm so excited to start my career after graduation!" and "oh my god the world is ending."

Been listening to lots of recession pop just to feel something other than dread (thank you Ke$ha and Pitbull).
January 31, 2025 at 12:06 AM
Reposted by A.G. 💎 (they/she/him)
jwyg.bsky.social
how to save stuff on the internet? short, sweet & useful zine on diy web archiving by @bitarchivist.net @ilya.webrecorder.net @quinnanya.me @akijas.bsky.social @literaturegeek.bsky.social ✨💾🐢 zinebakery.com/homemade-zin... #webarchiving
January 28, 2025 at 9:43 PM
gem-gem.bsky.social
Entering my last sem of college which means:
- Senior Side quests!!
- Existential panic and dread
- Lots of typesetting
- Crying at my laptop because my code won't work

Looking forward to seeing where it all goes tho lol
January 16, 2025 at 6:24 PM
Reposted by A.G. 💎 (they/she/him)
caseynewton.bsky.social
NEW: Meta has quietly dismantled the system that prevented misinformation from spreading in the United States. Machine-learning classifiers that once identified viral hoaxes and limited their reach have now been switched off, Platformer has learned www.platformer.news/meta-ends-mi...
Behind the scenes, the company was also quietly dismantling a system to prevent the spread of misinformation. When the company announced on Jan. 7 that it would end its fact-checking partnerships, the company also instructed teams responsible for ranking content in the company’s apps to stop penalizing misinformation, according to sources and an internal document obtained by Platformer. The result is that the sort of viral hoaxes that ran roughshod over the platform during the 2016 US presidential election — “Pope Francis endorses Trump,” Pizzagate, and all the rest — are now just as eligible for free amplification on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads as true stories.
January 15, 2025 at 12:51 AM
Reposted by A.G. 💎 (they/she/him)
roopikarisam.bsky.social
Helping your friend with her first website…
Friend asks how much space she needs, I say lowest unless she wants to be a digital humanist. She says pass, she doesn’t even know what we do. I said neither do we.
December 11, 2024 at 7:50 PM
Reposted by A.G. 💎 (they/she/him)
mellymeldubs.bsky.social
So there's been a LOT of chatter about whether AI-generated poetry is distinguishable from human poetry😯😵‍💫🤨🫠

Yes, it definitely is!

For CHR 2024, we compared thousands of poems by GPT-4, 3.5, and humans, and we quantified the differences.

2024.computational-humanities-research.org/papers/paper...
Screenshot of abstract for "Does ChatGPT Have a Poetic Style?" paper abstract. Generating poetry has become a popular application of LLMs, perhaps especially of OpenAI’s widelyused chatbot ChatGPT. What kind of poet is ChatGPT? Does ChatGPT have its own poetic style? Can it successfully produce poems in different styles? To answer these questions, we prompt the GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models to generate English-language poems in 24 different poetic forms and styles, about 40 different subjects, and in response to 3 different writing prompt templates. We then analyze the resulting 5.7k poems, comparing them to a sample of 3.7k poems from the Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets. We find that the GPT models, especially GPT-4, can successfully produce poemsinarangeofbothcommonanduncommonEnglish-languageformsinsuperficialyetnoteworthy ways, suchasbyproducingpoemsofappropriatelengthsforsonnets (14 lines), villanelles (19 lines), and sestinas (39 lines). But the GPT models also exhibit their own distinct stylistic tendencies, both within and outside of these specific forms. Our results show that GPT poetry is much more constrained and uniform than human poetry, showing a strong penchant for rhyme, quatrains (4-line stanzas), iambic meter, first-person plural perspectives (we, us, our), and specific vocabulary like “heart,” “embrace,” “echo,” and “whisper.”
November 22, 2024 at 3:40 PM
Reposted by A.G. 💎 (they/she/him)
archive.org
From salvaging 1914 Orient Express archives for The Last Express to the fight for digital preservation, legendary game designer Jordan Mechner shares why safeguarding our cultural artifacts—like video games—is vital.

🔗 blog.archive.org/2024/11/21/v...

🕳️ #VanishingCulture @jmechner.bsky.social
“Cultural artifacts are findable only so long as someone takes on the active responsibility to preserve, catalog and share them. Once gone, they’re gone forever. Historical oblivion is the default, not the exception.” Jordan Mechner Video game designer
November 21, 2024 at 2:49 PM
Reposted by A.G. 💎 (they/she/him)
kellyscaletta.bsky.social
Hey OG BlueSky followers, I have a question.

I've noticed there are "unwritten rules" here–rules of etiquette, if you will.

What I've seen are respect that there are people who have built this community, don't post screenshots of that other place, and follow back liberally.

Anything else?
November 14, 2024 at 12:45 PM