mulberrydays.bsky.social
513 posts
164 followers
159 following
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unfortunately i have no way to confirm that i am not some weird fucking bot.
i ask myself every day. i stare into the mirror, wondering.
yet i still don't know.
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i loved baking cookies for a cafe, but couldn't afford an apartment on that job. i adored working for an old theatre, a local historical monument, but lost the job to *volunteers.* i miss farmwork but community gardens are so unstable.
but i'm the problem because i "can't keep a job?" :/
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like, junk jobs are soul-sucking in and of themselves but also baffling as a systemic issue. if we're supposed to believe that capitalism rewards 'being a productive member of society' then why are the only options Junk or White-Collar Crime?
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almost every goddam day anymore, i'm struck by how many people would enthusiastically perform and create how many things that are *good for society* and socially productive.
but that's not enough. that's not our cultural definition of "success."
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This Rümeysa Öztürk hearing is radicalizing.
I've been a court reporter for many years, and I've never covered anything like this: A student deeply committed to her studies, imprisoned solely over writing an op-ed, being made to testify under oath for her own freedom.
Dark, dark stuff.
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i'm confused - so your criticism of Nick here is 'dipping into platitudes' but your explanation is 'brains are a weird soup?' :/
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eh, and sometimes we simply look back on the last picture we wore the outfit in, and don't even remember throwing it away.
the Last Beard works in mysterious ways 🤣
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i do feel like the Last Beard is one of those classic trans flavors, right?
it's like trying on a very old outfit you found in a drawer before moving. just for laughs, just because what-if, and because you know you're moving anyway so you can take this or leave it.
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or, using Maja Wilson's example - you don't discourage a child from drawing and coloring by making them study still lifes and sketch hands or skulls the way a formal artist would begin at art school.
there isn't a rigid timeline that needs to be followed, and in fact rigidity breaks the process.
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eh, people love to say things like "you gotta learn the rules before you can know how to break them" and ime that simply isn't true.
like, trying to train kids to write form-perfect five paragraph essays before experimenting or getting creative...just make them hate writing and also bad at it.
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somewhere in the world, big joel just got a nosebleed.
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Kill the lawn in your head.
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yeah this reminds me (like oh so many things) of Alfie Kohn. the students are practically the only rational actors *given the system we've provided them.*
it's way less rational for teachers to expect effort and engagement from this kind of schooling.
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that's absolutely an important consideration - we've taught them not to see those thought processes as "productive" or valuable. in a society obsessed with productivity, in a world where they're never allowed time to think, or to craft.
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i am, however, livid with every educator who asks chatgpt to generate more superficial worksheets and half-sensical "projects" they couldn't be bothered to design with care.
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it's really hard for me to be mad at any individual student who does this, after we submerged them in twelve years of schooling designed more for AI than for humans. we trained them to value cheap corner-cutting for the sake of meaningless grades.
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I mean…
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yeppp - all the obsessive standardization was just designing school systems for generative AI. rather than for humans.
the fact that we've been doing that since before it existed, and the way we understand that it doesn't actually think or know what words are...ought to tell us something.
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What's one word you'd use to describe school?
"Depressing"
Why do you say that?
"Just look at everything. There's no color to anything."
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don't ask me why, this was my first thought
youtu.be/iUfXK5V2EP0?...
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fascinating example; it's just possible that we should be having similar conversations about the structural and environmental impacts of cars. 🙃
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"As human beings, feeling alive means feeling alive in a body but also feeling alive in a society, in a culture; being loved, being part of a group, being accepted, and feeling purposeful." - Dr Mary Helen Immordino-Yang
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omg can you tell her to hurry it up with the world domination already? i know she's not, but *some of us* are growing old over here.
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i suppose that depends on how proportional you believe a bluesky follow is?
but also as a rule i never trust people who say "objectively." they are objectively always wrong. 🤣
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Not real pleased to see one of the last trustworthy science communicators on the net say the hallucinating world burning false oracle might have a point.
Hell of a take from an ostensible climate defender, and makes me worry I can no longer take anything SciShow says at face value.
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oh and you burnt down an acre of sustainable woodland in the process. 🙃
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more than redundant - counterproductive. you've done all the same work, *plus* the time you wasted plugging your inquiries into the thing in the first place, plus the time spent finding new resources when only two of the ones you tried to verify were real.
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also i'm not paying an assistant in aquifers per hour.
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i never in my life would have thought that Hank Green could have a take so irresponsible i'd feel compelled to unfollow him. wild.
wasn't this guy the Eco Geek? what happened to that?
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i suspect the data there is less about time spent on your phone and more about curating content.
heck, you can go back to retail plannograms for that old marketing ploy - if people have to look at everything to find what they want, then you've made them look.
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Our hunger for individual narratives with a clear hero and villain is itself a villain here.
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"won't somebody think of the children!"
*advocates for children*
"no, not like that!"
😑
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@hoots.bsky.social
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if they had, and it did, would that mean that the bot was more effective at gauging good writing?
or would that mean that we had redefined "good writing" entirely to accommodate what can be most easily scored?
what is this shortcut doing to a child's understanding of writing? of reading?
(🧵 6/6)
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let it tally up the sentence fragments and superfluous commas and displaced clauses and administer its failing grades and then tell me what it's doing wrong.
i suppose if they had all been writing five-paragraph essays, it could have delivered more consistent results.
(🧵 5/6)
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so we ask the programmer to write a program to *score* good writing. many i'm sure, will say this is easier - in fact, it's being done all the time!
but ask spellcheck how well Shakespeare scores. then try Dickinson, Whitman, cummings, try Audre Lorde, try James Baldwin.
(🧵 4/6)
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ask that same programmer to design a bot which writes best-selling novels. why is that more difficult? you might claim that "AI" can do this but i don't see any robot novelists in my book club.
it would seem that good writing is more complex than "proper" grammar and extensive vocabulary.
(🧵 3/6)
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consider a programmer, designing a game of pool - they can factor in weight, friction, physics, and accurately simulate what will happen with (admittedly comparative) ease.
ask that same programmer to simulate, say, the weather.
oh, that's more complicated? hm.
(🧵 2/6)
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omg Psychotic Wench is my favorite 90s riot grrrl band, i saw them open for Bikini Kill
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i had exactly one useful Ed course and it showed up, ironically, *after* they'd drummed me out of the track. i just needed another upper division elective so i picked the last Ed course i would have needed for he major. 🫠
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ah, i envy you! i had maybe one or two English courses that modeled anything like what i hoped to be doing. and one of them didn't even count toward the degree, i ended up having to pay out of pocket because the credits were too close to another course! 🤣