Student: “So Elon Musk is a trillionaire?”
Me: “Yup.”
Student: “How did he get that much money?”
Me: “Well, he doesn’t really have a trillion dollars cash. He just owns a lot of stock in companies that are valued at a trillion dollars.”
Student: “So those companies make huge profits?”
Me: “Oh gosh no. They all lose billions of dollars a year. All of them. Huge losses.”

The Economist headline: “Gen Z Mysteriously Hates Capitalism and No One Can Figure Out Why.”

We're going to have to repeat a lot that many Jewish people don't support Israel's genocide.

Criticism of the Israeli Government and their war crimes has nothing to do with who is or isn't Jewish.

To conflate them like this is both harmful and antisemitic.

"There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires."

Hm. Administrators are responding with corporate nonsense; faculty are responding by #organizing #unions.

https://archive.ph/WY1yk

#highered #humanities #criticalthinking #literacy

Having tried coding with AI, I've been thinking about how it feels.

Writing text is fun, shifting words and clauses to express with concision. Communicating, but with economy and precision. Get it right and it clicks, and you grow to like that click.

Code's the same, same shifting around, same satisfying click. You communicate to a compiler, not a person, but in a style, your style, that when captured, clicks.

So far, with AI I feel the communication, but no style, no click.

And no fun.

A month ago, I wrote an email to my current colleagues saying that Hampshire College was never about the campus, it was the people who made it.

A month on, those same people are at it again. We are raising funds for workers, we are petitioning the Five College Consortium to step up, and we are trying to shape what happens to Hampshire after Fall 2026. It's crazy, it's a long shot, and it's what we do. Join us.

https://hampshirenext.org/

https://www.gofundme.com/f/elc-staff-bridge-fund

https://www.helphampshireworkers.com/

This evening has had a sad surprise for me.

Now, I am calling for #openSUSE to revert the recently imposed project-wide ban on young people:

https://lists.opensuse.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/6PU6JU2IGKDANYNN3KIXDR2UQSVP6JI2/

(Update: Thanks for the overwhelming reactions! Please also consider https://toot.teckids.org/@nik/116550879189375534 .)