ChestRockwell

Are you gonna bump the BONK?

https://noshumusic.bandcamp.com/track/the-bonk-song

Folks, it's good! Incredibly violent with some fairly decent (tho not perfect) politics.

Great review

Excited to try. What are you preferred brewing methods for this stuff. Does it go well in a moka pot? I have a boring drip machine for my day to day, but have you done any aeropress or other methods with it that are wildly delicious?

Also, any other good coffee roasters out there worth supporting?

I'm up to episode 6, lullaby in frogland.

This is where it really kicks off imo. Show is so good folks.

Is it ok for a Beaver to post in this comm?

I'll take the lower bunk.

Hoping we rematch in the PAC 2 championship round 2.

he has eaten the pancake

CW - Oglaf has plenty of NSFW sex material on other pages , but this is SFW.

I don't want random techbros coming in, hence why I'm posting on Den. I hope this is ok.

I'm teaching an online composition class this summer. I got two essays from students that cited sources that don't exist. I called them out on it. Here's what happened.

One copped to using Bard, but then sent a second essay that still clearly reeks of gen AI or other horseshit.

The other copped to using a GenAI search engine unwittingly, and has tried to claim they've read things that, by all accounts, they haven't.

Normally, I would have just failed these students for writing hundreds of words on material that doesn't exist. But I really wanted them to go beyond a basic cop and explain their reasons for using this. This is in part since I have administrative duties around GenAI this year in our program. So I wanted to get data for my fellow instructors (i.e. here's what the student did, here's how we can design better assignments that both teach more carefully and also are harder to use GenAI on, etc. etc.) Instead, I've just hit a brick wall from them. They're insisting that it was only a research error, even though by all accounts, these essays shouldn't exist since the majority is written on things that just literally aren't out there.

Again, they wrote about things that don't exist as if they do. That's GenAI in a nutshell. It's some of the most blatant shit. And these students are still trying to justify their work.

What bugs me most, however, isn't the students. It's the fact that technology like this was thrown out into the ether without any fucking guard rails. These students don't realize the problems with it, so they're fucking themselves. And while maybe they would have found some other way to do this kind of lazy work pre-ChatGPT, the accessibility of these LLM models means that more students will do stupid shit like this and fail, instead of trying to learn.

I'm very doomer about this stuff, not because of some AI takeover, but the total enshittification of everything. The episode on it was very good on the other serious labor implications as well. However, there's also a ton of potential added labor or shittiness in the affected fields. After all, my instructors will have to work more for the same amount of pay OR just not bother policing it. Either outcome is terrible. While I'm going to do my damndest to try and help my colleagues build assignments that remain rigorous and have guiderails to avoid genAI production, the fact is, eventually it's coming for all of us. And even if it doesn't take our jobs, it's going to make us all more miserable. Because there's not the structures in place for FALGSC or anything. So we're going to lay people off, pay them less, remove some of the most human pursuits, and for what? A bot that's slightly more convenient and less accurate than wikipedia?

I'd love for someone to un-doomer me about this stuff, but it's just very depressing. I needed to vent among friends. Thanks for listening folks.

I'm still a at heart, but god damn is it hard to keep up in the face of material conditions.

Well love our real leftist folk singers, don't we folks.

The credits say this was made by Acid Marxist, is that our own @[email protected] ?

The source of my user name for those who haven't seen Boogie Nights:

Those are great names!

I love movies, some TV, some anime/manga, and have come to love going to concerts thanks to my partner's deep love of them. Still, I'd prefer the dark theater to the concert, if I'm being totally honest.

I'm a member of the academic precariat (AKA non-tenure track faculty), though a bit of a labor aristocrat among them, since I'm unionzed at least. I generally teach writing and composition, which I actually am fairly passionate about even though I didn't get my degree in rhetoric and composition. I've been doing what I can to get some institutional clout and maybe find myself in control of a writing program someday. I'm surprised how many writing instructors still focus on grammar/style rather than larger questions of rhetoric/argument.

So as to not doxx myself, I'll just say my academic work was english literature. While I'd love a position teaching that someday, I recognize the material conditions and so have been positioning myself to be part of the humanities "moneymaker" for the university, writing. I generally don't write on Marxism because, to be frank, a bunch of marxist academics basically suck (including the ones at my institution).

I discovered Marx probably 20 years ago (give or take) when I was in college in a philosophy class. We read the hits (German Ideology, Capital's "How much does a coat cost") before moving on to other stuff. I had already worked several really shit jobs though, so it really resonated with my experiences with wage work. However, at the time, I was very much the kind of "socialism is good, communism bad" liberal. I think if it hadn't been for the 2008 crash I would have probably turned into some copywriter or other "creative adjacent" worker.

However, with no jobs in 2008, I decided the best thing I could do is apply to grad school. So I did, and became more and more radicalized as I saw the way that academia has been hollowed out like every other institution touched by neoliberalism. I think a combination of a graduate union strike and then COVID led to my shift from "socialist friendly liberal" to full on communist. We must "end this nightmare." I'm here for the comradeship and the eclectic mix of marxists/anarchists we have here . As a sophist, I love being drawn by our various left perspectives, including the esoteric ones.

I hope someday we all get together to sing Billy Bragg songs after the revolution.

Oh, I also have two dogs I love. Sorry cat comrades. Here they are: