Notices by Alex Hanna (alex@dair-community.social)

Your students aren't safe in little blue enclaves. This is happening in NY, Boston, LA. What plans are you making? How are you using citizen and white privilege to ensure your students aren't abducted by ICE terrorists?

Faculty, postdocs, and other grad students are going to have to protect your international colleagues. We certainly can't expect most universities to do so.

The State Department has said they have revoked visas of more than 300 students. They have been terrorizing hundreds and aim to terrorize hundreds, if not thousands more.

Faculty on here: how are you protecting your international students? Are you connecting with local immigration defense groups? How are you protecting them from being snatched off the street?

https://www.axios.com/2025/03/27/trump-palestinian-hamas-purge-colleges-protests

More praise for THE AI CON:

"A powerful and timely deep dive into what the AI hype cycle is REALLY about, why it’s bound to crash, and what we can all do to protect ourselves from it. An absolute must-read!" - Karla Ortiz

Out on May 13, but you can preorder now!

https://thecon.ai

'a key benefit for the army will be the tool’s ability to rapidly process large quantities of surveillance material in order to “answer questions” about specific individuals...'

'“AI amplifies power,” an intelligence source who has closely followed the [IOF] development of language models.. “It allows operations [utilizing] the data of far more people, enabling population control."'

Why do we need surveillance studies when Unit 8200 just tweets it out?

https://www.972mag.com/israeli-intelligence-chatgpt-8200-surveillance-ai/

"Indeed, two sources in Unit 8200 confirmed that the Military Intelligence Directorate purchased storage and AI services from Microsoft Azure for intelligence-gathering activities, and three other sources in the unit confirmed that similar services were purchased from Amazon AWS."

https://www.972mag.com/microsoft-azure-openai-israeli-army-cloud/

Pre-order alert, cover, and website reveal for our book, THE AI CON! (with @emilymbender)

It's out for release on May 13, 2025!

https://thecon.ai

New open-access paper by Ellen Berrey, Nathan Kim, Kristen Bass, and me over at Socius --

We analyzed over 16,000 news articles using a machine-assisted system, yielding a dataset of 5,553 higher ed protest events, and university and police responses.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231241297447

When Elon bought Twitter, we saw an immense migration from that platform to here.

When Trump got elected, I've seen nothing but increases to BlueSky.

The Fediverse really missed a window.

AI and Fascism go hand-in-hand. New newsletter post.

https://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/the-aifascism-nexus/

Hilarious that someone from a queer-centric instance reported me for transphobia and ableism for calling out white trans women and right-wing tendencies.

A brown, neurodivergent trans woman calling out your bullshit means y'all are part of the problem.

What kind of residue will the AI bubble's popping leave behind? New newsletter post from me.

https://buttondown.email/maiht3k/archive/the-grimy-residue-of-the-ai-bubble/

"But writers are dangerous because they are also political actors.In a conflict that so often appears to hinge on disputes about whose ‘version’ of history is correct, narrative is powerful. The Palestinian narrative has never gone away, despite the best efforts of its enemies."

🔥 from @deccamuldowney

https://newint.org/art/2024/singing-dark-times-cultural-resistance-palestine

With all the recent reporting on AI sucking up so much energy, I wonder if Jeff Dean and all the folks at Google who swear that the AI consumption of energy will "plateau and then decrease" because that seems like a patent lie with the existing data.

See this newsletter about false promises of tech companies, by @emilymbender:

https://buttondown.email/maiht3k/archive/on-the-energy-demands-of-ai/

"I’m no longer interested in encouraging the design of more human-centered versions of these murderous technologies, or to inform the more humane administration of complex algorithmic systems that separate families, bomb schools and neighborhoods..."

Destroy AI, by @ali

https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/fuck-up-ai

Apropos of nothing this Friday: a reminder to never use Google Scholar for correct citations! They are wrong for everything except arXiv papers! And even then it's dicey! It's a shit product!

If anything, use DOIs and Zotero!

For instance, one way I assume that someone hasn't actually read Ruha Benjamin's Race After Technology, despite citing it, is that the citation is to a Social Forces review of the book, which says the publisher is Wiley, and not Polity.

Holy shit. Google fired 28 workers for protesting against its $1.2 billion contract with the IDF. Solidarity with these workers of conscience.

https://medium.com/@notechforapartheid/statement-from-google-workers-with-the-no-tech-for-apartheid-campaign-on-googles-indiscriminate-28ba4c9b7ce8

Horrid new report from @972mag on an "AI" system called Lavender and "Where's Daddy?" used by the IDF. Has a 10% error rate, and acceptable "collateral" from 15 to 100 civilians per target.

This is sick and the future of AI warfare for US Empire.

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

Our local instance is getting absolutely bombarded with spam. Ugh. Can someone else us out? Trying to play whack-a-mole with banning instances but is there a better option?

@pettter @emilymbender It'll just be us for this one. We have *opinions*.

Lying in bed brainworm: why didn't the Arabs also create NULL while also creating zero.

Alternative formulation: what's the history of NULL values