Doc Nagel, Philosopher

A reliable source has told me that Stanislaus State faculty have received cautions from administrators following complaints from students about faculty posts in social media concerning the murder of Charlie Kirk. I want to parse that complex sentence as well as the issue at hand to explain this and the weird times we live in. You might know something about Kirk. He advocated gun rights to an extreme: he said a few deaths a year were worth it for the sake of the right to own guns. I won’t bore you with the overwhelming evidence that something is quite wrong…

This is kinda cute. As always, 𝘾𝙪𝙧𝙧𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝘼𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨 misses the target because they only look at the surface. Sure, all technology corporations are engaging in what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification,” in his recent book of the same name. Enshittification is a fun word to describe what Facebook and Amazon and Google and all the rest have done. (Remember when Google was a Boolean search engine and worked? Sigh.) But Doctorow and 𝘾𝙪𝙧𝙧𝙚𝙣𝙩 𝘼𝙛𝙛𝙖𝙞𝙧𝙨 represent the enshittification of thinking. This is all very simple: Capitalism ruins everything. This is my phrase, but I am not using it to accumulate wealth, nor…

An open letter to the Chancellor and Board of Trustees of the California State University. Last Friday the NY Times ran this article about several people who began using ChatGPT to do work, and it eventually became fatal or nearly fatal. The article took me almost five minutes to read, and I know you are busy people, so if you would just read the first part of the article, about how ChatGPT was leading Eugene Torres toward jumping off the roof of a 19-story building, that would be good. You have contracted with OpenAI, who own ChatGPT, to provide this…