The Bard's College

Teachers win their strike

An MA teachers union went on an "illegal strike" for 5 days, ultimately winning out and getting a tentative agreement of a 13% raise and smaller class sizes. Teachers deserve like way, way, way more than that, but hey, any union win where they are told they're "not allowed to strike" is a VERY good win.

Twitter's premium service is uh… whoops

Apparently only about 0.2% of monthly active users in the U.S. have paid for the PREMIUM TWITTER EXPERIENCE under ol' Musky. Worldwide the number is less than 300,000 subscribers, raking in less than $30M in annual revenue. For perspective: They owe like orders of magnitude more than that.

Oh also despite claims to the contrary, Twitter is totally rife with child abuse content. Apparently it is becoming well known as an easy place to find such content.

Nazis Keep Going After the Electric Grid

A woman was arrested in Maryland for conspiring with a known Nazi from Florida. The intent was to attack the Baltimore electric grid using a similar style of sniper attacks that we've seen all over the country now.

I just need a moment, because the paragraph I just typed is ABSURD.

More Info About the PS VR2

Sony has been making a version 2 of their VR headset and we now have more info on that. It'll not have much in the way of backwards compatibility, but apparently there's a big ol' bunch of games in development for it.

Also once you set it up you can use it without a TV, so just throw your PS5 into a big backpack with a massive power supply and you can be IMMERSED on the go!

Race to the AI-ification of Search

Google announced Bard, their version of ChatGPT. Simultaneously, Microsoft announced an announcement of their own AI-powered search thingy.

Not pictured: the fact that these MASSIVE and extraordinarily rich companies had to scramble to get these products to market after getting absolutely shown up by ChatGPT. Microsoft at least can talk about their huge investments in OpenAI (who makes ChatGPT), but Google has been talking up their AI chops for YEARS and then had to absolutely scramble to get this out the door in time to keep up.

Even AI Seinfeld is getting cancelled

Okay so CONTEXT: someone made an AI-powered endless Seinfeld stream on Twitch. Basically an AI kept generating Seinfeld-like "episodes" and would play them out endlessly via a Twitch stream. It was kinda neat, albeit a bit weird and then uh...

Then during one of the opening standup routines, the AI just started spitting out transphobic and homophobic jokes. And so it got banned.

NOW, the unfortunate part is that the jokes it generated are so eerily *-phobic that they almost read like tongue-in-cheek in-jokes and would be kinda funny if they weren't actually awful.

“I’m thinking about doing a bit about [...] how all liberals are secretly gay and want to impose their will on everyone. Or something about how transgender people are ruining the fabric of society.”

More Stuff

• Google is playing around with skirting the "safari restriction" on iOS
• FTX is asking for its political donations back