Tootfinder

Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic are providing millions to the American Federation of Teachers to build AI training hubs aimed at educating 400,000 teachers (Jocelyn Gecker/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/artificial-int…

Microsoft and OpenAI invest millions in AI training for teachers
The country’s largest teachers unions are teaming up with tech companies like Microsoft and OpenAI to help educators build literacy in artificial intelligence. The tech giants are paying for training for teachers to apply AI skills in the classroom. For the companies, the partnerships are also opportunities to make inroads into schools and win over students in the race for AI dominance. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten says skepticism guided her negotiations, but the…

We're all really used to an FBI that is incredibly evil, but generally pretty competent. They have no problem using child sex offenders to infiltrate groups of clowns. They have no problem trying to convince civil rights leaders to commit suicide. They have no problem with sowing confusion within leftists groups and trying to get them to kill each other. They've always been radically anti-left, but they've also always been competent.
Fabricating evidence in a really obvious way would always have been off the table because they wouldn't be willing to throw a case. But those competent people have been pushed out of the FBI. It's now Kash Patel's clown show. It serves the whims of the regime above all else. It will sacrifice decades of hard built trust for a quick win, because no one involved is competent enough to understand the consequences of such actions.
In the past, they may have used torture to elicit a confession. They may have entrapped people. They could have deleted exonerating evidence, but they would probably not have just completely manufactured obviously fake evidence just to forward the regime's narrative. I don't think that we've seen anything like this, at the very least in our lifetimes.
We have to foster a new level of skepticism, far beyond what we have been used to... and this is especially true of Liberals, who still don't understand the level of corruption and incompetence in local law enforcement today.
#USPol #CharlieKirk

Wetzel: The NFL's Bill Belichick skepticism is being validated in Chapel Hill https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46592366/bill-belichick-nfl-coaching-cfb-owners

🔮 Spells, Skepticism, and Surrender: What Happens When the Agent Becomes the Author
https://lithub.com/spells-skepticism-and-surrender-what-happens-when-the-agent-becomes-the-author/

Spells, Skepticism, and Surrender: What Happens When the Agent Becomes the Author
My mother has always been drawn to New Age spiritualism—at least for as long as I’ve known her. Which means that over the course of my life, I’ve not only had my palms read, but my fortune told, an…

If a man has a strong faith he can indulge in the luxury of skepticism.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

Trump shows support for Pete Hegseth's Pentagon press restrictions, saying "the press is very dishonest", after expressing skepticism about the rules last month (Isaac Schorr/Mediaite)
https://www.mediaite.com/me…

Trump Flip-Flops, Throws Support Behind Pentagon Press Policy — And Threatens to Kick Media Out of White House
President Donald Trump threw his support behind Secretary of War Pete Hegseth's controversial new Pentagon press policy on Tuesday.

Eleven Madison Park,
the elegant, internationally acclaimed Manhattan restaurant
whose climate-minded move to an all-vegan menu four and a half years ago was hailed as both brilliantand baffling,
-- is bringing back meat.
Its chef, Daniel Humm, said in an interview that he wanted to draw more diners to the restaurant,
“I very much believed in the all-in approach, but I didn’t realize that we would exclude people,” he said. “I have some anxiety that people are goi…

Meat Is Back at Eleven Madison Park, After 4 Vegan Years
The Manhattan restaurant drew global praise and skepticism with its climate-minded, all-plant menu. Now its chef wants to be more welcoming — and popular.

"Freedom of speech is skeptical power: it is always a challenge. And it affirms truth: it is always a search. Without skepticism of power and affirmation of truth, we will not have freedom of speech. The me speakers push us to embrace their power and treat everything they say as truth. They will call this “free speech.”
https://

Free Speech and Me Speech
A helpful distinction

A healthy dose of skepticism is warranted whenever you hear: “the most powerful LLM ever released across key benchmarks”
📚 "When LLMs Remember Instead of Reason" #AI #benchmark

'Rhetoric often clashes with reality' — Trump's latest Russia sanctions threats met with skepticism: https://benborges.xyz/2025/09/08/rhetoric-often-clashes-with-reality.html

Skepticism Or Nepotism: Should The Las Vegas Raiders Fire Brennan Carroll? https://raiderramble.com/2025/09/23/skepticism-or-nepotism-should-the-las-vegas-raiders-fire-brennan-carroll/

Bully talking to bully...
I hope that it will help the people in Gaza and West Bank...
Trump to Netanyahu on Gaza talks: "You're always so f***ing negative"
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/05/trump-netanyahu-call-gaza-peace-deal-hamas

AI skepticism has reached levels unseen since Flatland was published.

Revolution or Hype? Seeking the Limits of Large Models in Hardware Design
Qiang Xu, Leon Stok, Rolf Drechsler, Xi Wang, Grace Li Zhang, Igor L. Markov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04905

Revolution or Hype? Seeking the Limits of Large Models in Hardware Design
Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Circuit Models (LCMs) have sparked excitement across the electronic design automation (EDA) community, promising a revolution in circuit design and optimization. Yet, this excitement is met with significant skepticism: Are these AI models a genuine revolution in circuit design, or a temporary wave of inflated expectations? This paper serves as a foundational text for the corresponding ICCAD 2025 panel, bringing together perspectives…

"You not believing it doesn't make it true. You not understanding it doesn't mean it isn't understood. Your ignorance give you no authority. Your skepticism doesn't make you wise."
https://www.the-reframe.com/your-ignorance-doesnt-make-you-an-expert/?ref=the-reframe-newsletter

Sources: CBS News staff are viewing Bari Weiss skeptically, as senior leaders cautiously get to know her; Weiss' "do the fucking news" line drew eye rolls (Status)
https://www.status.news/p/bari-weiss-cbs-news-free-press

A Bari Trying Time
While Bari Weiss faces skepticism inside CBS News, former colleagues describe her management style to Status as chaotic and abrasive—raising questions about how she’ll lead one of America’s most storied newsrooms.

Day 5: Robin Wall Kimmerer
I'm taking these liberty of changing my hashtag and expanding the intent of this list to include all non-men, although Kimerer is a woman so I'll get to more gender diversity later... I've also started planning this out more and realized that I may continue a bit beyond 20...
In any case, Robin Wall Kimmerer is an Indigenous academic biologist and excellent non-fiction author whose work touches on Potawotomi philosophy, colonialism (including in academic spaces), and ideas for a better future. Anyone interested in ecology, conservation, or decolonization in North America will probably be impressed by her work and the rich connections she weaves between academic ecology and Indigenous knowledge offer a critical opportunity to expand your understanding of the world if like me you were raised deeply enmeshed in "Western" scientific tradition. I suppose a little background in skepticism helped prepare me to respect her writing, but I don't think that's essential.
I've only read "Braiding Sweetgrass," but "Gathering Moss" and her more recent "The Serviceberry" are high on my to-read list, despite my predilection for fiction. Kimmerer incorporates a backbone of fascinating anecdotes into "Braiding Sweetgrass" that makes it surprisingly easy reading for a work that's philosophical at its core. She also pulls off an impressive braided organization to the whole thing, weaving together disparate knowledges in a way that lets you see both their contradictions and their connections.
The one criticism I've seen of her work is that it's not sufficiently connected to other Indigenous philosophers & writers, and that it's perhaps too comfortable of a read for colonizers, and that seems valid to me, even though (perhaps because I am a colonizer) I still find her book important.
An excellent author in any case, and one doing concrete ideological work towards a better world.
#20AuthorsNoMen

Somewhere around spring, can't remember exactly when, I told some people I was talking to that America was finished, to widespread skepticism. I then added it wouldn't happen overnight, it'd take a while, but the end of the US as a superpower was now inevitable. And that we should disentangle ourselves from it, otherwise we'd risk to go down with it.
In the months since, even I was surprised by how fast it's happening. And that's a problem. We're nowhere nea…

Auburn's Steven Pearl hiring evokes coach-in-waiting skepticism (after much consultation) https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6659731/2025/09/25/auburn-steve-pearl-bruce-pearl-coach-in-waiting-basketball/

What Does Your Benchmark Really Measure? A Framework for Robust Inference of AI Capabilities
Nathanael Jo, Ashia Wilson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19590 https://

What Does Your Benchmark Really Measure? A Framework for Robust Inference of AI Capabilities
Evaluations of generative models on benchmark data are now ubiquitous, and their outcomes critically shape public and scientific expectations of AI's capabilities. Yet growing skepticism surrounds their reliability. How can we know that a reported accuracy genuinely reflects a model's true performance? Evaluations are often presented as simple measurements, but in reality they are inferences: to treat benchmark scores as evidence of capability is already to assume a theory of what capability is…

What Does Your Benchmark Really Measure? A Framework for Robust Inference of AI Capabilities
Nathanael Jo, Ashia Wilson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19590 https://

What Does Your Benchmark Really Measure? A Framework for Robust Inference of AI Capabilities
Evaluations of generative models on benchmark data are now ubiquitous, and their outcomes critically shape public and scientific expectations of AI's capabilities. Yet growing skepticism surrounds their reliability. How can we know that a reported accuracy genuinely reflects a model's true performance? Evaluations are often presented as simple measurements, but in reality they are inferences: to treat benchmark scores as evidence of capability is already to assume a theory of what capability is…