I promise you, librarians are not intentionally throwing first editions and rare books out in the trash. It will apparently surprise some of you to know that we are actually trained on weeding. Books go througha process before they hit that dumpster.

Sacrifice! At the Harvest Festival@theharvestmaid.bsky.social · last wk.

The posters saying "wait till you hear how many books the librarians shred" are being disingenuous. The destruction of books is not by itself what's causing outrage. It's in combination with many other factors, chief among them AI companies' history of unethical and even blatantly illegal actions.

"finally, we have created Fahrenheit 451 from the cautionary tale,"

Dr. Jeroen W.P. Wijnendaele@drdragases.bsky.social · last wk.

No longer content with pillaging intellectual work and dismembering our environment (already critically weakened), AI companies are now hellbent on destroying books galore including rare editions. Shut down these nefarious enterprises already.

This is just to say I have OCRed the text thet was in tne arch:ve and whicb yov were prabaldy seamhing for "breahtast" Fargme ms fheg mem debo:w5 sb ?mccf mmb 5c oc1b

One of the story’s central arguments is that Scrooge has removed himself from the identities and processes of social care and social life that result in meaning. If ever there were a story ALLERGIC to the idea of a prequel, this is that story.

Don't do rhyme that often in work I write for publication, but I do love to sit on a hillside and write a little ditty on occasion...

Seeing this as I’m listening to @trufelman.bsky.social new episode on sizing and fit models is just a little on the nose

Julia Carrie Wong@joolia.bsky.social · 2mo ago

humans have known how to construct a shoulder seam for thousands of years, but with AI, we are unlocking untold new ways to fuck it up

It needs to be stated over and over - this isn't just a matter of errors: The point is that LLM AI is literally incapable of reviewing or validating research data. It absolutely cannot do that job, at all, ever. But it is very good at generating something that looks like a convincing review.

Okay so I read the whole of the Pope's latest encyclical "Magnifica Humanitas", the one the internet is calling the AI Encyclical, but it's about a LOT more than that (of course it is, it's over 40,000 words). Here's a thread of quotes...

Love this bit on Ai from the Royal Society. A classic case of the probability engine getting itself in a mess and revealing its complete lack of understanding

"women can be perfectly capable of using this technology and simply choose not to" we did in fact need data backing up this incredibly obvious claim bc a LOT of companies will insist Susan from Accounting is refusing to use AI to do the books because IT needs to come explain how it works to her

jenna newman phd@jennanewman.bsky.social · 2mo ago

“study of around 8,000 respondents concludes that women’s lower uptake of generative AI tools has little to do w/ skills or access. Instead, it is driven largely by how women perceive the broader societal risks associated w/ the new technology.”🧪 @josiecox.bsky.social

Here's the serious bit for anyone who'd rather skip the 4000 words of jokes

And we are live! Massive thanks to everyone who contributed to this. Reading your posts made me so much madder than I ever knew was possible

The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

The bugs, broken apps, and nightmare customer-service bots we can't escape, presented as a blessed and sacred addendum to Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on AI

theringer.com

Brian Phillips@brianphillips.lol · 2mo ago

I'm working on a column about the tech annoyances that drive us crazy, and I want it to be as universal as possible, so tell me yours! E.g. scanning a QR code to read a menu, never receiving the one-time passcode they supposedly texted you, "verify you're human" by IDing tiny motorcycles, etc.

The solutions we will need to develop at the level of the classroom are unlikely to be in alignment with policies like this that first and foremost imagine our students as incipient wage-laborers rather than learners.

Sen. Adam Schiff@schiff.senate.gov · 3mo ago

AI is reshaping industries and our economy, and it’s crucial that young people and our workforce are equipped to succeed in this landscape. Proud to introduce a bipartisan bill with Sen. Rounds to ensure students and educators have the resources they need to harness the power of AI.

this is fucking unreal stuff from Noah Wyle on the magic of The Pitt. www.gq.com/story/noah-w...

The most horrifying part of this is buried at the end. Like half the “citations” are just slapped on to give a false veneer of credibility.

Futurism@futurism.com · 4mo ago

This is catastrophic.

Don't taco Tuesday this shit. Millions of people spent the day wondering if they would get vaporized, and no one in our government stood up to him. Nothing cutesy about it.

just to be clear, everyone, when 8 pm EDT comes and goes, regardless of what does or does not happen, the president still threatened genocide and war crimes and we should still impeach, arrest, and try him

“A whole civilization will die tonight” is the most vile thing a US president has ever said, certainly during the post-1945 era when they’ve had the power to kill civilizations with the dropping of a bomb. I’m staring into the darkness. May this not be one of the most fateful days in human history.

Completely unstable and perilous. The House must bring up impeachment articles, and the Senate needs to remove a president who wants to commit war crimes. We cannot sit idly by as Donald Trump threatens to end an entire civilization.

What this also means: We should be grateful for our atmosphere 👀

Paul Byrne@theplanetaryguy.com · 4mo ago

The Artemis II crew just reported several impact flashes—explosions from hypervelocity impacts of meteoroids with the Moon—during the solar eclipse. We make a big effort to see a handful of these from Earth with telescopes. That astronauts flying by the Moon saw >4 in tens of minutes is AWESOME.

#Artemis crew to Mission Control, after seeing and attempting to describe the eclipse: "And if you could give me about 20 new superlatives in the mission summary tomorrow, that'll help my vocabulary out a bit. Thank you."

You can’t really learn much if you’re having AI generate your homework, your papers, and everything else you need to complete a class, but for some reason universities keep shoving AI into the learning environment on the assumption that it’s an improvement.

Jake Anbinder@jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I think we need an inverse thread where we talk about things that normal intelligent people universally agree upon that are for some reason hot takes within your profession

"Art didn't used to be political." Meanwhile, Mr. William Shakespeare: www.youtube.com/shorts/uec_u...

Sir Ian Mckellen deliver a 400 years olds Shakespeare monologue.

YouTube video by Tristian&Co

youtube.com

For those days when I’m not in one of my exhaustive exhausting village explainer moods: Normalize googling words/terms followed by “definition” or “etymology.” Doors of knowledge will hurl themselves open for you, I swear. I even swan.

Benjamin Dreyer@bcdreyer.social · 4mo ago

jerry-built ✅ jury-rigged ✅

Honestly cannot think of a time I knew less what was going to happen at court than I feel ahead of oral arguments on birthright citizenship tomorrow. The fact that this is getting a full hearing instead of a 9-0, per curiam, benchslap is already beyond disturbing.

I dunno. If they end birth right citizenship, a clear corruption of the plain language of the Constitution, I think this country is over.

"The IOC already tried mandatory sex testing. For decades, every female Olympic athlete was screened. In all those years, it never caught a single person deliberately misrepresenting their sex. What it did was destroy the careers & lives of women with intersex conditions they didn’t know they had."

the thing about "i'll just pirate it" for this HP show is that it is *ruined* i literally cannot enjoy it, she has put her disgusting transphobic veneer over all of it and so it literally cannot be enjoyed, even if I wanted to try (I don't) I would see her smarmy cigar smoking face in my mind's eye

the amount of energy some people use up on a daily basis just hating people, hating whole groups of people, trying to remind themselves again and again why they're the enemy and must be stopped. Instead they could learn to watercolor or bake sourdough, go on bike rides, plant a butterfly garden...

However much we love Emma Thompson, it's not enough.