When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

Contingent Magazine@contingent-mag.bsky.social · 10mo ago

Seems like it's worth posting this one again.

There's a cross-platform uniformity to how LLMs bullshit you. Today I was designing an exercise for a responisble-use of-LLMs course we are designing for NIH trainees. I asked ChatGPT to complete one of Claude Shannon's original guessing games: "There is no reverse on a __(10 letters)__"

Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other. Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick. Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.

The Conversation U.S.@us.theconversation.com · 11mo ago

Relying on ChatGPT to teach you about a topic leaves you with shallower knowledge than Googling and reading about it, according to new research that compared what more than 10,000 people knew after using one method or the other. Shared by @gizmodo.com: buff.ly/yAAHtHq

All of these things, deeply underpinned by the most ridiculously spun misnomer. We should stop calling it artificial intelligence and describe it as IA or ‘Intelligent’ Automation at best.

Iris van Rooij 💭@irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 11mo ago

“While the AI industry claims its models can “think,” “reason,” and “learn,” their supposed achievements rest on marketing hype and stolen intellectual labor. In reality, AI erodes academic freedom, weakens critical reading, and subordinates the pursuit of knowledge to corporate interests.”

Hundreds of thousands of people, dead because of a decision made by the world's richest man

The New Yorker@newyorker.com · 11mo ago

One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/jUzNSc

Enshittification is a term coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022. In his new book, Doctorow lays out how tech companies have made our lives progressively worse, finds Matthew Sparkes

Has life today been enshittified? Cory Doctorow's new book explores

Enshittification is a term coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022. In his new book, Doctorow lays out how tech companies have made our lives progressively worse, finds Matthew Sparkes

newscientist.com

And from image events, we get POLYSEMIC images that carry multiple forms of ideology into the present. Here, we have the convergence of Shepard Fairey's iconic HOPE poster for the Obama campaign with the frog icon from #NoKings. The is how you visually dismantle fascist iconography.

Welcome, new users. Posts on Bluesky are called skjörts. If someone re-skjörts you, that is a doppelskjört. If you respond to a doppelskjört, that is called a Trifect, and you cannot skjört again for nine hours. If you do anyway, that's a Time Clench. It's all very simple.

The knowledge was already free!! Open textbooks and libraries exist!! The benefit of a professor is having an expert teach it to you in a structured manner with assignments for practice and assessments to keep you accountable. Profs aren't keepers of secret knowledge. We are essentially tutors.

Immigrant Boo👻@porcupunk.eurosky.social · 12mo ago

Wow. Just wow. "Students pay premium prices for information that AI now delivers instantly and for free. A business student can ask ChatGPT to explain supply chain optimization or generate market analysis in seconds. The traditional lecture-and-test model faces its Blockbuster moment."

“Well-meaning” people are using machine translation to write Wikipedia articles in languages that they don’t speak themselves, accelerating the degeneration in quality of the web corpus for several languages with relatively few native speakers. www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1...

How AI and Wikipedia have sent vulnerable languages into a doom spiral

Machine translators have made it easier than ever to create error-plagued Wikipedia articles in obscure languages. What happens when AI models get trained on junk pages?

technologyreview.com

Daughter of Robin Williams, Zelda Williams 💔

This was published the day after the Heaton Park terrorist attack. I find its grim combination of antisemitism, conspiracy fictions and agrarian populism deeply worrying, as this is how it all kicked off a century ago. 🧵 farmsnotfactories.org/articles/zio...

Zionist Money Rules • Farms Not Factories

The purpose of our newsletter is to give you important information that is censored in the mainstream media. “The way... Read More

farmsnotfactories.org

Just an occasional note that … the less you use social media, the less you need to use social media. 🕯️

it’s funny* when i consider that the wars and mass deaths nobody really gives a shit about are also in the regions that will be most adversely affected by climate change and how much that plays into our doing fuck all to reduce emissions. *not actually funny

David Ho@davidho.bsky.social · 2y ago

In recognition of us doing fuck all to reduce emissions, let me remind y'all that carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is useless unless we decarbonize drastically. rdcu.be/dbFbB

my teacher brain is exploding. so now in addition to marking i must generate an anonymised summary of work to prepare it for the AI so the AI can synthesise constructive feedback … based on the summary??? and then I still have to customise the AI feedback. and yes on the turnaround window thing.

Ernesto Priego@ernestopriego.com · last yr.

Simply astonishing. Maybe Lecturer A should not have to mark over 100 essays in a two-week window in the first place? Invest in qualified staff and reduce impossible workloads FFS www.kcl.ac.uk/about/strate...

I see so much of this in academic funding calls ‘we are looking for projects that explore how AI can help to solve … hunger, violence against women and children, poverty, etc.’ But there’s no space in there to say: ‘um, what if AI is not the right tool for this’

Dr Abeba Birhane@abeba.blacksky.app · last yr.

AI is the wrong tool to tackle complex societal & systemic problems. AI4SG is more about PR victories, boosting AI adoption (regardless of merit/usefulness) & laundering accountability for harmful tech, extractive practices, abetting atrocities. yours truly www.project-syndicate.org/magazine/ai-...

There is so much real news, in so many countries, that there really is never any need to repost AI generated fakery (even if it hooks in to your personal rhetoric). Repost journalism not algorithm.

some foreign western person in a faraway land (with, at best, a social media-based activism and education) telling other people in their own countries that what they are doing is ‘not good enough’ is … well, a far too common feature of this landscape.

AI evangelism is like being in a cult. you abandon any sense of reason and go out of your way to defend it even when it makes no sense

Joe McKirdy@joemckirdy.bsky.social · last yr.

It has been 14.68 years since the last day in 2010. So, the AI is correct.

Academia may not give you job security, flexibility, or wealth, but it will let you unexpectedly connect to eduroam in foreign cities

In South Africa: Remembering Marikana, 13 years on - still no justice for the massacre victims. (An older article exploring the media’s failures at the time: theconversation.com/marikana-mas...)

Marikana massacre: how South African journalism failed the test

The reporting of the Marikana massacre was characterised by embedded journalism, sensationalism and polarisation of views. The media became a loudspeaker for powerful political and economic interests.

theconversation.com

If someone asks a question about "AGI", the only reality-based response is to demand a definition of "AGI" before replying. #acl2025

GIVE THE MONEY TO TEACHERS NOT SAM ALTMAN

Laprofmme@laprofmme.bsky.social · last yr.

The sheer quantity of bullshit here. The solution to instructor exhaustion and overwork is not outsourcing grading (if that’s not direct mentoring of students, I don’t know what is) but hiring more faculty and reducing class sizes. Give the money to teachers, not Sam Altman

Really this is one of the reasons it’s so hard to write contemporary dystopian fiction.

Steve Herman@newsguy.bsky.social · last yr.

The president of France, Emmanuel Macron, files a lawsuit in Delaware against Candace Owens for defamation over the American podcaster's “relentless and unjustified smear campaign” alleging his wife, Brigitte, is a secret trans woman and blood relative. clarelocke.com/wp-content/u...

Bari’s key insight as an entrepreneur is that there is a bottomless demand for rich people to have their existing opinions sold back to them as forbidden knowledge

Financial Times@financialtimes.com · last yr.

FT Exclusive: Weiss has met with David Ellison, the incoming owner of CBS News, over a potential deal to sell her three-year-old media company, according to several people familiar with the matter. https://on.ft.com/4eZ6WbM

Worrying news coming out of the #WestBank where the #IDF have arrested Dr. Nasser Laham, editor-in-chief of the Palestinian Ma'an news agency. This continues a troubling pattern of suppressing press freedom in the region: www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...

IDF arrests Palestinian newspaper's editor-in-chief in West Bank, outlet reports

haaretz.com

Support independent media, support local media - you can also do this in countries where you don’t live but follow the news. Particularly countries where you complain about ‘the media’ not covering stories. The stories often are being covered - just not in the media you know about. 🌍

you've heard about the college kids who can't do anything without ChatGPT's help—but what about the students who oppose generative A.I. for myriad reasons and refuse to rely on it as a shortcut? well, I found and spoke with a few of them here: slate.com/life/2025/07...

What It’s Like to Be a Student Who Hates ChatGPT

“Everyone is using it”—almost everyone.

slate.com