This is the part that breaks my heart. "Generative AI has broken the sacred contract between professors & students: that the professors are there to teach and the students are there to learn. The understanding has been broken...That’s a very deep part of the grief” www.chronicle.com/article/thes...

These Professors Are Retiring Early. AI Was the Last Straw.

What is the point of teaching, they ask, if students are just pretending to learn?

chronicle.com

I love how the same people who say "Chat GPT can't do math" also freak out at it hacking into other companies' computers. Is it worthless or is it so advanced it's threatening?

My MLS students would like you to know that if you don't post a salary with your job posting, they aren't likely to apply.

Super intriguing that my university's head of tech today asked AI users to use Qwen running on institutional infrastructure instead of commercial LLMs ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini that "incur token based charges" in order to "significantly save money." US big tech LLMs getting too pricy for HE now?

drive-in theater, buckroe beach mini golf, hampton, virginia, 1985

not following the Hank Green stuff too closely, but my understanding is he asked an AI to do some research on something and then followed every reference to determine accuracy and quality, and then wrote whatever he was writing himself, which tbh, doesn't sound that bad? Maybe I'm missing something.

I don't think I'm gonna vote for anyone for mayor, to be honest. This pains me, because I love voting.

Republicans love pushing vocational-only education instead of comprehensive-education because they want a healthy supply of low-cost servants and less competition for the professional and boss jobs they want their own kids to have.

Seth Cotlar@sethcotlar.bsky.social · yesterday

In a college sociology class in the late 1980s I was assigned a Marxist analysis of education that argued that the US education system is designed primarily to produce efficient workers for the labor market. And now Trump’s Department of Education is just tweeting it out.

Stopping data centres: Beyond Hamilton web panel discussion this Fri 8pm ET us06web.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

apparently there's *another* sequel to the Wicker Man coming out and I'm like dude did you even see "The Wicker Tree"

That's what taxes are, man. That's the definition of taxes. "You are subsidizing things you might never use" man shut the fuck up. My taxes currently subsidize like oil company exec private jets, you think I'm upset at low-income people eating inexpensive bananas?

USA TODAY Opinion@usatodayopinion.usatoday.com · 2d ago

Opinion: Mamdani's idea may sound appealing, but it's NYC taxpayers who will take the hit, subsidizing discounts they may never even use.

lol

evergreen

Max Kennerly@maxkennerly.bsky.social · 2d ago

The richest person in the world, an avowed white supremacist, today again posted "the next step is getting rid of 'source code' entirely and just making an efficient binary directly with AI" because he has no idea how anything works, not even the basics of industries he is in.

This thread (which Robin pursues down a couple different, useful forks) is a great overview of the mess that is eBook licenses for libraries, especially 24-month expiring licenses for books in series! (Context: cost per circ = cost per each time it's checked out.)

Robin Bradford@tuphlos.bsky.social · 2d ago

Book 1 is $59.99 went out 4 times. Cost per circ $14.99 Book 2 is $59.99 went out 4 times. Cost per circ $14.99 I'm not buying book 3. If the cost per circ was $5 or $3, I wouldn't mind. But that is WAY too high, especially for a thing that expires after 2 yrs.

Brilliant letter from Stuart Thompson to Jeremy Clarkson about his comments that benefit claimants should write weekly thank you letters to tax payers detailing how they spend their benefits each week.

this is an interesting interview and if i were clipping it for social media i would have excerpted "We're still a place where we don't downrank links. We love sending traffic to people. We send two million clicks a day to publishers" rather than the part that'll just piss people off lol

The Verge@theverge.com · 2d ago

Bluesky's new CEO Toni Schneider on the platform's reputation for being a liberal bubble: "Yes, we definitely want that to change. It is already changing. It certainly wasn’t designed to attract one specific group of people."

Every time I see a civilian go "we love librarians" I think ... yeah, you don't mean me.

Bluesky's new CEO Toni Schneider on the platform's reputation for being a liberal bubble: "Yes, we definitely want that to change. It is already changing. It certainly wasn’t designed to attract one specific group of people."

I've mentioned in the past that I sponsored a local female race car driver and put pro-library messages on the car. They did a "pit party" where kids could come through, see the cars, etc. Andrea got book stickers made so all the kids could sign her car. Truly some of my best library outreach work.

I'm a simple man and I am delighted and amused by extremely long cables.

It’s hard to explain but tv was better when you couldn’t watch the show you wanted whenever you wanted to watch it and most of the shows were worse and the TVs were worse and the entire experience was worse, that’s when it was better

Copyright law was written for a different era. The rules haven't kept up with what's actually possible or useful. That tension shows up everywhere, not just in libraries. We need better ways to update systems that no longer serve the people.

I think the cure for my depression is for depressing stuff to stop happening

This article is hilarious. First, panic over a reseller buying used books for destructive scanning by AI companies because they must be rare books, but turns out none are particularly rare, booksellers are happy to get rid of them, and the reseller has nothing to do with AI cos or digitization

The Guardian@theguardian.com · 4d ago

‘More than just objects’: Australian book sellers raise alarm over ‘horrific’ destruction of rare titles to feed AI

We spent decades treating the Turing test as a threshold for machine intelligence. Then language models crossed it so fast and so casually that everyone decided the threshold had never mattered.

Adverb@adverb.bsky.social · 5d ago

We really invented language models that are more verbally fluent than most famous scifi ai on spaceships (basically zero to hard to tell in five years) & people's response is to say how boring that is

Ridicule as praxis is a very shitty way to be, and I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer a big old service of slop if those were the only two alternatives.

Raise your hand if you look forward to a cultural future that consists of policing every artist, performer, entertainer, or author whom you love and admire for the slightest whiff of “AI,” defined by vibes and whatever set of folk forensics is currently in circulation.

I love that advice that’s like “be kind to yourself, treat yourself like you treat your friends, with kindness, be supportive” and I’m always like wow that’s such great advice for other people. I however am a piece of shit

I work at a public library. People who want to use AI seem to have no trouble doing so. People who don't want to use AI have a harder time. I crowdsourced and then finalized this document "How to disable or avoid intrusive AI" and then gave it a short URL: notoai.org Please pass along if it's useful

Fantastic paper demonstrating how LLM editing is gradually distorting our writing and the way we think to write: arxiv.org/abs/2603.18161

How LLMs Distort Our Written Language

Large language models (LLMs) are used by over a billion people globally, most often to assist with writing. In this work, we demonstrate that LLMs not only alter the voice and tone of human writing, b...

arxiv.org