Jim Clifford
@jimclifford.bsky.social
Professor of History, University of Saskatchewan Co-Editor of Historical Methods. Environmental and digital historian of London, Canada and the British World in the 19th century. #dyslexic
Petty vandalism against the synagogue in Saskatoon is pathetic and unacceptable. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
Saskatoon synagogue vandalized during prayer service | CBC News
Some members of Saskatoon's Jewish community are feeling uneasy after eggs were thrown at the Congregation Agudas Israel synagogue and vehicles parked there during Saturday's Shabbat service.
cbc.ca
Half the discourse this summer has been about the Second World War and half about Homeric Greece but yes there’s clearly no future for students trained in history
Glen O'Hara@gsoh31.bsky.social · 4d agoSo it's farewell to the History subject area at the University of Hertfordshire, not the first nor the last to go. One of the best departments in the country, just extinguished like a snap of the fingers. Think of the waste. (1/2)
Funded Masters of Arts (Island Studies) position University of Prince Edward Island “Island Metabolisms and the Genesis of the Canadian Agri‑Food System" Supervisor - @joshmacfadyen.bsky.social , Director of the UPEI GeoREACH Lab niche-canada.org/2026/07/24/f... #envhist #aghist #PEI
Funded Masters of Arts (Island Studies) position University of Prince Edward Island
Funded Masters of Arts (Island Studies) position studying “Island Metabolisms and the Genesis of the Canadian Agri‑Food System.”
niche-canada.org
To the risk of being cancelled here on Bluesky, I'm sharing an interview with @leotranscribes.bsky.social on using LLMs in historical research. I hope to have sufficiently highlighted the necessary precautions. Glad to read your thoughts on the matter!
Thiago Krause on HTR, AI Agents and Archival Discovery
A historian working across 100+ archives on how HTR and AI agents surface documents no catalogue indexes — and why he now reads more manuscripts, not fewer.
tryleo.ai
I’m very frustrated with @anthropic.com for their attempts to curtail competition by attacking open weight models. I’m equally frustrated with knee jerk reactions on BlueSky about them (a) breaking copyright law by downloading digital books and (b) following copyright law by shredding paper books.
Do I get angry that Anthropic bought those books and therefore *can* use them for their private-sector research? No, the part that pisses me off is that we in the public sector also bought them and we can’t—essentially because we a) don’t count as a single organization and b) are timid.
My secret, Cap, is that I'm *always* angry about old books. For instance, here's a tiny slice of the millions of books 1931-1986 that have no commercial value, that are digitized, but that we're unable to use in large-scale research because they are illegal to share or display.
Copyright laws, digital distribution deals, & publishing monopolies are the reason destructive book scanning is putting books at risk. I get why folks are angry at AI companies buying books to destroy them. However, these issues predate them and hang a lot on books being subject to "market forces."
Ngl i keep seeing this blamed on AI companies but this is just copyright law regarding scanning in action
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.
100% this. In fairness, a significant slice of humanities profs have actually responded "yup, we said language could do this without subjectivity 50 yrs ago"
aly@aly.codes · 2w agoI come from the quant-y side of ethereal hippie pothead culture theory which makes it amusing to see humanities ppl who have been teaching "everything we do is mediated by language" be incredulous at what language generating machines can do with structured data presented in a common syntax
🚩 My 2010 PhD thesis is ‘70% AI’ I ran my 2010 PhD thesis through an AI detector. It flagged 70% as AI, then tried to sell me a ‘humanise’ fix. Either I am a time traveller, or these tools do not work. Link to my thesis in the comments to try yourself. #AIDetection #HigherEd 🧪 #AI
I’ve been meaning to write this post for a few months. I’m happy to see Louis Hyman beat me to it. Claude can do most of the work to run jobs on your campus’ shared cluster. open.substack.com/pub/computat...
Claude on Cluster
Or how to use Claude to manage your university's cluster resources
open.substack.com
There is a lot of noise about AI and data centres. @hannahritchie.bsky.social has done a very good job pulling together the available information. ourworldindata.org/how-much-ene...
How much energy do data centers and artificial intelligence use?
Data centers consume around 1.5% of global electricity, but demand is very geographically concentrated.
ourworldindata.org
Great neighbour… Trump to Impose 50% Tariff on Many Canadian Goods www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/b...
Trump to Impose 50% Tariff on Many Canadian Goods
The administration will use an untested legal provision to put significant duties on Canadian exports, reigniting a clash with one of America’s biggest trading partners.
nytimes.com
It always felt likely that early concerns over AI electricity demand as usage scaled failed to account for armies of engineers working on efficiency. Maybe Jevon’s paradox means usage grows faster than efficiency, but I expect efficiency gains will continue. www.cnbc.com/2026/07/20/a...
Alphabet stock pops on report it's developing a more efficient AI chip
The new AI chip, called "Frozen v2," would embed parts of Gemini's architecture directly into the silicon, according to the report.
cnbc.com
How long would it take for the Chinese to spin up a Hugging Face clone? Or maybe this is Canada’s chance to gain a bigger foothold in a field that started here.
Ted Underwood@tedunderwood.com · 2w agoWave of concern 2 wks ago, based on Reuters story, that China would stop exporting open models. Turned out to be a discussion; didn't happen. Now I see an Axios story (and I guess some X posts?) that the US is discussing banning open models. Again I feel like "discussing" is an important word.+
I didn’t really have a horse in this race after cheering for Canada’s most impressive men’s team in history. But I became a Spain fan after terrible sportsmanship at the end of the England game and it was super fun to see Argentina lose. www.nytimes.com/athletic/745...
Argentina disgraced themselves, and the World Cup final, with their charmless petulance
Argentina's passion was an asset but too often in this World Cup it has spilled over into distasteful aggression
nytimes.com
I think David is right here, and it reminds us to distinguish a) emotional impact of a model solving abstract problems better than I do from b) job-market impact. On (b) I am firmly a normal-technology guy. Human decisions and human relationships are needed to get things done. +
conputer dipshit@davidcrespo.bsky.social · 2w agosurely some fields really are in trouble, but worth noting software engineering was hit with all this way before anyone else, and senior software engineers do not have any less work to do (unclear about entry level: looks like some decline in employment but not a collapse)
Fable is a powerful research assistant for history with a deep knowledge of the historiography and the ability to parse messy historical data. It still has some of the flaws of all LLMs. It stops before the job is done and is overconfident. But it has the potential to transform historical research.
Ted Underwood@tedunderwood.com · 2w agoFor me the Fable-class models crossed a threshold from “That’s clever, and is the sort of technical detail I might have expected a human reviewer to catch” to “Huh, not sure I would have thought of taking this that direction, and it’s a real improvement.” Ngl, it’s been disconcerting.
For me the Fable-class models crossed a threshold from “That’s clever, and is the sort of technical detail I might have expected a human reviewer to catch” to “Huh, not sure I would have thought of taking this that direction, and it’s a real improvement.” Ngl, it’s been disconcerting.
It won’t stop at math. Machines getting better at thinking through abstract problems than we are is going to be an emotional crisis for lots of people. I wish we were engaging that directly instead of having ridiculous shadow-debates about GPUs’ inherent thirst for water.
Zach Weinersmith@zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 2w agoVery worried about this sort of thing hitting more broadly:
This is fascinating stuff. The British Empire continually shifting people between continents - some more voluntarily than others. Here's a little family story of displacement: richardfjbrown.co.uk/2024/08/20/t...
The Lady Kennaway’s last voyage
This is a family story, an unexceptional but striking vignette of the British Empire. On 20 November 1857, The Lady Kennaway made anchor at East London, South Africa, having sailed from Plymouth, E…
richardfjbrown.co.uk
Jim Clifford@jimclifford.bsky.social · last mo.An interactive atlas of the British Empire's civil service: ~16,000 Colonial & India Office careers (1820–1966), every move an arc across the map. Rebuilt from the digitized Indian and Colonial Office Lists with a knowledge graph. WIP, feedback welcome: jimclifford.ca/col_matching/
The Apollo mission, famously sponsored by McDonald’s.
Cato Institute@cato.org · 3w ago"The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus." — Milton Friedman. They were driven by individual liberty and free markets. And they always will be.
I’d like to see the mile back in the Olympics. They run on a 400m track. 4 laps and a bit, feels like a better distance than 1500m and has the history of the 4 minute mile. 3:42.66 is crazy fast.
The New York Times@nytimes.com · 3w agoBreaking News from @theathletic.com: The Olympian Josh Kerr broke the world record for fastest mile, which had stood for 27 years.
Our Timber Colonialism special issue of the Journal of Historical Geography has been assembled. Eight research articles and an introduction. The papers range from the White Sea to Sierra Leone, Lingít Aaní, Labrador, and southern Patagonia. #envhist www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...
Journal of Historical Geography | Timber Colonialism | ScienceDirect.com by Elsevier
Timber colonialism emphasizes the specific nature of timber as a natural resource and commodity. Timber is a renewable resource, but trees grow slower than annual crops, and forests are complex ecosystems. Moreover, forests are a lot more than a natural resource. They are essential for biodiversity and help stabilize the climate. Forests are culturally significant for local populations, and in many cases, they provide humans with sustainable resources, including food, medicines and timber. Timber colonialism analytically encompasses two separate but often interrelated phenomena: settler colonialism and colonial extractivism. It pivots around four factors: colonial relationships, global markets and consumption, environmental change, and local social circumstances.
sciencedirect.com
I just finished The Soul of the New Machine by Tracy Kidder. It is wild how similar the concerns were 45 years ago. AI, job loss, increased control for management, power of tech leaders, and just about every other concerns we have today.
One of the best examples of the bad faith deflection strategy used whenever the very real consequences of their assault on climate action are plain for all to see: www.reuters.com/business/env...
Smoke, fire, floods: US faces triple extreme summer weather threats
Wildfire smoke blanketed the eastern U.S. from the Great Lakes to Washington, D.C. on Friday, floodwaters tore through Texas's Hill Country for a third day, and new fires erupted in the Pacific North...
reuters.com
Prof Chris Jackson@seismatters.bsky.social · 3w agoIs this a joke?
This is a brilliant new book by @ejonesimhotep.bsky.social
Edward Jones-Imhotep@ejonesimhotep.bsky.social · 3mo agoIt's publication day for The Broken Machine (@mitpress.bsky.social)! The book explores the intertwined histories of breaking machines, social order, and the self in the modern Atlantic, revealing how failing technologies have also shaped our world. mitpress.mit.edu/978026255334... #sts #histtech
I am not a climate scientist but when I was a kid the number of times we couldn’t go outside because of Canadian wildfire smoke was zero times