The fallacy that University leaders pushing AI are falling into is thinking that the point of undergraduate research is to find things out. It isn't. What students find out is typically already generally known. The point of undergraduate research is to learn how to find things out.

But is it fascism? Do they really yearn for apocalypse? Isn't that polarizing? Shouldn't we be nice to them? We made a short video so folks can hear the end timers in their own words and judge for themselves: www.youtube.com/watch?v=aK2n...

How modern fascism works | End Times Fascism | Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor

YouTube video by Naomi Klein

youtube.com

Feels like universities might also want to wait to liquidate hundreds of years of educational practice before transforming themselves into single-corporation stewarded data centers.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: "For too long the industry lied" about AI risks

The head of the artificial intelligence company calls the exponential rate of AI developments a "warning sign," with risks for humanity, and says, "We need to slow down." He talks with "Sunday Morning...

cbsnews.com

"People are really mad and however mad you are, it’s not enough. Because there is something so profound about no longer believing in the future, about seeing no value in our shared home, in the natural world. They’re traitors to creation.” www.theguardian.com/books/2026/s...

Naomi Klein: ‘Extreme wealth has a deranging effect. It turns you into a supremacist’

She’s tackled neoliberalism and the digital world, now the writer and activist is taking on tech billionaires. She explains how the super-rich are capitalising on climate and financial chaos in pursui...

theguardian.com

Friday night additions to the Interactive Map of the Japanese Empire: 1) administrative units for French Indochina 2) Burma railway lines (no animation or stations yet) 3) Japanese railway lines and stations (1930 and 1942) thanks to the dataset from 国土数値情報ダウンロードサイト froginawell.net/reference/ja...

The conflation of AI-critical with technophobic is tactical & infuriating. While accusing us of just knee-jerk hating tech, they’re enshittifying search engines, degrading digital archives, sundowning or enclosing popular tools, etc. We were all happily using that tech!

Aparna Nair@disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 2w ago

The thing about the people who insist that AI will "revolutionise" my teaching in history classrooms if I would just be open-minded is that there is existing tech that I do already teach with. I use digital mapping tools to map the Black Death, annotation technology, 3D printing to build exhibits.

Memories of German colonialism in the Pacific: Veranstaltung von „Brot für die Welt“ thematisiert Lage in Bougainville mit historischem Bezug zur deutschen Kolonialherrschaft. @kilderbenhauser.bsky.social @he-mel.bsky.social @misereor.bsky.social @uni-jena.de

Fixed that for you, BBC.

Seeing older people contentedly watching very obviously AI generated dramas on their phones is unnerving.

This is the culture Sam Altman has talked openly about creating. It seems entirely likely that it’s the only kind of culture tech billionaires is really capable of envisaging, because it’s the only medium in which they can exist. Why other people are still interested is for them to explain

Boston Review@bostonreview.bsky.social · last wk.

“Mathematics only makes sense as a gift economy. It has no trade secrets. Substituting a monetizable ersatz culture for the one evolved through historical experience is a particularly insidious form of knowledge collapse.” Mathematician Michael Harris on the AI companies coming for math:

A new version of ChatGPT is about to drop. Academics like @alexhanna.bsky.social and Emily Bender have been pointing out for literal years that these scare tactics about how powerful and scary AI is actually work as marketing. At this point, being this gullible is a choice.

Eric Lipton NYT@ericlipton.nytimes.com · last wk.

OpenAI’s top scientist, in a blog post on Sunday, warns that artificial intelligence is evolving so rapidly that it is becoming increasingly difficult for humans to understand and control it. Here is the post: openai.com/index/an-ali... And a couple of small excerpts--clear warnings.

Timeline cleanser in case you need one: here in Hong Kong we have pilons warning about the slippery wet ground that’re shaped like banana peels.

This is why people vote for fascists— they’ve already seized the middle. And, it’s not just about the dangers of “appeasement”: their views already inform how their many of their Labour/Christian Democrat/Democratic/otherwise centrist opponents see the world.

George Monbiot@georgemonbiot.bsky.social · last wk.

80 year-olds with pro-Palestine signs: arrested as terrorists. Greens planning to block a road, to highlight an existential crisis: sent down for years. Masked far-right thugs blocking roads and ports, using intimidation, obstruction & threatening behaviour: no arrests. The real two-tier policing.

80 year-olds with pro-Palestine signs: arrested as terrorists. Greens planning to block a road, to highlight an existential crisis: sent down for years. Masked far-right thugs blocking roads and ports, using intimidation, obstruction & threatening behaviour: no arrests. The real two-tier policing.

How nationalists, religious fundamentalists and tech titans turned their backs on a shared future: ft.trib.al/CNQUWbK

No arrests for this by the way

Lee Hurley@hleehurley.com · 2w ago

"activists" lol This is what they call trans people just existing.

The idea that classrooms are chiefly spaces for product testing, and that it is irresponsible pedagogy not to enforce this, is both cynical and vile, and “fuck off” is a cogent response from any professional educator to any non-teaching salescreep or tech-but-not-subject-matter expert who voices it.

As a Canadian, living somewhere with palm trees continues to freak me out a bit.

This kind of report should be accompanied by a press conference—not with some low-level bureaucrat, but with the prime minister. Flanked by all of his ministers. In prime time, with technical briefings. This report says we're facing unimaginable disaster, yet we didn't even get a briefing.

Canada's National Observer@nationalobserver.com · 2w ago

Environmental groups say there’s a reason why the federal government quietly released its latest climate report, which finds that average temperatures in Canada are set to go up by at least 3.5 C by the end of the century.

What is the point of trying so hard to maintain your academic freedom if you’re going to abandon the entire educational enterprise, sacrifice the undergrads to the tech companies, and then light your reputation on fire?

Harvard Humanities Faculty Push Back on Deming’s Call for AI Use in Writing Courses | The Harvard Crimson

Harvard faculty in the humanities and social sciences expressed broad concern over an email Harvard College Dean David J. Deming sent students Wednesday suggesting that artificial intelligence be inte...

thecrimson.com

Do any US/Japanese history folk know anything about the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi's consulate in Hakodate? All I've got to go on is that it opened in 1871, meaning, it would've been built to serve Hawaiians in Hokkaido -- probably whalers, but who knows -- rather than Japanese migrants going to Hawaiʻi.

Attacks on permanent residency seem to be a thing among peer nations. This is NZ, the UK is about to make it tougher to qualify, Japan is also making it tougher or even impossible to qualify, the United States' new "green card memo" is a way to force applicants to essentially self-deport...

Jeff Smith@sumisu3.bsky.social · 2w ago

This is complete and utter bullshit. I travelled a lot (70%) for work couldn’t meet the residency requirements for citizenship until Covid stopped my travel. My home, my family, and all my tax payments to NZ yet with these morons I would have lost my PR even. www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/...

Fyre Festival imperialism

Rachel Rees@rachel-rees.bsky.social · 2w ago

as.ft.com/r/01f9157d-8...

Interactive map updates: Added train lines and stations for 1930 vs 1942 for Korea and Taiwan (근대 철도 DB & 日治時期鐵路分布圖 as foundation) + "Train Tools" feature, currently only for Taiwan, lets you animate the rail network (according to a 1936 列車時刻表. froginawell.net/reference/ja...

I was surprised to learn that the author of Hyperpolitics is "only 32". Reading it, I fully expected him to be a Rémy Girard-esque aging, cretonistic academic Marxist who survives in neoliberal late capitalist academia by escaping into his own hedonistic tendencies and undeserved self-assuredness.

Meet the man whose groundbreaking book is being devoured by the left

Anton Jäger has been lauded for his exceptional ability to make sense of these strange political times – and he’s only 32. The writer and academic explains why we’re living in an age of hyperpolitics

theguardian.com

New book: Susan L. Burns, "Mapping Medical Modernity: Urban Space and Public Health in Tokyo, 1868-1920" (University of Pittsburgh Press). upittpress.org/books/978082...

I think the class of school administrators (not just in higher ed) who act fast to insulate core pedagogical functions from AI will reap major rewards for their trouble. In a few years, there will be an extremely stark difference between people who used AI in school and people who are competent

Anna Kornbluh@annakornbluh.bsky.social · 4w ago

cognitive sabotage, you can ban it extra credit to U Chicago for bans on professional AND undergrad programs; smart SLACs are going to market AI free campuses soon chicagomaroon.com/53262/news/s...

Abandoning one’s child on a mountainside really ought to be taken a little more serious than this. 🫤

Man leaves young son on Mount Fuji before ascending Japan’s highest peak

Boy, seven, had complained of feeling tired so father left him with snacks and a soft drink and continued his climb

theguardian.com

A clip of the opera in Mi'kmaq, with komqwejwi'kasikl (Mi'kmaq hieroglyphics) captions- excited to see this tonight!

Rafael Payare and Emma Pennell performs "You can die properly now" — with the OSM

YouTube video by medici.tv

youtube.com

Robbie Richardson@londonmikmaq.bsky.social · 2mo ago

My cousin Michelle Sylliboy wrote the words in Mi’kmaq language for an opera being performed in Edinburgh next month! So cool.

University of Ghent waking up to the fact that having a "race realist" on staff with stated intentions to become a professor of "eugenics and race science" is not ideal for their PR ambitions. They were fine with him 3 weeks ago though, so this investigation is the direct result of public pressure.

Steve Peers@stevepeers.bsky.social · 4w ago

Racist Zero under investigation by his current employer www.thenational.scot/news/2648073...