You think I'm joking, but this Nolan literary adaptation about a man's cruel cunning and hubris at least features David Bowie as Nikola Tesla
scott b. weingart
@scottbot.net
past: circus performer; historian of science; librarian; grantmaker; chief data & evaluation officer at NEH. present: dad; resident scholar at dartmouth; chief technology officer at the library of virginia. personal account. https://scottbot.github.io
Kinda weird that Nolan's best movie—Batman vs. Wolverine (featuring Jareth, the Goblin King)—is entirely absent from the discourse.
Every night I tell my five year old he cannot stay up flipping through books, and every morning I find books in his bed. (The plan is working.)
Hetan Shah@hetanshah.bsky.social · 19h agoThe secret to gaining everything your heart desires
Kinda weird that Nolan's best movie—Batman vs. Wolverine (featuring Jareth, the Goblin King)—is entirely absent from the discourse.
you can just read the george eliot translation of spinoza's ethics for free online! georgeeliotarchive.org/files/origin...
georgeeliotarchive.org
This piece I wrote for 'Transactions' is really about how I write history - by creating an argument through the amassing of details that 'brim with undiluted life'.
Royal Historical Society@royalhistsoc.org · 5d ago"Details, in their singularity and idiosyncrasy, point to the capaciousness of human experience." New today in the Society's journal 'Transactions': Joe Moran 'On Detail in Historical Writing': bit.ly/44UMi8C Now available OA @joemoransblog.bsky.social @massobsarchive.bsky.social #Skystorians 1/2
So much of librarian ebook math is depressing. Ebook: $59.99 x 150 copies = ~$9,000 Eaudio: $89.99 x 150 copies = ~$13,500 Lending model: 24 months, then we need to re-buy Current holds: Ebook: 1,281 ~20 week wait Eaudio: 1,522 ~21 week wait This is a single title.
Robin Bradford@tuphlos.bsky.social · 2d agoBook 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.
"Detail is itself a kind of argument and thus, since beauty and elegance in writing derive from economy, a way of making a point without belabouring it." Hell yes. Great piece, it's going straight into the kit for advanced students and when doing writing training.
Royal Historical Society@royalhistsoc.org · 5d ago"Details, in their singularity and idiosyncrasy, point to the capaciousness of human experience." New today in the Society's journal 'Transactions': Joe Moran 'On Detail in Historical Writing': bit.ly/44UMi8C Now available OA @joemoransblog.bsky.social @massobsarchive.bsky.social #Skystorians 1/2
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 agoBook 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.
You can now access many more digital laws, not just the GDPR, at the UCL Massively Crossreferenced Digital Laws page: EU: GDPR, DSA, DMA, AI Act, UCPD, NIS2 UK: OSA, DPA18, ...+ Each article/para/recital, links to what-cites-it in int'l cases/statutes/guidance homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucqnmve/law...
michael veale@michae.lv · 6d agoParts of the GDPR are cited and interpreted by thousands of pieces of case law and guidance, but there's no easy and free way to find out what. We've made a tool which makes it super easy, for 13,000 citing documents, all in one place. More regulations to come! homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucqnmve/law...
I don't know if people who spent years squeezing full thoughts into 140 characters are better writers, but we're certainly worse people.
Sarah Hörst@planetdr.bsky.social · 3d agoHave you ever really even lived until you’ve hit the MyChart message character limit? (Jokes on them I spent A LOT of time on twitter)
My auto mechanic father would be ashamed at how long the process took, but I just changed my car battery for the first time in my adult life and I would appreciate some polite golf claps.
I love the term "folk forensics"—and indeed, many cloying tells of AI use—like lists of threes, words deemed statistically likely to be LLM output, and em dashes—are mere superficialities. Not only that, they distract us from the underlying logic of textual production in the 21st century.
Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 4d agoRaise 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.
Interesting to see so many comments on ycombinator/hn agreeing that the codes results of AI are often well short of what's needed for broad distribution, that coding needs more humans than ever, etc. Feels like we're in a reckoning moment here and elsewhere.
Hacker News Top Stories@hackernewsbot.bsky.social · 4d agoAI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job | Discussion
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
So, so many times this week have I almost posted this. Scott did it for me. Copyright is the root legal scourge that did this. In particular, the US copyright ruling that it's legal to scan a book, IF you destroy it. Yes, AI companies are evil. But copyright rulings mandated the destruction.
scott b. weingart@scottbot.net · 7d agoCopyright 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."
Okay I gotta hand it to the illustrator on this one for sorta combining Minard's visualization of the loss of troops during Napoleon's Russian invasion with Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa. Figuring out how to combine those in a viz has gotta be a bucket list item for dataviz people.
Dr Ian McCormick@wokestudies.bsky.social · 6d agoHandy Guide to the death count in The Odyssey. #Homer #epic #film #Nolan
For a citation analysis project in 2010, I checked the bibliographies of 100 random papers from different fields. Only three of those articles had bibs entirely free of formatting errors, and *many* had pretty glaring errors (like journal name). To consider when using bibs to check for AI.
will pooley@willpooley.bsky.social · 6d agono doubt im a bad academic but i don’t doubt that someone who went through my work with a fine tooth comb would find some howlers. a french reader pointed out to me once that I got the name of the main archives I worked in for my first book wrong in the abbreviations/ front matter! mea culpalol
My aunt's last name is Wajc, pronounced Weiss. It's all a trap.
Neon Genesis Ewangelion@ewacat.bsky.social · 6d agoi love it when a Polish word or name with ł is around because it is a trap. i respect languages with traps
Okay I gotta hand it to the illustrator on this one for sorta combining Minard's visualization of the loss of troops during Napoleon's Russian invasion with Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa. Figuring out how to combine those in a viz has gotta be a bucket list item for dataviz people.
Dr Ian McCormick@wokestudies.bsky.social · 6d agoHandy Guide to the death count in The Odyssey. #Homer #epic #film #Nolan
I've shared this one here before, but if Spike the vampire could be reformed without magically getting a soul, that means Buffy and her vampire slayer gang were going out every night to commit extrajudicial murder.
Zach Weinersmith@zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 10mo agoDo you have any extremely niche, but serious, ethical stances?
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."
Half the planet is having a massive fight about how to correctly interpret an Ancient Greek poem but go ahead, close some more humanities departments.
This is excellent by @eve.gd, as always: disclosure on what parts of his site, and the workflow to get there, use AI (some of the code, some voice-to-text on account of rheumatoid arthritis), and what parts don't involve AI (every bit of text / writing).
Martin Paul Eve@eve.gd · last wk."I have no plans whatsoever to abandon writing by hand and brain. I strongly believe that we need to continue asserting human voices, amid the cacophony of 'slop'. If we stop writing and thinking for ourselves, then what is the point?" I added an AI use/automation disclosure page. eve.gd/ai/
yikes
Simon Willison@simonwillison.net · last wk.Hugging Face just published a highly detailed technical account of OpenAI's accidental cyberattack on their systems - it's wild how sophisticated this was: huggingface.co/blog/agent-i... Wrote up some of my own notes here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/28/...
BTW, this strikes me as an easy case for strict liability. It’s like a wild animal or ultrahazardous activity. You train and evaluate a frontier agentic model at your own risk, and if it escapes you are liable for all harm that it causes to others.
Simon Willison@simonwillison.net · last wk.Hugging Face just published a highly detailed technical account of OpenAI's accidental cyberattack on their systems - it's wild how sophisticated this was: huggingface.co/blog/agent-i... Wrote up some of my own notes here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/28/...
these nerds seem bizarrely smug over mastering Kant's third critique
The largest digital camera ever built has started filming a ten-year movie of the universe. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s 3,200-megapixel camera is now photographing the entire southern sky every few nights, producing roughly ten terabytes of data per night. buff.ly/MtqzYCy #ShareGoodNewsToo
Data | Rubin Observatory
Rubin Observatory will generate more data in ten years than everything humans have ever written. Learn how scientists will manage the deluge of data.
buff.ly
It's true! Working with brilliant thinkers and writers like @electrostani.bsky.social is the best part of my job. ✨ If you're on sabbatical this fall, consider partnering with a developmental editor (like me :)). I'd love to talk with you about how I can help you move your project forward.
Amardeep Singh@electrostani.bsky.social · 2w agoI do want to give a special shout-out to @halperta.bsky.social who worked with me as a developmental editor. Hannah's feedback and conversation were key in helping me figure out what this book should be *about*. If you're working on a book, consider working with Hannah! halperta.com/categories/m...