Well, it's a little clearer now why billionaires are so invested in technology that produces better written emails.

every company in 2025

If you missed Hiram Morgan's talk on 'Anatomies of death: force famine in the Tudor conquest of Ireland', an recording is now available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hAI...

The private ownership claim to Lough Neagh (Loch nEathach) originates with Sir Arthur Chichester, English commander during the Nine Years’ War and one of the architects of the Plantation of Ulster. There was even an attempt by colonists to rename the lake ‘Lough Chichester’.

The far right is obsessed with Lord of the Rings and Musk keeps posting about "hobbits" because modern scientific racism owes more to fantasy worlds and gaming systems than genetic science, and they see both as effective mediums for right-wing propaganda www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Excellent paper on Digital Skills Development which as a by-product highlights the amount of digital support library workers are doing. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

It’s difficult to underestimate the extra burden that this is placing on our public libraries. For example, on a daily basis library workers are now filling the in-person/human service gap that billion euro banking institutions have abdicated from to maximise their profit margins.

A bit of good news: I think you'd all be pleasantly surprised by how resistant the undergrads are becoming to AI. Institutions have lost their minds on this front, but more and more the students themselves are saying "no" to this horribly corrosive technology.

"Relying on LLMs for literature summaries without independent verification could lead to the unknowing citation and perpetuation of false information." #AcWri #SciComm

Yet again, we can't afford to let LLMs become a source of epistemic grounding for society.

I’m very late to this but I tried to watch House of Guinness and found it almost impossible to finish the first episode. A Temple Bar fever dream as period drama.

every single tech idea is like “soon our robots will be capable of playing catch with your kid, freeing you up to spend more time working on your employers’ spreadsheets”

The administration “is currently pressuring OpenAI and other AI companies to make their models more conservative-friendly.”

One curious thing on this site about speaking out against the encroachment of LLMs is that inevitably you get accused of being anti-tech. I don’t hate technology. I’ve used machine learning in my own code before. But I also recognize that oligarchs are so hellbent on pushing this tech for a reason.

Guardian investigation into Facebook groups with 600k members in which the kind of extreme dehumanising language that socialises racist violence is rife. Facebook has become more permissive towards extreme content in the last year. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

“AI” isn’t a tool or technology or even a cluster of technologies with a misleading name. It’s the infrastructure at the foundation of a form of capitalism dependent on data brokering. We should be teaching our students about this and not teaching them about “responsible” use.

It is, far and away, the most challenging thing I’ve encountered since entering the academy. And that is saying a lot. I might be working on this but I keep putting it aside because I’m not medicated enough to describe how demoralizing it all is.

Alice Walker said, “When we find our place, we know. Everything else can seem a distraction. We settle in to enjoy the beauty of Life itself.”

NEW WIRED led the way in reporting on Elon Musk's efforts to dismantle the US government. My colleagues and I spoke to 100s of employees at dozens of agencies to understand what happened. This is the definitive story of DOGE as told by those who experienced it www.wired.com/story/oral-h...

More on the failures/erasures that ai chatbots introduce into library search tools aarontay.substack.com/p/the-ai-pow...

I really hope there's a correction on it saying why they edited the story. It was the right thing to do, obviously, but accountability for harmful writings is the right thing too.

I cannot tell you how grim the AI in higher ed situation is. Many of the students have completely surrendered to letting AI do their homework, badly, I might add. How do you fix this? Truly, what the hell do we do, beyond what grading can address, which isn't a solution?

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

This is it. Overwhelming anti-intellectualism. Everywhere, all the time

Power is the rock on which truth founders. The mainstream media, with a few exceptions, is a single-issue lobby group, whose purpose is to assert the rights of capital. Here's what I've learnt about the industry in 40 years in journalism. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

A college English class where they’re told to use AI to complete assignments. Why bother teaching at all? Especially the languages/literature. I’m sorry but I will judge any professor who does this, especially in fields like English and history

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...

Vacuous, generic and scattershot advice for incoming 1st years on the use of AI at university. Especially liking 'Chin recommends giving it class notes and asking it to generate practice exam questions.' Surely we can't be the only programme that supplies students with past & practice exams?

"On the last episode of his show before he was killed," Kirk told "his audience, falsely, that “one in 22 Black men will be a murderer in their lifetime” and that “by age of 23, half of all Black males have been arrested and not enough of them have been arrested.”

I wrote my own Charlie Kirk obituary, and about valuing truth over manners: www.thenation.com/article/poli...

Good news about the cutting-edge AI tools from the $3-trillion-dollar company.

AI's best use case will always be scams. It's scamtech, top to bottom. Everything about it is crooked. Its bedrock is theft and its legacy is the destruction of the environment, both physical and virtual. Even most of its 'legitimate' uses are a form of lying. "I wrote this." "I created this."

Blackwater fish kill: EPA finds creamery co-op wastewater exceeded permitted discharge limits

Microsoft copilot for Excel has a warning not to use it for “business critical” calculations because the answer may not be accurate. Would someone explain why I might *ever* want to use a spreadsheet where results are unreliable?

When the dust settles, and if universities have meaningfully survived, it will be worth asking how institutions usually so resistant to thoroughgoing change chose to leap with both feet into an untested technology they didn't understand and didn't know how to use.

I've been thinking a lot about how I really hate the implication that AI skeptics are luddites because most of the AI skeptics I know are relatively tech savvy while the biggest AI champions I know can barely use email

"As human, as accountable beings, why should we suffer this any longer?" - Daniel O'Connell re: the abolition of chattel slavery (Exeter Hall, 23/4/1831)

Stefan Zweig on borders is almost too much to bear

help my job says i have to do my job what do i do help

Obviously as a Tipperary man I’m overjoyed by the incredible win today, but as an aside can I just call on the Cork County Board, the GAA and the Gardai to address the flying of an overt symbol of white supremacy & racism on Hill 16 today. Crazy that this is still going on and apparently tolerated.

Ethno-nationalist who has amplified and endorsed far-right propaganda about a “non-white invasion” has not ruled himself out of running for the presidency.

BREAKING: The Supreme Court allows the Trump administration to move forward with the abolition of the Department of Education. It gives no explanation for its order. All three liberals dissent. www.documentcloud.org/documents/25... From Sotomayor's dissent:

Decades of mechanistic talk about university degrees as if they were bundles of 'skills' and 'prep' are about to be proved completely wrong (obviously). Want to get a real boost? Do History or English.

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

Sure but can you even put a price on plagiarizing the world's libraries for the explicit purpose of making everyone dumber

New research from MIT found that those who used ChatGPT can’t remember any of the content of their essays. Key takeaway: the product doesn’t suffer, but the process does. And when it comes to essays, the process *is* how they learn. arxiv.org/pdf/2506.088...

Relatedly, if you haven't been in an archives you have no idea just how much historical material is not online, not even a digital record of it. An LLM cannot research data it doesn't have. It can't even extrapolate where to find that material.

Klan Imperial Wizard H.W. Evans: "to the South of us thousands of Mexicans, many of them Communist, are waiting [for] a chance to cross the Rio Grande and glut the labour marts of the Southwest." (1926) Klan Grand Dragon David Duke launches the Klan Border Watch (1977):

Frederick Douglass (1869): “There are such things in the world as human rights. They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are external, universal, and indestructible.”

This is so important. Please read. I have been doing blue book exams and in class writing in my 150 person intro to pol theory class for the last couple of years, and it has worked really well. However…