US Trade Dominance Will Soon Begin to Crack by Cory Doctorow https://www.wired.com/story/us-trade-dominance-will-begin-to-crack/

As 2025 winds (or stumbles?) toward its end, my wishes for next year sound much like my wishes for any day of any year: - Cities, nations, provinces/states, etc. all elect more women to leadership. - The sensible people who exist between extremist polarities (in other words, 80% of humanity) […]

The context really, really does matter. Yes, 764.6 billion liters globally is a lot of water by itself. But do you know how much water is used? Here's the comparison chart. Please note that I had to increase #LLM #water use by 10x, to 7646 billion liters, *to make #AI even visible.*

Jordan Kunni (@JordanKonek): "That’s her when she was 17. Walking into her igloo, that her dad made. It went viral in 2018. She’s now 93 years old." | nitter https://nitter.net/JordanKonek/status/2003158001050669140#m #inuit #igloo

Around 30% of Canadian renters spend 50% of income on rent: survey https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2025/12/21/canadian-renters-30-percent-half-income-rent-survey/

I am frustrated by how all machine learning has been conflated into this heated AI discourse There is good DH work that’s being dismissed as "AI slop" when it shouldn’t be The ubiquity & (political, economic, social, technical) power of these tools mean scholars *must* understand & teach them+

New #taskmaster tonight!!!!!!!!11

Paying for healthcare is the stupidest thing ever. My poor old moms has been laid up with a crook back for weeks now and is desperate for relief. Her doc put her on a wait list for an MRI which might not be until April next year. Meanwhile, she has the ‘option’ of shelling out $1300 bucks and […]

OK, if you're a huge nerd who spends Saturdays online too much I'm sure you've heard about the NIST NTP servers failing and being taken offline¹ ² ³. If you're in Canada, please know that our own NRC offers stratum-2 time sources as a government-funded public service⁴ & monitored/auth'd […]

This might be the most perfect meme in Canadian politics right now. #stephenharper #conservatives #cpc #lpc

*Am I going to follow the time-honored Tabasco Company into their nutty and overpriced brand-extensions, well of course I am #averyisland #louisiana

I watch most of the #linus and Dirk shows but this weeks from #oss #japan is a good one. It's hard to avoid mentions of #ai in the #tech world but Linus is at his pragmatic best here. I liked him pointing out that smarter #compilers have made us 1000x more productive but even if #llm's make us […]

‘This is preventative medicine.’ Toronto hospital starts $1-million fund to help patients with rent Cash strapped hospital system knows it's easier to house people than to pay for healthcare (and cops). So why aren't we housing and feeding people? Gift link […]

The virus of fake science is spreading: LLMs are hallucinating references that scholars are citing, and editors of real scholarly journals are accepting in published articles […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Here's the document release you were waiting for today! The UNIX V4 tape! https://archive.org/details/utah_unix_v4_raw #retrocomputing

I wrote about trying out LLM models for document transcription, inspired by @benwbrum (and Sara!) https://cdrhdev.unl.edu/log/2025/comparing-ai-models-for-document-transcription/

if you're a DH person (or humanities and data science person), our history dept participates in the DH and Data Sci specializations at the MA level, we're a leading dept of public history, I'm starting up a wee digital archaeology lab, and maybe you might find this interesting? […]

"The Attorney General shall take all necessary steps to complete the rulemaking process related to rescheduling marijuana to Schedule III of the CSA in the most expeditious manner..." - Executive order signed by President Trump […]

This *wild* story of an AI vending machine is worth reading, but this part—where the journalists convince Claudius it’s a communist vending machine, cannot help but recall Fredric Brown’s 1942 story "Etaoin Shrdlu"—in which a sentient linotype machine sets Marx in type & becomes a communist

Did Trudeau Destroy Canada's Consensus on Immigration? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCTHj6GO13U Betteridge's Law of Headlines says that answer should be no. In this case, it's actually a bit different: the Trudeau ministry broke the old #immigration system, and it seems that a new consensus […]

Forbes: Who Knew Rocker Joe Walsh Is A Hoarder And Ham Radio Operator? A Chat https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimclash/2025/12/12/who-knew-rocker-joe-walsh-is-a-hoarder-and-ham-radio-operator-a-chat/ #hamradio #theeagles #joewalsh

The Bondi Beach massacre would have been much worse without Australia's gun laws that forced the assailants to have to use a bolt-action rifle, writes @ryanlcooper.com. prospect.org/2025/12/17/a...

I knew a few people who worked at Mozilla in ‘good times’ and Twitter ‘after’ and they all said Mozilla on a regular day was a much more confusing and toxic org. I think Mozilla will go down in history as the one that squandered every opportunity and chased the wrong thing

So: #mozilla's got the next CEO with a corporate background determined to make yet another futile attempt to beat big tech at their own game, when in fact the obvious way to secure relevance and a good market share for #firefox is, to combine privacy and security with good usability on all […]

Ach ja #x #bluesky #fediverse

Mozilla has a new CEO which: - Has been at Mozilla for less than a year - Has no prior open source experience (but well in "fintech" and "real estate") - Has a MBA (aka "brainworm diploma") - Is all-in on AI That’s exactly the kind of profile the whole community has been waiting for.

... despite CMU's decision it looks like the code4lib 20215 conference IS ON https://lists.clir.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind2512&L=CODE4LIB&P=40998 in #philly

GitHub Actions charging per build minute for *self-hosted-runners*? Shit's about to hit the fan lol

All national cuisines are myths: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/15/myth-traditional-italian-cuisine-food The “Italian” cuisine that conquered the world was not the one Italians carried with them when they emigrated. They had no such cuisine to carry. Those who left Italy […]

DHers are humanists first and foremost. We help. We collaborate. We are erudite. We are boundary crossers, nomads, migrants. We are translators. We are debunkers of hype and myth. We are memory workers of the hybrid record. We manifest beyond prose. One thing we are not is your enemy! Stop.

"David Coletto’s latest Abacus poll is recommended reading for Liberals who might be prone to holiday-season euphoria. Abacus shows Liberals and Conservatives in a dead heat, Mark Carney’s approval ahead of Pierre Poilievre’s but sagging, and the Conservatives ahead among voters under 60. Most […]

Epic Games give away games every December. As per tradition, a leak of those titles has also appeared. This is the leak. 11th — Hogwarts Legacy 18th — Jurassic World: Evolution 2 19th — Desperados 3 20th — Total War: Warhammer 21st — Tropico 5 22nd — Chicken Police — Paint it Red! 23rd — Loop […]

looking for recommendations for books to give to curious teenagers interested in folklore, linguistics, astronomy, and also, murders/mysteries towards the cozier end of a spectrum anchored by stephen king and dean koontz. yes, family of nerds.

So fucking ironic to have the Fraser Institute reporting about the continued drop in charitable giving by Canadians, following decades of promoting low taxes so people can "direct their money to their personal causes and values". Turns out that a low-tax environment increases wealth disparity […]

May, this list of predictions are depressing as heck. Yeah, but in a way, all of these things are already here. Nothing is new. It's simply the continuation of what's going to keep happening: - Decreased value attributed to human labour. - Consolidation of wealth and power. - Profiting off […]

[May's tech-hype predictions for 2026] May's tech-hype predictions for 2026 onwards: - The month after major public pensions and governments buy huge stakes in the AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc), the US AI bubble will start crashing. This will happen in 2026. - At this point, free […]

"Last week, the Library sent its staff a newsletter acknowledging the precarious financial situtuation faced by many of its workers - not to offer support, but to encourage workers to forego Christmas presents this year." Grace Blakely reports on striking workers at the British Library, who are […]

Recently, some documents regarding Singapore and Malaysia’s separation were made available in an exhibition. They are called the Albatross Files, named after then 1960s Singapore finance minister’s belief that Malaysia was ‘an albatross around Singapore’s neck’. No real emotions on this other […]

This was an unexpected surprise. I wrote a thread about what was happening with redistricting in Indiana. It’s been a wild ride. The state senate was under immense pressure from Trump to vote for a new map that would make Indiana 9-0 Republican districts. They voted against it.

The senate is considering a bill to allow 16 and 17 year olds to vote in Canada. They can work and pay taxes, they can drive, they're expected to start considering their future careers and make decisions to further them. Have your say on the bill before the Senate: https://vote16.ca/action […]

I don’t want to hear any dude freak out about population collapse if your solutions include making people have more babies they don’t want

I was just musing about the organizational change at my alma mater that led to the College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, the name being railroaded onto the college over the objections of staff. I thought College of Computer Science and Cybernetics would be much cooler […]

Has anyone compiled a list of open data APIs for cultural heritage that they're willing to share?

I clicked two library catalogue "permalinks" today, one 2 years old and one 15 years old, from different catalogues, and neither one worked. We really shouldn't call them that if we're not going to make it happen.

Pretty crazy that nearly all of the EU Commission is still on X even as Elon Musk is literally talking about destroying the EU. You can leave X. It's really not that difficult.

Does this mean the #fediverse and #mastodon are main steam yet? #snl

In Singapore, my wife had to agree to seek permission from the government if she ever wanted to marry a Singaporean man. This was because she was on a work visa that was for people 'without college degrees'. Foreigners who work in physical labor (helpers and construction workers) are not even […]