"According to Velloso, less than 3% of paying users actively use Copilot, even though Microsoft has pre-deployed it directly into the Windows 11 taskbar and across the Office suite." lol, lmfao

They’re at it again. None of this is valuable historical research. It’s about exploiting historical artifacts and historians to develop computer vision further and to make a soft cultural argument for surveillance tech. This nonsense has been going on since c2010.

Who was that whiny whiner whining about not enough sports chatter on BlueSky? My feed is full of it tonight. Feels like everyone’s watching the sportsball!

minnesota gov. tim walz has signed a bill banning prediction markes (kalshi, polymarket). first state-level ban of its kind. (sports betting via traditional/mobile sports books is still illegal here too)

In November I broke this story about Andrew Paul Johnson, a pardoned J6er who molested children and used the promise of reparations to bribe his victims silence.

it took this country five decades for the surviving interned Japanese-Americans who were deprived of absolutely everything and imprisoned for no cause to get $20,000 in reparations per person. we are currently awarding the guys who did the Beer Hall Putsch five years ago orders of magnitude more

May 18, 332 CE: Constantine introduces the annona (bread dole) to his "new" city, Constantinople. It was based on Rome's & diverted grain from Egypt to 80,000 recipients in the city (Chronicon Paschale [Whitby & Whitby 1989], p. 19). archive.org/details/chro... (Bread 🍞 exemplum from Eirenopolis).

I don’t know what to tell you, man. I’m a medieval historian, and, in my field, if you don’t check your sources (and your sources’ sources) you are just asking to be taken for a ride by some bored 19th C. aristocratic English antiquarian with a penchant for inventing history.

There is absolutely no reason for prediction markets to exist. None.

A historian made a claim that the Colorado Klan at least had *some* progressive ideas because one of the Klan ladies tried to pass a pro-birth control law. Except she didn’t. When I tracked down the source & cross-checked it with her other writings, she was anti-birth control & her law was the same.

What is maddening about this debate is that citation practices are not just about AI hallucinations. Scholars should be familiar with the ongoing conversations in their fields. Citations aren't throwaway padding. They are about matters of methodology, ethics, and care. 🛢1/2

I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

Librarians literally saved my life

If the actor with British accent is evil then you’re watching Sci fi. If the actor with a British accent is good then it’s Fantasy. If the actor with a British accent knocks something over then it’s a Rom com.

This settlement violates the separation of powers under Article I and it is being contemplated in order to avoid an order from an Article III that a President cannot instruct a federal agency to give him money. I am not sure this could be more wildly unconstitutional.

The Ecstasy of St Paul, by Nicolas Poussin, 1650, 📸 by @jaethephotog

Raising the Flag Follow my work and writing on Substack: nickanderson.substack.com

This banger of a quote from Tressie McMillan Cottom is exactly why that woman was booed at that graduation ceremony, btw.

"Scientists don't want you to know-" Buddy there are so many things I, as a scientist, want you to know and the only thing stopping me from writing more papers and posts about it and then starting a podcast to tell you even MORE things is that I am limited by hours in the day

Report: Dodgers' Edwin Diaz is being linked to illegal cockfighting

still not quite over the fact that i watched 15 year olds get sued for millions of dollars for downloading twelve songs and now we all have to accept AI slop because every tech company in the known universe decided that IP laws don't exist now that they're inconvenient for them

🚨 BREAKING: The Bureau of Land Management has just announced plans to open up ~80,000 acres across rural NW Arizona (north of the Grand Canyon) for oil and gas leasing. The rub? The geologists and land managers I spoke with said there’s not any oil or gas there. www.azcentral.com/story/news/l...

Feeling overwhelmed with all of this. LISTEN. Another Louisiana resident (Marshawn is the only name we have) testifies against the state’s racial gerrymander, speaking truth to power up and down the hearing room and predicts how this story will end. Speak your truth, fight and believe.

Recently, FamilySearch digitized and uploaded tons of microfilmed records, including many from 18th-century Massachsuetts. They're using some sort of AI to transcribe/summarize the handwritten documents. I've noticed that the AI strips out references to race and enslavement in 18thc documents.

“A citation is a formal assertion of a relationship between works, and when that relationship is fabricated, the integrity of the entire document and the scholarly record is compromised.”

Curious if there have been any studies done on sleep quality when you dream that you cannot fall asleep. Asking for a friend.

Often parties begin by taking positions in bargaining. Unanimous support for a salary cap is a position. It's not an interest. The more the clubs (that's what this multi-employer group likes to be called) talk about salary caps the slower the bargaining will go. 1/ www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/...

As Kevin points out here, the state legislature pushing to reinstall these monuments while they renew efforts to disenfranchise Black voters gives up the game. Same as it ever was. As always, these statues and monuments are never solely, or even primarily, about history.

"When the moral sense of a nation begins to decline and the wheel of progress to roll backward, there is no telling how low the one will fall or where the other may stop." Frederick Douglass, "The Lessons of the Hour," 1894 hdl.handle.net/2027/coo.319...

😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹😹

Baseball Goes West, in a season that once grieved me, but no longer. ourgame.mlblogs.com/americas-nat...

The definitive millennial song is clearly legend_of_zelda_System_of_a_down(1).mp3

Historical research does not need to be done faster or in greater volume for any social or intellectual purpose whatever; if anything, it needs to be done more slowly and deliberately than at present, by people allowed the training, time, space, and resources to do it that way.

It’s the scene from The Simpsons when the brewers at Red Tick Beer are perfecting a batch, and after tasting it, one of them says, “Needs more dog.” So, I imagine the developers at Anthropic sitting around a table debating how to make their AI moral, and one of them just says “Needs more religion.”

Exactly! We historians and our pesky little “why” is too uncomfortable for those who only care about what happened.

"This will transform historical research!" Cool but it's already being transformed out of existence by the same forces pushing these transformative technologies. Forgive us if we're skeptical of a moment that's telling us "This will help you do your work--which we despise--faster and better."

“We are committed to implementing AI in a way that keeps human creativity at the center of everything we do.” How exactly? Because AI does the exact opposite by removing humans from content creation. www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/bus...

the last 3 seconds is the best

“officials discovered two industrial-scale water hookups feeding a data center campus located 20 miles south of downtown Atlanta. One water connection had been installed without the utility’s knowledge, and the other was not linked to the company’s account and therefore wasn’t being billed.”

what every “how to incorporate AI in your humanities classroom” article/email/workshop looks like to me

Elmo in the booth with T-Mac and John Kruk

Lessons from the educators: The most valuable conversations around education begin with realizing you want the students to learn how to think for themselves, not outsource it to a mediocrity machine.

And since it's #caturday, one of my favorite artists-with-animals photos: Lois Mailou Jones in her Paris studio in 1938 with the most adorable studio assistant ever

This is what journalism is supposed to be about.

Black people are giving it these Confederates raw and uncut. This is how it’s gonna be now. You wonder what we’re thinking? It’s this. I believe this is activist Gary Chambers again in Louisiana.

now thats an anecdote with a punch, from Gillian Tett www.ft.com/content/c0ae...

THIS! We have strayed too far from what eduction should be: a public good. Hell, even “originalists” need to reconcile the fact that the Founders believed democracy relied on an educated populace. We need a major movement to realign education as a public good that we all benefit from!

Don’t run universities like a business run it as a public good