This is what its been inside. Normally the forest fire smoke just blows past but this time its real bad.

Remember what McDonald's smelled like in the 80s? That was a few hours ago. Now its more like taking a drag of a cigarette every breath while outside.

Decolonizing philosophy is on the agenda! If you know any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists/designers who would be keen to collab with the @aaphilosophy.bsky.social for the org's Reflect Reconciliation Action Plan, send them here: aap.org.au/EOIs-RAP-Art #philsky #philosophysky

I have been thinking for a while that it also places the focus on a dynamic, and not on the actual views/politics involved and their implications

It's the look of someone who's only ever seen the stampede from a suite.

Every person who tries to make excuse for a public official or candidate with a 'we shouldn't hold a little xyz against them' or 'who hasn't done xyz' has 100% done xyz themselves or had a close friend do it.

That was... not a close soccer game...

Allowing lawmakers (of any party) to continue 'serving' while unresponsive seems counter to the idea of the US.

Of course it is. There’s also an ever increasing amount of solid research showing that offloading your thinking to fancy auto complete is bad for cognition. I’d also argue that ramming LLMs into everything is undermining adoption in places where it might genuinely be useful.

I, who live desert adjacent, am having a cold and wet start to summer while people who haven't seen a 40+ day in their lives are trying to survive with houses not built for the heat. This seems... not normal...

An interesting take on the excessive anthropomorphism in LLM scholarship and how if you want to see human traits in something, you probably will. www.ibm.com/think/news/m...

Submit now for the 2026 Western Canadian Philosophy Conference/Canadian Society for Environmental Philosophy wcpaonline.ca NB: on the first day there is a special workshop, "Interconnection in Indigenous Philosophies and the Disciplinary Colonial University" ...

New plan. We renovate 24 Sussex so that it can be both the prime ministers house and the house of the leader of the opposition. I'd watch a reality tv show about that. Imagine the leaders partners being neighbors, complaining about their spouses to each other or to their partner about the neighbors.

Canada should just pay for upkeep and maintenance on national properties. This shouldn't be controversial. Instead we get this easy to grift version.

"Trump's 13-Year-Old Accuser"

I really think it's important to understand the current Gender Critical movement in the UK to see that civil society was rejecting their position and so they have now turned to using their superior access to the media and state apparatus to try and force their bigoted hatreds through regardless.

I'm reading a book from the beginning of the 20th century that basically frames this move from content to form as the point in every past education system where it dies because it makes the teaching rigid and limits the growth of the next generation. But I'm sure that won't happen to us... right?

Alternatively: if risk is the issue, the UK could increase subsidies to less qualified students more and decrease them to more qualified ones. You know, if the government were really interested in equalizing life chances or anything like that.

100% its such a basic fix for a major health concern.

I'm not sure about the particulars, but this is happening just a few weeks after companies using AI heavily started to see the costs mount and how that finally balanced the books for AI companies. Were I a CEO looking at those costs and how much potential profit goes to AI, I'd start rethinking.

It will never stop being funny to me that the street fighter subreddit has a much better, well reasoned ai policy vis a vis literally all universities.

Each pyramid scheme victim thinks that *they're* the only failure in the whole bunch. They go to massive "sales conferences" where people boast about all the sales they're making, and *they're all lying about it*. 5/

Watching the batman movies again with my kid, and got to Batman & Robin. However bad you remember it being, it's about 3x worse than that.

My exact reaction while reading this piece:

Also applies to anyone who buys the 'this test is a good approximate for IQ' grifters.

I'm attending a digital humanities event in Montreal. There was a keynote on AI and something about the talk made me wonder if it had been written by Claude. I said as much in the Q&A. As I posed the question, the speaker shifted, looking slightly uncomfortable. What he said next shocked the room +

Respectfully, I can’t tell you how much I hate this query. I joke that studying the 18th century prepared me for scenes built on reputation. 18C novelists knew was how fragile & illusory that is. No one is the worst — or best — thing they have ever done, & public lists will never reflect reality.

Hey fun friends, does anyone recognize this as any kind of translatable shorthand?

Some of us saw this coming. I feel weird saying that because it wasn’t particularly difficult. marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevo...

pro tip for people in academia (and elsewhere): saying "thank you" is free, and people do notice when they do something for you and it's not acknowledged

/s Wait, there's actual full relativists outside of new philosophy undergrads who haven't finished their reading list? Oh, nope its just a straw man that they need to support their entire argument. Fun. /s

The Republican position is to refuse to accept or acknowledge any result of voting that they don’t like, and use obstruction and violence to enforce their position.

Doesn't Kant discuss how context impacts our understanding of knowledge? IIRC that was one of the concerns a lot of following philosophers had with him, because it implied that what we could Know without reservation was very small.

The Canadian judiciary is filled to the brim with a bunch of centrist, moderate, sober nerds. Describing it as woke is disinformation.

in other words: AI works best when it... is developed the way ML is meant to be developed, lol. which could be achieved with much more focused, less expensive, and more accurate ML solutions.

good ML: * carefully designed for narrow contexts (or with awareness of context limits) * designed by ML and topical experts, with expert curated data and expert reviewed outputs * designed for specific needs and consumers, and kept up to date for both * clear training / comms on use and limits

One of the things I don't like about being a humanist is how much time we spend working alone. I would love a philosophy lab. Might be a project for life after dean-ing. open.substack.com/pub/openques...

Maybe don't use gAI to group religious groups based on similarities in names?

I dont think siding with the defenders on D-Day is a dog whistle anymore. That seems pretty clear which side you think you would have supported.

What are the 50 best university strategic plans? Why? I am developing a Great Strategic Plan curriculum.

Raul taught me how to write a literature review, but more importantly he taught me how to understand the breadth of literature in a field, how to meaningully engage in what I read, and how to examine connections between it. For someone I never met in person, he impacted my scholarship immensely.

I think having a fund to pay honoraria to those without service to profession as part of their job (grad students, precarious instructors, not full time, etc.) would be good. Simple reason: work should be paid. If you're paid by employer to do service then youre paid by them, otherwise honorarium.

Alpha School is a grift, an op, and when this all implodes in a relatively short amount of time I will be taking the names of the education consultants who took this seriously and never forgetting who you really are.

You know it was a good conference when you filled 1/4 of a notebook. Thanks CSSE and CSSHE it was fantastic!

The person running on a progressive conservative style platform (trying to split the difference between the old liberals and Rustad I think) came last. So i guess we'll see what the platform is going to be. Super tight finish between Kerry Lynne-Findlay and Caroline Elliot.

~"Michaels figured it out? This is a real low point"~

Westjet's new policy for domestic flights: you must be at the airport 120 minutes before your flight Westjet in practice: opens the check in desk 100 minutes before flight. Glad I ignored them and arrived at my normal time.