we have gone from a world in which we were told not to cite wikipedia because it was unreliable to a world where wikipedia might be the only reliable source left on the internet and we all owe a lot to the pedantic nerds who got us there

Every major publication in this country needs to have dedicated staffers or correspondents reporting on gaming, streamers, podcasts, and TikTok. Not as a once in a while thing. As standard beats. These are massive segments of American culture. No excuses for it anymore.

UC Berkeley Depart of History tenure-track asst prof job in Global History of Technology. History of technological artifacts & infrastructures through a global & transnational lens. All fields, areas, & periods of #HistTech considered For more info: aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05065 #HPS 🗃️

you don't cast someone from the board game group because they favor low taxes and more carefully targeted regulations on industry you cast someone from the board game group because they don't accept the humanity of other members of the board game group

For students interested in Émilie du Châtelet and/or early modern philosophy and science: please consider participating in the 2025 Libori Summer School (a hybrid event)! historyofwomenphilosophers.org/libori-summe... #philsky #earlymodern #academicsky

The university leadership talking point condescendingly repeated last spring to explain why we weren’t fighting back was “we just aren’t popular with voters.” People may not report feeling affection elite institutions but they don’t support these specific attacks!

In the Corporation Rim, everything has to be owned by someone.

RIP the great Tom Lehrer. From transubstantiation to non-proliferation, from Gropius and von Braun & Lobachevsky, from the AEC to the MLF, from the Elements to Fight Fiercely, his works opened worlds of sardonic humor, yes, but equally of learning, of culture, and history.

SIGCIS 2025 deadline extended to Monday! Theme is POWER with keynote Lily Geismer. Going to be an epic year. Submit! And feel free to ask me any questions about it!

Loss of a great scholar, mentor, human being

It is with profound sadness that we learned about the passing of our beloved friend, colleague, and mentor, Mario Biagioli. Mario was a pre-eminent scholar in many fields of inquiry: history of science, science studies, media studies, and the interdisciplinary study of intellectual properties. 1/2

Looks like “intuition” is due for a return.

Paging Baudrillard

If there’s any silver lining to this whole debacle, it may be that it’s such a clear cut case abusing national security powers based on pretextual bad-faith nonsense that the courts may be less inclinded to automatically genuflect whenever the goverment utters the word “security”

A really interesting oral history of the relationship of #NLP and #LLMs, part of a very strong series that Quanta magazine is running on the state of AI...

This essential and often lost point by the most excellent of Scotts.

Is it just me or wasn’t Cartman supposed to be parody not an instructional manual.

For the last 3 yrs, I was the director for the Science of Science program at the NSF. We funded projects on science communication - science communication to the public, communication of public priorities to scientists, citizens engagement & participation in science. 🧵

@nnedi.bsky.social on her Death for the Author at @princetoncdh.bsky.social: pushing back on facile partitions of human and robot, articulating creative processes and African futurism, underscoring erasures and parochial AI, incorporating disability, outlining an optimistic future of storytelling

Tfw you remember the 1974 Privacy Act is not a nothing burger ….

Some of my Columbia Law School colleagues and I offer our thoughts on legal issues with the Administration's March 13, 2025 letter to our University's president, and its threat to academic freedom. balkin.blogspot.com/2025/03/a-ti...

turn your analytical engine off before midnight--it turns out Babbage's earliest programs failed to account for Y2K.

What a GIFT to the #surveillance and #privacy studies community from Annenberg @ Penn. Oral History of Oscar Gandy Jr, author of "The Panoptic Sort," over four sessions with Jefferson Pooley 💕 www.asc.upenn.edu/research/cen...

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty STS researcher: The cup is an affordance

The transformer is not the final architecture. Taking 6 months and 100 million dollars to train is not a selling point. Let 1000 architectures bloom!

Here’s a link to my Critical A.I. graduate seminar syllabus if anyone wants to see it. 2/3 of the way over, and a fun time overall; students are the best. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Babbage's list of books borrowed, to be found, and wanted. BAB S22.

Bluesky now has over 10 million users, and I was #715,339!

For all the new people here, if you have an idea/proposal for a book manuscript in the history of technology, @patrickmccray.bsky.social, Kate McDonald, and I co-edit a series at Johns Hopkins UP. Get in touch with us! More info here: www.press.jhu.edu/books/series... #STS #histSTM #histoftech

Apply for our assistant professorship in early modern or modern European history! Please spread the word. careers.historians.org/jobs/2041099...

Anyone here participate in ye olde Netflix Prize back during the primordial days? Would be thrilled to chat with you for a history of the prize and its significance in the development of AI and ML. Cannot offer $1m dollars, alas.

What can people recommend to understand the constant invocation of "safety" echoing through the statements of administrators in the face of encampments? While clearly a congealed logic of public and private space shared in many quarters, this "safety" seems an inflection that needs a genealogy.

The Columbia students who delivered such vital coverage of tonight's events on WKCR:

Check out Gardiner's review of How Data Happened in MIT Technology Review www.technologyreview.com/2024/02/27/1...

What’s the secret to cryptographic key lime pie?

My small homage to Natalie Zemon Davis. davidabell.substack.com/p/natalie-ze...

In DC, on Fri, Oct. 20 @9am (& ltr on CSPAN) Princeton's Matt Jones @nescioquid.bsky.social, VT's Janet Abbate, Columbia's Matt Connelly, & I are doing a public/free @ahahistorians.bsky.social AHA Congressional Briefing on how AI history informs AI risks. Dirksen Senate Off. Bldg. Rm G11 #histsci

Check out @bentarnoff.bsky.social ‘s judicious review of How Data Happened (by me and Chris Wiggins)

If you're a historian of technology & will be at the SHOT meeting, stop by the JHUP table and look for Asif Siddiqi, Kate mcDonald, or me. We have a book series with JHUP & are happy to discuss projects. #Histsci #HistSTM 🗃️ (Running owl added because we all need more running owls in our lives)

'From Wednesday, five million scanned documents from the archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) will be digitally searchable at the click of a button thanks to a text recognition project by the Huygens Institute and various partners.' 🗃 #earlymodern #c18th

Past, Present, Future of AI in Nelson's Computer Lib, c. 1974

Honored to be in the forum on “Artificial Intelligence and the Practice of History” ed. by Darrell Meadows and Josh Sternfield with scholars I so admire including Kate Crawford, Leen-Kiat Soh, Liz Lorang, Chulwoo Pack, Yi Liu @bschmidt.bsky.social @nescioquid.bsky.social @merbroussard.bsky.social

New blog post, trying to get beyond a debate that has so far treated students mostly as consumers of AI. In the twenty-first century, critical thinking will require understanding how models work.