Discworld QOTD, from Guards! Guards!

AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH

Happy Trans Day of Visibility. I know trans people and I know fascists who are making life difficult for trans people. The trans people are pretty cool and I'm glad I know them. The fascists can go fall down a deep dark hole.

“You can separate the art from the artist.” Not when the artist in question is alive and using the vast profits from their franchise to punch down on a vulnerable minority, you can’t.

Due to popular demand, here's every Space Marine legion from Warhammer 40,000 as a document in our collection. I: Dark Angels Obviously, they're this photograph of a tree in Burnham. Why this photograph? The tree has Fallen.

"The War in Iran was started by WOKES!" Colin from Portsmouth says that the war is a ruse by carbon neutral lobbyists to put up the price of oil so we all start investing in green energy.

Please have a play. You are a raven. A creature of myth and legend... or just a big bird, your choice. Eat the gods! Dance with a Dracula! Take Edgar Allan Poe to Alton Towers! Ruin a Zumba class! Drive the M4 w a mythic princess! Get very lost & end up in the wrong game! j2gb9g9f.play.borogove.io

Badge-making for the AI Arts Festival, supervised by my true overlords Snips (black & white), Tiger (tabby) and Sabine (calico)

I’ve always wanted my TV to Tell me game situations in the Sports

Sometimes the metaphors are just a bit too on the nose

What a life! Another brilliant interview by @shattenstone.bsky.social

me when I get negative feedback on a draft

OOOOH Researchfish Is going extinct 🐡🐟🐠 help.researchfish.com/en_US/resear...

Happy 6th "Large boulder the size of a small boulder" anniversary to those who celebrate! #Geology ⚒️

The New World asked me to speak to some British trans women about what life has been like for them over the past few years - here's what they had to say, in their own words: www.thenewworld.co.uk/marie-le-con...

I saw an academic unironically suggest that instead of assessing students’ understanding and competence through their writing of essays, arguments etc., we can assess the “quality” of their prompts, and I feel us slipping further and further into dystopia.

This whole🧵 Reduce online noise by replacing the meaningless term 'artificial intelligence' w/ the actual analytical approach(s) used + any design,dev & application info needed for a useful conversation. Alternatively, rather than solutionising describe the task/activity/procedure to be automated.

I think this post nails the actual problem, for researchers at least—AI hallucinations would simply not be a problem in academic work if we’d not normalized citation-as-signaling rather than actual engagement—you can only cite a fake paper if you’re not in the habit of reading the papers you cite

Don't steal pies this Christmas.

Final comedy gig of the year and the audience agreed with me that Die Hard IS a Christmas movie 🎄

You are ABSOLUTELY NOT going to regret listening to this bird:

Oh joy, another helpful AI infographic via LinkedIn. Off I go to my job as a liberaian, maybe to run some critical evaligane workshops and of course use New! Boulean! Logic!

Dressed very formally for a networking event

Happy Gazpacho Soup Day to all who celebrate

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick. Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.

Laughed then cried

Every ad now

The UK Reproducibility Network: OER for Open Research oercommons.org/hubs/ukrn @ukrepro.bsky.social @oercommons.bsky.social

A reminder that this anti-trans panic is 100% bullshit and exactly none of our country’s problems are related to someone expressing their gender identity and everyone who isn’t a hate-filled weirdo knows it.

"If Grokipedia is getting things about me wrong, what else is it getting wrong in other articles, where I do not have the same level of domain knowledge?" - @scalzi.com

'New proposals by Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley and Sage were sent to universities this week after their initial offers were decisively rejected by institutions in a sector-wide consultation run by Jisc,...negotiating jointly with Universities UK on behalf of universities.' 1/3

This is my favourite laptop sticker and I have no idea why I like it so much (I paid £1 for it at Southampton Pride)

Where do I work? Oh, just a totally normal university library

Initial success in my quest for house plants that Snips won’t eat

Just to say that teachers do an incredibly difficult job, with all the right intentions, and can be the defining influence on a young person's life. They are the exact opposite of poisoners because good teaching provides the antidote to so many dangers

💥New: Open educational resources should be central to the public mission of universities ✍️ @niamhtumelty.bsky.social & @heroicendeavour.bsky.social #OpenResearch #AcademicSky #HigherEducation (@lsepress.bsky.social)

This beautiful little menace (who featured in my comedy set at the uni Open Day this afternoon) has found a new way to get to my houseplants which does not bode well for them

Hwæt! 🐉 Ever wondered what the epic poem Beowulf sounds like spoken in Old English? #NationalPoetryDay

Every few months now I re-read this "Who Goes Nazi?" piece from 1941 and am blown away by how it captures the people we are dealing with 80 years later. harpers.org/archive/1941...

Yep yep yep. I teach courses that are based on my expertise as a researcher and my work in the archives. Why on earth would I add a conservative pundit to one of those courses? What would they add?

Mordor on the Orient Express

OMG Peter @nickiclarkson.bsky.social you are genius

The whole series of #AHistoryOfEnglandIn25Poems is incredible. I was unfamiliar with most of the poems so it was a delight to discover them, and hear Catherine unwrap and explain the words and their context. The absolute best of audacious empathy

Discworld QOTD, from Eric “‘Multiple exclamation marks,’ he went on, shaking his head, ‘are a sure sign of a diseased mind.’”

A Labour government that does not fight back against the far right, racism and extremism fundamentally misunderstands the nature of its electoral support.

As a parent of a trans kid, the only ideology I know of is that people want to be allowed to be themselves and stay alive. It’s pretty minimalist as far as ideologies go. Shit is so dangerous right now.

My phone showed me this memory from 4 years ago

Something I didn't get to say yesterday: We heard over and over during the event about "human-centered" approaches to "AI". But if refusal is not on the table (at every level: individual students and teachers right up through UNESCO) then we have in fact centered the technology, not the people.

Discworld QOTD, from Men at Arms

The Somebody Else's Problem field is much simpler and more effective, and what's more can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery. This is because it relies on people's natural disposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain.