Data-centre energy demand adds hundreds of euros to home electricity bills, study claims

i really can’t understand why many journalists fail to provide a link to the original scientific paper/survey when reporting on a given work… its my biggest pet peeve

VP for Research and Innovation @ucc.ie Prof @jfcryan.bsky.social opens this year's Research and Innovation Awards, acknowledging the breadth of research, innovation and entrepreneurial activity across the UCC campus.

Our Call for essays is closing on June 30th for volume 2 of Digital Art in Ireland. (Ireland being VERY broadly construed). If you've got something that you think could fit please do get in touch. www.blackwaterpublishing.com/digital-art-...

President of @ucc.ie Prof @joh2024.bsky.social addresses attendees at the UCC Research and Innovation Awards 2025. He acknowledges the work of UCC researchers and innovators in pushing boundaries, embracing knowledge and creating real-world impact through their work #UCCRIAwards

Having coffee in WebWorkHouse. Haven’t been in a long time despite it being close to home. Only a small few computers left 😢. I spent many a happy overnighter here playing Star Wars Galaxies and World of Warcraft; messing with Geocities etc. I miss the online culture I grew up with. Man, I’m old.

The fact that Nyong’o’s beauty is causing a war between two rival cultures in America right now is proof enough that she is the perfect Helen of Troy.

Remember the metaverse? 🫠

I’m not at all surpised by the Jamir Nazir Commonwealth Prize / Granta fiasco (it was bound to happen at some point), but we should be deeply concerned that literary culture can no longer verify authorship through reading alone (no, AI detectors are not a solution). open.substack.com/pub/jamescos...

Everyone is losing their minds about who's playing Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s adaption of The Odyssey but nobody says a word when classics departments are shut down. We all know that this is not about Homer. open.substack.com/pub/jamescos...

I forgive you for cross posting, and that forgiveness is legally binding and perpetual. You no longer need to apologize. You are free.

📣 New publication alert: The Humanities in the Age of Generative AI by @jamesosullivan.bsky.social "The question addressed here is [how universities] should think about teaching and learning, research, & governance under conditions in which genAI has become infrastructural." doi.org/10.22554/26y...

“The machines are coming for us, or so we’re told. Not today, but soon enough that we must seemingly reorganize civilization around their arrival.” — @jamesosullivan.bsky.social www.noemamag.com/the-politics...

This stuff has to be pointed out for the extremism it is — Wanting to live in places, rural and urban, where you are safe and free to go about daily life without depending on the expense of a car — or being terrorised by users of them — isn't wanting to "live like hobbits", it's freedom.

Harassment by online influencers requires legal change People have been subjected to humiliation and degradation by an influencer using Meta's glasses - this needs urgent attention, @jamesosullivan.bsky.social, UCC School of English and Digital Humanities, writes.

Read my latest opinion piece for the Irish Examiner on the need for the regulation of devices like Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, and the role of universities in filling the gap when policymakers fail to act. www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/comm... #privacy #socialmedia #meta #rayban #smartglasses #pov

if only Mary Shelley had warned us in 1818 about the dangers of literature instead of the reckless, hubristic pursuit of scientific and technological advancement carried out by ghoulish men with no regard for humanity—men who would desecrate the dead and kill the living to feed their power hunger.

RIP Ask Jeeves. The natural-language search engine founded in 1996 was rebranded as Ask in 2006, and officially shut down May 1. When websites close, the historical record can disappear with them. The #WaybackMachine preserves 30 years of web history: web.archive.org #90s #90sNostalgia #WebHistory

This is the thing that’s going to replace software engineers? 🤷🏻‍♂️ www.tomshardware.com/tech-industr...

AI can take over many writing tasks. But there is something irreplaceable about a text with an author standing behind it. An Idea by @jamesosullivan.bsky.social

One para aside, this is a love letter to Michael Jackson with no engagement with the allegations of child sexual abuse. I suspect that with the release of his biopic, produced in co-op with the Jackson estate (ahem), we’ll see a lot of these whitewashes. www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/ar...

We’ll soon find out what is truly special about human writing Read my latest essay in Psyche, here: psyche.co/ideas/well-s... #writing #ai #genai #llms #largelanguagemodels #aiwriting

Wonderful evening at @mtu.ie’s annual Lord Mayor’s Dinner. @marygalvin.bsky.social

Woohoo, here's my essay with my fav co-author on 30,000 fellowship wins across the Guggenheim, Stanford CASBS, NAEd, National Humanities Center, RSF visiting scholar, and Harvard Radcliffe. Spoiler: it's the people working at prestigious universities www.publicbooks.org/who-gets-gug...

Really enjoyed today’s guest lecture by Sharon Marcus’ to UCC’s School of English & #DigitalHumanities, “Character Reference: A Structured Approach to Literary Characters”. Organised and introduced by @claireconnolly.bsky.social.

I’m increasingly confident that any plans for the Cork Luas will be ruined by NIMBYism. Of course, when they do eventually settle on a route, I look forward to using it to access the events centre. 🙃

The Garden of Earthly Delights (detail), by Hieronymus Bosch, 1480-1505, 📸 by @alexbrandon

When it comes to writing, the process is the purpose. You don’t have to always like or enjoy the process, but if you don’t respect it enough to do it yourself, there is no purpose. AI will never fill that void. www.thehandbasket.co/p/refusing-t...

Silence is not neutral and is now unforgivable. Ongoing silence, especially by those who claim to focus on ethics, social justice and the politics of the past, is indefensible.

Don't miss the latest issue of #ReviewsInDH! @jenguiliano.bsky.social & I are thrilled to bring you a slew of great projects drawn from our open submissions process. Enjoy! And submit your own work for review. reviewsindh.pubpub.org/v7-n2-3

Call for Chapters: Minimal Computing for Social & Cultural Heritage Link to call: jamesosullivan.github.io/MinimalCompu... This collection will explore how minimal computing can be applied to social/cultural heritage. We welcome full chapters as well as shorter pieces. Funded @researchireland.ie

America's new "Golden Age"...

Great 2-year postdoc for a digital humanities/I school/computational culture scholar to work on computer vision + film/TV w/ great colleagues @ Distant Viewing Lab @nolauren.bsky.social (U of Richmond). These guys are doing cutting edge stuff, apply! richmond.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/staff_...

We laugh at how unutterably pathetic he is (me as much as anyone) but if you think Trump won’t sacrifice countless American soldiers’ lives to postpone the public humiliation of his epic failure in Iran, then you really haven’t been paying attention…

Precisely, not only that they don't work, but never will work. (As you say.)

AI detection software does not work, which I thought everyone knew until I saw so many people running Peter Vandermeersch’s recent apology through tools like GPTZero. AI detectors cause as much harm as the misuse they claim to prevent—stop using them! jamescosullivan.substack.com/p/the-ai-det...

A lot of people won’t see the harm in this, but consider how many decisions you make every day, each one based on what you know. Now, between you and ALL the info on the web, there is software designed to mimic human language, controlled by a firm whose goal is to take your data and sell ad space.

"the decline in [academic freedom in] the United States has been more rapid and pronounced, particularly in the last year. It has deteriorated by 50% from 2015 to 2025 and is now evaluated as moderate autonomy by country experts" academic-freedom-index.net/research/Aca...

With all the commentary around Peter Vandermeersch, it’s a good time to remind everyone that AI detection software *does not work*. Journos running his apology through detection software shows a complete lack of understanding of their limitations. Making claims based on them is negligent.

Meta needs to lay off people to juice their balance sheet and cause the stock market loves layoffs. "AI" is at best just the thing that allows you to fire people without having to admit you overhired or have no strategic vision.

It is not an extreme position to want to be able to think for yourself, to write by just typing words in, to learn things from other people or to make art with your hands.

Values-Led Governance of Generative AI in Irish Higher Education: An Interpretive Analysis of National Focus-Group Findings journal.ilta.ie/index.php/te... New paper by @colinlowry.ie and me in Irish Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning. #genAI #generativeAI #LLMs #highereducation #highered

The free "DIY Web Archiving" zine by me, @ilya.webrecorder.net @bitarchivist.net @akijas.bsky.social @quinnanya.me covers a friendly (even for kids!) intro to using Webrecord (+other methods) to preserve things you care about on the web: zinebakery.com/homemade-zin...

Webrecorder's browser-based viewer for archival preserved versions of websites ⬇️ & the GitHub repo is github.com/webrecorder/... (WACZ = Web Archive Collection Zipped file format.)

Thanks @ilya.webrecorder.net, I finally replaced my static archival version of InfiniteUlysses.com (participatory+public annotatable reading for Joyce's weird novel Ulysses, built as my '15 Literature/DH dissertation) w/a Webrecorder interactive playback of its WACZ preservation file.

Two 10-year lecturerships in #DigitalHumanities @ucc.ie. Requirements to teach at the Communications University of China in Beijing on a new joint BA programme. For information package including full details of the post, selection criteria and application process see ore.ucc.ie (Job ID: 094538).

This gives me hope that even if all those MPs - with dollars in their eyes from what they can personally gain from US Big Tech’s ravaging of human creativity - vote for a data mining exception to copyright, the Lords ain’t having it - and the boom will be over by the time any dust settles?

Anthropic is not your friend