Excellent essay. Especially as someone who teaches undergrads, specifically in the humanities, the unmeasurable training IS the desired outcome.

"The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing. Not a dramatic collapse. Not Skynet. Just a generation of researchers who can produce results but can't produce understanding."

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

Ooof this podcast. The people in it are exactly my age and there's so much that sounds familiar - and also so much that is (thankfully) absolutely foreign and unbelievable, and totally heartwrenching.

Oh did you want 3300 words from me on today's IOC sex testing rules? An essay on the nature of evidence and why we can't seem to stop getting stuck in the same traps around sex and gender in sports? Wow lucky you!! www.coyotemedia.org/the-olympics...

Had a little fashion shoot with @wowthanks.bsky.social this weekend 😎 You TOO could look this cool with a shirt designed by Sea of Doom that supports @skypeascientist.bsky.social 💅 Get a shirt at SquidFacts.net

It’s infuriating, but also just so depressing. *No one* in charge of any part of our educational infrastructure seems to understand why it’s important for people to…read things that are difficult.

ALSO worth reading about Dr. Alan Hart, who pioneered the use of X rays in detecting TB. He was also the first trans man in the US to get a gender affirming hysterectomy: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_L....

From his Medium page thehalfwaypost.medium.com/the-halfway-... But again, read the "BREAKING: Two dogs bite ICE agents!" post above. It's not satire. It's just a lie.

Is it a giant wooden horse

look at this baby beaver and feel better briefly (@ wildheartrescue on TT)

So, um... this is bad. Really bad. I looked at the letters that were translated by the AI, and the very first one I found was almost entirely hallucination. Thread:

Amber Alerts are important but I genuinely do not see how it serves anyone to wake up millions of people with a horrible alarm noise in the middle of the night, when people with phones on 'do not disturb' are, presumably, in their beds fast asleep and not in a position to see any cars anyway

4yo: where did all the dinosaurs go? Me: an astroid hit earth and they all died. 4yo: ? Me: … *realizing she meant the dinosaur toys that were on the windowsill which my wife had moved* oh

A viral video about a man named Solomon Fairfax, who earned the nickname the "Grim Reaper" of Charleston after spending years killing slaveholders, has hundreds of thousands of likes and shares. There’s just one problem: Solomon Fairfax doesn't exist

Submitted without comment: An "AI-curated knowledge platform" emailed me to let me it has a profile of me and my work. Here's the picture the AI picked for my story on Neanderthal male/modern-human female mating preferences.

They’re telling me a great empire will be destroyed if I attack Persia. Even the oracles who don’t like me very much, very nasty, they all said to me, “Sir, it’s one of the great empires, and it’ll be destroyed. And all because you attacked Persia.” That’s what they’re telling me.

On the one hand, obviously there are more important things going on here and I probably agree with the op on a fundamental level. And this poor lady. On the other hand - there is no one more AGAINST AI right now than college professors. It is the daily bane of our existence.

Nothing is going to make me okay with losing my job in the truly unethical way Concordia is doing it, but if I give up on academia entirely then, well, at least I won't have to rethink all my assessments YET AGAIN because of AI

Result! Just received from Grammarly: "Hi, Thank you for reaching out. After careful consideration, we have decided to deactivate Expert Review while we reimagine how to make it more useful for customers and more respectful of the experts whose work it surfaces." 1/ 🧪💙📚 🗃 #academicsky

Somehow, the snowday vibes + still actually teaching on zoom and having all my usual responsibilities from home seems like a pretty disastrous combination

The use of AI that created quotes, the 'I lost the document and panicked at the last second' excuse, this copy-paste stuff. This is absolutely textbook for how students react when caught using AI and plagiarizing. I can't believe it's happening in a courtroom.

1 week from today! I’ll be at the Toronto Public Library w/ Tiffany Watt Smith Come on out and hang, why dontcha? tpl.bibliocommons.com/v2/events/69...

I'm sorry, this is so funny I genuinely laughed out loud. This is some real Cato the Elder bullshit right here.

This seems to me to miss the point of academia pretty profoundly. Yes, we want to produce knowledge. But the knowledge doesn't exist in a vacuum - we're not producing shoes or cookies, where once the item exists, our role is done. We also need to be repositories of understanding.

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed. Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

Sometimes I'm sad that the cutting of sports at McGill got so much more attention than the cutting of professors at Concordia

I keep thinking about this.

this is very @cowtoolsdaily.bsky.social coded

When my student asked ChatGPT why it was making up quotes, it answered: "I don't *intend* to make up Latin quotes, but I see why it can feel that way sometimes." We're now outsourcing our gaslighting to AI

“We’ve invented a service that will do every substantial piece of human activity so you can focus on being slowly lowered feet-first into an industrial shredder”

Hey so Grammarly is now basically Search Party / Ring cameras for education, enabling large-scale surveillance of both users (students) and educators alike

Today I learned that pseudoephedrine is a) not easily available in the US anymore and b) is experienced by some people as an actual upper??? This is wild news to me

Well, I got my picture in the (student) newspaper! Can't say I'm thrilled as to why. theconcordian.com/2026/02/conc...

It's the Shein-ification of output. It looks like a shirt or a document, but it's shoddily-made and will fall apart with any use. Then we'll just all end up walking around with holes in our clothes and reading things that are only 90% correct, and trying to figure out why we feel like life sucks.

The year is 2045. Nurse is the only job left. It has been hastily retconned to a male coded job and every nurse now wears tactical combat gear and has a gun.

The disaster bisexuals and the disaster biathletes should unionize

hi hello happy tuesday, it is very important to me that everyone is made aware of possibly the most unhinged story to emerge from these olympics: www.reddit.com/r/olympics/s...

The idea of China's ultimate goal being the destruction of The Stanley Cup is so, so funny to me. Was there a three week tactical assault on the Vezina Trophy? Did they annex the Ted Lindsey Award? Oh God, sir, a second plane just hit the Clarence S. Campbell Bowl!

It's genuinely kind of funny that people were mad about Bad Bunny not singing in English when the first song Kid Rock played begins as so: Bawitdaba, da-bang, da-bang, diggy-diggy-diggy / Said the boogie, said up drop the boogie / Bawitdaba, da-bang, da-bang, diggy-diggy-diggy / Said the boogie, sai

This is the ur-grift: it’s not the get-rich-quick scheme that makes you rich, it’s teaching other people how to sell it to someone else.

I wonder if stuff like this is going to swing the pendulum back in the other direction. It's one thing to take a chance on a book that's possibly okay and possibly bleh, but it's another to know that 99% of the books available are garbage. Why would anyone take a chance on a new press or author?

Extremely weird when stuff happens in places I have been. This was at the old Rathskeller, it seems? The new place had that nice courtyard area the last time I was there. It didn't have jaw punching vibes imho, but I guess you never know with State College.

Calling on my ancestors for guidance but the only one who answers is a weird eutherian rodent-mammal from the early cretaceous period. "EAT BERRY SLEEP UNDER ROCK" it says. Pretty good advice

Is Homer cancelled over his DEI woke inclusion of Memnon?

i've been watching the coyote on Alcatraz's progress with great interest. a week-ish ago, a coyote SWAM to Alcatraz for the first time and looked fuckin rough after the dangerous swim. but the coyote is doing fine now, gorging itself on unprepared birds & rats who are dealing with a sort of Godzilla

On the one hand, yes, absolutely! On the other hand, the existence of our programs and departments are depressingly uncertain right now. I will grovel if they will let me teach next semester tbh

Life be like: La vie en un résumé:

Looks like Newsmax just used AI to grab a random quote about someone else and put it my mouth. www.instagram.com/p/DTIvkQeiawS/ Thanks to @bungdan.bsky.social for the find.