I'm creating a series of short form videos about how language models work technically. The goal is to be something in between "you know it's next token prediction" and "now you've taken a machine learning class." I'd love your thoughts so here are the first few! 🧵 www.youtube.com/shorts/VZB8X...

Insane grip from earlier today! Never seen this in the wild before. Still has the wrap with the "NYTimes" and "Rolling Stones" pull quotes from Stephen Holden and Steve Pond!!!

Sometimes I think this is my fav Dylan song just because you get to hear him sing "The buyin' power of the proletariat's gone down / Money's gettin' shallow and weak" lol www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGT7...

SZA to i_D on the rise of AI-generated music: “It’s happening disproportionately with Black music. Why am I hearing AI covers of Olivia Dean, when Olivia Dean just came the f*ck out? She can’t even collect the streams.“

Cannot really articulate adequately how excited I am for Quinn Slobodian's new book on "Muskism" lol www.harpercollins.com/products/mus...

Read my "KULA" piece on the political economy of "hallucinated" citations!!! doi.org/10.18357/kul...

That new ~electronic~ Harry Styles just sounds like he was trying to remake "The King of Limbs" to me lol

New Eejungmi album out today for Bandcamp Friday! eejungmi.bandcamp.com/album/water-... First in 6 years!!!

Picked this up a few days early! Super excited to dig in.

Cool album of acoustic guitar covers of Autechre that came out last week that I'm lttp on - very sick idea! shaneparish.bandcamp.com/album/autech...

AI translated articles swapped sources or added unsourced sentences with no explanation, while others added paragraphs sourced from completely unrelated material.

Cool cinema stuff happening in YYC this month: - Calgary Cinematheque is doing a Joan Crawford/Bette Davis series (calgarycinema.org/40s-divas)! - Globe is also screening "Inland Empire" a bunch over the next 10 days!

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.

You could write such a good paper on Undermind and its follow-up/clarifying questions that it goes through prior to the generation of the deep research report as subsuming/absorbing the labour of the reference interview. (It's honestly really freaking good - better than me that's for sure lol)

So exciting - here is the new journal "Humanities Methods in Librarianship"'s first CFP!!! cuny.manifoldapp.org/read/call-fo...

Patrick Hyland absolutely snapped on the new Mitski - wild that they've been working together for ... 12 years now?!?!

I wish I had a bit more time right now to write a piece on my 2nd viewing of Kim A. Snyder's "The Librarians." Lots of complicated thoughts/feelings.

This Mitski single that I slept on is extremely Natalie Prass-coded IYKYK www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPy1...

David Harvey looking fresh in a Carhartt button up lol Yes, this is the first thing I noticed about the photo

Just realized that Melissa Adler's 2 new books on Jefferson both came out over the last few months: fordhampress.com/peculiar-sat... www.bloomsbury.com/ca/surveilla... Too many new books to read/review!!!

Somehow missed that Wiseman died this week. 96 years old! I had a COVID project to go through all his films. Didn't make it even remotely close, but loved so many of them. RIP

Consciousness to the stars, Love, Understand the Universe

One of my "JRL" reviews from 2024 got cited in a Wikipedia "Reception" section! Pretty cool. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeding...

New 'elbows up' just dropped: Protecting our sovereignty by destroying our capacity to tell our country's history. Ask any Canadian historian and they will tell you that things were already extremely dire at Library and Archives Canada. Not sure it will even be functional after this.

This is the best song of 2026 and it isn't even released yet lol www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKou...

"It's not artificial intelligence. It's African intelligence." Michael Geoffrey Asia, the secretary general of the Data Labelers Association in Kenya tells @jasonkoebler.bsky.social about the notoriously brutal and underpaid work of training AI. Watch now: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH65...

New Charli is so much better than I expected! m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zrsg...

New issue of "JRL" out on citational politics! Amped to dig into this. journal.radicallibrarianship.org/index.php/jo...

Jane Schoenbrun getting Paul Buchanan (and Alex G) to do music for her new movie is insanely goated

Cover of new Anton Jäger goes ridiculously hard

Tremendous discussion of the political economy of prediction markets at the beginning of this new "Nothing But Respect" ep! youtu.be/j7Xt3eXFMF4?...

Here's ~20,000 words of weekend reading from some sharp thinkers (Morozov, Benanav, Weatherby) who disagree re: what AI means for the left: www.theideasletter.org/essay/social... www.theideasletter.org/essay/a-real... www.theideasletter.org/essay/automa... www.theideasletter.org/essay/the-so...

Super interesting to see this Jon Schoenfelder piece (doi.org/10.33137/cja...) in the new "CJAL" issue that takes up Zurkowski's images in "The Information Service Environment." When I read Z in 2021 for my QAnon prez, I noted how crude/weird the hand-drawn figures were. Cool to see it taken up!

The Sham Wow Guy running for Congress as a stock reactionary crank is reviving my declensionist vibes majorly lol

I just found out about this horrible news. RIP. The "vocational awe" piece came out my first year of library school and was pretty foundational for me getting into the literature of critical librarianship.

Can't stop thinking about this tweet and how stupid yet hilarious it is lol

Lol at the new Zach Lowe Show ep being titled "Another Year, Another James Harden Trade" That really is how it feels

The special issue of the Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship on "Reflections and Speculations on Critical Librarianship" (which I co-edited with Sam Popowich and Lydia Zvyagintseva) is now available! Many thanks to the authors and co-editors: cjal.ca/index.php/ca...

Finally read this today, and it's so great. It's interesting that both Crano and I noted how unsatisfying these rushed to market AI books are as texts in our separate reviews of them. My review of Mollick's "Co-Intelligence" from 2024: journal.radicallibrarianship.org/index.php/jo...

www.insidehighered.com/opinion/care... Perhaps instead of zealously endeavouring to lead the new "AI answer economy" we could help students reflect on why the entire field of play is framed uncritically as an "economy" in the first place by default. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Song of 2026 already?!?!? www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCSh...

Great write-up by Sam Sodomsky, one of the best music writers going, about The Blue Nile's "A Walk Across the Rooftops" today: pitchfork.com/reviews/albu... That said, not sure how one finds the equivalent of 1.3 out of 10 things wrong with an album like that lol

I'm boosting my "KULA" piece that is partly on AI fabricated citations again: doi.org/10.18357/kul... One thing I really wish I would've touched on but didn't is the irony of resources ostensibly about ~AI ethics~ including fabricated citations. Would've been fun to draw that out a bit more.

I'm not sure this Raps squad can win a playoff series, but whooboy is this a markedly more watchable regular season team than years previous when they're actually near full strength. Shead, Mamu, and Walter are so fun off the bench.

This ep is proof of how/why this is the best b-ball pod going: open.spotify.com/episode/4z7x...

Loved this ep!

The new Lucinda has some real nice moments on it. She can do it like no other (and lol she loves writing about dancing barefoot) www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rr8A...

Read my new article on fabricated citations in "KULA"! doi.org/10.18357/kul...

IMO the only worthwhile engagement with the Claude's ~Constitution~ doc thing from Anthropic would be using it to perform a discourse or rhetorical analysis of self-serious anthropomorphism. Even so, though, who has the time to read an 84 page(!) PDF about all that lol

"Pitchfork" finally integrates user scores and suddenly everyone rushes to lowball "Kid A" lol