Happy New Year! Danny made this year's lemon piglet and he's put its ears on backwards

Looking back at the year professionally and craftily I have 'achieved' relatively little in 2025 - there's not as much to show for what I've been working on. BUT. There has been a huge amount going on! And I'm so proud of myself for doing the things I have done to get myself here!

On Boxing Day a few years ago I wrote off my car on black ice on the M74 and *so* many people stopped to help me. An off-duty firefighter, a newspaper delivery person, a builder who gave me hot water from his flask and sat me in his warm van until the police arrived...

Marx had many things to say about this, but it boils down to this: pushing AI onto the general populace is intentional, the GOAL is alienation - to unhook that link in your brains between labour and product. It's why fast fashion is made where you can't see it.

"Academics literally cannot make genAI go away" we also can't make underage drinking go away and we're not advocating for installing bar carts in every classroom.

Ask your friendly academic librarian about all the times we tried to tell you that what we do is important and you should fund it. You get the services you pay for, friends.

This is why I loathe AI apologists in the library. “Just have AI do w/e for you, while teaching patrons how to use it and how to protect themselves from it.” Like. No. It’s job is to make slop. My job is to prove quality information and recreation, that’s why we have collection development policy!

Remember: There's always strength in a union. Solidarity.

I think this is a really important point. When folks say "no AI" they often don’t mean "I can conceive of no possible use for AI"—they mean "the use cases I’ve been shown do not begin to justify the harms"—that’s not something you respond to by offering another narrow use case

Love to be "the meanest person ever" because I will not allow a child to wear heelies on my new engineered wood floor

If you're an academic who is protective or defensive about your own area of expertise (understandable, in this day and age), but are offended when it's suggested that professional archivists & librarians have unique expertise outside your own experience, that's worth some self-examination

A Christmas menace

Responsible researchers have the privilege to unhitch themselves from the "AI" brand at any time. Are you studying wildfire smoke or deforestation using satellite imagery? That used to be "remote sensing" and you can call it that again. Signal processing, image segmentation, structure-from-motion.

“why are women using ai less than men” bc our ideas have to actually be good

People are saying that this is a problem for all library catalogues but that's not true: this is a problem for, in this case, Ex Libris Primo and more generally for outsourced proprietary library catalogues that libraries don't control. The answer, as always, is to build and control our own tech.

Professional societies keep beclowning themselves buying into a lie about what an LLM "summary" is. They are inherently counterfeit: not an epistemic product of the ideas in the source, but summary-shaped text linguistically based on *other* works (in the training corpus) that use related language.

It's that time of year again

Danny has made a batch of mince pies so good that one of the people at the choir Christmas do had three in a row. Such is the power of @alysdragon.bsky.social's mincemeat

I love it when researchers say "you don't save any time with AI assisted research because you can't be sure the sources exist" kind of giving away the game there

Gingerbread (hard and chewy) Lebkuchen Chocolate chip cookies Lavender shortbread Maids of honour Pineapple upside down cake

Yes...ha ha ha...FUCKING YES!!!

Does anyone have experience of what HE libraries look like after they've been KPMGed?

All I want for Christmas is objective reality back.

Doing culture day at school today, hundreds of kids from 50+ different nationalities in their national/traditional/casual dress having a massive laugh together sharing food, music and joy. Don't let them tell you multiculturalism doesn't work.

Looking at everything that’s going on right now it does make it obvious why they hated experts, scientists, university professors, librarians, journalists, etc etc so much. Imagine wanting the world to be like this and having society stop you because it says that you’re wrong.

Not excellent news, but at least they listened to the community and now AI summaries are not the default view

I sympathize with our students not knowing what to do about genAI, given that some parts of the university are busy telling them to use it and get certificates in it and demanding they apply it and some of us are begging them to stop destroying themselves and the planet and our minds.

while i am not an academic i did see this coming and post about it on bluesky, which is why i am quoted in this article

techbros: we have created AGI cognitive scientists: you fucked up a perfectly good spreadsheet is what you did. look at it. it's got anxiety

On my Festive Bullshit 🎄

Thankful for penicillin rn

it's (somehow) also worse than this because the AI summaries are embedded into the search output too instead of a preview of the abstract, you get misleading garbage text immediately under each result (post below shows example with the summary clicked to expand) bsky.app/profile/5tua...

This comes right as ACM has finished convincing all the research libraries (and academic departments, probably) to fund their flip to Open Access, too! Just feeding the machine.

The ACM Digital Library, where a LOT of computing-related research is published (I'd say at least 75% of my own publications), is now not only providing (without consent of the authors and without opt-in by readers) AI-generated summaries of papers, but they appear as the *default* over abstracts.

When 97% is 'no clear consensus', and 52% is 'the will of the people', it's time to face facts that Governments do what Governments want to do regardless of what their people actually want.

I have so many good ideas, but I am forced to labor under capitalism, so I rarely get to use them. Maybe instead of outsourcing my brain to the machines we could introduce UBI and let people create while machines work. Idk idk

What if I told you that finding relevant papers and synthesising them with citations was in fact...part of the 'science'.

"The machine, in its quest to sound authoritative, ended up sounding like a KCPE graduate who scored an 'A' in English Composition. It accidentally replicated the linguistic ghost of the British Empire."

the exclusive use of festive, ambient lighting in *all* living spaces will continue until morale improves

we knew that the Google Scholar enshittification was coming... telling students to not cite papers, chapters, books, etc they haven't read has always been ab ensuring references' accuracy & appropriateness - now, apparently, there's another reason: to make sure references exist in the first place

- Only 3.5% want a new copyright exception for AI training (3% want an exception + opt-out for rights holders, 0.5% an exception with no opt-out) These results are absolutely overwhelming. The government should rule out a new copyright exception immediately. /end

when I read a student paper that's obviously written by them

AI is incredibly creative if you’re the sort of person who confuses asking for things with making things

Youngest is really keen on learning to cook just now. He absorbs so much and then recites it next time, including, much to my delight, announcing: "I'm going to measure [x ingredient] with my heart", Ina Garten style.

the good that you do persists in this world

Rob Reiner was a good guy. He made a lot of movies about good guys, in worlds where not everyone was good and you didn’t have to be good. He made movies about people trying. He was angry, as many hopeful people are. He knew the world could be better and he wanted it to be. His death is devastating.

He's also responsible for raising all the money that paid for bringing Hollingsworth v. Perry & even more importantly Bostic v. Schaefer, which created the circuit split that forced SCOTUS to take on Obergefell v. Hodges. The role he played in American marriage equality cannot be overstated.