NEW: Days after WIRED revealed that Meta had embedded an unreleased facial-recognition system in software distributed to more than 50 million users, the company appears to have removed it. www.wired.com/story/meta-r...

Have to retell my experience of AI talking about the Lodz affordable homes. “Ghetto” was presumably a banned word and there are many British news stories calling affordable home schemes ghettos, so AI treated it as an acceptable substitute.

Well I think I've just definitively dated the arrival of the very first enslaved people from Africa to an English colony in the Caribbean - the exact day which launched a slave plantation system that would see 3.5m people trafficked in its wake. And it seems that 400 year anniversary is upon us.

1. How common is LLM use in scientific publishing, and how does it vary across field, publisher, journal prestige, author demographics etc.? @kylesiler.bsky.social has new paper in PNAS that addresses this question on a massive scale: 7.3 million papers from Elsevier, PLOS, MDPI, and Frontiers.

Do you want to learn to read old documents? Do you need to learn some Latin? The 49th Palaeography Summer School is for you! 👇 Tell all your friends. #palaeography #Skystorians #MedievalSky palaeography.uk/study/short-...

WIRED got a copy of a New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau report that has a curious term for opposition to AI development and data centers: "anti-tech violent extremist activity." Great reporting here on how law enforcement is tracking big tech opponents www.wired.com/story/us-law...

As the ties between the confederacy and modern fash are once again getting more attention, re-upping my thread about how the slavers' regime didn't even hold the South, facing widespread resistance from day one... Also a reminder that North vs. South is the wrong framing, then and now.

I've had a working theory for years about the invisibility of trans mascs being a consequence of being stuck within the realm of the domestic which can also explain why much of the (limited) representation we have is like straight working class trans guys

The silence is conspicuous: virtually nobody in Toronto who can do anything about it, or running to be in a position to do so, is talking about the police despite the biggest scandals in the force's history of late. What's up with that? I dig into it in my @thestar.com column this weekend.

Reading this it's rarely hit harder to me how disconnected amnesty are from grass roots hate researchers. This is a great report in that amnesty have a lot of weight but there's so much information amnesty seem to just not know

A great post from @skeuomorphpress.org Assistant Director Emeritus @divinetautology.bsky.social about building a book lab on a budget & under challenging circumstances—the timing couldn’t be better as I prepare to chat with aspiring booklabbers at RBS today

Teaching students to avoid "bothering" their teachers stops learning in its tracks, undercuts essential social development, and trains kids not to seek help (from people) when they need it. Its sole function is to enable higher student-teacher ratios. @aft.org promoting this is sick and sickening.

College librarian here. One of the things I regularly tell students that shocks the absolute pants off of them is that they can talk to their teachers, that questions are what office hours are for. It just doesn't occur to them. They are cutting themselves off from part of their education.

I can't stop thinking about this. How am I (along with so many others) looking at this Granta story and seeing 100% obvious ai/nonsense, and other people are going, "No, that's writing. That's what writing is. This is what writing looks like." Are we living in different universes??

They’re at it again. None of this is valuable historical research. It’s about exploiting historical artifacts and historians to develop computer vision further and to make a soft cultural argument for surveillance tech. This nonsense has been going on since c2010.

In 2020 @yaelrice.bsky.social and I authored this article to dispute this kind of pseudo-scientific research, which regularly gets press attention, precisely so that others don't have to cope with the tedium of refuting it. Here's the refutation you need! hyperallergic.com/how-scientis...

"hallucinated references disproportionately assign credit to already prominent and male scholars, suggesting that LLM-generated errors may reinforce existing inequities in scientific recognition" arxiv.org/abs/2605.07723

🚨 #medievalsky 🚨 Middle English Dictionary update via FB: "In its 100-year history, MED has enjoyed periods of support, and periods when that support was lacking. It is about to enter on one of the latter. After this year...UMich will no longer fund ongoing editorial work and maintenance." 🧵

Alright, here's my contribution to the Is-Bluesky-Dying discourse: Bluesky is a record store davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/bluesky-is...

Now that Amazon has shown there is legal precedent, which ed tech company or institution will dare to sue to get AI agents to identify themselves so that we can keep online learning environments for human learning? Rumi/@mozadeh.bsky.social makes a good case here: www.rumidocs.com/newsroom/the...

Random little Catholic fact for all yinz heathens, today is the day of veneration for Julian of Norwich. She wrote a book, The Revelations of Divine Love. If you are into medieval mystical writings I really think its one of the best, a stunningly beautiful read. julianofnorwich.org/pages/who-is...

I wrote about being inundated with AI writing at every turn, unwittingly turning my brain into the AI police, and how shitty AI writing is randomly showing up in my real life outside of the internet www.404media.co/your-ai-use-...

Technician at the apnea clinic asked me how I slept. Do I have to do EVERYONE else’s jobs these days?!

bluesky banning the bot that tracks what accounts are banned is probably the most bluesky thing bluesky has ever done this is their final form

What I wish for everybody to remember when Canvas comes back online: The reason OUR data can be held for ransom is because Instructure, their owners (KKR private equity & Dragoneer venture capital), & our own employers (see ASU Atomic) monetize it. It's Canvas that hacked education & stole our IP.

It Has Ever Been Thus

I am once again tapping the "it is a genuine qualitative break from 99.9% of human history that society can now produce massive food surpluses with the labor only a tiny percent of the population and nobody has any idea how to grasp this" sign.

If you're thinking about using gen-AI to "write" books, this 🧵 is for you. I’m a highly experienced editor who’s been in the biz a long time. Recently I’ve had manuscripts come to me where the author has used gen-AI – not for writing, I’ve been assured, but for “structuring” or "organising"

Exhibit A: in a recent antitrust filing, Meta argued it isn't a social media monopoly because it isn't really a social media company anymore. Only 7% of Instagram time and 17% of Facebook time is spent on content from friends or followed accounts. The rest is algorithmic video from strangers.

My favorite art history genre is "Judith beheading Holofernes"

You've probably been wondering: "How many eels is a cottage worth in 14th C. England?" This is a reasonable question. I get it. And happily, I'm here to help! I included a chart showing this kind of equivalence in an article I wrote for HistoryExtra , but here's an excerpt! 🗃️🧪

This is why science is so exciting: “This surprised me because we had no prior evidence…” Imagine the excitement in the lab when these results emerged! This tiny single-celled organism learned to ignore being gently tapped in its Petri dish. It learned. That’s amazing!

This is bleak. Essentially, lecturers as middle managers between students and chatbot.

Dude. Christian conservatives (& Christian liberals!) using “Pharisees” as a shorthand for evil / hypocritical / tyrannical is “just how they talk” BECAUSE of antisemitism. Antisemitism was so embedded in Christian rhetoric for centuries that you all see it as “normal” religious language.

In 1999, I was playing a decker in Shadowrun, and tried to distract a guard by hacking a water fountain to overflow, and my GM said "why would a water fountain be on the network? That's fucking stupid. No you can't try." Well it's 2026 and I just want you to know, Phil, that I FUCKING CALLED IT!

I just re-found this painting, which was in a kid's bible I had growing up. I used to obssess over it, and I'm pretty sure seeing Lucifer here was the first time I thought a man was attractive? Over the years I'd think "it couldn't possibly be as horny as I remember it", but I mean come ON

This is NUTS www.thehandbasket.co/p/trump-usai...

NEW—I got an exclusive excerpt from a USAID whistleblower's new book that made me gasp multiple times. It details Trump's dismantling of the humanitarian aid agency & his team/DOGE's shocking ignorance to public health. 'Into the Wood Chipper' by Nicholas Enrich is out tomorrow. Read excerpt here:

Hello Bluesky! My new book, THE FIREARM REVOLUTION, is out on 14 April. It’s about how a new technology changed society, and how hard it was to control. Here’s a little thread of what’s inside:

The WSJ piece is a truly horrifying read, and I’m not sure I can recommend it; it needs a content warning klaxon. But if you have any doubts about how dangerous these things are, for adults *and* kids, or if you think their spongy ‘guardrails’ actually hold, it will clear that right up for you.

Amazing treasures of medieval legal history to distract one briefly from current news and marking - the Catslechta ˙ (or Cat-sections) - an old Irish legal text on cats (the Senchas Már) which even sets out various categories of cats based on various characteristics or talents. #medievalsky

With Hungary in the news, it’s worth paying attention to what happened there to see if we can still stop it here. Mostly using antisemitic propaganda, Orbán has eliminated 90% of teaching activity at Budapest’s top university. Hungary has subsequently seen a massive brain drain & economic stagnation

Well, that was predictable. But given how Trump doesn’t give a crap about alliances, I’m beginning to wonder if he might just leave Bibi out to dry.

Weingarten has been wrong on every major issue facing educators: she embraced testing, charter schools, an abandonment covid protocols, now AI. Her mantra is always the same: we need to welcome the systemic changes imposed by neoliberal administration, so that they appear inevitable

Meanwhile the European federation of teachers union is calling yours out. See below a useful book by our union to hold yours to a higher standard. @etui.bsky.social @etuce.bsky.social @aob.nl @ucu.org.uk PDF for whole book here: www.csee-etuce.org/en/item/7245... bsky.app/profile/oliv...

"Whether you find cocaine exciting or frightening, its widespread use—including among students—means we all need to learn how to interact with it responsibly."

Y'all there is a woman and a black man circling the moon and NASA's mission control+ science teams are so diverse and people are nerding out about science and exploration this is all a gigantic middle finger to the stupid and hate and grotesque ghouls running our country

Now that all those innocent people have died tragically I do think that this is worse than lesbians being in a Cheerios commercial, but you couldn’t have expected me to know that prior to the election

Sir, a second bird is at the feeder

Happy Easter: “I’ve spent well over 20 years studying the history of the Crusades, thinking about the ways that sanctified violence works once it takes hold in a culture and becomes institutionalized. Once leaders start talking the way Pete Hesgeth does …limitations can easily fade away.”