"The world Russia is imposing on Ukraine is built on the denial of human freedom, agency, solidarity, and humanity." Maksym Butkevych — Václav Havel laureate, fresh out of two years in a Russian penal colony — in his Lviv Media Forum keynote.

Recently, FamilySearch digitized and uploaded tons of microfilmed records, including many from 18th-century Massachsuetts. They're using some sort of AI to transcribe/summarize the handwritten documents. I've noticed that the AI strips out references to race and enslavement in 18thc documents.

A lot of people don't seem to know this but the Genocide Convention does not require a single person to have been killed for it to have been violated.

Talked about knowledge organization #KO from Llull to Wikidata with Jack Kausch @realcharacterlanguage.world in Pavia

Listening to infosec people freak out over Mythos is so tiring. Like, bro, your local water treatment plant runs Windows XP, your mobile provider's hardware is older than you are, and the protocol that routes internet traffic is secured by everyone just agreeing that hijacking it would be uncool.

My above post is satirical but also might have a tiny point to it. Anyway, if you want goblins, OpenAI tells you how to hack the system prompt in Codex

TIM ASH: Ukraine has most effective military in Europe at the moment. It’s like pendulum has swung, right? Now Ukraine has cards. Ukraine is the key to European defense and security going forward, if we're to have at least some kind of autonomy from Americans.

Sadiq Khan may try to stop Scotland Yard signing #Palantir contract - www.theguardian.com/politics/202... "Mayor raises concerns about using public money to support firms ‘who act contrary to London’s values’" @london.gov.uk leading the way yet again... #london

I don't know what to think about the Red Sox situation. Maimonides wrote 'Guide for the Perplexed' ~1185 C.E. to explain Jewish theology. This intrigues me, & I'm not even Jewish! I'm just perplexed! But let's talk about baseball. Where is the Maimonides who can explain 2026 Red Sox to me?

A @pewresearch.org study found that 38% of webpages from a decade ago, and about 25% of pages sampled across the decade, are now inaccessible; @archive.org's analysis shows that the @waybackmachine.bsky.social has rescued roughly 15% of those otherwise dead pages. blog.archive.org/2026/04/23/g...

Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

My dissertation "A 21st century essay towards a real character language" has been published on Western Theses repository: uwo.scholaris.ca/items/f609ab...

for additional comedy here, there is in fact no mention of anything like this in the Malleus Maleficorum (I just did a text search for 'mirrors,' 'reflection,' 'double' in the OUP translation and none of the references have anything to do with this)

well at least it's citing its sources

She wrote on her too: www.ursulakleguin.com/bvc-art-info...

Exactly one year ago today:

I usually try to explain it like this: picture Amber Frost as Glenn Greenwald. Now imagine they're Uzbek. Doesn't look so much like the Dancing Plague of 1518 was caused by dudebros vaguetweeting now, does it?

Trying to explain St Augustine to the pope, the former head of the Augustinian order, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Augustine, on his way back from celebrating mass at the Basilica of St Augustine in Annaba, Algeria, overlooking the site where Augustine lived is peak Adult Catholic Convert.

On a journey to a place where Hesse dwelled to find the spirit of the Glass Bead Game. What did he intend by that enigmatic novel, which won the Nobel prize for literature in 1946?

do you want "Catholicism but american" we invented that, it's called Episcopalianism and it's even more woke. all the priests are lesbians. good luck

Found a new way to calculate subclass relations with a fuzzy boolean algebra

Finally tweaking the UI to include the spinnable "glass beads"

*I get it that the guy is a Russian spook, but how much longer can he remain in this liminal state of dead-or-alive? There can't be that many people who know one way or the other. What if they all die? Does Averyanov permanently vaporize, a permanent missing-person report?

We're going to fire you and replace you with one of Jabir ibn Hayyan's magic squares

*Hmmm. I'm not sure that "expanding the limits of knowledge" even counts as a "job" *I don't doubt that people can do that, it's just that R&D is considered an expense rather than a revenue source

A little known fact is that every time you spell "America" with a "k" you make it 0.0001% more likely that there is a full communist decolonisation of Turtle Island (in a way that is, somehow, also good for Black people with a capital B) and if you do it with three "k"s you decolonise Australia too.

It really is quite specific on the theme “we are marching to our deaths but for abolition it’s worth it”

That UK government ever considers asserting its contractual rights against a major supplier is rare and welcome. And here, this is especially welcome. This will not be easy but it can be done, but it is good it is being seriously considered at all. www.ft.com/content/2d2b...

Just leaving DC after a quick stop. Seeing the words EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW atop the Supreme Court bldg. was infuriating; all four words have been made into a lie by the Roberts Court. But the cherry trees were in full bloom

Increasingly starting to think the Unicode Consortium should establish a Strategic Emoji Reserve of a number of new emojis they keep back, that can be rolled out in conjunction with vital security updates in order to get users to actually install them promptly.

Ah. Realizing that everyone needs to start making plans for how to survive next winter if there is no LNG. How very 19th century

Controversial but - students *perceive* they have been failed when what has happened is they have failed to understand information retrieval is a skill requiring effort. I don't believe a zero friction experience is realistic or desirable in learning, actually.

Big congrats to Doctor Jack Kausch @realcharacterlanguage.world who passed his thesis defense today! “A 21st century essay towards a real character language" Thanks to @gnoli.eu @lukestark.bsky.social @brimwats.com @danlizotte.bsky.social Grant Campbell, Shengnan Yang and @westernufims.bsky.social

truly incredible that strava leaks are still happening after all this time

In 2003 it was fantasy WMDs in 2026 it is fantasy objectives

People keep saying “oh so you want OPEN BORDERS” as some kind of gotcha and like. Yeah. When I was a kid you could just drive into Canada. On accident, even. It was great, and I think we should do that instead of kidnapping children. Normalize being normal instead of being kidnapping weirdos

I’ve spoken to lots of New School friends over the past yrs, months, weeks. They’re dreading the impending cuts + mourning the end of an aspirational mission we all activated through our labor and creativity — but which A Trump Within has decided to terminate. This is more than…

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.

is everybody just hypnotized into believing that the only thing you can send towards the input is a gradient and the only thing you can send towards the output are activations

As a former data labeler myself, I just joined the Data Labelers association today at datalabelers.org You too can aid in their struggle for better working conditions in Nairobi

I am moderating this ASIS&T Webinar March 12th 11 AM with @mmw09.bsky.social . Don't miss it! She will be discussing linked data, image annotation, RDF, Wikidata ontology subclass paths, and much more! Register here: www.asist.org/meetings-eve...

And I saw an article about TF/IDF as this *cool RAG thing* in another data science magazine. I want to resurrect some of the CRG's "lost" information retrieval architectures. They would be hailed as a "great RAG breakthrough" in the current climate

*Has AI ever done me any AI-specific harm, personally (as yet) *Well, they scraped a bunch of my novels to train the models *I think this might be classified as "harm I myself personally did to AI," due to blameful science fiction dystopias, etc

Somehow the use of the LLM makes it all the more enraging, this literally high-powered (CPU-burning, fossil-fuel-burning) technology used to basically do a keyword search, adding no refinement or expertise, just augmenting ignorance in the service of destroying knowledge-making processes