Everything about this is (a) horrifying and (b) rampant. Even if we could apply the brakes immediately, cleaning up the mess already made in this short time would be an enormous and very difficult task.

Funny animal videos no longer being trustworthy just fucking sucks all around. I love the wonder of animal behavior and what it says about the experience of being alive. It's because it happened in reality that it's so fun. It's not fun if it was just made up. There's no wonder there.

Philosophy bros and tech bros are two cheeks of the same arse, and the point of intersection is where you find the real arseholes

Doll for all those people out there who think open infrastructure and open content is free, can you please remember the following two things: 1) Everything on the internet is rented. 2) it’s not free, it’s “included”. Someone somewhere is paying

‘At all levels of university’ is spot on here. Under-discussed and theorised is the way these sorts of undergrad trends mirror trends in authorship, peer review, etc.

From @aip-publishing.bsky.social: cost of a peer reviewed article is $2700 (*before* you start giving back to the community). Would like to see a more detailed split, but it does align with estimates from eLife and EMBO #ScientificPublishing www.stm-publishing.com/cost-transpa...

And we’d do it again

These sorts of moves are completely understandable and bound to cause problems for philosophers of science

Some people argue that 'the British Isles' isn't political and we shouldn't be bothered by it, which is why they're invariably so open to my suggestion that we should switch to 'the Irish Isles' for the next few hundred years while we work out a solution.

every time there's political violence discourse i think about how jo cox was assassinated in broad daylight by a fascist who shouted "britain first" as he shot her, and now nine years later her party is dedicating every moment in power to placating the ideology of her murderer

It really seemed, at least from this distance, that the US was making real strides in the unionisation of poor & precariously employed workers, and now business is aligned with an economically illiterate president and there’s AI slop as far as the eye can see. They really hate paying people huh.

Let us by all means determine that software should be covered by the Working Time Directive. Let’s tell OpenAI they can no longer change or deactivate their models because that amounts to forced surgery or murder. If we must have this conversation, let it go all the way.

People are really hating on this but creating a narrative voice that melds Patrick Bateman and Alan Partridge is actually a significant technical feat

UCL top of the UK University Palestine Repression League Table updates.techforpalestine.org/announcing-t...

Achoimre trí fhocal ar pholasaí an Aontais Eorpaigh i leith Gaza. Handy three word summary of EU Gaza policy.

Fen Diagram A cartoon for the mathematically-minded lovers of flatlands, a particular Venn diagram in itself. www.worldofmoose.com/products/fen...

Someone's bound to have done this one already, right?

Do you ever look at someone else’s job and think about all the bad choices you’ve made and how it might have been

Okay, but look at how many _employees_ Nature has. How many philosophy journals have employees, let alone expert full-timers? www.nature.com/nature/editors

With the Israeli aid blockade, every time UNICEF says how close the population is to famine, "authorities just loosen the noose a little bit and a bit of aid is allowed to come in. When international attention dissipates, it's tightened once more. When famine hits, it will be too late."

If we understood publishing as a labor arrangement btwn variously situated workers (scholars, pub labor, librarians, etc.), whose labor is alienated & repackaged in cunning ways, we’d all be in a better place to feel & express solidarity, & to work toward something better. bsky.app/profile/time...

I wish scholars complaining abt editorial quality or enshittification realized they’re acting as if they’re entitled to the labor of others: people who are typically (even when not out-sourced) in more precarious situations than scholars are. In the face of AI, they are suddenly essential workers.

While scholars here are currently hot & bothered by OxfordUPs efforts to integrate AI-tools into their editorial workflow,👇 has been the actual labor arrangement (albeit, without the AI subterfuge) at big presses for quite some time, & most scholar haven’t batted an eye. bsky.app/profile/brun...

Socrates: Philosophers must rule as kings Glaucon: okay but what if we give them journals and blogs to manage first, to see how it goes?

Weak at the knees looking at these covers

Talking about himself on Thurs. Taking the opportunity of the end of the postdoc to reflect on ~15yrs of studying him. Planning normie philosophy + personal views on: slavery/anti-Irish views; B's loving parenting alongside family separation inherent in slavery; new work on tech & agriculture

Want to take a useful step in the face of the LibGen/ Meta situation? Learn more about how the scholarly publishing industry, which includes publishers and libraries and aggregators and more, is structured. + the experts who make it work, and how and why humanities publishing is so vulnerable.

Me: No no, they're very friendly, totally harmless My dogs:

I've had rheumatoid arthritis since age 20. Sometimes, I've been able to dance! But, at times, I've needed a wheelchair. Sometimes I couldn't use my hands. I have had a stroke and sepsis. I have terminal kidney failure now. I have never qualified for PIP, which they are making harder to claim.

A thread full of bangers for Patrick’s day, but this one is particularly delightful

As admin on a journal published by a commercial publisher (alongside my work for MHRA, which is non-profit), an issue that constantly recurs is that authors have no idea how completely separate the submission side of the journal (run by me and the Editor) is from production (run by the publisher).

The little sister knocking it out of the park as usual

This is still bugging me and it seems the problem here isn’t as self-evident as I’d have assumed. It’s not an issue of bullshit jobs and bloat, much more one about the loss decent jobs. Let’s take travel arrangements…

Surprised to see people lauding this quite bad article, which is inter alia another example of how David Graeber's deeply crap concept, "bullshit jobs," invariably leads to reactionary nostalgia about what constitutes 'real' work within an organisation. academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

I'm in the paper today, discussing AI and the new landscape facing kids and adolescents. Hovering over Sarah Healy's victory like harbinger of doom. www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025...

Granting that large and old institutions will inevitably develop strange processes and baffling spandrels, it's still DOGE-level naive to assume you can tell what is and what isn't an efficient use of resources from the armchair

Has anyone ever seen Clare and Sally Rooney in the same room at the same time? I KNEW IT.

Acronyms and the like can reduce the burden for the writer, but they usually increase the cognitive load for the reader. Or, as I like to put it, ANTLCRTBFTWBTUITCBFTR.

Roses are red Violets are blue Have you got scurvy? People do not like you

"Coup Klux Klan" feels like a keeper

Dreamt last night about starting a blog featuring philosophers writing about a novel of some (broadly construed) philosophical import to them. Commissioned Kitcher on Joyce, of course, and @aidanmcglynn.bsky.social on Le Carre. Co-edited with @srdfrench.bsky.social. Is this a thing maybe?

This is such a nice thing to read. I love being an editor but it's one of those jobs where if you do it well, it should be invisible (suits me); if you make a mistake, it risks going viral (no thank you). And philosophers can be defensive about being edited compared with other academics/writers.

I once made a comment about how big companies are definitely using sci-hub to train their models and some guy replied very sternly that they would never do this because of how risk averse they all are. Lol.

Henry VIII finishing Greensleeves: "I haue written a peece of musicke yt wyll make all ye worlde thinke, lo, I could really goe for a 99"

Have a read of TRiSS postdoc, Clare Moriarty's, piece in the Irish Times about swimming. www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2024... @quiteclare.bsky.social @tcdphilosophy.bsky.social @tcdssp.bsky.social

This is the end of A Muppet Family Christmas, which ran on tv in prime time in the late 80s. Watch all the way to the end. You’re in for a treat.