Goths! Academics! I have possibly made this up (irony), but I am reasonably sure I read something in the last few months that said LLMs are essentially gothic in nature. Sound familiar to anyone? Any idea what it might have been? Probs just a thread, but might have been a substack…

That sound you are hearing is my jet lagged brain slowly creaking back into teaching mode.

Major yn Englisshe: • focused readinge & writinge prepare you for anythinge • research, communicacioun, creativitye, and interpretacioun will be needed for careers not even invented yet • meaningful engagement wyth big ideas and textes that will staye wyth you forevir • it ys awesome • books!

There's lots more to say about @davidharvie.bsky.social and my findings. Please read the report to support union action & honour those who shared experiences. I'll finish with an eyeopening stat: the hidden, 'backdoor' redundancies affecting *11,500* people. 11,500 HIDDEN job cuts. This must end.

Queen

First morning back in Britain: cold*, wet. Trying to figure out how to get the washing to dry. Welcome home to me. ❤️ *it was well into the mid 20s and above in the US. 12 may as well be winter to me right now.

Also my cabbie from the station was a full on lefty and the sigh of relief I let out was incredible. The US was not, shall we say, comfortable over the last week and a bit. (NB not my family - just the overall vibe.)

Found out when using my brand spanking new British passport for the first time this morning that apparently you need to thwack them to get the chip to work correctly. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, as a friend put it.

More prosaically, as someone pointed out to me recently: LLMs are *always* hallucinating. its just that sometimes their hallucinations appear to map our experienced reality. But the map is never *of* our reality, just *like* it. So the words don’t describe it. 4/4

Haven’t had a single serving friend on a flight in… 15 years? 20? Nice to pass the time with someone way too happy to chatter for a change.

Me: *finishes book proofs while on holiday* Me: ah, I have three days left - I will reward myself with a Barnes and Noble trip and relax til my flight. Journal article proofs, 1am Saturday: the hell you will.

Reading your edited proofs as a pro copy editor yourself: yeah, like, I can see why you might think that, but WORLDS OF NO. In other news, I am glaring at my laptop.

Aw man I wish academics had headlines like this. “Stephen Aguilar (existential dread) is not expected to write today, per @mpolikoff.bsky.social”

Could UK HE please hold themselves together at least till I get back from holiday? FFS. (In all seriousness, I’m gutted and furious and terrified for colleagues at both institutions - and what this means for the rest of us…)

the word “sloppycat” just popped into my head for people who try to ape actual specific human work using slop generators please feel free to use it

Not sure whose fault it is primarily that most people don't seem to know that the president is basically a manager whose job is to carry out the will of Congress, and not The Country's Boss

Le Guin undefeated at "the fuck you say to me" as subtext

I’m going to say this louder this time: if you are lying about having a high-risk condition to get a Covid vaccine, all good, do what you want to do BUT show some actual goddamn respect for people who *actually* have that condition and start masking.

I also really appreciate this advice from @emilymbender.bsky.social and @karenhao.bsky.social, which tracks with my own experience teaching high school students and college students and talking with my own kids. Emphasize environmental costs and - once more - that GenAI is *not* inevitable.

Good lord, people! We can have sand batteries? We have so many real solutions…

What we don't talk about enough is that our central conception of governmental executive power remains essentially that of an absolute monarch - that they hold, as if by magic, the power and the right to do *anything they want* unless some fragile bonds of custom & law prevent them. But why?

dear everyone MOCKING PEOPLE'S APPEARANCE ISN'T HOW YOU BUILD A MORE JUST WORLD MOCKING ABILITY OR HEALTH MOST *CERTAINTLY* ISN'T how many times must we cover this yes this includes "chosen" things like self-tanner FFS it doesn't matter people's SPEECH & ACTIONS are what matter GO AFTER THAT

I am 90% sure this is going to be the death of the academic book review, too. No one wants academic ebooks and I hate pretending it’s anything like getting a physical copy. Now we won’t be able to send to the US from the UK - and much of the EU has been near-impossible since Brexit.

Favourite ways to check book proofs so you don’t miss anything: go! (I’m thinking backwards chapter by chapter/section by section?)

Something that I have been thinking about with attribution of "PhD level intelligence" or "PhD level expertise" to a machine is that it reflects an increasing trend among these AI bros and their sycophants to want the products of highly skilled training without actually doing any of the work.

What @drlindseyfitz.bsky.social is saying is true. I explained UKIP/Reform/EDL to my parents as British MAGA (and they were rightfully horrified). And it’s not an exaggeration, at all.

You do not get to claim you hate Trump and MAGA and then turn around and vote for Reform - a party that is literally funded by the MAGA movement. British people, please wake up before it's too late. I've seen what this is doing to my home country, and it is ... horrific. time.com/7281644/trum...

Anyone who doesn't think Britain is following the USA into the depths of hell isn't paying attention. The US flag was one of the first symbols co-opted by the far right in America, and now it's happening in the UK. Farage's Reform Party is British MAGA. www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...

Oh, now the Spectator has joined the Telegraph in wringing its hands about the university crisis! Like it's nothing to do with them. Too late guys, you've already smashed it, maybe think twice before going in with the bull in a china shop tactics next time eh. www.spectator.co.uk/article/pick...

Business leaders are now very concerned about the state of the UK's universities. See below. If they knew how bad things really are they'd be even more worried. www.ncub.co.uk/insight/secu...

If you wouldn’t share it on social media, you shouldn’t put it into an LLM.

now google each of those six universities and “redundancies”

As OP has since realised, this is AI. it's fascinating to me how it messes up in basic ways - watch the timestamp top right, particularly the year. It doesn't, can't, know that's supposed to stay the same.

I really think universities underestimate how true this is for a lot of students and their parents. They don’t want us to try to pretend to be cool. They want us to be a bit dusty, and very serious. Enthusiastic, definitely! But also nerdy. We’re selling them ACADEMIA.

Happy 15th anniversary of the peak achievement of literary criticism, to all who celebrate

I remember well UEA’s rebranding about 15ish years ago, when we went from the wonderful cobalt blue, 1960s font to the Windows 95 background-coloured UE*\ we have now. I can’t remember how much it cost. Wish I’d bought a hoodie before the rebranding.

Jo Johnson, architect of OfS and UKRI, says a ministerial "dereliction of duty" is behind the university funding crisis, while splitting responsibility for universities between the DfE and Dsit has "damaged policymaking". Via @chrisjparr.bsky.social www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-p...

Remember me telling you the university redundancy situation was far worse than it looked? Well, here's the evidence - not renewing contracts, forcing people to 'retire' and the like may not show up in the stats, but it cd double the losses number. (1/2) www.timeshighereducation.com/news/uk-univ...

Probably about 35%+ of all university Humanities posts will be closed. Those subjects will be taught in far fewer universities. There will be a lot less modular choice within those degrees that remain. A large-scale but unannounced policy change from central govt, with far-reaching implications.

The UK did have one standout product that was considered globally valuable- universities- and unilaterally decided to stop providing the product because it was more important to be xenophobic than successful

Part of the “deep-rooted” economic problems is thinking that producing goods = making widgets.

'Rebecca Harrison, a former lecturer at The Open University, said that the extent of the deterioration of job security in universities was “alarming”, adding that institutions had not been transparent about the extent of the cuts occurring in the sector.' 1/3

do you ever stare at the ceiling and think about how the worldwide scientific establishment did the impossible and created a COVID vaccine in under a year and the response of the general public has been to go on an unstoppable rampage to destroy science and scientists

When the British government talks about reducing the number of international students, or imposing a levy on universities, or whatever, remember that international student fees *are an export*

we produce tonnes of marketable, valuable, productive stuff that we could sell to the world — like university education, and television programmes, for example — but the government has no interest in improving the conditions for making and selling these things

💯💯💯 if you dip just a biiit further back to pre-1750s you'll find that *women* were often the characterized as having strong and "uncontrollable" sex drives, as well as a bunch of other stereotypes we now hold about men, which really blows up a lot of the basic manosphere assumptions #histsex

We're 200 years away from it being normal to assume that an adult woman could do 12-14 hours of manual labour, six days a week. And for the definition of "adult woman" to start around 14... And let's not start on what female field-slaves were deemed able to do...

I mean, it's funny because, if you've spent any time at all with social history pre-1850, you'll know flat-out that all the "debates" about women's work as a problem weren't about strength or weakness *at all*, but about "skill" and appropriate boundaries in a hierarchical, patriarchal society.