Профиль

I have been waiting all summer for Erik to bring us his annual TOMATO SANDWICHES thread. This is nothing short of pure joy. Read and delight in it.

<<cough>> H/t to @ebwood.bsky.social for the NYT story here

First, this is fantastic. Second, it gives the lie to the idea that people need to “learn” how to use AI given that it’s become compulsory. What lurks behind the notion that people need tutorials in it is that AI “education” is just a how-to in avoiding its hazards. The real education is this ⬇️

I have a joke about Hermes but you’d have to be pretty quick to get it.

My drunk roommate refuses to eat supermarket-bought frozen treats now that my husband makes him homemade ones.

Rather than engage with the Tankus Zitron throwdown I read a bunch of this report yesterday. Strikes me as a solid assessment. publicenterprise.org/report/bubbl...

Bubble or NothingPolicymakers concerned about the deployment of clean energy and compute-focused infrastructure over the long term need a framework for managing the uncertainty in the AI sector's investment landscape—...publicenterprise.org

Get in Losers, we're producing Lazarillo de Tormes.

"Democratizing art" are we now? “Now this isn’t just an artwork that exists several centuries ago that’s stiff and unapproachable, but it’s talking to me in an accent and I can ask it questions...Related to that idea is more broadly this idea of democratizing art.” www.artnews.com/art-news/new...

Harvard Art Museums Tested Out Using Generative AI to Animate 18th-Century Painting as Part of Marketing CampaignThe Harvard Art Museums recently tested out using generative AI to animate a 1750 painting by François Boucher as part of a marketing campaign.www.artnews.com

One nice thing I've done over the last two years is get print subscriptions to a bunch of excellent culture and politics periodicals. I tend to think that that is where the absolute best writing is happening these days.

If what I’ve been reading lately is indicative, “chain of custody” is going to be the anti-AI phrase of resistance for the next year or so. I think it’s good, or haven’t been convinced of why it’s bad. Lends legal credibility to a range of related forms of objection as to why AI cannot be trusted.

“A model of roads trained on only grid cities won’t properly predict the street plans of Rome or Boston. Having the available data biased toward a well-organized structure is a problem. But it isn’t the big one.” James C Scott <<high fives>> ⬇️ this chemist

My dog’s best friend and soul mate is so irresistible we might steal him.

Sure, it's only July 30 but it's never too early to plan to include the translation of Panofsky's very first article in your Methods course.

Hell yes my weekly UMass Faculty Newsletter about beakers and labcoats!

Inventing new investment vehicles to protect billionaires on the way down for a fee is obscene. But when you realize the thing they’ve invested in is undetachable from the state you realize it’s so much worse than that.

I’m reading a used copy of a book and while the previous reader underlined and asterisked the same things I would, their handwriting is messier mine and it’s taking a lot of willpower not to erase their annotations and replace them with my own.

Given that we are all upset today about Anthropic-shredding-books, I’ll add that I address this here, and it’s part of the same infrastructure threatening the preservation and profession of history but people don’t want to talk about that if the same industry is paying for their research.

I love my drunk roommate.

Harvard is embarking on a new and exciting experiment to determine whether one truly needs to have a university that does university things in order to maintain an endowment the size of a small nation’s GDP.

David just gave a presentation to the grad student mentorship program I'm co-convening through the Medieval Academy of America: I cannot recommend highly enough the work that he's doing to help scholars reach public audiences. This book is fantastic & folks should 100% invite David to present.