Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.

Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto include academics as the enemy, but the description of our sins could just as well fit venture capital.

First world war: The manifesto of Futurism FT Marinetti's 1909 manifesto of the principles of the Futurism movement

Reading Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto. He quotes Martinetti's Futurist Manifesto which includes, "We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman."

Table 2. Disconnection during COVID-19

Table 3.

Table 4.

"Digital detoxes" are trendy. But who actually does this voluntary disconnection?

Minh Hao Nguyen & @eszter.com find that younger, higher educated, more frequent internet users, and those with less dependable access are more likely to voluntarily disconnect

doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqad021

I can't bring myself to read more than a page of the Andreessen thing. It's word vomit; LLMs do much better.

But the meta-pattern is interesting: academia and tech are locked in the sort of struggle for moral authority that used to take place between academics and journalists.

Hoooo boy

Call for papers 2024 - Replaying Japan Replaying Japan 2024  – The 12th International Japan Game Studies Conference – [Conference Theme] Preservation, Innovation and New Directions in Japanese Game Studies [Dates] Monday, August 19 (U...

Call For Papers is now up for Replaying Japan 2024. This is being jointly organized at the U of Buffalo, SUNY and at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester (with transportation.) Should be a great conference on Japanese game culture. See replaying.jp

Reflecting in my blog on how OpenAI has changed the "core values" it describes on its Careers page. Now AGI is the first core value and anything that doesn't help with the commitment to building safe and beneficial AGI is out of scope. See theoreti.ca?p=8364

AI reads text from ancient Herculaneum scroll for the first time Machine-learning technique reveals Greek words in CT scans of rolled-up papyrus. Machine-learning technique reveals Greek words in CT scans of rolled-up papyrus.

A 21 year old undergrad played a key role in this major breakthrough for the Herculaneum Scrolls project (one of the coolest DH projects NEH has funded). Luke Farritor, from U Nebraska-Lincoln, was the first person to uncover a full word from a 2000 year old scroll. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

@AmandaAskell on Twitter: Philosophy: "Our low-hanging research fruit has been plucked for the last 2000 years, so to make progress you must build a ladder." AI: "And over here we have the fruit gun. It pelts you with low-hanging research fruit every few seconds. Try not to let it distract you."

Every field has its own challenges.

Cover of the Chronicle of Higher Education with a white dude in 90s sunglasses juxtaposed with some computer visualization of something scientific as a big picture on the cover.

It's 1991. While you and your buddies are doing humanities computing, across campus people are experiencing science with computer-created "virtual reality".

Reflecting on presentation tools like PowerPoint and Tufte's critique. Wishing MORE had been successful. theoreti.ca?p=8346

Native American group to digitize 20,000 archival pages linked to Quaker-run Indian boarding schools The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition says it will digitize 20,000 archival pages related to Quaker-operated Indian boarding schools.

The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition has been awarded $124,000 to digitise 20,000 images from Swarthmore and Haverford archives to reveal truth and begin repair around #Quaker boarding schools, 1852-1945
#Quakers #Skystorians

Digital Humanities Bluesky Code Sharing Form Given the ongoing deterioration of Twitter as a viable space for the sharing of digital humanities work, ACH has begun exploring alternatives. Bluesky social has the makings of a viable alternative, b...

Down to less than five extra new codes in the can in our spreadsheet that has 220 rows in it! Keep an eye out for any new codes you get and submit them here to share out to a colleague.

bit.ly/dh-bluesky

Second day of Replaying Japan in Nagoya and continuing my conference notes, https://philosophi.ca/pmwiki.php/Main/Replaying2023 . Excellent paper on the challenges of game studies in China. If I understood the story their DiGRA chapter was ruled illegal by the government and papers disappear.

Reading AP's "Standards around generative AI" (https://blog.ap.org/standards-around-generative-ai they strike me as sensible advice we should give our students including "We urge staff [students] to not put confidential or sensitive information into AI tools."

This is a really good example of a general principle about prompting, which is that you have to ask yourself when & how words are actually used in captions — not what the dictionary says they mean.

At Nagoya Zokei University for Replaying Japan 2023 in Nagoya, Japan. Finally we are back in person. Keeping conference notes at https://philosophi.ca/pmwiki.php/Main/Replaying2023

Hey babe, wake up, a new robots.txt just dropped https://platform.openai.com/docs/gptbot

Just posted a small album from our trip to Bamfield and Kiix̣in on Vancouver island. flickr.com/photos/geoffreyrockwell/...