this is just to say
I have had an issue
fetching the posts
that were
on the timeline
and which you
were probably
hoping
to doomscroll
forgive me
the takes were so hot
and so
rate limited
I don’t think administrators are off on a frolic here without endorsement (or more likely mandate) from academic leadership, but I don’t know the ins and outs of the internal politics 🤷♀️
❗️Change:NOW! Mobilising the Progressive Majority
IIPP Professors @cacrisalves.bsky.social, @ceciliarikap.bsky.social, and @jryancollins.bsky.social will be speaking at the upcoming Change:NOW! conference on May 30 2026.
🔗 Learn more and register here: buff.ly/TwW22xy
@pef-online.bsky.social
if people are telling you that you did something wrong, you will feel defensive and angry! you have to wait for those feelings to subside and then you must seek out accounts of people who had similar things happen to them and work on your sense of empathy. read about how it affected them.
Putting aside Sam Altman just continuing to emit huge lies constantly, this is an amazing example of what I mean when I talk about how GenAI is replacing *extremely low energy* digital tasks with *WAY WAY HIGHER ENERGY* replacements that *do not even work*
Why TF is anyone using ChatGPT as a timer!
From Michael Milken to Sam Altman, perhaps we should interrogate why our economic system seems to structurally incentivize the rise of grifters….
🚨New preprint and our results are rather concerning..
We find the "boiling frog" equivalent of AI use. Using large-scale RCTs, we provide *casual* evidence that AI assistance reduces persistence and hurts independent performance.
And these effects emerge after just 10–15 minutes of AI use!
1/
"Among young American men, the strongest predictor of support for the tradwife lifestyle was not gallantry but hostility towards women"
Apparently this is not what researchers "expected". Which makes one wonder: had these researchers thought about it for 30 seconds?
www.thetimes.com/life-style/s...
The. Rise. Of. Cognitive. Surrender.
Study finds that people who use GenAI chatbots rely on them 80% of the time, and develop almost no capacity to recognize when a chatbot is feeding them faulty information.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Vaseem Khan – Quantum of Menace (2025)
★★★★★ This is a new endeavour for Vaseem Khan, after his two award-winning series set in India, the Malabar House and Baby Ganesh series, and his recent standalone US-based thriller, The Girl in Cell A. I'm always intrigued by extended-universe work that…
Everybody who tried to argume with me about the water and energy consumption of "AI" abd data centers can go jump in a fucking lake.
While they can still find any.
Let’s talk ✨constructive friction✨ in educational design!
Yes, many students adopt AI as a rational response to assessment where thinking isn’t required for success @wonkhe.bsky.social
But let’s talk about cases where friction makes something hard to do, and the by-product is learning! 🧵
19th-century oil portrait painting of British writer and social reformer Caroline Norton, shown seated at a table draped in a vibrant floral tablecloth. She wears an elegant off-the-shoulder yellow satin gown with ruffled sleeves and gold jeweled bracelets on both wrists. Her dark hair is parted in the middle and upswept in an elegant updo. She gazes directly at the viewer with a gentle smile, her left hand resting under her chin and her right hand holding a quill pen above an open book. The dramatic background includes a classical stone column, a rich red drape on the right, and a stormy night sky with silhouetted buildings on the left. The painting is signed “G.F. Watts” in the lower right corner.
After Caroline Norton's husband took her kids & earnings, she fought for:
+ Custody of Infants Act 1839: For the first time gave married women a right to their children
+ Matrimonial Causes Act 1857: Deserted wives' right to own & protect property
She was born #OTD in 1808. #UK #WomensHistoryMonth
One thing that AI evangelists seem to assume, particularly legal AI evangelists assume, is that the thinking and analysis is quick, and the writing is just tedious busywork that slows us down.
But the writing IS the thinking and analysis. You work out the thinking and analysis by writing it down.
There are few things I hate quite like the data center boom. It’s an environmental crisis, invitation for corruption, and economic bomb in the making all at once. It’s a lot like 19th century railroad booms and bubbles.
I wrote about that for @damemagazine.bsky.social here.
Gaynor Torrance – Death of a Ghostwriter (2025)
★★★★ I'm really enjoying the trend towards detective fiction with a strong sense of place, and as someone who lives in Dyffryn Gwy at least part of the time, I was obviously going to pick up this Wye Valley Widows series! (I had actually been trying…
This screams tail-wagging-dog system problem. Presumably the system is incapable of selecting the time period for multiple packages?
I would love to know why this is, if anyone familiar with Royal Mail’s intricacies is reading this… 🙈
Hope your packages came together at 10:30!
Challenge for people who believe Claude *is* conscious and use it anyway: Explain how you’re not a slaver.
Oooh. Yes. I can reliably show up for coffee after running a distance, but not appear at a start line at a predesignated time willing to run a preset distance. 🙈🙈
Isn’t this a poster by the SU, rather than the uni? A bit of a shame if the SU is detached from the student body!
Lucy Foley – Midnight Feast (2025)
★★★★ This book was everywhere on Waterstones tables for months, and it follows in the well worn tracks of her previous crime thrillers, starting with the excellent The Hunting Party. I had been a little disappointed in The Paris Apartment, feeling that things…
Sorry I'm not more open-minded about LLMs, it's just some fucking maniacs shoveled out a bunch of useless bloatware featuring that technology, did not give me any chance to opt out, reorganized the entire economy around it, zeroed out gains made by green energy, and made it impossible to buy RAM
Powis Castle stands talll on top of a hill, daffodils grow in the garden below
The house at Bodnant Garden viewed across a large expanse of grass with daffodils blooming
Dyfryn Gardens with the house and daffodils bathed in sunshine
A child is stood on top of hay bales with the Welsh flag placed in them
Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus | Happy St David’s Day
Here’s to Cymru! The nation’s language, traditions, culture, and the heritage that connects us. From dragons to daffodils, Wales’ story is told through the places we look after.
Photos: Powis Castle, Bodnant Gardens, Dyffryn Gardens, Chirk Castle.
History of Science and Science Fiction (Victorian Reading Project)
This was the third theme on my Great Nineteenth-Century Reading Project list, which I started in 2023. As with the other themes, there was a mix of poetry, fiction and non-fiction in this list. Reading plan (chronological) Erewhon,…
50 percent of people who go to watch The Cure actually end up watching Placebo, and enjoy it just as much.
(No, YOU fuck off)
Major cuts to physics & astronomy research
When staff & infrastructure compete for the same funding, bricks & mortar win
Grim consequences fall on early-career researchers through hiring freezes, non-renewed contracts & broken fellowship pathways
www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...
I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to bother with the film (because I’m lazy about going to the cinema), but John Mullan’s piece reminds me why it’s great, and I might just reread the novel instead! 😂 www.newstatesman.com/culture/book...
Thesis: ICE is un-American and the Minneapolis protestors are real Americans.
Antithesis: Ackshually ICE is operating in a long American tradition of racist terror.
Synthesis: Minneapolis is now the epicenter of a clash between two distinct but historically grounded American political traditions.
How the financial problem is described is not neutral. It reflects and reinforces a particular way of understanding what a university is and how it should function. If the financial situation is framed as a classic demand-and-cost problem (i.e., demand is insufficient, prices are constrained, and unit costs are too high), then the university is, implicitly, being treated as a ‘service provider’ operating in a competitive international education market where students are customers. In that frame, the obvious actions are to emphasise tight cost controls and to strengthen output-focused performance metrics, targets and incentives such as promotions based on publications in highly rated journals, income generation or teaching satisfaction scores. If the same financial situation is framed instead as a system-level shock that threatens the conditions under which teaching, research and public service can flourish, then a different picture of the university comes into view: a ‘living knowledge ecosystem’ serving a public mission and facing financial constraints partly beyond its control. Within that frame, the responses appears quite different. Attention turns to protecting core capacities, reducing harm to the most vulnerable parts of the system and working with others to share risks and resources. In both cases, the numbers in the spreadsheets are the same. What differs is the story told about the problem, and the underlying image of the university that story presupposes. At present, the former factory-like framing is the most common. With it, the danger is that, under a narrative of financial constraints, universities take actions that emphasise governance practices that reshape behaviour so deeply that, over time, what remains may still be called a ‘university’, but no longer acts like one.
Three short paragraphs, and you've got the whole mind-bending mess that is #UKHE finance & governance neatly laid out.
This is why it's all so exhausting: our managers declare there's only one static frame, while we know their framing is part of the issue.
💡 www.hepi.ac.uk/2026/01/10/w...
Cast a Long Shadow, published by Honno Welsh Women’s Press!