Thank you!

Book cover of the book "Egypt's Mediterranean" by Zoe Griffith. It is an artist's rendition of a view from a balcony overlooking palm trees and boats.

Hi everyone! My book, Egypt's Mediterranean, came out with @ucpress.bsky.social on Tuesday 💙💛 It's a new look at how Egypt fit into the political economy of the Ottoman Empire and eastern Mediterranean.

Please enjoy the *beautiful* cover art by Mohamed Gohar (@mohamed.gohar on IG)

The rehabilitation of the luddites is a beautiful thing

mind-boggling to me that i still have yet to see a single democrat utter the phrase “every republican president of your lifetime has destroyed the economy and started a war”

What if all those years of life were not just an investment in capital growth but were actually the entire point of all of it, what then.

Questioning AI Resource List Excellent summary of major problems with companies’ focus on AI written by expert in machine learning: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/ Another g...

I made this 19 page list of resources for questioning AI because I was so frustrated by this dynamic, the tipping point for me was an admin saying that people who were questioning the push for AI were being "emotional": docs.google.com/document/d/1...

The website for Harper Collins's edition of George Orwell's 1984 provides an image of Orwell's Animal Farm, not 1984.

is it Too On The Nose that the publisher's website for Orwell's 1984 wants you to believe that this is the cover of 1984?

(Click to expand, or google it yourself!)

loooove this 💖

on the educator's responsibility to "respond" to AI:

Screenshot of an Outlook email with very dumb smart replies suggesting "So proud of you!" and "I am very proud of you." to a student emailing their thesis statement to their professor

chortling at these AI smart-replies to my student's thesis statement

so very proud!

I'm not proud to say that I have been a heavy Spotify user for over a decade, but I *AM* proud to say that I'm finally ditching them (not because of the AI audiobooks, though that's another good reason.)

Qobuz is a very good alternative for music, and they pay their artists!

Handing back student work that’s been written by ChatGPT with a 0 followed by the comment “This essay will never stand in authentic wonder before the Beauty of God’s creation.”

Really, really agree with this piece from Huffpo. We don't have to accept the aura of AI inevitability. We can, and should, refuse to engage with it in our classrooms (and elsewhere, but especially in the classroom!)

Claim: Mamdani is a communist. False: Any real communist will happily spend six hours explaining why this isn’t true.

Fact-Checking Claims About Zohran Mamdani theonion.com/fact-checking-claims-abo...

yearly reminder to people insisting that we view Christopher Columbus as "a man of his time" that *the people responsible for the Spanish Inquisition* thought Columbus was out of pocket

An orange and white cat caught mid-yawn, sitting in a small box

An orange and white cat sleeping in a box that is too small for him.

Happy #caturday from a boy who really really loves his @ranchogordo.bsky.social bean club box 🫘

Some wise advice on your academia.edu account.

It's probably time to delete it.

Im glad Dr Tao is speaking up, but this attitude among people; that you can work in STEM and "avoid politics" is...alarming. And has always been wrong.

Opinion | America Is Pushing Its Workers Into Homelessness

A Labor Day reminder: today there isn't a single city, metro area, or state in the U.S. where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a modest 2-bedroom apartment.

Millions of people with jobs—even multiple jobs—aren't safe from homelessness in this country.

Anthropic Settles High-Profile AI Copyright Lawsuit Brought By Book Authors Anthropic faced the prospect of more than $1 trillion in damages, a sum that could have threatened the company’s survival if the case went to trial.

NEW: A major AI copyright legal showdown just took a huge twist today. Facing a class action on behalf of book authors that could've seen it pay over a TRILLION in damages for alleged piracy, Anthropic has agreed to settle instead: www.wired.com/story/anthro...

The mental health benefits of not knowing any history right now must be massive. Moving through your day with total equanimity. What happens next? Who knows? Maybe something good

A key difference here is that while either can be incorrect, the structure of Wikipedia *creates context* and the structure of LLMs *destroys context*

Wikipedia has linked sources and an edit history showing where information came from and who added it when

An LLM just generates text

What If A.I. Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This? GPT-5, a new release from OpenAI, is the latest product to suggest that progress on large language models has stalled.

hey what if?!

No one wants to hear this, but it’s true. Either we can value education — not for a select few but for anyone willing to put in the effort — and provide the requisite resources, or we can watch it become a pursuit available only to an elite minority, with everyone else getting a cheap facsimile

That's a great idea, thanks!

Why does Goorge W. Bush looks like a mashup of Mitch McConnell and Bill Gates? Dude doesn't even wear glasses.

Nothing, but nothing, is funnier to me at this moment than these Ph.D.-level charts.

Historians Politely Remind Nation To Check What's Happened In Past Before Making Any Big Decisions WASHINGTON—With the United States facing a daunting array of problems at home and abroad, leading historians courteously reminded the nation Thursday that when making tough choices, it never hurts to ...

"While the new strategy, known as 'Look Back Before You Act,' has raised concerns among people worried they will have to remember lots of events from long ago, the historians have assured Americans they won’t be required to read all the way through thick books or memorize anything."

"I need ChatGPT to brainstorm" dear human person the whole point of brainstorming is to find new ways or angles when approaching a problem, the "let's regurgitate the complete stolen corpus of human achievement"-machine doesn't help you brainstorm - it stops you from brainstorming.