Izabella Laba 🇨🇦

‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI As AI has upended the way students learn, academics worry about the future of the humanities - and society at large

I'm one of many professors quoted in this report from Alice Speri. I really appreciate The Guardian taking an angle which has basically eluded every other major outlet.

Yeah, $60.90 when I renewed last month.

And watching French-language TV with French-language subtitles! And you can read a synopsis anywhere on the internet before you watch so you have some general idea of what will be happening!

“The Women’s Issue” of Bakersfield Life magazine with two cover models who are old white dudes in suites.

Happy International Women’s Day!

I’ve been reading a lot about accessibility for all sorts of reasons. Something that keeps coming up is ‘designing for cognitive load’.

What is the cognitive load of war, war, environmental catastrophe, political catastrophe, observation of near constant suffering, trying to teach/learn math?

And I have already talked to my bank here about moving that part out of the US.

Hi Bluesky, is it good or bad when an email from a financial company holding part of your retirement funds has a "Geopolitics Meets Your Portfolio" header?

(To be clear, this is a US company and only a small part of my retirement funds.)

Whatever was going on, there was nothing I could do about it now, and that just made me more furious. So I watched five minutes of episode 174 of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. Did that work? No, no, it didn’t.

And I'm not going to be surprised if Canada does the same.

Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time According to a new analysis by Stanford Medicine scientists, changing clocks twice a year disrupts circadian rhythms, leading to higher rates of stroke and obesity.

@davidebybc.bsky.social

Happy to hear the announcement today that we in BC will no longer be changing the time forward and backward after this next time change.

But why choose DST rather than ST as our permanent time in disagreement with the medical community.

med.stanford.edu/news/all-new...

Fuck this. It's not healthy to have to get up long before sunrise.

As in, even the actual Party commissars were probably not true believers, for the most part. The point was for us to submit to their power, not for us to believe whatever Marx or Lenin wrote. So if you then see Western folks analyze those writings as if they were a Bible, it's quite a ride.

Yeah, by the time I got to be that age it was all mostly perfunctory. I wrote a longer thing about it some years ago, but the tl;dr is that it never took root with us and maybe wasn't even designed to do so. As long as we weren't rocking the boat too much.

And yeah, I had those too, in school and at uni. Mostly, it was hard to even bring yourself to disagree because it was so fucking boring.

Yeah. Folks on the left generally understand that the US Founding Fathers did not, in fact, say or write anything about the internet and that it's anachronistic to rely on their wisdom in that regard. But Marx and Lenin are their Bible and we must heed their deep insights forever. Like - why???

I grew up in the communist Poland. I'm very much on the left side of the political spectrum here in Canada, but also, when I first moved here, I could not believe it was for real when I came across tankies. Like, how was this still a thing? How the fuck did they not learn?

Ugh.

I had SO MANY conversations with mathematicians where I argued that people (esp. women) should be able to opt out of random online interactions, and they would tell me that no, wisdom of the crowds or some such. Good times.

omg that's so true. I had a cat who had many medical problems. I wish I could have explained to him what was happening. But you can't. It's just "this hurts" and "can't do this" and "let's try again if I can do this now" and "wtf do y'all want from me".

Hugs to you and your animal family.

Same! And the last wool duvet I had lasted more than 10 years. Down never even came close.

Please re-grade my final exam because I don't like the grade I got.

Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim started false claim councillor 'handed out illegal drugs' Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim accused city Coun. Sean Orr of "handing out illegal drugs on Christmas Day" in a briefing for Chinese-speaking reporters.

This is one of the worst things I’ve seen in Vancouver politics.

Vancouver councillor outrageously lies to Chinese audience that fellow councillor is a drug addict & dealer. Gets caught, forced to “apologize” for lying, mayor commends him for admitting fault.

Then turns out the mayor did it first.

tarfefe

Even leaving aside the cheating of it all, absent extenuating circumstances, Canvas IDs are university IT student IDs, which means that if these "Einstein/companion AI" people have your canvas information, they can have access to all of your student accunt information.

This is such a terrible idea.

Yes please. Ideally, at least one place that can be accessed without installing an app.

I don’t have the energy rn to express how horrific this is. Please submit a public comment.

No one from outside the US should go to #ICM2026. No mathematical societies should send official delegations. Let them sit on their own, with the invited speakers they are paying for (at least those who can make it there safely) and NO ONE ELSE.

And pay through their nose for the empty rooms.

Love that people are finally waking up en masse to the fact that they don’t need or want a lot of the stuff that’s been marketed for the past 25 years as “the future” and “making all our lives better”

This is a great interview.

The pulling of gold teeth. If you grew up in the aftermath of that, some things are impossible to forget.