Julian Hitz

Revisiting my Master Thesis for an upcoming application. Time to reopen that rabbit hole.

I wrote my thesis on Jan Hendrik Schön and how overhyped imaginations of what technoscience could achieve gave his misconduct a massive platform in the first place.
Here are some of the red flags I see in pro-AI ads.
- Too clean numbers
- promises of daily integration
- Mystifying the process

I don't like the expression "history repeats itself", as each event has an incredibly complex amalgamation of factors leading to it...

That being said... I can only highly recommend watching this clip and then watching Ceaușescu's last speech for a bit of eerie historical comparison.

A screenshot of the royal institution posting a project on youtube, that mentions OpenAI and ChatGPT as collaborators in a thermodynamics paper.

Calling it collaboration unnecessarily humanizes AI and doesn't mention in which function AI was used.
The fact this gets traction by being posted by RI is an issue, as institutional approval is a vector of scientific accountability that can backfire.
Interesting times for historians of science.

I didn't expect this abstract to make me teary-eyed, but this would have been a perfect addition to my master's thesis about the Schön scandal.
It reminds me of the fMRI salmon as well, we need more of that.

Natürlich sind die ersten 45 Minuten aufgrund technischer Probleme in die Untiefen des Lost-Media Schlundes verschwunden.
Outtakes gibt es trotzdem.
Warum wir vor antik mediterranen Hintergründen sitzen erfahrt ihr wenn die Aufnahme klappt. :D

do you need test readers? :D

A picture of the "Cabinentaxi", a german public transport system developed in the 1970s and, sadly, later torn down as it proved too expensive.

If you ever wanna chat up a historian, ask them what they're mad about having missed. For me it's probably Buzludzha in its prime and the "Cabinentaxi" pictured down below. 12 y.o. me would have spent all of their change on the test track.
Sadly the 11 stations in Hamburg were never built.

A tweet of trump under a white font on blue background "Making Automobiles Great Again" where trump stands in front of a LADA

Ah yes, the famously american Lada.
Does anybody want to grab coffee and talk (probably too much) about Tolyatti's history?

Addendum: I do have backups of everything, studying eastern European history comes with a side effect of saving and hoarding everything in case it gets deleted.

In 2019 @philippsarasin.bsky.social held a lecture on the history of sexuality.
I no longer have access to 45pages of notes I took, because google docs is censoring their documents.
Same goes for @modomodo.bsky.social ' colloquium on investigating the church.
Pull your notes from google products!

45min Material in 18 Minuten eines 10min Vortrags unterzubringen ist eine Kunst 😂

Zeit neue Projekte anzugehen. Diesmal als Teil eines Duos, welches gerne quatscht, und sich dabei noch passende Quellen und Methodik zurecht gelegt hat.

Most swiss media reports this as "Reporter hit by rubber bullet", which gives the wrong impression of the reporter being hit by a stray projectile.
"Reporters deliberately shot at" is more like it.

I have been collecting knowledge for the past 7+ years, and so far I have been reasonably happy with my external hard drive. This makes me consider printing out thousands of PDFs.

If you are in any way shape or form someone who both is *and* understands what it means for you to *be* in contact with an archive of material, you need to start doing whatever it takes to protect those archives, right now.

Maybe a bit controversial, but as someone who has worked with newspaper archives a lot, I consider April Fools an underestimated threat to data integrity.

1) it is global
2) it is protected by being considered traditional
3) it has been going on forever
4) it is competitive between newspapers

Of 368 footnotes in my Master thesis (handed in June 2024) about 30 have become unavailable in less than a year. Several more have been paywalled.
Ironically I wrote it on the history of science and how truth is proven in academia, and now my own damn footnotes are under threat.

Johann Hübners vollständige Geographie, Zweiter Theil von Dänemark, Norwegen, Schweden, Preußen, Polen, Rußland, Ungarn, Türcken, Asia, Africa, America, und von den unbekannten Ländern. Frankfurt/Leipzig 1743.

Johann Hübners Vollständige Geographie from 1743 is one of those tomes I enjoy casually reading. It's like having eyes and ears in the mid 18th century.
It doesn't feature a single map, which makes it all the more entertaining as it features countless thoughts on the people instead.

My first thought: oh cool
my second thought: this comment 😂

Picture of the sequoia next to the UZH historical seminar

I've been staring at this tree for years now. Nothing like a huge tree to put the flow of time into perspective.

In Swiss german I'd suggest the word "gschiss" literally translated it would mean "a shitting", but it refers to an overly complicated, usually frustrating situation (usually in development with an unforeseeable future full of negative outcomes).

a screenshot of President Trump stating "He who saves this country does not violate any law"

I don't like the phrase "history repeats itself", as historical developments are too multifactorial to just repeat. But sometimes people treat it as a playbook and make it a little bit too easy, so yeah... There are definitely familiar developments and they are not nice.

A schematic of the underground nuclear explosion at Urtabulaq gas field sealing the problematic gas well, which had been burning and nearly unextinguishable.

Surely you wouldn't weld the gas-pipe with the pressure still on?
Meanwhile in the USSR 1966:

The history of peaceful nukes is fascinating, but rarely does the Urtabulaq Gas-Field fire get enough credit as the one major event where fighting fire with fire worked.

Ja, auf infoclio. www.infoclio.ch/en/node/188493

Ich hab meine Masterarbeit über Jan Hendrik Schön geschrieben. Teils war es sicher seine eigene Motivation, es gab aber zusätzliche äusserliche Strukturen, die den Erwartungsdruck erhöht und z.T. seinen Pfusch überdeckt haben.
Hype, Ruf von Institutionen und fehlende Gesetze waren Teile der Krise.

A wall full of old PS3 games

I still think it is odd to force future teachers into getting a job first.
However, now I am in the unique position to talk about segregation in "Bioshock Infinite", old computers like the Didactic Gama, historical references in "The Last of Us", or social criticism of war in "Army Of Two".

Yesterday I taught 4 lessons on the rise of the NSDAP and a certain austrian painter.
Nobody in the teaching diploma course told me how much of a challenge it would be to hold back tears and expletives about the current developments mirroring a lot of that time.