@jeffreyjdean
Music historian (15th–16th centuries), editor/book-designer/typesetter, Quaker; foreign-born naturalized British citizen; ally. He/him/his NOT the Jeff Dean at Google, or the archeologist, or … Fediverse: @JeffreyJDean@hcommons.social
1. Are you currently using an AI tool for work-related tasks or projects? * Yes * No, but I would like to (PLEASE SKIP TO QUESTION 7)
My employer asks me to complete a survey on AI usage for which this is the first question (required):
Good words of warning here. AI models are generally designed to read and incorporate (and, in a sense, believe) virtually everything they find online, with very few guardrails. The information can get divorced from its original source, context, & rebuttals or retractions. That's a really big problem
Every second of free time you have ever had in your life was subsidized by the existence of the combine harvester.
in case you've never seen it, this is Roger Ebert on The Mummy
I spent 4 months trying to answer a simple question: has this book been translated into my language?
Turns out no one tracks this. Not ISBN registries. Not Amazon. Not Google. Not libraries.
So I built a tool that crosses four databases to piece it together.
zenodot.app
Do you know somebody who needs to learn Latin from scratch or improve their Latin to PhD standard? CMS Toronto's summer Latin program is now entirely online and a remarkable bargain for the intensity and quality of instruction. Details here: www.medieval.utoronto.ca/latin/summer...
#medievalsky
i wouldn't go as far as to say labour are a far-right party, but they're certainly implementing far-right policies
so it's not just that their unpopularity makes the greens the strategic choice - if you're motivation is to vote against far right policy that now *includes* labour
quick reminder that NT's production of The Importance of Being Earnest, starring human ray of sunshine Ncuti Gatwa, will be streaming FOR FREE on YouTube this weekend
www.radiotimes.com/movies/ncuti...
A machine in Exeter train station that vends Penguin paperbacks as if they are Crunchie bars or packets of Quavers.
I do like the Penguin Books vending machine at Exeter train station but I won't be truly happy until there's another one next to it solely selling rare jazz, psych and soul records made between 1965 and 1970.
I've been thinking this morning: the generation of my sons, they've grown up with US politics dominated by Trumpism since 2016 (including when Biden was in office). Trump, to them, is the political face of the US. That's the image of the US. Respect? I don't think so.
Copy-editor here (academic non-fiction). Thanks for saying so.
Dear god, no, it’s a person. It’s the kind of thing software is atrociously bad at, because it requires balancing patterns and tacit nuances across layers of complexity. Exactly the kind of task where even the latest AI systems are (definitionally) lost.
I love my copy editor :)
Imagine trying your damndest to find *more* absentee landlords given Ireland's history. #spéirgorm
GenAI is appallingly bad at history. It's not simply that there's no need for it, it's actively shite.
And of course, you see a fool doing the reading. #skystorians
If I had a nickel for every time Franz Ferdinand was involved in the precursor events of a world war, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird it happened twice
The Men In The Turnip Field: an old Somerset story collected in Kevin Crossley-Holland's Folk Tales Of The British Isles
The best short ghost story ever.
Cover of the book “Tomatoes on Trial”, by Lindsay H. Metcalf. A giant tomato looms over two groups of people shouting and reaching up toward it; one group is shouting “it’s a vegetable!” and one is shouting “it’s a fruit!”
J found this at the bookstore this weekend. It’s exactly what it looks like - a children’s book about the 1893 SCOTUS case Nix v. Hedden, where tomatoes were legally determined to be vegetables.
It also has the highest density of food-based puns of possibly any book ever.
This is the warning on the blood pressure monitor my dad just got.
Exceptional work. Anybody know what the fuck it’s supposed to mean?
Last line is especially ominous
For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper Now I let it fall back in the grasses. I hear you. I know this life is hard now. I know your days are precious on this earth. But what are you trying to be free of? The living? The miraculous task of it? Love is for the ones who love the work. —Joseph Fasano
All I can say is the last line isn't about homework.
Apparently, Lindsey Graham's drunken Fox News bullshit isn't working in the more clear-eyed Middle East.
It's normal to restrict or move away from treatments when evidence of harms starts to outweigh evidence of benefits.
It's not normal to restrict or move away from treatments when there is evidence of benefits and none of harms, even if the evidence of benefits is "low quality."
On Wednesday, May 25, 1949, between 3:30 and 6:30 pm, streetcars and buses accounted for 3.7 percent of the vehicles leaving the downtown loop district in Minneapolis. They carried 48.3 percent of the people leaving the loop. Another 6.9 percent walked.
holy shit
Join us for an interfaith vigil for Middle East peace with The Episcopal Church as we hold those suffering violence in the Light. @bridgetmoixfcnl.bsky.social will be joining as well as we pray for peace buff.ly/c6Otn2O
THIS good lord this
Westminster is dangerously underprepared for a multi-party future.
Responsible and farsighted leadership would mean recognising the Gorton and Denton by-election as a warning.
Read our full comment here:
www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/comment/gort...
W. C. Fields short, I think it’s The Dentist: Fields plays the string bass, puts it in a cupboard. Patient comes in with a string bass, puts it in the same cupboard. After a good deal of other business, patient leaves and opens the cupboard — out fall a dozen violins.
I’m still very undecided about the wisdom of an under 16s social media ban, but I do like the idea of “a Play and Recreation Levy on social media companies, to fund investment in alternative spaces for children and young people, both offline and online”.
