Jean-Michel Lapointe
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lapointejm.bsky.social
Jean-Michel Lapointe
@lapointejm.bsky.social
300 followers 590 following 40 posts
Chargé de projets pédagonumériques et wikimédien en résidence à l'UQAM. Montréal, Québec.

Ambassadeur de Wikipédia et des projets Wikimédia dans le milieu de la recherche et de l'éducation.
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lapointejm.bsky.social
Le cloud n'est pas immatériel. Les centres de données assèchent les nappes phréatiques du Chili.

www.arte.tv/fr/videos/12...
Chili : asséché par les data centers - ARTE Reportage - Regarder le documentaire complet | ARTE
Au Chili, l’eau disparaît. Pas seulement à cause de la sécheresse, mais aussi du cloud. Ce nuage qui n’amène jamais de pluie. Dans la banlieue nord de Santiago, les marais s’assèchent, les nappes phré...
www.arte.tv
November 12, 2025 at 5:30 PM
Reposted by Jean-Michel Lapointe
mollystarkdean.substack.com
My fellow Wikimedian @antisomniac.bsky.social wrote about Grokipedia: "All of this is ultimately subordinate to Grokipedia's unavoidable prime directive of neutrality: neutrality is whatever Elon Musk says is neutral."
www.techpolicy.press/with-grokipe...
With Grokipedia, Top-Down Control of Knowledge Is New Again | TechPolicy.Press
Ryan McGrady asks, who is Grokipedia for, other than its owner?
www.techpolicy.press
November 4, 2025 at 8:34 PM
lapointejm.bsky.social
CommonsDB, a new registry that enables users to verify the rights status of online images

Great tool in the making presented @ Wiki GLAM in Lisbon today

meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CommonsDB
CommonsDB - Meta-Wiki
meta.wikimedia.org
October 31, 2025 at 3:08 PM
lapointejm.bsky.social
L’université est plus qu’une simple cliente des géants du numérique www.lapresse.ca/dialogue/opi...
Outils d’« intelligence artificielle » | L’université est plus qu’une simple cliente des géants du numérique
Une trentaine de professeurs font part de leurs préoccupations à la direction de l'Université de Montréal quant à l’adoption de « solutions » d’IA qui leur semble inconciliables avec la mission de l’é...
www.lapresse.ca
October 24, 2025 at 6:44 PM
lapointejm.bsky.social
www.e-flux.com/architecture...
Intensification - Kate Crawford - Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop
AI slop isn’t invested in the order of events or even looking like reality. The slop is not the territory: it just smothers it in synthetic goop. It’s flooding the zone with AI shit.
www.e-flux.com
September 9, 2025 at 6:21 PM
lapointejm.bsky.social
Plus de la moitié du trafic web mondial provient désormais de bots fr.statista.com/infographie/...
Infographie: Plus de la moitié du trafic web mondial provient désormais de bots
Cette infographie montre l'évolution de la répartition du trafic web mondial généré par des humains et des bots de 2019 à 2024, en %.
fr.statista.com
September 7, 2025 at 6:19 PM
Reposted by Jean-Michel Lapointe
hannahshelley.bsky.social
Since search is dead, how soon do you think Google Scholar is headed for the Google Graveyard? I'm betting it's soon, and academia is NOT prepared
Google Scholar Is Doomed
Academia built entire careers on a free Google service with zero guarantees. What could go wrong?
hannahshelley.neocities.org
August 13, 2025 at 1:28 AM
lapointejm.bsky.social
Le mondes des revues scientifiques au bord de l’asphyxie www.lemonde.fr/sciences/art...
Le monde des revues scientifiques au bord de l’asphyxie
Plus de trois millions d’articles sont publiés chaque année dans les revues scientifiques, les chercheurs étant incités à les multiplier pour se distinguer. Une logique économique perverse s’est insta...
www.lemonde.fr
July 11, 2025 at 5:56 PM
lapointejm.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Transparent peer review to be extended to all of Nature’s research papers
From today, all new submissions to Nature that are published will be accompanied by referees’ reports and author responses — to illuminate the process of producing rigorous science.
www.nature.com
June 29, 2025 at 12:24 AM
lapointejm.bsky.social
Nouveau bouquin de Marcello Vitali-Rosati que j’ai très hâte de lire : « C’est la matière qui pense -
Pour une philosophie de l’édition »

ceen.univ-rouen.fr/matiere-marc...
C'est la matière qui pense
ceen.univ-rouen.fr
June 25, 2025 at 3:06 PM
lapointejm.bsky.social
Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task

arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task
This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools). Each completed thr...
arxiv.org
June 17, 2025 at 5:37 PM
lapointejm.bsky.social
AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums
www.404media.co/ai-scraping-...
AI Scraping Bots Are Breaking Open Libraries, Archives, and Museums
"This is a moment where that community feels collectively under threat and isn't sure what the process is for solving the problem.”
www.404media.co
June 17, 2025 at 4:37 PM
lapointejm.bsky.social
McGill professor Juan Serpa created SUSAN, the online forum helping U.S. researchers protect their data from Trump macleans.ca/society/amer...
American Climate Scientists Have a New Canadian Hero - Macleans.ca
How McGill professor Juan Serpa created SUSAN, the online forum helping U.S. researchers protect their data from Trump
macleans.ca
May 29, 2025 at 4:44 AM
lapointejm.bsky.social
Cut the bullshit: why GenAI systems are neither collaborators nor tutors www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Cut the bullshit: why GenAI systems are neither collaborators nor tutors
The rapid development of Generative AI (GenAI) technologies has led to widespread endorsement of GenAI systems serving as a ‘personal tutor’ and learning ‘collaborator’ in higher education. However...
www.tandfonline.com
May 19, 2025 at 1:58 PM
lapointejm.bsky.social
The physicality of learning -
Generative AI threatens the valuable process of searching for answers

jamescosullivan.substack.com/p/the-physic...
The physicality of learning
Generative AI threatens the valuable process of searching for answers
jamescosullivan.substack.com
May 13, 2025 at 6:35 PM
lapointejm.bsky.social
Qui sont les « petites mains » de Wikipedia, l’encyclopédie libre qui agace réacs et géants de la Tech basta.media/Qui-sont-les...
Qui sont les « petites mains » de Wikipedia, l'encyclopédie libre qui agace réacs et géants de la Tech
Chaque jour, des millions d'internautes y trouvent des infos et du savoir gratuitement et en accès libre. Mais ce site n'existerait pas sans ses bénévoles. Des « wikimédien·nes » racontent ce que sign...
basta.media
May 6, 2025 at 12:12 PM
Reposted by Jean-Michel Lapointe
edzitron.com
I wrote about this in this week's newsletter. I seriously believe one of the main reasons ChatGPT grew is that Google Search both failed to meaningfully innovate, especially in how it answered a user's query, and eventually deteriorated into something worse.
www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/
This Bubble Was Also Inflated By The Failure of Google Search Everybody I talk to that uses ChatGPT regularly uses it as either a way to generate shitty limericks or as a replacement for Google search, a product that Google has deliberately made worse as a means of increasing profits. ChatGPT is, if I'm honest, better at processing search strings than Google Search, which is not so much a sign that ChatGPT is good at something as it is that Google has stopped innovating in any meaningful way. Over time, Google Search should've become something that was able to interpret your searches into the perfect result, which would require the company to improve how it processes your requests. Instead, Google Search has become dramatically worse, mostly because the company's incentives changed from "help people find something on the web" to "funnel as much traffic and show as many ad impressions as possible on Google.com." By this point, Google Search should have been more magical, more capable of taking a dimwitted question and turning it into a great answer, with said answer being a result on the internet. Note that nothing I'm writing here is actually about generating a result — it's about processing a user's query and presenting an answer, the very foundation of computing and the thing that Google, at one point, was the best in the world at doing. Thanks to Prabhakar Raghavan, the former head of ads that led a coup to become head of search, Google was pulled away from being a meaningful source of information. And I'd argue that ChatGPT filled that void by doing the thing that people wanted Google Search to do: answer a question, even if the user isn't really sure how to ask it. Google Search has become clunky, obfuscatory, putting the burden of using the service on the user rather than helping fill the gap between query and answer in any meaningful way. Google's AI summaries don't even try to do what ChatGPT does — they generate summaries based on search results and say "okay man, uhh, is this what you want?"
May 1, 2025 at 11:03 PM
lapointejm.bsky.social
Will the Humanities Survive AI? www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...
Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?
Maybe not as we’ve known them. But, in the ruins of the old curriculum, something vital is stirring.
www.newyorker.com
April 27, 2025 at 1:14 PM
lapointejm.bsky.social
U.S. attorney for D.C. accuses Wikipedia of ‘propaganda,’ threatens nonprofit status www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...
U.S. attorney for D.C. accuses Wikipedia of ‘propaganda,’ threatens nonprofit status
Ed Martin sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation accusing it of spreading propaganda
www.washingtonpost.com
April 26, 2025 at 1:08 PM
lapointejm.bsky.social
AI companies demand huge amounts of data to train their programs. Peer inside LibGen, a pirated library of millions of books and research papers used by Meta and others: www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...
Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI
Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.
www.theatlantic.com
April 18, 2025 at 3:26 AM
lapointejm.bsky.social
«Un enfant va aller mieux s'il ne regarde pas du tout d'écran avant l'âge de six ans. Je répète: le développement d'un enfant ira mieux s’il ne voit pas d'écran avant six ans.»
Dr Jean-François Chicoine
www.985fm.ca/audio/690394...
Selon un pédiatre | «Le développement d'un enfant ira mieux s’il ne voit pas d'écran avant six ans»
Écoutez le Dr Jean François Chicoine, pédiatre au CHU Sainte Justine, professeur agrégé de clinique à l Université de Montréal, en discuter.
www.985fm.ca
April 8, 2025 at 11:53 PM
Reposted by Jean-Michel Lapointe
wired.com
Nearly 35 years ago, Paul Ginsparg created arXiv, a digital repository where researchers could share their latest findings before they had been systematically reviewed or verified. If arXiv stopped functioning, scientists would suffer an immediate and profound disruption.
Inside arXiv—the Most Transformative Platform in All of Science
Modern science wouldn’t exist without the online research repository known as arXiv. Three decades in, its creator still can’t let it go.
www.wired.com
March 27, 2025 at 1:10 PM
Reposted by Jean-Michel Lapointe
juleswp.bsky.social
Léo Joubert : « La force de Wikipédia, c’est la pluralité des engagements qu’elle suscite » sur @la-croix.com
Léo Joubert : « La force de Wikipédia, c’est la pluralité des engagements qu’elle suscite »
La célèbre encyclopédie en ligne fait face à des accusations de partialité idéologique, de la part d’Elon Musk comme de l’hebdomadaire « Le Point ». Le sociologue Léo Joubert, auteur d’une thèse sur l...
www.la-croix.com
March 16, 2025 at 5:42 PM
Reposted by Jean-Michel Lapointe
zephoria.bsky.social
When politicians ban books, I read them. So when I heard that Meta - who, of course, believes in free speech - is using egregious legal tactics to silence a former employee's book, my eyebrows went up. Who else is reading "Careless People" just cuz Meta is suing? www.nytimes.com/2025/03/12/t...
Meta Seeks to Block Further Sales of Ex-Employee’s Scathing Memoir
An arbitrator has prevented the employee from promoting her book and disparaging the company until private arbitration concludes.
www.nytimes.com
March 16, 2025 at 6:45 PM
lapointejm.bsky.social
Can librarians and guerrilla archivists save the country’s files from DOGE?

www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...
The Volunteer Data Hoarders Resisting Trump’s Purge
Can librarians and guerrilla archivists save the country’s files from DOGE?
www.newyorker.com
March 14, 2025 at 11:44 PM