Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Mark Thakkar

Danny Kingsley @dannykay68.bsky.social · 21h

ATTACKS from bots are a major problem for libraries scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/10/07/g...
"Can we differentiate the behavior in our systems from the motives of the operating individual or organization, and should we be in the business of judging “good” and “bad” site visitors and uses?"

Guest Post - “Have You Proved You’re Human Today?” Open Content and Web Harvesting in the AI Era - The Scholarly Kitchen

AI web harvesting bots are different from traditional web crawlers and violate many of the established rules and practices in place. Their rapidly expanding use is emerging as a significant IT managem...

scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

9 7

Reposted by Mark Thakkar

Richard Ovenden @richove.bsky.social · 1d

MLGB is back!! Delighted that Medieval Libraries of Great Britain @bodleian.ox.ac.uk is now back online. We are also working had on plans for the next phase of the resource, enhancing & adding data & functionality. HUGE thanks to my colleagues for their hard & clever work mlgb.bodleian.ox.ac.uk

2 100 230

Mark Thakkar @brunellus.com · 4d

PS. For reasons that a codicologist may be able to explain, alternate letters of the header (originally in blue ink?) seem to have been lost. It should say ‘ET MUNDO’, being the second half of the Latin title of Aristotle’s work.

Mark Thakkar @brunellus.com · 4d

This is the opening folio of Aristotle’s De caelo interspersed with Averroes’ long commentary, both in the translation by Michael Scot (c1230). The marginal annotation records the first of many divergences in this section from Moerbeke’s “nova translatio”, which begins “Continuum quidem igitur est”.

1 2

Reposted by Mark Thakkar

Sam Ottewill-Soulsby @samottewillsoulsby.bsky.social · 15d

A great thread applicable to scholars outside the US. Much of the work that historians do is not strictly what they’re paid for. Being able to do it depends on historians being stably employed, with access to resources, and with flexibility built in their schedules. All of those things are at risk.

Liz Covart @lizcovart.bsky.social · 15d

Something I’ve been thinking about:

History as a profession has long relied on affiliation.

Your university or museum pays your salary, and in return, you give time to edit journals, peer review articles, write book reviews, consult on exhibits, and volunteer for institutional support. 1/

5 16

Reposted by Mark Thakkar

Mark Thakkar @brunellus.com · 17d

Breaking news: OpenAI researchers use actual intelligence to discover that bears shit in the woods! Stay tuned for their “landmark study” on the pope’s religious affiliation. (PSA: it is a category mistake to call the generation of falsehoods “hallucination”.) www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws

In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limi...

www.computerworld.com

3 7

Mark Thakkar @brunellus.com · 17d

Yes, it’s open to debate whether it’s better to treat “with(out) reference to X” as binary or as a spectrum. The spectrum approach allows the lexicographer to allocate each quotation to one sense or the other without losing sleep over it. But you’re right, it does complicate the syntax for readers!

Mark Thakkar @brunellus.com · 17d

Breaking news: OpenAI researchers use actual intelligence to discover that bears shit in the woods! Stay tuned for their “landmark study” on the pope’s religious affiliation. (PSA: it is a category mistake to call the generation of falsehoods “hallucination”.) www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws

In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limi...

www.computerworld.com

3 7

Mark Thakkar @brunellus.com · 17d

With ‘evanescente’ instead of ‘evanido’?

1

Mark Thakkar @brunellus.com · 18d

(I’d have preferred IGNIS FATVVS, but it was too big.)

1

Mark Thakkar @brunellus.com · 18d

Crest fallen.

The belted crest of Oxford University, with the usual motto DOMINVS ILLVMINATIO MEA altered to read DIABOLVS ILLVMINATIO MEA.

1 4 12

Mark Thakkar @brunellus.com · 18d

Sure, but PPE has its merits, and not everyone who did it is power-hungry and overconfident. My preferred fix would be to make it a 4-year degree, as formerly required for Maths/Physics & Philosophy (to prevent both subjects being too watered down). Would stop it being seen as a fast track to power.

Mark Thakkar @brunellus.com · 19d

You’ll miss them when they’re gone!

1

Mark Thakkar @brunellus.com · 19d

Don’t worry – fake intelligence will solve all the world’s problems!

2 2

Mark Thakkar @brunellus.com · 20d

Or 'gloss over'?

1 2

Reposted by Mark Thakkar

Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

96 1.5K 3.1K

Mark Thakkar @brunellus.com · 21d

Someone else asked this recently and I think the answer was just ‘filler’. Academia being what it is, though, maybe the French got there first and there are Anglophone authors who solemnly wheel out a word like ‘remplissage’, italics and all!

1

Reposted by Mark Thakkar

Carin Ruff @carinr.bsky.social · 21d

Note that although the upgraded high-res digitization can be viewed at BAV, the Biblissima interface allows a much higher-resolution download.

Screenshot of Biblissima download options

Screenshot of BAV download options for the same manuscript

1 3

Reposted by Mark Thakkar

Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 24d

Reminder @theguardian.com has a partnership with OpenAI; which explains this thinly sourced excuse of an article that relies on ONE Masters student and OpenAI's International Education Lead countered by measly words of "caution" from ONE university admin.

Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · 24d

Vacuous, generic and scattershot advice for incoming 1st years on the use of AI at university. Especially liking 'Chin recommends giving it class notes and asking it to generate practice exam questions.' Surely we can't be the only programme that supplies students with past & practice exams?

How to use ChatGPT at university without cheating: ‘Now it’s more like a study partner’

The ubiquitous AI tool has a divisive effect on educators with some seeing it a boon and others a menace. So what should you know about where to draw the line between check and cheat?

www.theguardian.com

2 81 200

Mark Thakkar @brunellus.com · 25d

Verb-wise, ‘generate’ has the right kind of connotations. (I mean, personally I prefer ‘spew out’, but we need something neutral to avoid upsetting the hard of thinking, and everyone seems happy with ‘generative’.)

2

Mark Thakkar @brunellus.com · 26d

And for that matter funded ≠ high quality. It would be interesting to know, case by case, how people like this acquired the delusion that the allocation of research funding was meritocratic. Somehow I don’t think the answer would reflect well on any of them.

1

Reposted by Mark Thakkar

Darren Dahly @statsepi.bsky.social · 26d

We need more "unfunded" research, not less. Or rather, we need more "core" funding and much less project based funding. Then universities can *invest* in core research infrastructure (including people), reduce precarity, and focus on growing and retaining talent.

1 5 27

Reposted by Mark Thakkar

Clelia Crialesi @cleliacrialesi.bsky.social · 27d

Join us next week to assess ⚖️📏 the role quantity played in diverse premodern cultural domains and practices.
It is possible to attend on Zoom (if you send me an email).

1 1 4

Mark Thakkar @brunellus.com · Aug 27

A useful guide in such difficult cases: thomgobbitt.wordpress.com/2016/07/28/h...

Hair and Flesh

When I first began doing my own manuscript research in the second year of my PhD, I remember sometimes struggling with identifying which side of a folio was the hair side, which the flesh. For ever…

thomgobbitt.wordpress.com

2 1 4

Mark Thakkar @brunellus.com · Aug 27

Yes, to me the brazen head comparison seemed obvious, but I don’t recall seeing it made elsewhere. Titivillus has been a favourite since I was given the enviable task of researching him for the DMLBS: logeion.uchicago.edu/Titivillus

2