I only know about the following article on how AI is likely to alter/erase history (unless companies do stuff they are not doing) because it’s by UCLA‘s Chief Data and Artificial Intelligence Officer (who may have forgotten all he’s written on this topic). www.nytimes.com/2024/01/28/o...

Yes, that’s certainly what I gather from the world around me. Now stopping for a moment to think and enjoy is an act of resistance as well as just a pleasant thing to do. If you have other ideas about how to resist all that, and help others to do so, let me know.

Yes. We could discuss the origins of the tea trade and all that, but maybe sitting with a cup of tea and milk, made at home or with the office’s electric kettle, and having a quiet moment, and feeling like it’s a lovely treat in the middle of a busy day, is an excellent way to live the good life.

I think sans serif is easier for on-line reading (and for things one does not actually think anyone will read), but serif is easier reading in a book or long print text, where the letters flow into each other & pull one forward. How do most State Dept employees do their reading; do they read at all?

Now that they let text-generating AI write everything for them, all they need to do is decide about the font.

Yes, we could all have 37 pencils if he didn’t give 5,000,000 for each of his children and keep 20,000,000 for himself. (I did not do the actual math here!)

Yes—human beings who want to pass the buck not to someone higher up and unreachable but rather to a machine that they can pretend is always right AND can also take no responsibility. Big companies built these models so big companies could get away with evil stuff in the name of “intelligence.”

Thanks! This looks great—and useful for my teaching, too.

Yes, they are taught elsewhere. But efficiency and consolidation are not the best means to educate a lot of people or do good research. We need to be asking many questions with different frames and assumptions, and then working hard (& noodling around) figuring out answers in many local contexts.

Statistics? Earth and atmospheric sciences? Who cares that AI is ”just” applied statistics? And that its proliferation threatens our earth and atmosphere. This time we know what we’re doing; it’s not just accidental that we’re causing a global climate crisis. Those are important departments!

Another example of the way LLMs need human labor—in these cases, after the text is extruded, not before. Also another example of the way text-generating LLMs cause distrust between people.

I can send you a copy of a chapter I wrote about the book if you want.

These include: the effect of people’s listening to different national broadcasts, what it’s like to mainly only get rumors, how a plain “good morning” is an act of resistance, writing with the use of euphemisms (how people talked, or maybe a way to protect herself if the manuscript is found), etc.

Sounds like a great class! Maybe too far-fetched, but Gertrude Stein wrote ”Mrs. Reynolds” in occupied France, and it‘s a novel, but it also captures aspects of that experience and history that really ring true and aren’t in history books as far as I know.

and positions itself as an unelected steward of human destiny, it betrays its mission as the “people’s university,” rooted in democratic ideals and social justice.“