😶 stuart reeves 😶

Who can say if dice are sentient

when the bubble bursts I'm wondering what will happen to research fields and researchers who have pivoted everything they do to "AI"

I'm thinking particularly about the lack of conceptual depth in tech driven research (cough CHI cough)

“.. His conclusion is very stark: not just that an economy already at stall speed will fall into recession as both the data-center and wealth effects plateau, but that they’ll reverse, just as in the dot-com bubble did ..”

@marketwatch.com
www.marketwatch.com/story/the-ai...

you think GS is bad?

just wait till you learn about Scopus - picks and shovels par excellence

Curbing ‘unfunded’ research ‘could chase away academics’ - Research Professional News Researchers wary of signals from senior figures that universities “can’t afford” research without external funding

Curbing ‘unfunded’ research ‘could chase away academics’.

Researchers wary of signals from senior figures that universities “can’t afford” research without external funding.

www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-u...

turns out relational databases are actually very damaging for your health and turn you into whatever this is

I'm reminded of a recent pearl I found in Newcastle

I was curious so I looked but I wish I hadn't

tossing off a column every week composed of someone else's milquetoast opinions he's read online somewhere - where do you even start?

Huge cost of university's controversial new campus revealed It has been spending millions while cutting staff jobs

www.nottinghampost.com/news/notting...

FWIW I think we need to just ban all UK government ministers from visiting Silicon Valley or talking to any tech people

they lack the critical faculties to handle it, just as they probably shouldn't be allowed on the internet either

Peter Kyle going through his own personal "Silicon Valley" phase

apparently students must aspire to be individualist entrepreneurs not collegiate teamworkers

precisely

absolute garbage online course about how to "support immigration compliance as an academic member of staff" - you really don't want to know what is written on this page, honestly.

learning how to be a border guard

claiming "it's the WiFi" in front of a tech audience

have you told him?

UUK already has pretty low credibility with many staff, particularly those who went through the USS debacle

if Malcolm Press really did make this offensive and ignorant statement about "unfunded hobbyist research" then he's not fit to represent universities in the UK

they can spin it as much as they like, i.e., 'super-university'

but it doesn't change the underlying UKHE conditions - 'mergers' (more like 'takeovers') are about kicking the financial can down the road because no-one wants to deal with the real problems

the standard university management mindset that I've consistently encountered is "I know metrics and rankings are made up nonsense but we have to engage with it because if we don't we'll be left behind"

the notion of a principled resistance is completely alien

M365 Copilot fails to up productivity in UK government trial : AI tech shows promise writing emails or summarizing meetings. Don't bother with anything more complex

12th Jan 2025: "Today’s plan mainlines AI into the veins of this enterprising nation – revolutionising our public services and putting more money in people’s back pockets."

www.theregister.com/2025/09/04/m...

"You don’t want to spend more time doing this than you need to, and you don’t want this to be more complicated than it has to be"

umm what

I have a clever solution to this "spending time on REF" thing

University of Nottingham workers vote to strike over job cuts Unison said more than three quarters of staff who voted were in favour of industrial action.

A university is not just made up of academics and students. And those groups of University citizens cannot function properly without the work of the staff whose jobs are at direct risk here.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Can AIs suffer? Big tech and users grapple with one of most unsettling questions of our times As first AI-led rights advocacy group is founded, industry is divided on whether models are, or can be, sentient

It's worth noting that these are not merely stupid questions, but have the function - as does much of the professional and academic ethics industry - of taking up up space for serious discussion of politics and value with speculative, sci-fi bollocks.
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

I'm not sure there's much relevant here tbh

I'm talking about the kinds of shared, probably quite widespread understanding amongst many UK researchers whose institutions adopt these sorts of technologies in house - whatever the legal actualities are is disjoint from that

it's unfortunately extremely UK gov behaviour to get taken in by a charlatan in the belief that somehow this will contribute to growth

even in the best case scenario, how will using the ofuscated plagiarism machine go beyond diminishing returns? no-one ever explains that

we're consistently told about GDPR and the importance of using compliant services as a kind of protection

turns out we're just Imperial subjects after all

looks like there's a longish running contradiction between GDPR and US legislation which apparently is considered to apply to overseas territories when US-based companies operate there - exceptionalism I guess?

"if the United States were to issue a legal request to Microsoft for the data of a French citizen hosted in the EU, Microsoft would comply regardless of French or EU law."

this is huge

Against Narcissistic-Sociopathic Technology Studies, or Why Do People *USE* Technologies? Why and how do people USE technologies? This question should be at the center of any thinking about human life with technology. The ways in which people use technologies, after all, determines the so...

I just posted "Against Narcissistic-Sociopathic Technology Studies, or Why Do People *USE* Technologies?" about the need in technology studies to be less preoccupied with our own judgments and more interested in what people who are not ourselves are up to.

peoples-things.ghost.io/why-do-peopl...