Ben Schmidt

Stock image of a robot in an elevator with three dots on its right arm

"We do not accept AI-generated content into our visual library" cool Getty images, I guess it's just that "demaerre" took two almost identical robots into an elevator for a photo shoot, but one has three dots on its right arm and one doesn't.

Fortune headline: Microsoft researchers have revealed the 40 jobs most exposed to AI—and even teachers make the list Accompanying Getty image of a robot with breasts at a computer while a woman packs a box with her belongings, captioned "Sorry, Gen Z: AI is coming for safe and secure teaching jobs, as well as grad roles."

It's fun that the Fortune article saying historians are the #2 job affected by AI includes what's clearly an AI-generated stock image of a creepily female robot "teaching" (i.e., looking at a computer) while the real teacher gets fired.

Tradcore

Wow.

A dive into the Board of Visitors’ political donations Here is a look at Board members’ political donations — all but one of whom has records of political donations which are overwhelmingly to Republican candidates and campaigns.

I wonder if the IHE article was spurred by a good article in the student paper at UVA a couple weeks ago framing this as "viewpoint diversity" just to needle them www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2025...

OK let's say she just did it to stick it to Elise Stefanik, would that be a good reason?

Bet you weren't expected to get Godwin's law'ed on that one

IDK if $75m is a high enough price to get out of them, but honestly I think maybe it's ok? If not Waltz, they're saying it would have been the guy who spent his time as ambassador trying to convince the Germans they should give the far-right another go.

Ok and then yeah, of course there's no way you can make a map of Maine without including Montville *somewhere*.

I saw a bumper sticker once that said "Montville: the way life is". I think of that as the motto, but our friends who live there hate when we bring that up.

How does Montville end up *there*?

People always ask me : “Cristi, how do you manage parenting a baby while going up for tenure?”

It’s easy. The secret is *flow-based-scheduling*. Here are its three core strategies for new academic parents:

Sleep when the baby sleeps
Cry when the baby cries
Publish when the baby publishes

Been meaning to try some of the agents in zed for a hobby project.

We’re on cursor at Nomic — full IDE integration is key IMO because you need to put prompt files and lint rules alllover the place to reign the LLMs in.

My quick reaction is that the acquisition and retention distinctions (*if* they stick on appeal and are more widely adopted) will be enormous practical problems for any AI developer that was less than extremely scrupulous in assembling and maintaining training datasets.

Cover of "Citizen and Subject" by Mahmood Mamdani (Reissued edition with a new preface Princeton UP 2018)

C'mon everybody why did we even make a social network exclusively for leftists with graduate degrees if we're not going to make #facultybratsummer a thing.

But yeah that's not how I wrote it originally for sure, something just rubbed me the wrong way about the statement in the quote-post.

Yeah I'm not proposing there's some secret master plan here. Just that whoever posted probably didn't GAF about effectively communicating the exact nature of the changes.

I’m don’t think that’s 12d chess, just… who are the NARA staffers saying “management should be giving people the impression that things are fine, actually”

Also have you been to NARA II? I got there taking metro to a bus, not sure how else you get there.

Counterpoint is that this is *excellent* messaging from leadership if the point is to appropriately freak people out that somehow, shockingly, NARA is disintegrating under Rubio.

Hearsay, but would be best case at a place with lots of layoffs ongoing, & more coming.

Tired: Time, Life, The New Yorker
Wired: Wired

Fired copyright chief loses first round in lawsuit over Trump powers Shira Perlmutter asked a judge to reinstate her, arguing the Library of Congress is not under direct presidential control.

Has there been news/unreported activity at the Library of Congress in June? Is it a weird stalemate? I haven't seen any news since a federal judge upheld the Register of Copyright's firing: seems as though the professionals have kept the politicos out? www.politico.com/news/2025/05...

See this is an object lesson against tech determinism bc I’m pretty sure some kid in my calc math class did some bit twiddling code that would do this on a TI 85 but then they went and nerfed calculators.

I was worried I’d have to get computer and reverse image search that face but then I got the joke

If you’d been in a Subaru Outback driving down the garden state parkway to the beach yesterday, you’d have been able to hear two PhDs failing to convince a 9yo that “modern” is a term of art that actually means “after 1789” and insisting on *1453* because real history is political history I guess.

Explore Wikipedia through a data map. Pages are grouped by semantic similarity, for topic clusters.
Hover to see details, zoom to explore more fine-grained topics, click to go to a page. Search by page
name to find interesting starting points for exploration.

lmcinnes.github.io/datamapplot_...

There’s something even deeper going on here; the NYer is drawing the line separating Modernity from Olden Traditional times to fall somewhere between the dot coms and the iPhone. Fees like this is becoming the new starting line for History, like the 1945 was when I was growing up.