Dr Brett H Meyer

Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition.

Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

And not only completing it, but doing so well, producing a durable result worth being proud of. There has always been shortcuts. When the work matters, they’re always a trap.

Rhetoric didn’t shoot the guns.

Ed tech is profitable. It is also mostly useless Independent research identifies few learning gains

Blistering piece on ed tech in @economist.com.

‘Although ed-tech companies tout huge learning gains, independent research has made clear that technology rarely boosts learning in schools—and often impairs it.’
economist.com/united-state...

Good Bones poem by Maggie Smith

The ruling ideas of a time are the ideas of the ruling class. That's what AI is. A ruling-class idea. To working people whose wages haven't kept pace with increased rent, food prices, etc., AI is irrelevant or making matters worse. Software developers losing their jobs because companies think they can make more money off cobbled-together AI slop should not embrace ruling-class fantasies about hyper-intelligent messiahs. Scientists, including those who study software engineering like me, must stop incessantly discussing AI and pay more attention to working-class problems and phenomena. Bhaskar argued that the twin aims of science are to understand the universe and to emancipate humanity from suffering. No one said anything about enriching AI oligarchs. AI has become a black hole, vacuuming up all our intellectual bandwidth, funding, and publication opportunities.

AI is a ruling-class idea

Paul Ralph (Dalhousie University)

www.linkedin.com/posts/pralph...

four panel illustration of a small child careening down a yellow plastic slide, flailing as they try to slow their progress to no avail, each panel their becoming more terrified and panicked, with text on each panel reading 1. January 2026 2. January 2026 3. Also January 2026 4. ...January 2026

can we stop for just a sec?

A List of Predictions Made in 1926 About 2026

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😬

Just say no!

I agree with all this — sick leave is essential to a healthy society. While we’re working on that, though, we need to make it a general norm that if you MUST be around others while sick, you wear a mask (preferably a good one).

Wow, what a flashback. That’s how we used to make Christmas lists, just paging through the catalog, marking things.

Doing yoga with small dogs around is an adventure every single time.

The key phrase in this op-ed: "scarcity breeds ingenuity." What's so remarkable about the human mind is how nimble it is, how capable we are despite *not* having read all the data on the Internet. The brute force methods of today's AI models are offensive to human cognitive elegance.

😬

Vive la résistance?
Vive la résistance!

I don’t know if anyone else notices or cares, but when I see a presentation in which the speaker uses obviously generated-AI images to illustrate their slides, it makes me immediately less confident in whatever other content they’re presenting.

Is there a comparable situation where advocacy, reform, and regulation was needed, and massive resources opposed it? That we can learn from?

Cigarettes? Climate change?

If my childrens’ education in Quebec has taught me anything, it is that French doesn’t have words for things, it has sentences and paragraphs.

This explains the trouble I had trying to secure RAM for new PCs for home! Whatever I’d selected in PC Part Picker would disappear between adding it to the build and actually going to the website to make the purchase. I had to revise my choice three times in a matter of a few hours. 🤨

It’s better than bad, it’s good!

Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness (30th Anniversary Edition)

Make an exenniel feel old with three words: 30th anniversary edition.

open.spotify.com/album/6nrppj...

Learning with AI falls short compared to old-fashioned web search Doing the mental work of connecting the dots across multiple web queries appears to help people understand the material better compared to an AI summary.

New research supporting the radical proposition that trying to learn something works better than not trying.

theconversation.com/learning-wit...

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick.

Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.

Is the fact that I appreciate this a sign of identity-protective cognition? 🤔 😅

Welp, you can either 1) stop Google from using all your email to train models, or 2) you can use spellcheck.

COWEN: The stupidest question possible: Why don't we just make more GPUS? ALTMAN: Because we need to make more electrons. COWEN: What's stopping that? What's the ultimate binding constraint? ALTMAN: We're working on it really hard. COWEN: If you could have more of one thing to have more compute, what would the one thing be? ALTMAN: Electrons.

These are not serious people.

Academia is a really racist and sexist place. Larry Summers, as the president of Harvard, epitomized that racism and sexism but he is not unique. That's why we needed DEI.

I'll believe the Democrats give a fuck and this isn't just about ✨political scandal points✨ when 𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑚 completely denounce and cut all ties with 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦𝑜𝑛𝑒 in these chats and start standing ten toes down for the 𝑣𝑖𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑠 . No matter who it is. No matter what.

"It's like asbestos" is the perfect analogy.

Useful in some contexts, dangerous and unhealthy in others we won't even know about for decades. *perfect*

I’d like the “too close to the sun” package, please! Thank you.