Dr Amanda Dillon

As promised, here are the slides I shared with students to convince them to NOT use chatGPT and other artificial stupidity.

TL;DR? AI is evil, unsustainable and stupid, and I'd much rather they use their own brains, make their own mistakes, and actually learn something. 🪄

aaaaaaaand it turns out the answer to "how TF did some guys with a ladder steal the French crown jewels" is "cuts to arts funding mean the Louvre is massively understaffed"

And I will tell you flat out, there is a HELL OF A LOT BETTER-QUALITY ACTUAL TEACHING involved in getting a good degree out of a student who came in with BCD than there is getting one from an A*A*A student.

We all know that the UK could have a well-funded university system without heaping debt on the heads of students, if politicians wanted it to.

That's the only thing to say, really. Every dysfunction is a choice. A choice made by politicians, not by lecturers or students.

University tuition fees in England to rise with inflation every year from 2026 Bridget Phillipson confirmed the plans for the next two years, with fees to increase automatically after that.

I remember once at an office job I had, I was really struggling with a big awkward box of files and paper up some stairs, and my boss came past me and said "oh let me help you" and took ONE SHEET OF A4 PAPER off the top.

Anyway, in completely unrelated news.....

Apparently university finances have already been stabilised. So speedily some of us must have missed it. 2/x

You do realize that not adjusting for inflation has been unsustainable for over a decade?

That cost of living applies to faculty and staff as well who don’t get pay rises in part because universities have been getting less money from fixed fees every year.

Pair with: "we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. ...realists of a larger reality." www.ursulakleguin.com/nbf-medal

When we refuse to hold people accountable for atrocious actions, we should not expect better behavior, or even just the same behavior.

We should and arguably must expect worse after every time we make this same mistake.

Here's the thing:

Everything is Gamergate because no one with any power to actually hold people accountable took this seriously.

The same will be true if every time something atrocious happens like this and no one is held accountable.

They are only further emboldened.

I could have used the weekend off. Guess we’re working 20 days on the trot…

The list is there. The 6 hours of page number finding I did was not. OneDrive’s version history kept defaulting to the unedited version from night before. I was in too much shock to do anything other than stare at the screen.

Well OneDrive has eaten my 1/3 done index. I wasn’t enjoying it THAT MUCH, universe. Fuck’s sake.

Reposting this to see if I reach anyone who knows what I’m referring to here. It’s driving me nuts.

Indexing is really the most chaotic thing.

‘These are the things I think are important and the way I see them connecting. If you don’t like it, tough bunnies.’

There’s legit no real rules. I weirdly enjoy it.

Proofs and proms today (yes, well after the fact; I just want something on in the background). I had not realised how the BBC had turned it into a sports event. The commentary is… no. Just no.

Goths! Academics! I have possibly made this up (irony), but I am reasonably sure I read something in the last few months that said LLMs are essentially gothic in nature.

Sound familiar to anyone? Any idea what it might have been? Probs just a thread, but might have been a substack…

That sound you are hearing is my jet lagged brain slowly creaking back into teaching mode.

Major yn Englisshe:
• focused readinge & writinge prepare you for anythinge
• research, communicacioun, creativitye, and interpretacioun will be needed for careers not even invented yet
• meaningful engagement wyth big ideas and textes that will staye wyth you forevir
• it ys awesome
• books!

There's lots more to say about @davidharvie.bsky.social and my findings. Please read the report to support union action & honour those who shared experiences.

I'll finish with an eyeopening stat: the hidden, 'backdoor' redundancies affecting *11,500* people. 11,500 HIDDEN job cuts. This must end.

Queen

First morning back in Britain: cold*, wet. Trying to figure out how to get the washing to dry.

Welcome home to me. ❤️

*it was well into the mid 20s and above in the US. 12 may as well be winter to me right now.

It was hilarious. I sort of expected the gates to get grumpy, because technology, but the glee with which the immigration lady hammered it on the desk was impressive. ‘If it ever stops working again, just give it a good thwack’, according to her.

Also my cabbie from the station was a full on lefty and the sigh of relief I let out was incredible. The US was not, shall we say, comfortable over the last week and a bit.

(NB not my family - just the overall vibe.)

Found out when using my brand spanking new British passport for the first time this morning that apparently you need to thwack them to get the chip to work correctly.

There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, as a friend put it.

More prosaically, as someone pointed out to me recently: LLMs are *always* hallucinating. its just that sometimes their hallucinations appear to map our experienced reality. But the map is never *of* our reality, just *like* it. So the words don’t describe it. 4/4

Haven’t had a single serving friend on a flight in… 15 years? 20? Nice to pass the time with someone way too happy to chatter for a change.

a cartoon of a dragon sitting at a desk with a stack of books and the words buy above it Alt: a cartoon of a dragon sitting at a desk with a stack of books and the words buy above it

That’s the plan!

Oh definitely. This one is for the journal I manage, so I know the timescales intimately. They can hold off till I’m back in Blighty on Tuesday. (Unless I really, really feel like doing it. But I doubt I will.)

elmo from sesame street is making a funny face while looking at the camera . Alt: elmo from sesame street staring at the camera, definitely done with this shit.

I mean, given the current UK HE state, even that’s not really a thing anymore.