Mita Williams

Google Scholar *could* be using AI to actually scrape journals that aren't currently captured in its citations stats because they're not 'properly' formatted. Instead it's going to ruin the search function itself.

You’re Edits have been viewed more than 15,569 times recently. Readers around the world appreciate your contributions. In the last two months articles you’ve edited have received 15,569 total views.

Wikipedia’s Year-End Wrap up is my absolute favourite.

Being an editor feels good!

YANSS 326 – The surprising, boney, bipedal, baby-driven origins of human language We sit down with Dr. Madeleine Beekman, a professor emerita of evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology at the University of Sydney, Australia, whose new book, The Origin of Language, presents a…

Chaser:

YANSS 326 – The surprising, boney, bipedal, baby-driven origins of human language

youarenotsosmart.com/2025/11/24/y...

Is language the same as intelligence? The AI industry desperately needs it to be The AI boom is based on a fundamental mistake.

Shot:

Large language mistake
Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it.

www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

The Ten Largest, No. 1, Childhood, by Hilma af Klint, 1907 (rotated), 📸 by @WeversAndrew

I'm glad you found it useful! I wish I had included your addition about how libraries shield patrons from incursions into their reading habits! It's such a good point!

I think if Canada wants to have a strong cultural identity we need to go back to doing what we're best at, making the weirdest fucking TV shows you've ever seen

Thomas King gave the 2003 Massey Lectures, entitled (now painfully ironic) "The Truth About Stories."

He also played himself as a character among a number of fictional Indigenous characters in CBC's Radio's Dead Dog Cafe Comedy Hour

This is why I write I use the form: Ai

The internet was designed to route around gatekeepers We can create space where students grow in confidence as they develop their own abilities as they gain new ways of understanding. But that space will require gate-keeping.

📚Librarian of Things: The internet was designed to route around gatekeepers

We can create space where students grow in confidence as they develop their own abilities as they gain new ways of understanding. But that space will require gate-keeping.

librarian.aedileworks.com/2025/11/25/t...

I am into this.

See also: Jack Cheng's Digital Mending Circle: www.jackcheng.com/sunday/450-r...

See also: Ain’t no party like a LibGuides Party: ’cause a LibGuides Party is mandatory crln.acrl.org/index.php/cr...

We have known that the monetization of Internet traffic has been incentivizing fictional news for *years* now: www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverm...

Metafoundry The newsletter of Deb Chachra's work and ideas. Musings on infrastructure, technology, culture, design, education, and more. Low volume, no spam, no tracking, unsubscribe whenever. Want a taste of wha...

Friends — after a lengthy hiatus, I am finally rebooting my newsletter, Metafoundry. If you’re already a subscriber, you should have received your first newsletter from my new provider, Buttondown. Otherwise, you can learn more and subscribe here: buttondown.com/metafoundry#...

This is your periodic reminder that I have a newsletter called “The University of Winds” that is sent out every other Saturday morning which you can subscribe to either via rss or by email 🪁

This is weaponized petty and I'm here for it.

Update November 22. We’ve updated this article after realising we contributed to a perfect storm of misunderstanding around a recent change in the wording and placement of Gmail’s smart features. The settings themselves aren’t new, but the way Google recently rewrote and surfaced them led a lot of people (including us) to believe Gmail content might be used to train Google’s AI models, and that users were being opted in automatically. After taking a closer look at Google’s documentation and reviewing other reporting, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Gmail does scan email content to power its own “smart features,” such as spam filtering, categorisation, and writing suggestions. But this is part of how Gmail normally works and isn’t the same as training Google’s generative AI models. Google also maintains that these feature settings are opt-in rather than opt-out, although users’ experiences seem to vary depending on when and how the new wording appeared. It’s easy to see where the confusion came from. Google’s updated language around “smart features” is vague, and the term “smart” often implies AI—especially at a time when Gemini is being integrated into other parts of Google’s products. When the new wording started appearing for some users without much explanation, many assumed it signalled a broader shift. We’ve revised this article to reflect what we can confirm from Google’s documentation, as it’s always been our aim to give readers accurate, helpful guidance.

If you have been sharing that Malwarebytes article on the Gmail thing, you should note the giant correction up top.

www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/20...

This is my new favourite newsletter. I learn something new and meaningful every issue.

"academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it... The dominant four collectively generated... $12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024."

Beyond credibility To believe in supremacy is to refuse to see what’s right in front of you, over and over and over again.

“Rather than believe the women he had collaborated with, and so be forced to revise his image of the respectable men in his midst, he chose to maintain that respectability by refusing the validity of his own observations.”

aworkinglibrary.com/writing/beyo...

You’ll never guess who the article was about

I want to restate something I said in a lot of replies yesterday, which is that this move is not going to reduce replies yelling at the Bsky team—and that should not be the goal.

What it does is clarify how moderation works here so that people can assess that and act accordingly.

LCNAF & Trie Storing +11M unique LCNAF names in 50MB Trie data structure

I don't do this level of technical work so I ONLY HAVE A HUNCH that what I previously shared above might be useful context to appreciate this project by @thisismattmiller.com called, "LCNAF & Trie" thisismattmiller.com/post/lcnaf-t...

"Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941 –> afgiiilnoorvw11124889"

Build Your Own Database A step-by-step guide to building a key-value database from scratch.

Some weeks ago, I found on Pinboard's most popular bookmarks, this interactive essay called Build Your Own Database: A step-by-step guide to building a key-value database from scratch." www.nan.fyi/database

From it I learned that memory management is very important in building a database!

William S Burroughs Cut Up Method The cut up is a mechanical method of juxtaposition in which Burroughs literally cuts up passages of prose by himself and other writers and then pastes them back together at random.

Also! www.languageisavirus.com/creative-wri...

"As Burroughs experimented with the technique, he began to develop a theory of the cut up, and this theory was incorporated into his pseudoscience of addiction.... Burroughs adds an analysis of control over human beings exercised by language..."

Today I was able to make it into one of the rounds for FIFA World Cup tickets. I was in the queue for a very long time.

Once in, I was unable to get any for Toronto except one opportunity to purchase tickets for $2755 *each*.

I did not purchase these tickets.

Presumably a mistaken suspension of a journalist who is a very anodyne poster over here, @aaron.bsky.team and co. What's the best way to reach the team who can look into it?

How I use Signal (and Why) This blog post will go into why I use Signal as my personal messaging app of choice and to point out its features in hopes that it might convince you to use Signal as well.

"How I use Signal (and Why)"
librarian.aedileworks.com/2025/11/11/h...

This blog post is part of a larger series that might be of interest: librarian.aedileworks.com/tag/howandwhy/

Sarah Kendzior • 4m I've been suspended from BlueSky. I don't know why. I wasn't online much today, and the last things I posted were excerpts from my substack newsletter articles. The suspension followed without explanation. It seems there's a crackdown. If you enjoy my work and want to make sure you can access it, subscribe! It's free - I would never paywall in times of peril — and voluntary paying subscribers keep it going. It would be great to have your support at this time. Thanks!

In a rare case of Substack notes usefulness, I just learned that Sarah Kendzior (author of They Knew and a brilliant writer) got bounced from Bluesky. What the hell? new @sarahkendzior.bsky.social

I Want You to Understand Chicago Politics Chicago 2025-11-08 I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time. Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning. A week later it happens again. An email arrives. Agents with guns have chased a teacher into the school where she works. They did not have a warrant. They dragged her away, ignoring her and her colleagues’ pleas to show proof of her documentation. That evening I stand a few feet from the parents of Rayito de Sol and listen to them describe, with anguish, how good Ms. Diana was to their children. What it is like to have strangers with guns traumatize your kids. For a teacher to hide a three-year-old child for fear they might be killed. How their relatives will no longer leave the house. I hear the pain and fury in their voices, and I wonder who will be next. Understand what it is to pray in Chicago. On September 19th, Reverend David Black, lead pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was praying outside the ICE detention center in Broadview when a DHS agent shot him in the head with pepper balls. Pepper balls are never supposed to be fired at the head because they can seriously injure, or even kill. “We could hear them laughing as they were shooting us from the roof,” Black recalled. He is not the only member of the clergy ICE has assaulted. Methodist pastor Hannah Kardon was violently arrested on October 17th, and Baptist pastor Michael Woolf was shot with pepper balls on November 1st. Understand what it is to sleep in Chicago. On the night of September 30th, federal agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter to execute a raid on an apartment building on the South Sho…

Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer.

He is a computer safety researcher.

And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine.

In under 1600 words.

aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

I love that the Boston cop slide never got fixed and now people just willingly go down it in tribute. It’s basically a national landmark at this point