Alison P

I am teh oldz. Done all except for 9 (which is anti-social as noted).

Please get proper financial advice and don’t listen to this. If you have a mortgage you still need savings. But it does make sense to have a mortgage that you can overpay and withdraw that overpayment if you need to.

But in the crazy world of U.K. banking it is possible to have a lower interest rate on your mortgage where fixed terms and fixed rates are common, than on your savings account. Also you still need savings for emergency repairs, a new car etc. also see offset accounts.

Could not have said it better. I mean I would rather live in Australia but this economic migrant needs to stay put for the moment.

No?

It’s actually:

1. I’ve invested barely any time in learning how it actually works and I believe it’s magic wand/substitute for a human.

2. I’ve invested time learning how it actually works & see some use cases but if it looks like magic it’s bc there’s a lot of human labor behind the curtain.

@catvalente.bsky.social spitting facts for generations!

I cannot understand what these people think the purpose of human life is?

It is *not* "pursue joy, deal justly, love well, try to understand as much and see as much of this beautiful world and of the deepness, richness and variety of human culture and experience as you can before you die"?

OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limi...

"In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits."

www.computerworld.com/article/4059...

YouTube video by Thriving Autistic Lightbulb Moments: Being Autistic

Just out - new educational animation films about Autistic Experiences that I have been working on with @thrivingautistic.bsky.social team - would love to hear your feedback!

Lightbulb Moments: Being Autistic
youtu.be/3O6hy-usIug?...

In Which Nadine Amuses a Dragon and Makes Autumn Happen

Their memorials are history. Ours are political. Because as always, there are two sexualities - straight, and political.

Two genders - male, and political.

Two religions - Christian, and political.

Two races - white, and political.

Your semi-regular plug for Dr Nerdlove (www.doctornerdlove.com) who is *amazing* at offering compassionate, practical advice that is not shy about calling out toxic masculinity and implicit misogyny and working to decouple masculinity from both of them.

That's how you can tell human authors from AI.

AI will put in some em dashes, then apologise and take them out when told off.

Human authors will climb the filing cabinet, hissing, and defend their right to em dashes with a loaded stapler.

YouTube video by Angela Collier vibe physics

I watched this (youtu.be/TMoz3gSXBcY?...) on the abuse of LLMs & 'vibe physics' by @acollierastro.bsky.social - well worth a watch! - and I was struck by how the back 15 minutes (the 'thought train') also summed up neatly what it has been like to be a public-facing historian, even before LLMs.1/

I want one!!

Noting for good recs

Meredith has always been a G, but it's still exceptionally weird and very refreshing hearing from a tech exec who can see through all of this AI bullshit for what it is at its foundation: a backdoor surveillance tool.

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. 🪄

I mean. I hate AI and would rather read a post from a human. But also the ableism is real in that we don’t value rest. My worth as a human should not depend on whether I have a job and can do something ‘worthwhile’.

Maybe it’s because we are similar ages with similar cultural backgrounds but I find your blog really entertaining and that makes it a great way for me to learn a bit more about R. But your worth as a human being should not be tied to what you do. Don’t let late stage capitalism get you down.

Thank you for posting this.

Target-rich environment, this speech.

1/n

Ooh we should have done this!! But I gave up reading student comments years ago 🤷🏻‍♀️ (comments bear no relation to teaching quality! As noted further down the thread)

Nobody outside academia appreciates what it’s like inside. I could no longer recruit with a clear conscience.

Still learning how but. 1. Sure this is true and 2. Suspect it waaay harder for women to do.

No one stuck up for me either when I got ill. Uni’s are ableist hells.

That + perpetual pandemic + fascistic resurgence + institutional collapse + realizing that we'll never work up to the privileged positions our mentors held, contrasted w/ the pervasive failing upward of profoundly incompetent men (who also remind us of a career's worth of sexist indignities :)

Hellooooo I'm sure you've seen people suggest it's totally harmless to generate the odd AI image just for a bit of fun but let's take the theft from artists out of the equation...it uses the same amount of power to create five AI images as it does to boil the water for a mug of coffee.

The AI Boom Is Draining Water From the Areas That Need It Most A Bloomberg News analysis finds that roughly two thirds of new data centers built or in development in the US since 2022 are in places with high levels of water stress.

Each time you ask an AI chatbot a question, it sends a request to a data center and strains an increasingly scarce resource: water.

A 🧵on our investigation into how the data centers that power AI are increasingly being built in highly water-stressed places:

www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

also you all need to see this, because this is something I don't think *anybody* could predict for where this ad goes