@zoegriffith.bsky.social
Friendly crone. Asst professor of History at CUNY. Aspiring horticulturalist. I wrote a book on Ottoman Egypt and the Mediterranean archive. You can preorder it! https://www.ucpress.edu/books/egypts-mediterranean/paper
What if all those years of life were not just an investment in capital growth but were actually the entire point of all of it, what then.
I made this 19 page list of resources for questioning AI because I was so frustrated by this dynamic, the tipping point for me was an admin saying that people who were questioning the push for AI were being "emotional": docs.google.com/document/d/1...
is it Too On The Nose that the publisher's website for Orwell's 1984 wants you to believe that this is the cover of 1984?
(Click to expand, or google it yourself!)
loooove this 💖
on the educator's responsibility to "respond" to AI:
chortling at these AI smart-replies to my student's thesis statement
so very proud!
I'm not proud to say that I have been a heavy Spotify user for over a decade, but I *AM* proud to say that I'm finally ditching them (not because of the AI audiobooks, though that's another good reason.)
Qobuz is a very good alternative for music, and they pay their artists!
Handing back student work that’s been written by ChatGPT with a 0 followed by the comment “This essay will never stand in authentic wonder before the Beauty of God’s creation.”
Really, really agree with this piece from Huffpo. We don't have to accept the aura of AI inevitability. We can, and should, refuse to engage with it in our classrooms (and elsewhere, but especially in the classroom!)
Fact-Checking Claims About Zohran Mamdani https://theonion.com/fact-checking-claims-about-zohran-mamdani/
yearly reminder to people insisting that we view Christopher Columbus as "a man of his time" that *the people responsible for the Spanish Inquisition* thought Columbus was out of pocket
Happy #caturday from a boy who really really loves his @ranchogordo.bsky.social bean club box 🫘
Some wise advice on your academia.edu account.
It's probably time to delete it.
Im glad Dr Tao is speaking up, but this attitude among people; that you can work in STEM and "avoid politics" is...alarming. And has always been wrong.
A Labor Day reminder: today there isn't a single city, metro area, or state in the U.S. where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a modest 2-bedroom apartment.
Millions of people with jobs—even multiple jobs—aren't safe from homelessness in this country.
NEW: A major AI copyright legal showdown just took a huge twist today. Facing a class action on behalf of book authors that could've seen it pay over a TRILLION in damages for alleged piracy, Anthropic has agreed to settle instead: www.wired.com/story/anthro...
The mental health benefits of not knowing any history right now must be massive. Moving through your day with total equanimity. What happens next? Who knows? Maybe something good
A key difference here is that while either can be incorrect, the structure of Wikipedia *creates context* and the structure of LLMs *destroys context*
Wikipedia has linked sources and an edit history showing where information came from and who added it when
An LLM just generates text
No one wants to hear this, but it’s true. Either we can value education — not for a select few but for anyone willing to put in the effort — and provide the requisite resources, or we can watch it become a pursuit available only to an elite minority, with everyone else getting a cheap facsimile
That's a great idea, thanks!
Why does Goorge W. Bush looks like a mashup of Mitch McConnell and Bill Gates? Dude doesn't even wear glasses.
Nothing, but nothing, is funnier to me at this moment than these Ph.D.-level charts.
"While the new strategy, known as 'Look Back Before You Act,' has raised concerns among people worried they will have to remember lots of events from long ago, the historians have assured Americans they won’t be required to read all the way through thick books or memorize anything."
"I need ChatGPT to brainstorm" dear human person the whole point of brainstorming is to find new ways or angles when approaching a problem, the "let's regurgitate the complete stolen corpus of human achievement"-machine doesn't help you brainstorm - it stops you from brainstorming.
Gustave Caillebotte, Nasturtiums, 1892
Either colleges produce graduates who have been transformed by 4 years of study in ways that are valuable but hard to quantify, or they produce interchangeable widgets with pieces of paper that say they jumped through a series of hoops, probably with the assistance of chatbots because who wouldn't?
Parents insist their kids go to college to get business degrees. Administrators respond by defunding the humanities and social sciences, while hiring business profs at ~2X what historians get paid. Meanwhile, businesses say over and over that they want to hire humanities and social science majors.
Decades of mechanistic talk about university degrees as if they were bundles of 'skills' and 'prep' are about to be proved completely wrong (obviously). Want to get a real boost? Do History or English.
