Peter Tarras

PLEASE this.

And also to scientists writing press releases, too - calling something "AI" when it was actually your student spending 12 months fitting and validating a model is disingenuous

Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪

Breslau Codex (Wrocław, Stadtbibliothek, MS 1302, s. xii ex./xiii in.), f. 82ra, showing tear in the page but only the very edge of the text in the inner gutter.

Oh wow! This is what happens when you're photographing MSS & don't capture the text in the inner gutter. 1st, here's the photograph (made about 100 yrs ago) of the Codex Salernitanus, f. 82ra. Although that big tear of the page is obvious, the inner gutter hasn't been fully captured in the photo.

I'm not sure either, tbh. But perhaps the second set of cows could count as "definite", because it's not that set we heard about before, and they have an attribute which makes that clear.

Map 1. From Iberia to India, ca. 1000–1250. Map created by John Wyatt Greenlee of Surprised Eel Mapping.

Map 2. Egypt and Northeast Africa, ca. 1000–1250. Map created by John Wyatt Greenlee of Surprised Eel Mapping.

Maps! From my forthcoming book and created by @greenleejw.bsky.social. I highly recommend JW Greenlee and especially appreciated his collaborative and iterative process of design. These maps capture the geography implicated in the slave trade that I study in the book. There is ... 1/3

Table from McCormick

What languages did the 35 hermits living in Jerusalem in 808 pray to God in? Charlemagne wanted to know, so he found out. (Mostly Greek and Syriac)

If I remember correctly (big if), absolute state normally goes with numbers, but emphatic state is also possibly. In the second case, however, you probably have emphatic state because they are more precisely defined.

hive-mind, know of any research/academic work that has detailed the various ways social media/large platforms have made audits/critical investigation of these platforms practically impossible. exuberant API fees, access only to partial data even when you can pay fee, retaliation again auditors, etc

Resisting GenAI and Big Tech in Higher Education Tuesday 25th November 2025 8am - 9:30am PST | 11am -12:30pm EST | 4pm - 5:30pm GMT | 5pm - 6:30pm CET Virtual on Zoom – REGISTER HERE: http://bit.ly/4qE27dB Generative AI is permeating higher education in many different ways—it is increasingly embedded in university work and life, even if we don’t want to use it. But people are also sounding the alarm: Gen AI is disrupting learning and undermining trust in the integrity of academic work, while big tech’s energy consumption, use of water, and rapid expansion of data centers are exacerbating ecological crises. What can we do? How do we resist? Come learn about the environmental, social, economic, and political threats that AI poses and how we can individually and collectively resist and refuse. Learn about how some are challenging the narrative of inevitability. Join this interactive discussion with international scholars and activists on resisting GenAI and big tech in higher education. Inputs from multiple scholar-activists include: Christoph Becker (University of Toronto, Canada), Mary Finley-Brook (University of Richmond, USA), Dan McQuillan (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK), Sinéad Sheehan (University of Galway, Ireland), Jennie Stephens (National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland), and Paul Lachapelle (Montana State University, USA). This event will be recorded and is co-sponsored by: Climate Justice Universities Union and Climate Campus Network

Resisting GenAI and Big Tech in Higher Education - Tuesday 25th Nov, free registration, great panel, big focus on climate justice. Register here: lmula.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

You're welcome! By the way, many of the authors are also active here: @kakapitan.bsky.social @mikekestemont.bsky.social @folgertk.bsky.social @danielsawyer.bsky.social @remcosleiderink.bsky.social

Forgotten books: The application of unseen species models to the survival of culture Quantitative ecological methods can be used to estimate the extent of losses of medieval narrative literature.

It think that's the main paper:
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Yeah, it's quite clear that we have lost a great deal, I'm sure you're familiar with the attempts to model this using biological methods. I think it's great to ask how we should deal with this insight, e.g. what role imaginative reconstructions of historical settings can play.

That's a very exciting topic! Some of those stories may still be preserved in folklore, but perhaps not dating as far back as the 12th century. We now have snow and before extremely misty weather. I'm sure such changes in nature must also have greatly stimulated the narrative imagination.

Offener Brief gegen die zunehmende unkritische Nutzung von KI an deutschen Hochschulen und Forschungseinrichtungen - bitte teilen! openletter.earth/gegen-die-un...

Soeben unterzeichnet! Lest den Brief, unterzeichnet ihn, teilt ihn, wenn ihr gegen *unkritische* Nutzung (nicht gegen Nutzung generell) von KI an deutschen Hochschulen seid.

Medieval Philosophical and Scientific Manuscripts – an online short course taught by Anna Somfai This course will run online from 14:00-17:00: Monday 26 January – Thursday 29 January 2026. The course explores medieval Western philosophical and scientific manuscripts produced over the spa…

How have books shaped the way we think? In January Anna Somfai will teach an online short course on books about science and philosophy in the Middle Ages. Book now 👇 #MedievalSky @ies-sas.bsky.social @warburginstitute.bsky.social @sas-news.bsky.social palaeography.uk/study/short-...

I Set A Trap To Catch My Students Cheating With AI. The Results Were Shocking. "Students are not just undermining their ability to learn, but to someday lead."

"And I guess that’s why I hate AI in the classroom as much as I do. Students are afraid to fail, and AI presents itself as a savior. But what we learn from history is that progress requires failure. It requires reflection."

This morning's discourse on how LLMs fuel misconceptions & strengthen people's delusions reminds me of a student of mine who, in the early days of ChatGPT, used it for an exam essay. The replies to his prompts caused him to delve into an irrelevant topic without even trying to make it relevant.(1/n)

Screenshot of Microsoft asking for feedback on Word where I wrote: One of the worst times I had this year was spending DAYS trying to turn off that horrible, awful AI, copilot. I am a writer, I have spent years honing my craft, and it is frankly offensive to offer to rewrite what I just wrote with a stupid machine. I almost stopped using Word until I FINALLY found a way to turn it off. I don't want to use AI and you still keep trying to ram it down my throat and I hate it.

Why yes, @microsoft.com, I will HAPPILY provide you feedback on how exactly I feel about Word right now.

Danke, ich schätze die Initiative sehr und teile den Brief gerne mit Kolleg_innen. Ich habe den Zusatz in Klammern gemacht, weil Vieles, was schon seit Jahren an Universitäten in der Forschung eingesetzt wird, jetzt auch unter "KI" läuft. Der Begriff sorgt leider für Unklarheit.

Soeben unterzeichnet! Lest den Brief, unterzeichnet ihn, teilt ihn, wenn ihr gegen *unkritische* Nutzung (nicht gegen Nutzung generell) von KI an deutschen Hochschulen seid.

Detail from a photostat picture of a page from a twelfth-century manuscript. The manuscript contains liturgical texts, and in the picture we see musical notation above a line of text, then a section of prose with the header "Lectio VII", which means that this is the seventh lesson out of twelve to be read aloud. In the margin on the right-hand side of the text is a drawing of a head that seems more like an animal than a human being, but it is difficult to see exactly what kind of animal.

For the feast of Saint Edmund Martyr, here is one of my favourite depictions of the wolf that guarded Edmund's head - a marginal drawing appearing by the lesson before the one in which the wolf is mentioned. Or so I interpret this figure.

[MS Pierpont Morgan 736, f.187]

God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible — ANCIENT JEW REVIEW Candida Moss, God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible. Little, Brown and Company, 2024. In God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible ,…

New at AJR! Herman Arnolus Manoe engages Candida Moss' God's Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible.
www.ancientjewreview.com/read/godsghostwriters

Excellent thread on a fascinating aspect of saints' cults in the Middle Ages. A combination of expectation, wishful thinking & opportunism drove minor religious centres to connect themselves to more famous figures, which elevated their prestige.

saturation with Tolkien spinoffs has somehow not prepared our culture for the arrival of dark lords bearing a gift that everyone becomes convinced they can wield to accomplish great things but just makes them dependent and start whispering about preciouses if you suggest just throwing it away

Tolkien: In my book I invented the One Ring as a cautionary tale for the corrupting influence of convenience without accountability

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the One Ring from classic fantasy epic Don’t Create the One Ring

if, on the other hand, it matters to you that these systems are basically still generating complicated statistical models of word tokens and the orders in which they tend to come out, then very little "technical" innovation these tech companies have done in the last 5 years seems worth writing about

A study on a palimpsest witness attesting to the complete Syriac version of the so-called middle recension of Ignatius of Antioch’s Letters is ready.