Jessica M. Elliott

Microsoft has taken a gradual approach to adding Al elements to Excel, particularly because the data it handles powers some of the most important parts of businesses worldwide. "[Agent Mode] lets you build sheets that are auditable, refreshable, and verifiable," Chauhan says. "We have spent a ton of time making sure that the validation loop on all of these sub-agents is pretty tight." Microsoft says its Agent Mode in Excel has an accuracy rate of 57.2 percent in SpreadsheetBench, a benchmark for evaluating an Al model's ability to edit real world spreadsheets. This result places Agent Mode above Shortcut.ai, ChatGPT agent with xIsx support, and Claude Files Opus 4.1. It's still behind the human accuracy of 71.3 percent, though.

there’s only like two sentences between “excel is incredibly important to worldwide business” and “we have a 57% accuracy rate”! What are we doing!

if you aren’t super tuned into COVID news it is unlikely you know just how easily the newest variant spreads.

vaccinate. mask. act like it is 2021. or you are probably going to get it. (ask me how i know!)

I just need everybody to stop making things worse for one goddamn minute so we can all catch our breath

feels like we're living through some kind of cultural gas leak

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

it is worth mentioning that many of these laws are written so broadly as to define any discussion of LGBT topics as pornographic

As always: the primary goal of disinformation isn't to make you believe the fake thing.

It's to make you believe that everything is fake, so you shouldn't even bother attempting to discern truth.

The basic infrastructures that allow women to be participants in public life—birth control & abortion access, no fault divorce, childcare access & affordability, civil rights law in employment and public accommodations, the minimal efforts to mitigate sexual and domestic violence—are all crumbling.

Finally: AI cannot do your job, but an AI salesman can 100% convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job, and when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging "foundation models" will be shut off and we'll lose the AI that can't do your job, and you will be long gone, retrained or retired or "discouraged" and out of the labor market, and no one will do your job. AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:

This whole section really.

A lot of people think that every international student admitted means one fewer spot for domestic students, when the opposite is more likely true - the tuition revenue international students bring allows public universities to provide substantial discounts to domestic students, improving access.

I’m always saying that!

Can't we just get healthcare

Every good programmer I know has been saying this to me for months; meanwhile every not-great programmer I know has been trying to outsource their work to ai, causing more issues/delays than they if did it themselves.

A lot of these tools only seem good to people who are not great at their jobs.

It is, far and away, the most challenging thing I’ve encountered since entering the academy. And that is saying a lot. I might be working on this but I keep putting it aside because I’m not medicated enough to describe how demoralizing it all is.

The fundamental problem with the HBR-business/tech genre of AI studies is they all start from the premise that "learning" = "transfer of content" and thus "learning" is measured by "quantifiable restatement of said content," and that's just...not how learning works

Visiting Assistant Professor of Medieval Middle East-3 year - Waterville, Maine, United States job with Colby College | 37887745 Description Visiting Assistant Professor in Middle East/Islamic History The Department of History at Colby College invites applications for a...

Three-year VAP in Medieval Middle East/Islamic History at Colby's History Department
jobs.chronicle.com/job/37887745...

It's pretty wild to me that investigators have uncovered that anti-trans campaigns are largely funded by the fossil fuel industry, and that the presumed motivations are pretty directly to redirect the public conversation away from climate change... and that this isn't bigger news.

The thing regular people don’t often grasp about ‘academic freedom’ is that if you don’t allow experts to research & teach in their fields of expertise, guided by their professional judgment & decades of training, you have effectively given up on the concept of knowledge & shut down your university

Tenured Associate/Full Professor in History, Deinard Chair in Early Modern/Modern Jewish History in Minneapolis, MN for University of Minnesota Exciting opportunity in Minneapolis, MN for University of Minnesota as a Tenured Associate/Full P...

My department is hiring an associate/full professor of Early Modern/Modern Jewish History. Please apply and please share within your networks. I have been told to say we're very interested in the early early modern.

Note: I am not involved in the search but am happy to answer general questions.

At my institution, the Teaching and Learning Center's programs are now primarily focused on integrating AI into teaching.

This includes their funded workshops. These used to be on different topics, and are one of the only ways for adjuncts to get some extra cash. Now they're almost all AI.

Poll: Capitalism is out … and socialism is in The movement is gaining popularity among Democrats, a left-leaning group found.

To be clear: this entire “we’ve got to run more pro-lifers” insanity is because literally a week ago polling showed that Democrats would prefer politicians like AOC and Mamdani over Jefferies and Schumer by, let me emphasize this, a 20 point fucking margin.

www.politico.com/news/2025/09...

Texas Won’t Study How Its Abortion Ban Impacts Women, So We Did Since Texas banned abortion, no one has studied the statewide effects on pregnant women experiencing complications. Here’s how we sifted through data on millions of pregnancy hospitalizations and anal...

Earlier this year, ProPublica found that the sepsis rate in second-trimester pregnancy loss hospitalizations increased by more than 50% under Texas’ abortion ban.

Here’s how we did our analysis.

(Published Feb. 2025)

Lemme spell it out. Trump's only leverage over Jimmy Kimmel and ABC came from FCC regulation. His direct power over H1-B visas gives him similar leverage over tech, higher ed, and others.

Critical part of the President's new $100,000 charge for H1-B visas: The Administration can also offer a $100,000 discount to any person, company, or industry that it wants. Replacing rules with arbitrary discretion.

Want visas? You know who to call and who to flatter.

there’s a lot of talk about big tech and corporations but so many international academic colleagues are also on H1Bs.

no university is going to pay 100k extra a year to keep them. if this holds, it would essentially mean the end of foreigners on tenure track jobs at US universities.

Matthew McConaughey says he wants a private LLM, fed only with his books, notes, journals, and aspirations, so he can ask it questions and get answers based solely on that information, without any outside influence.

this exists it is called thinking

It is fucked up what they did to the headphone jack

Don't apologise for your dog showing up during the Zoom, apologise for hiding him all this time

Censorship Is the Authoritarian’s Dream The right to free expression must include the right to say horrible and evil things.

"More professors in the United States have been fired for controversial views in the past week than any other week in all of American history."
www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...