I do love an Irish bus queue. A bunch of strangers hanging around together pretending not to queue.

Charles Brooks looks inside a 250 year old French Violin. Photographed with a Medical Laparoscope adapted to a Lumix G9ii Camera. 1770 violin by Augustin Chappuy. #music #art #photography

41 new articles on disagreement - coming out in the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Disagreement (released on 26 Nov). A pleasure co-editing this with Maria Baghramian and Rach Cosker-Rowland, and a long time in the making (thx to our fantastic contributors) www.routledge.com/The-Routledg...

It seems like there are just endless bad ideas about how to use "AI". Here are some new ones courtesy of the UK government.

... and a short thread because there is so much awfulness in this one article.
/1

www.ft.com/content/f2ae...

"We had four lawyers, three privacy experts, and two campaigners look at Microsoft's new Service Agreement, and none of our experts could tell if Microsoft plans on using your personal data..."

foundation.mozilla.org/en/campaigns...

As a funder: CAN CONFIRM.

Llegint l'article hi pots identificar tots els problemes d'aplicar tecnologies digitals a educació amb serveis que no són propis, no només del tema IA. El penso estampar a la sala de profes.

When think tanks, consultancies, industry etc recommend more "AI tools" in education they are either naively or deliberately obfuscatory. AI isn't "tools" - it's infrastructure. Institutions will pay licenses to access it. Its owners will take rent. It will hustle its users to follow its scripts.

AI image synthesis is inherently wasteful. As we all know but often ignore, anything called AI today consumes enormous energy resources and computing power. Also, it relies on the mass exploitation of human labor on a planetary scale. But there’s more to it …
1/6

Arlington Reservoir, January 2018

My best attempt at making sense of what has been happening at the British Library and more importantly how to learn from it

ciaranmartin.substack.com/p/on-the-mat...

Mass layoffs with translators being replaced by AI (ChatGPT4) are being rumored. This will probably result in a worse user experience (all those fun humorous phrases). When OpenAI put in their charter that AI ought to benefit humanity, what exactly were they thinking? How is it going to do this?

To read:

Epistemic Rights in the Era of Digital Disruption

link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

I'm not a Luddite or technophobe. I just know that after 466 years the thing on the left can be read fine. The thing top-right is 15 years old & uses tech that already no longer comes standard on computers. And the 30-yr-old thing bottom-right needs specialized antique hardware & software to read.

Depressing news: to rebuild after the cyber attack, the British Library "will now be forced to spend . . . £6mn-£7mn . . . consuming a sizeable proportion of its £16.4mn in unallocated reserves" www.ft.com/content/4be5...

Here's a paragraph from my paper in the brand new, open access, collection What Is Structural Injustice?
edited by Jude Browne and Maeve McKeown.

fdslive.oup.com/www.oup.com/...

The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/27/business/media/new-york-times-open-ai-microsoft-lawsuit.html

Epiphytic saxifrage (St. Patrick's cabbage) on oak in the woods, showing off a fabulous array of colour.

An abundance of epiphytes is the defining hallmark of rainforest anywhere in the world, including Ireland. 🌎

old custom now rarely seen: a candle placed in the window on Christmas Eve