Tobias Wilson-Bates
@phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
Assistant Professor of 19th century British Literature. Temporality. Ecology. Robots. Education.
It’s so important amidst all the noise to recognize that we aren’t even beginning to experience the aftershocks of COVID. We’re still experiencing the long shadow of the Recession www.npr.org/2024/05/10/1...
Zombie 2nd mortgages are coming to life, threatening thousands of Americans' homes : Planet Money
Karen McDonough of Quincy, Mass., was enjoying her tea one morning in the dining room when she saw something odd outside her window: a group of people gathering on her lawn. A man with a clipboard tol...
www.npr.org
*taking a long drag on an e-cig
“Aren’t all opinions just, like, our versions of hallucinations, bro?”
Mad Max, but it’s my syllabus of cobbled together pdfs, broken links, and outdated memes roughly soldered together from the last vestiges of the usable internet
Going on 200 years of the never ending struggle between Education and Assessment.
“O brave new world,
That has such people in't!” Is something Miranda says in The Tempest bc she’s been brought up in an intentionally blinding patriarchal education/slave system in order to become a tool for extracting revenge…
RIP Thomas Pynchon, you would’ve loved Banana Room
Evidently MIT has a "banana room" on campus with a dozen crates filled with bananas stacked in a corner every day where you can just walk in to grab a snack anytime.... Bananas! 🍌🍌🍌
Uncle Sam fighting a pandemic by juicing crypto, space tourism, and neural networks
Admin: we’d LOVE to hear your thoughts on AI in academia
Me: well, I think-
Admin: these thoughts CANNOT include additional faculty hiring or other forms of support
Me: 😒
Gollum (*flirting): tells us a riddle
Bilbo: umm, uh, what have I got in my pocket?!
Gollum (*insanely turned on):
Adobe, the company that successfully made signing PDFs a waking nightmare
Let The Hate Flow Through You Your Hate Has Made You Powerful GIF
ALT: Let The Hate Flow Through You Your Hate Has Made You Powerful GIF
media.tenor.comI think that’s a bit more emphasized in the Ion, but absolutely, I think both of them are pretty pertinent on the limitations of AI
The kind of résumé that makes it abundantly clear certain schools’ primary function is managing an endowment
The only Gollum content I want is an Antiques Roadshow style show where he studiously declares whether or not an item is “Precious”
Ya, I realized that I misread the original post. The real tragedy in my mind for game devs, authors, illustrators etc is that in an ideal world nobody would be better able to understand and tune these technologies than them, but the whole system optimizes towards antagonism and undercutting
I think the dead end projections have more to do with kicking the can on 40 years of hollowing out the higher ed workforce and the fantasy that AI offers a solution to that rotten infrastructure.
People out here banking on technologies eternally improving while we’ve watched our technological infrastructure, access, and performance degrade across nearly every one of our social tools
The fucked thing in so many fields of thought/creativity, the barriers to entry are also often the only protection for the few people actually making a living in those lines of work.
Many fewer people would mind new technologies creating art or writing essays if it didn’t undercut others.
*Edmund Spenser pulling out a cudgel named ALLEGORY to beat your brains out
Jesus Christ, if you wrote this in a book, you’d get laughed out of the room for being too heavy handed
Also “Behavioral Intervention Management” is so fucking Foucault it should come with a complimentary black turtleneck
This essay goes so hard. Nobody in the game is ready to discuss clocks and animals like JL!
Ready to punt on LMS altogether. Let’s just go back to paper.
Is it the end of reading? Well, let me ask you this, how are you understanding these words that you're looking at right now???
This is fucking bonkers, but I suppose at least makes really clear that police funding is an explicitly racist enterprise
UNC trustees voted this morning to reallocate the university's $2.3 million DEI budget to campus police.
Budget vice chair: “I think that DEI in a lot of people’s minds is divisiveness, exclusion and indoctrination. We need more unity and togetherness, more dialogue, more diversity of thought.”
UNC-Chapel Hill BOT votes to divert DEI funding, redirecting it to campus public safety
The UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees voted to divert millions of diversity, equity and inclusion funding to public safety and campus law enforcement
www.wunc.orgI used to have a joke about Benjamin Button, but I don’t think it aged well
I have a joke about Tantalus, but no one ever quite gets it.
If I don’t check email every minute of the day, do I even exist?
If you think about it ALL studies are Information Studies 🤔
Whew! Glad you’re not taking on any extra proj-……
Matthew.
As a professor of a subject and ostensibly knowing a great deal about it, but seeing how little I know, it’s pretty enlightening as to how much we should value the Serious People™️ who weigh in on subjects with absolute certainty
This kind of technological catastrophe worries me so much more than any Terminator-style robot singularity scenario
More than 200 people with diabetes were injured when their insulin pumps shut down unexpectedly due to a problem with a connected mobile app, the FDA says.
More than 200 people with diabetes injured after software issue drained insulin pump batteries | CNN
More than 200 people with diabetes have been injured when their insulin pumps shut down unexpectedly due to a problem with a connected mobile app, the US Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday.
cnn.itBoth that and as professors see more AI prose style saturating assignments (often through a tool like grammarly) it will change how we think students write, in the same was the thesaurus function had a dramatic effect on my high school writing