Well this horrifying #AI ad just popped up. The worst part is hard to pin down, but it's probably a toss-up between encouraging a student to auto-generate a citation without reading it, & the friend claiming she's used for years a tool that only recently had this range of shortcuts.

Talk to your kids/students about this! (Teaching prop, @LaurelGreen?) Have a frank chat about the kinds of critical errors that can slip in if they use this #Technology passively.

#Education
https://youtu.be/c7BTS7QOEDM

A week ahead of COP16, Tough Times Tuesday is a bit gloomy about our prospects. A recent position paper attempting to tackle Russian oil ships highlights the depth of our global unreadiness to address an accelerating environmental crisis that doesn't give two bits for our borders and our wars. (Maybe pair this one with a funny cat video?)

#ClimateCrisis #Environment #Energy #Economics #War #PoliticalScience #War #Russia

https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/a-few-notes-on-failed-environmental

I haven't been out in days, and I still wasn't up for it this morning. Just not ready to people yet - though I do have a Zoom meeting with a mentee in under two hours, so I have to be "on" for that.

Here's a fine poem by Lisel Mueller, in the hope that a little #Poetry brightens your day. This is from "Monet Refuses the Operation":

"I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent."

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52577/monet-refuses-the-operation-56d231289e6db

More from the G&M article:

"Conservatives voiced 36-per-cent support for Ms. Harris, compared with 89 per cent of Bloc supporters, 85 per cent of Liberals and 82 per cent of New Democrats.

Meanwhile, 44 per cent of Conservatives support Mr. Trump, compared with 7 per cent of Bloc voters, 8 per cent of Liberals and 6 per cent of New Democrats.

Support for Mr. Trump has increased by 11 percentage points among Conservatives from 2020, but is unchanged among supporters of other parties."

FFS.

Popping on to be upset about #Canada.

"Support for the former president has increased among Canadian men, in particular those between 18 & 34, with 36 per cent of that group preferring a win by Mr. #Trump. That is a significant change from 2020, when younger men preferred Mr. Biden over Mr. Trump by a margin of 2-1 (52 per cent to 24 per cent)."

We have a serious problem with right-wing nationalist radicalization, & it's not going away any time soon.

Happy Turkey Day.

https://archive.ph/0EmwO

I feel like an awful human right now, but it's just a mood, and moods will pass.

While I'm this angry with myself, though, I'm going to be scarce online.

Sorry for having worried folks last week. This low was triggered by doing something necessary but ugly to remedy a difficult situation.

I have many flaws as a person, so I try to keep from situations where they might be exploited - but I don't always succeed, & my failure to "fix" myself then leaves me furious.

It will pass. Take care, all.

#History #CatsOfCoSo

One little smile to share, at least.

"Miss Iris Davis, a nineteen year old from Clapham, London is a volunteer worker of the Dumb Friends Leagues, and spends a great deal of time recovering cats with the aid of a "lassoo" from the debris of bombed house. So far she has rescued six hundred of these feline strays, 8 November 1940."

[Dumb Friends is an animal rescue organization, if the name seems odd. Chapters exist today under that name.]

This is another beautiful little meditation on death, suffering, and the wonder of having lived at all.

"It is Prince Andrei whom I think of as I watch the rabbit's eye flit only occasionally to me and then quickly back up to the blue above.

Oh little creature on my lawn who cannot move your broken body, you are now my problem."

#Essays
https://open.substack.com/pub/erikhoel/p/vigil-fa6

Just a wee one today. Trying to get back in the groove with a few workflows. Last week, seeing my inbox full of Substacks - so many attempts to explain the world, in its awfulness! - just flipped a switch. There is so much that is terrible around us right now, and no essay is going to fix all that atrocity. We have to keep doing things to keep ourselves human, though - because the alternative is even worse.

#Film #Existentialism #BetterWorldsTheory
https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/art-in-a-time-of-personal-and-world

Sometimes it just hits super hard that we went from pandemic to this immoral nightmare.

I remember the gut punch of February 24, 2022: the feeling that a last gasp at order had been shattered irrevocably.

It seems so quaint now.

We've demonstrated so little decency, integrity, and capacity to surmount dehumanizing and anti-democratic forces since then.

I can't believe how much time has been spent rationalizing cruelty.

Or that the US election is still tight.

What the hell is wrong with us?

I was feeling like a piece of shaving cream yesterday, but the utopian leftist comedy #Podcast SRSLY WRONG had me covered with a silly meditation on the difficulty of moving through a world with so much shaving cream, and so many people who feel like it even when they shouldn't.

@BosmangBeratna, this might be up your alley. I don't mean to suggest that your alley is made of poop, but sometimes life feels like a poop shoot, eh?

#YouAreNotAPieceOfShavingCream
#OnlyHuman
https://srslywrong.com/podcast/320-you-piece-of-shit/

There's a lot of highway in this one, but I'll have more time for post-production work next week.

Today, it's just about getting back into a work groove.

This piece discusses a recent so-called AI issue in SFF submission queues, and the broader issue of hype cycles and artificial notions of success in publishing today.

Just some musings, really.

More reviews again next week.

#WritersOfCoSo #WritingCommunity #SFF
https://youtu.be/X_nEV4BSzkU

And for #Science and #Technology folk interested in so-called #AI, here's an excellent paper released this month on the limits of LLMs:

"We hypothesize that this decline is due to the fact that current LLMs are not capable of genuine logical reasoning; instead, they attempt to replicate the reasoning steps observed in their training data. When we add a single clause that appears relevant to the question, we observe significant performance drops [across all models.]"

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05229

This is an excellent meditation by Charlie Stross on the failings of the language we use to depict #Space travel and settlement.

Worth the time of anyone writing in #SFF, even if you might wince at the comment about TNG!

(But we've all had our "throw-book-at-wall" moments with SF media, no?)

#WritersOfCoSo #WritingCommunity #StarTrek lovers beware

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/10/conceptual-models-of-space-col.html

Here's a fun little #SFF film to brighten your day, folks.

Or create nightmare fuel for it.

Either/or.

https://youtu.be/CXhnPLMIET0

I've had a rough few days, and I'm still trying to get my heart for things back.

Hope everyone's doing okay.

One step at a time, if you're not.

I should mention that I spent part of today watching in-depth videos about Cambodia, the Killing Fields, S-21, and Operation Menu.

I have cried many tears today, and am looking forward to a film, after all is said and done, that reminds me the world contains more than pain - even when pain is a huge part of it.

We humans are not all that.

It is extraordinary whenever we rise above the cruelty so many of us carry, and pursue care and empathy for one another instead.

When I finish my work today, I'm going to put on THE RED SHOES (1948). Definite oversight in my film-going life, and one I look forward to rectifying soon.

Anyone else planning to put on something fun/enriching tonight?

#CoSoFilms