Essays like this remind me why I picked my English major. There are other ways to get facts. Newspapers are full of them, as are podcasts and documentaries. Travel shows proliferate, take your pick. But even then, there is nothing like the view of the world via a novel. Novels can go beyond merely being…
Rewatching ST:DS9 In the Defiant mess hall, Kira and Dax chat about Kira being single again, and don’t notice Odo’s reaction. Sisko reluctantly lets Dax talk him into a detour to study a random planet’s plot contrivance particle field, and of course things Go Wrong. Instead of staying on the ship to unflabbergast the Defiant’s…
Books / Culture / Cyberculture / Education / Empathy / Ethics / History / Humanities / Literacy / TechnologyAI has transformed my experience of education. I am a senior at a public high school in New York, and these tools are everywhere. I do not want to use them in the way I see other kids my age using them—I generally choose not to—but they are inescapable. During a lesson on the Narrative of…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Bashir scolds Martok for injuring himself (again) during a holosuite training program. (He’s being reckless and self-destructive, even for a Klingon.) On the Defiant, Nog stealthily pantomimes strangling Worf for ordering him to download an operating system “one file at a time.” (The intended comedy in this scene is a bit awkward; Nog’s…
Art / Business / Culture / Cyberculture / Design / Media / Technology / WritingThe illustrations clients bring to her are commonly littered with unclean lines and nonsensical text, and they look like a mess of pixels when blown up beyond a certain size. “There’s people that are aware AI isn’t perfect, and then there’s people that come to you angry because they didn’t manage to get it done…
Hey! Want me to take her for a bit? In a few hours we’ll be heading to the airport to send the girl to her MFA program at the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art. Similar:Air miles be damned. I say the best way to find out about the joy and complexity of…
Traffic on my website has plunged over the past few years. In 2019, my site attracted almost 1.5 million visitors. The content on my site has not gotten this bad, this quickly! Back in 2016, a single popular page on my website attracted almost 1 million visits — about as many visits as my entire…
Journalists who can’t verify their sources, or their own humanity, face consequences. Multiple news organisations have taken down articles written by an alleged freelance journalist that now appear to have been generated by AI. On Thursday, Press Gazette reported that at least six publications, including Wired and Business Insider, have removed articles from their websites…
Similar:Air miles be damned. I say the best way to find out about the joy and complexity of our wo…I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education.Humans are being hired to make AI slop look less sloppyToday's lunarbaboon… there might be something in my eye.August Wilson Trifecta (Two Trains, Ma Rainey and Fences on…
Fences was performed in the backyard of August Wilson’s boyhood home.
Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre Company
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Ever since DuoLingo announced it was pivoting away from human workers to AI, I’ve enjoyed my visits with the spunky little owl less and less. Today’s switch from the “hearts” system to “energy” was just too much. It used to be, you could keep doing lesson after lesson as long as you answered correctly…
Students say they appreciate AI’s ability to organize ideas and improve flow, but many also recognize that what comes out often feels “robotic,” emotionally flat, or uncanny in tone. Still, convenience almost always wins. Reflection is hard, and AI makes things easy. I don’t fault students for wanting help. Writing about your life, especially the…
Though not in a hospital setting, the “basilar ganglia” is a real error that was served up by Google’s healthcare AI model, Med-Gemini. A 2024 research paper introducing Med-Gemini included the hallucination in a section on head CT scans, and nobody at Google caught it, in either that paper or a blog post announcing it. When Bryan…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Much pew is pewing inside the bar, which is closed due to a vole infestation. Quark is not in the mood for Rom cheerfully announcing his engagement to Leeta, but he does accept his suggestion to visit their mother on Ferenginar. Trying to be supportive of Rom’s interest in pleasing Leeta with a…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Kira is excited to welcome Tekeny Ghemor, the sympathetic Cardassian who was tricked into believing a surgically-altered Kira was his daughter (s3e5 “Second Skin”). Now that Dukat and the Dominion have displaced the legitimate government on Cardassia, Kira has high hopes that Ghemor will inspire a resistance, but before the opening credits roll,…
Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of footage. I’m almost at the halfway point of editing 35 short videos from the 2025 York Plays, presented in Toronto by a troupe of hundreds of performers in June. The event was a textually faithful but theatrically creative staging of some 50 plays that were performed as…
Tickets for To Battle: A Fight Play Similar:Air miles be damned. I say the best way to find out about the joy and complexity of our wo…Children of Time #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 22) Defiant crew meets happy co…I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education.Soldiers of the Empire #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch…
Coders who used AI self-reported that they worked 20% faster, but an objective study found AI actually made coders 19% slower. This study confirms that while AI can help for general low-level tasks, humans with deep knowledge of the specific project could spend far more time working on higher-level tasks, rather than hunting for errors…
I had a great time narrating and coming up with the character voices for this short story. Look for elements of the classic crime story, with a plot that just touches on social commentary, showing tension between a reporter and his politically ambitious boss, and tension between the reporter and his wife. The narrator lives…
From an article in the Houston Chronicle: It’s still unclear who started a widely shared rumor over the weekend that raised false hopes of desperate parents that two girls had been found alive clinging to a tree around Comfort or Center Point. I first saw the rumor spread on Facebook where a user mentioned it…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Playing tongo at the bar, Dax is annoyed that Quark is distracted by bad financial news. He’s put the bar up as collateral to three different debtors and he’s wiped out. At this very moment, because the opening credits are gonna roll soon, Quark’s cousin Gaila the weapons dealer shows up with a…
Similar:Air miles be damned. I say the best way to find out about the joy and complexity of our wo…I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education.Humans are being hired to make AI slop look less sloppyToday's lunarbaboon… there might be something in my eye.Blessing the “American sweet gum tree” that grew…
A cast of hundreds participated in a public medieval re-enactment dramatizing the Christian story from Creation through Final Judgement at the University of Toronto a few weeks ago. I attended as the event videographer. I had at least three cameras running at all times — sometimes five — while a roving camera also caught the…
No Democratic president should send in troops trained for lethal combat into a pro-life rally, a worship service, a gun show, or any other peaceful gathering expressing solidarity on an an issue that rubs Democrats the wrong way, at least not in a land where people have first amendment freedoms (no establishment or prohibition of…
I’m getting ready to record about 18hrs footage from four different cameras, and I noticed my new 4K webcam was heating up pretty fast. I’m settled in a dorm room at the University of Toronto, far from the junk drawers and tool boxes that would have aluminum foil and copper wire. I suppose I could…