OpenAI has already taken a toll on human workers. It’s chilling to contemplate that students and creatives are comfortable with relying on this product in any meaningful way. The business model depends on devaluing human labor, and benefitting the powerful. The 51 moderators in Nairobi working on Sama’s OpenAI account were tasked with reviewing texts,…
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I just removed from my syllabus template a digitally altered PR image of our school’s namesake St. Elizabeth Ann Seton holding an iPad, because iPads have not been part of the tuition package for a couple years now. I’ve been an Apple user for about 10 years, since Seton Hill instituted its MacBook plan, and…
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Thanks to watching many, many YouTube tutorials on #Blender3D and #Unity3D, this summer I’ve created about 100 engineers, clerks and technicians to wander about the ship’s many levels. This was my full-time summer project for about six weeks, and I’m amazed at how much I’ve learned. I’ll still work on this when I get the…
Very excited to see this project coming together at the University of Toronto. As a grad student, my first scholarly publication was an explanation of my own 2D simulation of the York Corpus Christi pageant. On Saturday, June 7, 2025 (rain date Sunday, June 8, 2025), starting at 6:30am and continuing past midnight, we will…
Rewatching ST:DS9 At the bar, Dax performs magic tricks that amuse Bashir and annoy Quark. Sisko lets Dax know a Dr. Lenara Kahn is coming to the station with a Trill science delegation, and suggests Dax use her some of her personal leave. Clearly troubled, Dax says she won’t let her past lives interfere with…
Rewatching ST:DS9 New-to-me episode in which Kira teams up with an enemy to solve the mystery of a Cardassian ship that disappeared six years ago, along with its Bajoran prisoners. An old friend from Kira’s resistance days has found a chunk of metal from the Ravinok. Knowing that Kira knew someone aboard that ship, Odo…
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Rewatching ST:DS9 Worf grumbles to Kira that Odo seems permissive about Quark’s shady doings. On a runabout, O’Brien stops himself just before saying he wishes Keiko were more like Bashir. Plot contrivance particles get the runabout crashed on a planet and the spacebros captured by Jem’Hadar ground forces before the opening credits roll. The leader…
Whereas Twitter was once a fountain of authoritative information, X is a platform where trolls can pay a small fee to have their ugly content boosted ahead of reputable sources. X is a platform where identity verification no longer exists and impersonation is only a paid subscription away. X is a platform where journalists are…
We ask students to cite encyclopedia articles, dictionaries, news interviews with experts, and in-person conversations. A generative text-generation tool that scrapes published work and uses a statistical model to emulate a response that mimics the way the humans in its database have responded to similar prompts is formally something like a conversation, and the MLA’s…
Rewatching ST:DS9 On a dark and stormy night, a man gives himself an injection, and a rain-soaked young woman shows up at his door, on a quest to ask the famous writer Jake Sisko why he stopped writing years ago. We flash back to young Jake tagging along on the Defiant ostensibly to see a…
Rewatching ST:DS9 We cold open into an action sequence, as security teams sweep the station with phaser rifles, looking for a Changeling. Sisko, now with a shaved head and goatee (actor Avery Brooks’s preferred personal style), enjoys a dinner with Kassidy Yates in his quarters, until he’s interrupted by a vague message from Dax. A…
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Rewatching ST:DS9 The cold opening has Jake gearing up to say something dramatic, which turns out to be celebrating his dad’s promotion to captain. During the festivities, Ambassador Krajensky injects some exposition about joining the Defiant on a patrol of the volatile Federation-Tzenkethi border. In the Defiant engine room, O’Brien hears a noise, but dismisses…
I was searching for how to change the default font in the WordPress editor, but the answers I was getting were overwhelmingly for how to change what the user sees in published posts, which I already know how to do. Bing’s response was right on target. It probably helped that I knew the specific name…
Rewatching ST:DS9 The lead characters channel the personalities of Dax’s previous hosts, in a low-stakes episode that gives the cast some acting challenges and advances Nog’s character arc, but as a stand-alone episode this was just okay. I hadn’t seen it since it originally aired ~30 years ago, and I think I must have bailed…
“Hospice.” Once the word is uttered aloud, there is a seismic shift. You will feel it. Like a (very short) thread through the eye of a needle, swiftly in and swiftly out. The air itself becomes thin, steely. At the periphery of your vision, an immediate dimming. The penumbra begins to shrink. In time, it…