Unemployment rates for recent college grads: Overall, 5.8%; Computer science, 6.1%; Computer engineering, 7.5%; Journalism, 4.4%

The market is rough for college grads, and especially rough for computer-related majors that the STEM-first mindset pushed as a guaranteed safe career track. According to a recent report, employment for journalism majors is not only better than CS and computer engineering, but also a notch or two better than the average employment rate for…

Why Even Try if You Have A.I.? Now that machines can think for us, we have to choose whether to be the passengers or pilots of our lives.

We’re drawn to activities that invite us to grow, by trying and trying again, because we want to evolve as people. Life is mostly repetitive—wake, eat, work, sleep, repeat—and each day can feel like an unsatisfying circle. But repetition with variation broadens us. It makes our circular days into spiralling journeys. “The spiral is a…

Microsoft Publishes Garbled AI Article Calling Tragically Deceased NBA Player “Useless”

This is what we have to look forward to, as a torrent of AI-generated slop that’s good enough for the CEOs to monetize squeezes out the human-generated content that actually matters. Former NBA player Brandon Hunter passed away unexpectedly at the young age of 42 this week, a tragedy that rattled fans of his 2000s…

Stop sharing those unsourced memes about “be woke” and “God doesn’t need soldiers” — here’s what Pope Leo XIV is actually saying.

Pope Leo XIV, in his first address to journalists at the Vatican, called for the release of imprisoned journalists, championed the free press, and urged caution about AI. My social media feed is full of memes that purport to represent the words of Leo XIV. Legitimate news sources have already published stories about Pope Leo…

A.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting Worse

The newest and most powerful technologies — so-called reasoning systems from companies like OpenAI, Google and the Chinese start-up DeepSeek — are generating more errors, not fewer. As their math skills have notably improved, their handle on facts has gotten shakier. It is not entirely clear why.   Today’s A.I. bots are based on complex mathematical systems that learn…

Pater Noster Passenger Elevators

Some 50 years ago, my father took me to his office in Washington, DC. I believe he was working for the Social Security Administration as a technical writer. I remember he held tightly onto my hand as we used a moving lift like this.  The event was notable to young me for two reasons. One,…

More than a million people die on roads every year. Meet the man determined to prevent them

Imagine a society that engineers its highways so that ordinary people who make mistakes, and even people who intentionally break the law, are less likely to kill people with their cars. On 22 May 1997, the Swedish government presented Bill 1996/97:137 to parliament. It cemented zero deaths as a long-term goal for road fatalities. It reiterated that…

Is AI making us less intelligent?

This morning, after students submitted a homework assignment (a 200-word evidence-based argument paragraph), I asked them to annotate a printout of the instructions (including a rubric), had them peer-review their own submission, and then had them write additional annotations on the assignment sheet, in which they stated what changes they now realized they needed to…

For some reason, I saw a bump in traffic to a page that linked to a “make-your-own-Trump-executive order” page

This sort of thing was funnier back in 2017. Similar:Pesky journalists, always showing up to document atrocities.I MacGyvered myself a heat sinkHow to be a Medieval Spectator (Intro to Toronto York Plays 2025)Unemployment rates for recent college grads: Overall, 5.8%; Computer science, 6.1%; Comput…York Corpus Christi Pageant, Toronto, June 7Waiting for a talk on preserving…

Students are trusting software like this to do their work.

  The technology will continue to improve so that that simulated gymnastics videos will look less and less bizarre, but people who can use AI to create flawless gymnastics videos aren’t actually learning gymnastics. No human being will become a better gymnast thanks to a better AI simulation of a gymnastics routine. More convincing AI-generated…

A former student working in SEO shared this. I miss Google classic.

Similar:I MacGyvered myself a heat sinkUnemployment rates for recent college grads: Overall, 5.8%; Computer science, 6.1%; Comput…York Corpus Christi Pageant, Toronto, June 7Waiting for a talk on preserving artifacts from NASA’s Apollo programWhy Even Try if You Have A.I.? Now that machines can think for us, we have to choose wheth…'Most Transparent’ White House In…

Googling Is for Old People. That’s a Problem for Google.

When I ask my students to use the library database to find scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles, some students stick with the search methods they’re already familiar with, and they submit works cited lists that include articles written by undergraduate interns, or articles from low-value pay-to-publish ecosystems like “Frontiers.” While I don’t read every article students…