Ryan Randall

Many people are saying that Chalamet's second position on ballet is noticeably more open than his first.

A stack of paperback books. The book is Audiofuturism: Science Fiction Radio Drama and the Black Fantastic Imagination

#Audiofuturism is here!!!!

fordhampress.com/audiofuturis...

@fordhampress.bsky.social

"post pawn propter pawn" fallacy, mmkay

“To believe in laws over belief in people is to be colonized.”

And also,

That ship did get unstuck.

That static quality could even be a virtue for teaching information timeliness and relevant websites.

For example, an answer could be written as "As of 2026-03-01, the University President is Doctor So-and-So. Please read [link to relevant page] to see if she still is as you receive this response."

In my previous library's experience, the "it's basically an FAQ" model worked well precisely because we made it clear that the chatbot was a supplement for overnight or when humans weren't available.

The answers were also static, not continually regenerated. So we could put in HTML links, etc.

I appreciate your insights, Aaron. You have far more experience than I do with various LLM tools!

To me, library services & information are different. They don't need to be collapsed into the same interface. So maybe a library could provide patrons with parallel channels, one human, one bot-based?

Mayor Mamdani and a child play with Legos while looking very serious and concentrated. The child is impossibly adorable and wearing tiny blue glasses.

No interruptions, please. We’re building universal child care.

Schrödinger's Poaster (and their Potential Madness)

In contrast, students who only are able to reach out for assistance in off hours often have other structural impediments to access & learning.

To me, providing them a dodgy tool effectively increases their difficulties, amplifying inequalities in service when some claim that it lessens them.

Some other differences you're pointing to are the individual user's level of sophistication, plus their consent in knowingly using such a tool. If someone chooses to use software that claims to synthesize, they hopefully know that its output is of varying reliability. But they've chosen that.

A huge purpose of reference chat is to model how experts approach research, as well as help guide learners to build their mental schema of the domain.

So I agree it's a bad idea to replace library workers with tools that merely generate answers! The answer is truly only part of a reference service.

If you're on Mac, I've used Acorn occasionally and think it's a very good mix of capable & approachable.

I'm still unconvinced that middle of the night access to incorrect confabulations really counts as providing a useful information service point.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Dover's not the only bee in yr bonnet

Deep red cover with two photos of hands reaching toward red theater seats against a dark background

"Fair Use," a special issue of the open access journal liquid blackness, is now available. View the TOC and read the full issue, freely available: buff.ly/szfvoyr

Should anyone be curious about this post, I had a post quote-boosted within 5 seconds, framed by bot-generated blathering that ELIZA-fied my words to redirect them to be about how some "LocalTool" could help people provide information.

Of course, I blocked it to save anyone else that nuisance.

No, VendorBot3000, I will not be mislead by your fawning into letting you graft your publicity onto my post.

Dear `$deity`, these tech peddlers have neither shame nor regard for others.

My previous library had a chatbot using a different tool that we specifically designed to anticipate a number of these failure states!

It's possible to use good "old fashioned" natural language processing without using generative AI… but when vendors make money from conflating terms, students lose.

This has nothing to do with the specific content here, but Polymarket adopting the language of news, here with BREAKING, and with Texas election results earlier this week, is BAD. Polymarket is not and will never be a news org or break news. It's a betting app. It's Draft Kings for sociopaths.

The joys of being in an AI tool demonstration where the tool itself repeatedly claims to be doing things that we all see it not in fact performing. (i.e. prompt: "Add the file". text claim: "Content added" but it's not actually there.)

Gaslighting as a Service is my favorite experience enhancement.

Fishbone - Unyielding Conditioning YouTube video by FishboneVEVO

Why have I never seen the music video before? Why???

Thinking about John Dewey's Distinction between Education and Training got a Fishbone Song Stuck in My Head,

the Ryan Randall story

A wise person tumbles a stone until smooth, makes a few choice cuts.

I foolishly chisel so many facets into it again that unless you zoom in, it appears as rough as the original stone.

Kroger joins Trader Joe's in recall of rice products: Growing fears of glass fragments spark dramatic expansion A recall that initially included about 3 million pounds of frozen food products is now 10 times larger. Carrots are now believed to be the culprit.

The recall includes rice and dumpling products at Trader Joe's and Krogers.

After an investigation, it was found that the carrots used in the products were the likely source of the glass fragments.

No, the source was insufficient food safety procedures.

When the Future Feels Foreclosed: AI Resignation and the Power to Act This article develops the concept of ‘AI resignation’ to capture how young people encounter AI not only as a helpful or flawed tool, but as an overpowering and seemingly inevitable force that can for....

"The task of AI education, then, is not merely to teach technical competence, but to cultivate the political imagination and collective capacities necessary to contest and reshape technological power," write Jan‐Philipp Siebold, Annemarie Witschas, and Rainer Mühlhoff.

Oops, yet again learning the "you need to turn off media autoplay on each separate device, since BlueSky desperately wants you to Watch Other People's Misery so The Engagement Numbers Go Up™" lesson.

Anyways, that's as close as I'm going to get to the privacy / security discussions of the day.

If Big Worm's bank ends up telling the authorities that you wrote him a check, that's different than Big Worm himself telling the authorities that (or what!) you bought from him, right?

Arguably, Big Worm shouldn't even be accepting checks at all… but he also sells perfectly legal stuff, sometimes.