Linkblog - 2026-07-19

AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking · Radically Ethical Data Consulting

hermit-tech.com

The reality of how much damage AI mania is doing to our ability to run institutions effectively.

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Often enough, though, it’s an actual failure in what LLMs can accomplish. The most common version of this, being rolled out across businesses around the world, is the internally-facing chatbot, or for the more daring company, the customer-facing chatbot. The story is always the same. For the former, I’ve never seen substantial internal uptake from inside a business. Employees don’t use internal chatbots because companies tend to have low-quality documentation and an LLM is not psychic – it can only know things that have been written down and made accessible. For the latter customer-facing applications, I have rarely had a pleasant experience as a consumer, with perhaps the exception of live transcription during medical appointments – hardly something worth pivoting an entire organisation around. In both cases, project leaders are very careful to avoid tracking basic metrics, such as whether the tools are being used at all, or they track metrics that are easily gamed.

#AI #productivity #via:TimBray #person:NikhilSuresh

When faculty ask, ‘what’s the point of teaching?’: GenAI as identity crisis, not skills gap

tandfonline.com

Laidlaw, P. (2026). When faculty ask, ‘what’s the point of teaching?’: GenAI as identity crisis, not skills gap. International Journal for Academic Development, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2026.2680432

“GenAI integration is not a technical challenge requiring policy solutions. It is profound ontological transformation challenging core assumptions about knowledge, learning, and professional identity. My own threshold crossing taught me that transformation requires holding grief and excitement, confusion and clarity simultaneously.”

#via:NatashaKenny #AI #IJAD #person:PrueLaidlaw

Re: the wasted photos on your phone - Maira Martins

mairamartins.com

A good old-fashioned personal blog from an insomniac, programmer, photographer, day trader, dog-mother, bread baker, piano student, wannabe artist.

This tracks - I have something like 55,000+ photos on my phone. So many that I get to pay for the full Apple One™ subscription so they all fit inside The Cloud. And I can’t/won’t bring myself to delete any of them because they’re basically my memory.

#via:KagiSmallWeb #photography

Kurzgesagt - How are memories stored inside your brain?

youtube.com

we’re all anthropomorphizing AI, saying LLMs work just like our brains. do they?

Memory is one of the strangest abilities you possess. Your brain uses an incredibly complex biological system to preserve moments from your past that no longer exist, allowing you to revisit experiences from years ago. But memories are not always recordings of reality. In fact, every time a memory comes under the spotlight of your attention, it can melt and change a tiny bit.

#memory #Kerzgesagt #via:JasonKottke #video

A History of Large Language Models

gregorygundersen.com

A History of Large Language Models traces the evolution of LLMs from early distributed representations to the transformative transformer architecture. It demonstrates how attention mechanisms and massive-scale generative pre-training enable these models to exhibit complex linguistic regularities and emergent intelligence.

#LLM #AI #via:StephenDownes #person:GregoryGundersen #history

glm-ocr multimodal OCR model

ollama.com

GLM-OCR is a multimodal OCR model for complex document understanding, built on the GLM-V encoder–decoder architecture.

#Ollama #LLM #OCR

Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster - The Atlantic

theatlantic.com

A shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project

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The problem is not simply that AI is being deployed so widely or quickly. Other computer technologies have seen similarly massive growth without triggering such a large spike in electricity or a shortage of computer components: Video and music are now streamed around the globe, accounting for many terabytes of internet traffic daily; the smartphone boom required the manufacturing of billions of devices that are now transferring huge amounts of data; billions of household devices are also now part of the Internet of Things; and whole industries have moved their operations to cloud software, which is hosted not in the sky but in, yes, data centers.

#AI #datacentre #economics

Designing a Course Students Want to Screenshot - Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

facultyfocus.com

Learn how intentional course design and branding can improve accessibility, student engagement, and the online learning experience in Canvas.

#coursedesign #graphicdesign #layout #template #LMS #onlinelearning