Bookmarks: Week of Aug 24 - Aug 30, 2026

(posting a day early)

I’m the Guy Who Destroys Antique Books After We Scan Them into Our Company’s Insatiable AI Platform - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency

mcsweeneys.net

“One minute, they are a treasured record of human thought. The next, they are twelve searchable megabytes and a manageable quantity of mixed paper strips goi…

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You can see people relax once I walk them through it slowly. Their shoulders slump in an accepting way. They stare. Sometimes they make a wordless rasping, just like the books do as I slide their sliced-out pages into oblivion.

Tags: McSweeney’s, AI, books

Are Crows Really Our Friends? | Audubon

audubon.org

An investigation into the state of corvid–human relations.

Tags: via:Alessandro Corazza, crows, Audubon Magazine

The Art of Simplifying Complex Information with UI Design: Tips and Best Practices

medium.com

In this article, we’ll explore the art of simplifying complex information with UI design. We’ll discuss the challenges of presenting complex data and concepts, and provide tips and best practices for creating user-friendly interfaces that help your users understand what they’re seeing.

Tags: person:Judith Lopez, design, information, UI, UX

Inge Druckrey: Teaching to See

vimeo.com

“Perceiving Deeply”: a documentary on designer and educator Inge Druckrey, on learning to see and draw as the foundation of design. Directed by Andrei Severny, produced by Edward Tufte. “A great story beautifully told.” (Ken Carbone) http://designobserver.com/feature/perceiving-deeply/38497/

Tags: via:Jason Kottke, video, art, design, type, person:Edward Tufte, person:Inge Druckrey

Developing an AI statement for your course – The CIEL blog

wordpress.viu.ca

a good set of guidelines for instructors from VIU.

Tags: VIU, AI, course outline

Online Growth Is Not Always Institutional Growth

onedtech.philhillaa.com

The charts below compare changes in fully online (Exclusive DE), on-campus (a combination of No DE courses and Some DE courses), and total enrollments. The five-year comparison captures both enrollment growth and changes in the mix of enrollment following the pandemic. I focus on nonprofit institutions because changes within the for-profit sector complicate comparisons over this period.

Each chart shows 30 institutions for readability; the analysis and category counts cover the 50 largest institutions in each group.

The patterns Across four-year undergraduate, two-year, and graduate enrollment, six patterns emerge. The table below distinguishes them according to whether total enrollment grew or declined and how exclusively online enrollment contributed to that change.

Tags: person:Glenda Morgan, OneEdTech, person:Phil Hill, online learning

The Future Of Knowledge Workers In An AI-Driven World

noemamag.com

A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless. AI might give us the pleasure of finding out what happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers.

and

Getting calls right 100% of the time may be objectively better, but it is subjectively less interesting and entertaining

Tags: via:Grant Potter, Noema, work, career

MIT Report – AI and Education

aiandeducation.mit.edu

As an institution deeply identified with the birth of AI and known for its distinctively rigorous, hands-on education, designed to produce graduates unafraid of the world’s hardest problems, MIT has a unique role to play in this moment. We believe it also has a responsibility to lead.

We hope our report can help the Institute lean into the spirit of Mind, Hand, and Heart as it continues to define and foster the highest-quality residential education – of humans, by humans, in support of human flourishing, and for the betterment of humankind.

Tags: MIT, AI, report

More Fucked Today than Yesterday - by Prof. Eliot Jacobson

climatecasino.substack.com

And even more fucked tomorrow

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If we consider the paleo-temperature record, then it is highly likely that 2023, 2024 and 2026 are the only years to break 17.0°C in the last 115,000 years.

and, on global ocean temperatures:

yesterday was the 55th consecutive new daily record high, and the global oceans were a full 0.14°C hotter than any previous July 26th on record. For statistics geeks, the current temperature is more than 3.8 standard deviations above the 1991-2020 mean. The daily temperatures are on the precipice of setting a new record high temperature for any time of the year.

Hey, everyone! Let’s float datacentres on barges or sink them in the ocean because it’s cheaper to cool them with seawater and people don’t complain about the noise of the fans! Surely, there’s no downstream impact of pumping additional heat into the oceans…

Tags: climate change, climate

Harvard Is Selling a $699 Course Taught by A.I. Clones of Its Faculty

nytimes.com

Bussgang is one of several teachers at Harvard Business School who volunteered to help create A.I. clones of themselves for a new eight-week entrepreneurship boot camp called H.B.S. Foundry. Harvard has tested the product, which costs $699, with more than 100 universities across 50 states.

Foundry guides participants through a framework for starting a company, from refining the idea to pitching it to investors and customers. Along with Harvard Business School content, its virtual work space includes a community of peers and access to A.I. agents — some intended to “represent” instructors. It also features video call simulations for practicing pitches, sales calls and board meetings with instructor A.I. avatars, like the one of Bussgang.

It seems pretty creepy to have an AI avatar built to look like video of an actual person. Clippy would be better as an avatar - provide the same chat functionality with something that’s not pretending to be something it’s not.

Tags: AI, avatar, Harvard, NYTimes, via:Stephen Downes, person:Sarah Kessler

ongoing by Tim Bray · Text Watermarking

tbray.org

Quite a few people, some very smart, have reacted to this watermarking idea with fear and loathing. Mowshowitz scoffs at them. He (correctly) observes that the hostility is in large part due to people assuming that anything the AI vendors say is probably a lie and that anything they do is probably greedy and dangerous bubble fodder. But he (incorrectly) opines that this take is unreasonable.

Tags: person:Tim Bray, AI, Claude, Anthropic, watermark

LLMs do not grade essays like humans

sciencedirect.com

Abstract:

Our results show that agreement between LLM and human scores remains relatively weak and varies with essay characteristics. In particular, compared to human raters, LLMs tend to assign higher scores to short or underdeveloped essays, while assigning lower scores to longer essays that contain minor grammatical or spelling errors. We also find that the scores generated by LLMs are generally consistent with the feedback they generate: essays receiving more praise tend to receive higher scores, while essays receiving more criticism tend to receive lower scores. These results suggest that LLM-generated scores and feedback follow coherent patterns but rely on signals that differ from those used by human raters, resulting in limited alignment with human grading practices.

Tags: LLM, AI, feedback, grades, article, via:Tyson Kendon