Profile avatar
charlespidgeona.bsky.social
PhD (DPhil) candidate at University of Oxford, English Faculty. Researching internet nonfiction books, cultural histories of information overwhelm, and the different metaphors we use for human versus machine cognition.
84 posts 462 followers 1,994 following
Getting Started
Active Commenter
Posts 9 Comments 39

I think the conclusion of this study is likely to be valid however it is worth noting that any attempts to localise cognitive tasks such as writing to a specific brain activation/connectivity is problematic because that's not how the brain works. 1/

submitted 3 days ago • 6 comments

"The idea of granting rights to a future sentient robot legitimizes a kind of techno-optimist thinking which, much like the current fad of commercial space travel, actually undermines rather than promotes sustainability" firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

submitted 55 days ago • 3 comments

Government’s wins are often invisible: Systems that avoid plane crashes; alliances that avert war; surveillance that prevent pandemics. Government wins are often *the avoidance of loss.* So how do we tell the story of the destruction of government? The story of future losses *not* averted?

submitted 126 days ago • 69 comments

My heart ached when I was reminded that Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for trying to make academic knowledge more accessible to the public. Meta, meanwhile, is doing it for their own bottom line. I'm going to guess that no one at Meta will be looking at spending 35 years in jail for this.

submitted 130 days ago • 23 comments

Googles response basically being “it’s not making things up, it’s just incapable of telling facts from made up bullshit” would have destroyed a product in the days before the economy was propped up by a thin framework of scams lashed together with investment capital

submitted 132 days ago • 33 comments

This is a good review, particularly for this reminder at the end:

submitted 131 days ago • 0 comments

New from the BJPS Review of Books: Philosophy, Bullshit, and Peer Review —Neil Levy (@neillevy.bsky.social) Reviewed by Joshua Habgood-Coote (@impractknow.bsky.social) Read it here: www.thebsps.org/reviewofbook... #philsci #philsky

submitted 131 days ago • 1 comment

Meta illegaly downloaded 80+ terabytes of books from LibGen, Anna's Archive, and Z-library to train their AI models. In 2010, Aaron Swartz downloaded only 70 GBs of articles from JSTOR (0.0875% of Meta). Faced $1 million in fine and 35 years in jail. Took his own life in 2013.

submitted 135 days ago • 54 comments

My pa was an engagement farmer, just like his pa before him. But when the algorithm dried up, we had to sell the family socials

submitted 144 days ago • 6 comments