Mar Hicks

@histoftech.bsky.social

15497

Followers

903

Following

1367

Posts

Historian of technology and dad joke aficionado who lives with a tiny, spotlight-stealing rabbit. One of those they/thems.

Posts Replies Media

Reposted by

Mar Hicks

Yeah given the racial labor dynamics of this occuring at at Historically Black College and University (HBCU) it's real weird to simplify this to just some raceless rich people, my guy.

lol it’s going to be so stupid in ten years when exclusive schools for rich people brag that they use real human teachers

Reposted by

Mar Hicks

So a thing about AI is that, not understanding the material itself, it cannot understand what the gap is in someone else’s understanding. Students already have access to materials that will repeat important points over and over. They don’t need more.

Also known as “training your replacement.” 😩

Morehouse to be the first university to use virtual AI teaching assistantswww.axios.com The Atlanta HBCU will have AI teaching assistants this fall.

I’ve never in my life been more on an animal’s side

Important penguin news

Reposted by

Mar Hicks

Reply to

Joshua Foust 🪖🎮

Remember MOOCs... the idea was going to be that it was ok that your professor was a video (or dead) because the professor would be the Best Professor, preferably from Harvard, +

Amazing discourse coming out of that conference. Folks who refuse to mask to protect others screaming bloody murder bc someone didn’t take precautions to protect *them*. When they don’t feel at risk it’s nbd but when they do feel at risk suddenly it’s a huge deal.

Reposted by

Mar Hicks

Reply to

Mar Hicks

It really is depressing when talking to folks in the Cloud HPC/AI space who just do not care. As long as they get to play with cool toys, the world can burn.

Reposted by

Mar Hicks

"They're just fearmongering about Project 2025," brought to you by the people behind "They're just fearmongering about a coup" and "they're just fearmongering about abortion bans"

Reposted by

Mar Hicks

This made me laugh so much harder than it should have.

Degenerative AI

Google’s emissions are up 48% in 5 years. Microsoft’s are up 30% since 2020. Those soaring figures are being driven by mass investments in data centers to power AI tools. Generative AI is a climate disaster and data center expansion must be stopped.

Generative AI is a climate disasterdisconnect.blog Tech companies are abandoning emissions pledges to chase AI market share

Reposted by

Mar Hicks

an entire movement of wicked people who celebrate wickedness

As a side note, this is John McEntee, Trump's Director of White House Personnel and the primary architect of Project 2025. On Tik Tok he said he gives counterfeit bills to homeless people so they will be arrested when they go to spend them.

Reposted by

Mar Hicks

Reply to

b-boy bouiebaisse

I think this is one of the more important interventions I’ve seen on the topic recently defector.com/journalism-i...

Journalism Is Activism | Defectordefector.com We are a few months into The Great Will Lewis Experiment at the Washington Post, and everything there is fucked. For those who haven’t been following the story, a quick primer: Holy Amazonian Emperor ...

Reposted by

Mar Hicks

Reply to

b-boy bouiebaisse

there is a certain amount of inconsistency between 'we in the media are vital to democracy' and 'our coverage has no influence on anything anyone thinks' which will never be resolved until the legacy media come to terms with the concept of responsibility.

Reposted by

Mar Hicks

Reply to

Don Zeko

one of the most dishonest things people in my profession do is pretend as if “the story” and “the narrative” isn’t something they have direct control over

Reposted by

Mar Hicks

Say what you will about the various Democratic party actors in the fight over whether Biden stays on the ticket, but I can understand all of their behavior much better than I can the journalists who are trying to write their way into the camps

“Nice new rug ya got there. Be a shame if anything… happened to it.”🐰

Reposted by

Mar Hicks

Just to be really explicit about what’s happening here, the cover conflates age, physical disability, and cognitive disability, and goes on to conflate disability with unfitness for office. It’s utter bullshit.

IMO this is a straight-up ageist and ableist image, no?

Reposted by

Mar Hicks

Reply to

Ashley Shew | Against Technoableism

I'm 40. I'm laying next to my wheeled walker (rollator) right now. It's the mobility aid I use when I'm not wearing my prosthesis. It's an absolute banger of a technology - a classic, so simple and elegant for its task, one of the cheapest, most effective mobillity aids you can get.

Reposted by

Mar Hicks

Reply to

Ashley Shew | Against Technoableism

None of those dudes use walkers. But disabled people do. Maybe we should think more carefully about how we represent disability technologies, esp when framed as the only image next to the words "No way to run a country."

Reposted by

Mar Hicks

A boy and his emotional support grass

Reposted by

Mar Hicks

Pretty much every move I’ve ever made in comics since age 25 has been inspired by the 70-year-olds I saw in comic con Artist Alleys, cranking out sketches of characters they created but don’t own, to pay their doctor bills and nursing home fees.

Jerry Siegel, co-creator of Superman, 61, at his clerking job in Los Angeles, 1975

Reposted by

Mar Hicks

Like remembering that before unions, a lot of folks worked 6 or 7 days a week, it's worth remembering that before environmental movements, the air and water in a lot of places were fucking gross. Left to their own devices, companies just straight-up poisoned people. They will again if we let them.

It's worth googling the Great Smog of London to see how far we've come. Images like this from the 1950s. It was caused in part from burning coal

Reposted by

Mar Hicks

July 4th is very rough on my dog (he is a royalist and considers George Washington a traitor)

Looking at the front pages of CNN and the major “left leaning/moderate” papers and I gotta say: fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuiiuuu

Reposted by

Mar Hicks

We have learned so much about how viruses transmit over the past four years & yet none of the passive yet effective measures (better ventilation, HEPA filtration) have been adopted as new standards. An opportunity to future proof our buildings & workplaces let slip away. www.rte.ie/news/2024/07...

Covid rates were a third higher in deprived areas - ESRIwww.rte.ie A new report has found that Covid-19 infection rates were more than a third higher in the most deprived areas of Ireland, relative to more affluent areas.

Anyone else lost 3 hours to underwatermelon?

Reposted by

Mar Hicks

a cop shot himself and this is the headline they went with

Reposted by

Mar Hicks

capitalism is that thought experiment where pushing a button gets you $10,000 but kills a stranger and every CEO on earth is mashing that shit like they're someone's kid brother playing Street Fighter

Reposted by

Mar Hicks

Threads turns 1 this week. We interviewed Meta's Adam Mosseri and wrote about how far it has come (175m users), how far it still has to go to catch X (pretty far!), and whether its refusal to embrace hard news, politics or even "social issues" will help or hinder it in getting there. wapo.st/4btdz2L

One year in, Threads hasn’t overtaken X. Meta still thinks it can.wapo.st The goal is to build “a less angry place for people to share their ideas,” Instagram Threads chief Adam Mosseri says. Some users aren’t happy about that.

💚

Reposted by

Mar Hicks

Students who enrolled at a fake university in Michigan set up by ICE have the right to sue the U.S. government, a federal court has ruled

Students at fake university in Michigan created by ICE can sue US, court ruleswww.freep.com An appeals court ruled in favor of students who said they were tricked by ICE into enrolling at a fake university in metro Detroit.