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Michael Black

@mblack.us

225 followers 152 following 294 posts

Professor: writing studies & history of computing. Book & pubs: mblack.us

Posts Replies Media

Michael Black @mblack.us · 05/10/2026

Me reading my university's daily announcement email this morning.

Three panel meme from A Muppet Christmas Carol. First panel: "You there, boy! What season is it?" Second panel: "Its shoulder season, sir!" Third panel: Then I haven't missed it!"

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Michael Black @mblack.us · 15/07/2026

Good news, everyone. They've cancelled all the heat advisories because the wildfire smoke is blocking out the sun and keeping surface temperatures 5-10 degrees cooler than originally forecast.

Professor Farnsworth "good news everyone" meme

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Michael Black @mblack.us · 10/06/2026

Decided to check my email after seeing this post. Got our periodic summer notification to set our office thermostats to 80 degrees, close all windows/shades/blinds, and turn off all "non-vital" electronic devices.

This is an immediate energy conservation notification. ISO New England has notified Facilities Management that regional energy consumption is reaching undesirable or unsustainable peak loads and thus has requested to promptly reduce the University's energy consumption. By reducing consumption during times of significant power needs, demand resources can help ensure enough electricity is available to maintain electrical grid reliability cost-effectively. Therefore, immediately today, Wednesday, June 10, 2026, we are requesting the Campus Community to reduce electrical use through the following strategies:

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Michael Black @mblack.us · 06/05/2026

Hmmm. Sounds familiar... 🤔 (From 1960)

Technologically, as I have argued earlier, machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work that a man can do. Economically, men will retain their greatest comparative advantage in jobs that require flexible manipulation of those parts of the environment that are relatively rough--some forms of manual work, control of some kinds of machinery (e.g., operating of earth moving equipment), some kinds of nonprogrammed problem solving, and some kinds of service activities where face-to-face human interaction is of the essence. Man will be somewhat less involved in performing the day-to-day work of the organization, and somewhere more involved in maintain the system that performs the work.

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Michael Black @mblack.us · 25/03/2026

I know not everyone is guilty of using arXiv to avoid peer review, but... I guess its good they have some small standards there. (And yes, I know there's a lot of problems with academic publishing and peer review, but that's a separate discussion)

A footnote from Karen Hao's Empire of AI: "A note on AI research paper conventions and peer review: In the AI Field, researchers often post their papers directly online to a free and open repository called arXiv (pronounced 'archive') and either go through a peer-review process with a conference or publication many months or years later, or do not bother to get peer reviewed at all. This practice has become so normalized that many people in the field cite papers base don impact rather than whether they have passed peer review. In this book, I will do the same. The endnotes denote which papers did not get peer-reviewed as preprints."

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Michael Black @mblack.us · 25/06/2025

WTF? I haven't logged into that site in over a decade, and now I'm getting emails about AI turning my work into podcasts?

Email from Academia.edu stating that "An AI created a podcast of your paper"

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Michael Black @mblack.us · 25/05/2025

The future of literacy.

Harper Reed, another longtime programmer and blogger who was the chief technology officer of former President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, agreed that career advancement for engineers could be an issue in an A.I. world. But he cautioned against being overly precious about the value of deeply understanding one’s code, which is no longer necessary to ensure that it works.

“It would be crazy if in an auto factory people were measuring to make sure every angle is correct,” he said, since machines now do the work. “It’s not as important as when it was group of ten people pounding out the metal.”

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Michael Black @mblack.us · 01/05/2025

I've seen this post come up several times in my feed and each time, grown frustrated by all of the "Um, actually..." replies. Whether or not these models perform a web search before generating text does not change the fundamental problem Leckie is getting at here.

Post by sci-fi author Ann Leckie: "Say it after me: Chat GPT is not a search engine. it does not scan the web for information, it just generates statistically likely sentences. You cannot use it as a search engine, or as a substitute for searching. Now. Please never use an LLM for information searches ever again."

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Michael Black @mblack.us · 19/03/2025

Digging through certain NYT and indie journalists' writing for examples of AI boosterism rhetoric for an article I'm getting ready to pitch.

A meme photo of Ben Affleck smoking and looking exasperated.

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Michael Black @mblack.us · 10/01/2025

This shit is hilarious because Meta has been doing it for years, at home and abroad

A screenshot from news coverage of the TikTok Supreme Court case summarizing justices’ responses during oral arguments.

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