🫣 stuart reeves 🫣

don't worry, I'm sure all of it will be worth sacrificing for Great British AI

Interested in conversation analysis? Loughborough University's DARG team @darg-sessions.bsky.social are holding the next one-day online *CA for Beginners* on January 14th 2027. More info here: emcawiki.net/CA_for_Begin... Registration in online at store.lboro.ac.uk £45 Students £90 Professionals

finally PHP is getting the public respect it always deserved

there's something timelessly heartening and fascinating about the emergence of a reply-all email thread within an organisation of thousands of employees

there's something timelessly heartening and fascinating about the emergence of a reply-all email thread within an organisation of thousands of employees

Semi-regular reminder that "metascience" is governmentalising bullshit masquerading as research.

I'm looking for a strong PhD student candidate for applying to EPSRC DLA (Doctoral Landscape Award) studentships (starting Oct 2027) topic: studying software developers' practices with "AI tools" (i.e. LLM-based assistance) and mapping out its implications stuartreeves.mataroa.blog/blog/phd-adv...

research - particularly in my biased view ethnomethodological / conversation analytic work that explicates tech-in-interaction - has extensively and exhaustively shown time and time again that the mundane 'clerking' that technology requires regardless of claims is a fundamental feature of its use

We gear up for major strike action, with picket lines on Thursday while council deliberates on c.600 job losses, 48 course closures, 1:22 staff-student ratios, all for a 9% surplus. @uonucu.bsky.social put forward a comprehensive alternative financial plan to save jobs, education & research.

one reason I dislike researchers using the concept "human-in-the-loop" is that it is actually impossible (and analytically foolhardy) to disentangle people, their interlocking lifeworlds, and the vast set of technical and other fabrics that compose them (h/t to @wendynorris.bsky.social)

Our massive strike action for the fall begins on Wednesday, but we will be facing some intense financial hardship to do so. Please consider supporting our members by donating to our solidarity fund. www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding...

the Moore's Law of funding is "AI use is inevitable"

this move to structure gov - dividing universities between DfE and BIST (was DSIT) - was incredibly stupid, indicative of muddled thinking and deep cluelessness about how research and teaching intertwine* * at least, that is how UKHE has been set up historically, rightly or wrongly

I've found where all the GPUs have gone

hardly surprising from the sector body (UUK) that callously stood against university staff during the USS pensions crisis (in which, surprise surprise, staff were *right about the whole time*)

maybe it is time to retire(?) the term "human-in-the-loop" it is often used as an apology, or an excuse, or a fix for technology - now hijacked by bad actors too it is underpinned by a conceptual poverty that imports, unannounced, some kind of cybernetics-lite way of thinking

unfortunately this is happening all over the sector because of university management culture that thrives on copying the de rigueur rather than listening to staff, HE consultants are siphoning off huge amounts of cash from university budgets to construct plans to sack staff

I posted some waffle on "The discomforts of embodiment in research on human-machine interaction" on my Mataroa blog #EMCA stuartreeves.mataroa.blog/blog/embodim...

the vision of the future is virtually identical to Apple's Knowledge Navigator (1987) while simultaneously being ignorant of Weiser's decentring of computing (albeit not quite "decomputing" ofc) if you want further proof that vision has entirely dried up post-smartphone look no further

I wrote about a reason not to use generative AI in your writing that I haven't seen anyone talking about. Once I realized this, banning GenAI in our lab's writing became a no-brainer. Feel free to share, I think this is probably useful especially for trainees: www.carlsonlab.bio/thoughts/the...

Meta: "please, we're too important simply to be ignored" given that the "agentic AI" gambit failed, and that the more desperate "singularity" and "AGI is here" silliness hasn't moved the dial, they're all going for "we're dangerous" again www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

why aren't they just "asking the AI"?

if you are doing human* centred research on/with technology (e.g. HCI), funding frequently becomes entangled with big tech in one way or another - this interview is a nice reminder of what we're up against (*person, social, more-than-human, etc.)