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November BasilCockWatch (and other thoughts) part 1
a month ago
General
Starting off with a neat miniature from Max Mini, painted by Adrian. Almost looks like he's on fire, there.
A museum in Spain with an interesting exhibition: The Library of Fantastic Beasts, has pictures but not of basilisks (though we get a mention): There’s no doubt that the devil himself is the ultimate monster. His evil is represented in beasts such as the dragon, the snake, and the basilisk, through features such as long tongues, fangs, and sharp claws. Tongues, fangs, sharp claws and wings / These are a few of my favorite things!
That's about all there was these last few weeks aside from a bunch more ads for the Basilisk gaming mouse, the translucent white Basilisk keypad and other accessories, and stuff about getting cockatrices in Grow a Garden, the Roblox-based game. Must be a thin time of year.
I have to plan for a birthday that someone doesn't want to celebrate, an anniversary, the usual holidays, and thank goodness the end of this semester is coming.
As far as semesters and schools go, a few things have been causing a lot of consternation at my college. One is forcing a merger between the Computer Science department (it was part of Math) and the Computer Information Systems department (it was part of Business) and the other is a scramble to meet accessibility standards in all web pages and online resources.
The merger is happening because...they both have computers in the name? No real reason for this was given; several other forced mergers are happening but they make slight amounts of sense, since they concern departments of 2 or 3 people with only about 20 classes (Psychology and Sociology are the examples that come to mind). CSC and CIS are not in that position. Most of the directly involved faculty are unhappy about it but it looks like it's a done deal. I was told it will make us able to "create a stronger AI degree pathway" which at first I was excited about because I thought they were going to teach people how to actually make LLM's and other AI's from the ground up, like our CSC does with making very basic OS's. But no, it's courses about how to make AI prompts correctly and how to decide who can be replaced with an AI (the business side). I smell money lurking behind this.
The accessibility thing started out as extremely reasonable and completely necessary. You can't tell visually impaired people "Sorry that you can't access these materials, and we're not going to lift a finger to help you either." It's another matter to say "No scans of handwritten materials", and "PDF documents are not considered accessible" unless they have specific internal formatting, even for a document less than a page long. I get low accessibility rankings because I use LaTeX to format equations and those count as images to the software that is ranking me, and when I tried putting in alt text the alt text was "too long". Other departments and specific courses are having even worse problems: imagine taking an Anatomy class; you're shown a picture of a bone and asked to identify it. The alt text is "This is a picture of a human femur." Hmmm, what could the answer be? What a mystery!
A conspiracy theory hatched right under me and bit my tail: is all the work they're demanding we do for formatting these materials in order to make them more palatable to AI data scraping? They've already gotten to the novels and textbooks...now Almighty Roko wants the exams and class notes and videos we've all made and he's going to make us serve it up as tastily as we can manage under pain of $10,000 fines (not an exaggeration) and if Roko has his way, perpetual punishment of simulacrums of ourselves!
He's named for Roko but he's still a Basilisk! ;> I can feel some angst as well as some pride, can't I?
A museum in Spain with an interesting exhibition: The Library of Fantastic Beasts, has pictures but not of basilisks (though we get a mention): There’s no doubt that the devil himself is the ultimate monster. His evil is represented in beasts such as the dragon, the snake, and the basilisk, through features such as long tongues, fangs, and sharp claws. Tongues, fangs, sharp claws and wings / These are a few of my favorite things!
That's about all there was these last few weeks aside from a bunch more ads for the Basilisk gaming mouse, the translucent white Basilisk keypad and other accessories, and stuff about getting cockatrices in Grow a Garden, the Roblox-based game. Must be a thin time of year.
I have to plan for a birthday that someone doesn't want to celebrate, an anniversary, the usual holidays, and thank goodness the end of this semester is coming.
As far as semesters and schools go, a few things have been causing a lot of consternation at my college. One is forcing a merger between the Computer Science department (it was part of Math) and the Computer Information Systems department (it was part of Business) and the other is a scramble to meet accessibility standards in all web pages and online resources.
The merger is happening because...they both have computers in the name? No real reason for this was given; several other forced mergers are happening but they make slight amounts of sense, since they concern departments of 2 or 3 people with only about 20 classes (Psychology and Sociology are the examples that come to mind). CSC and CIS are not in that position. Most of the directly involved faculty are unhappy about it but it looks like it's a done deal. I was told it will make us able to "create a stronger AI degree pathway" which at first I was excited about because I thought they were going to teach people how to actually make LLM's and other AI's from the ground up, like our CSC does with making very basic OS's. But no, it's courses about how to make AI prompts correctly and how to decide who can be replaced with an AI (the business side). I smell money lurking behind this.
The accessibility thing started out as extremely reasonable and completely necessary. You can't tell visually impaired people "Sorry that you can't access these materials, and we're not going to lift a finger to help you either." It's another matter to say "No scans of handwritten materials", and "PDF documents are not considered accessible" unless they have specific internal formatting, even for a document less than a page long. I get low accessibility rankings because I use LaTeX to format equations and those count as images to the software that is ranking me, and when I tried putting in alt text the alt text was "too long". Other departments and specific courses are having even worse problems: imagine taking an Anatomy class; you're shown a picture of a bone and asked to identify it. The alt text is "This is a picture of a human femur." Hmmm, what could the answer be? What a mystery!
A conspiracy theory hatched right under me and bit my tail: is all the work they're demanding we do for formatting these materials in order to make them more palatable to AI data scraping? They've already gotten to the novels and textbooks...now Almighty Roko wants the exams and class notes and videos we've all made and he's going to make us serve it up as tastily as we can manage under pain of $10,000 fines (not an exaggeration) and if Roko has his way, perpetual punishment of simulacrums of ourselves!
He's named for Roko but he's still a Basilisk! ;> I can feel some angst as well as some pride, can't I?
But maybe it’s a matter of the name having jumped out at me. :>
Vix