past: circus performer; historian of science; librarian; grantmaker; chief data & evaluation officer at NEH.
present: dad; resident scholar at dartmouth; chief technology officer at the library of virginia.
personal account.
https://scottbot.github.io
scott b. weingart
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Since life is keeping me busy I don't have time to do much writing and what not now, so just to keep my blog active I fired off a quick post about the latest report on the humanities.
sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-...
I'd go even further and say even the smart ones are mostly stupid most of the time. That's one lesson I got from studying the history of science.
Yet we basically (until recently) cured measles, we figured out cosmology, etc. Humanities contributions are more intangible but no less real.
I do not care about this game but I do care that my feed feels closer to 2010 twitter than it has in a long time, and it feels nice.
You know that feeling that the world is Wile Y. Coyote, who has just run off the cliff, and we're all holding our breath waiting to see when he'll look down?
How the heck are you supposed to handle when he simply doesn't look down and just keeps on walking in midair?
Timeō Danaōs et popcorn buckets ferentēs
The machinery of academia spits out (on average) benefits to society, tangible and intangible. That includes time spent *in* that machinery. But try not to examine each individual assembly part as it goes through the machine, it'll give you a headache.
Unfortunately life is keeping me too busy right now for blogging, or really much else. But I just thought I would weigh in on the State of t...
Do you know of studies that actually evaluate use of LLMs in the public sector or other kinds of knowledge work? Teknologirådet in Norway just published a report evaluating their own use of LLMs, based on careful logs from 35 cases. teknologiradet.no/publication/...
using AI and/or zotero is fine and refusing either is fine. don't use them to cheat or do bad things that undermine your work or your investment in it
case closed, you're welcome
"The court classified Google as a direct infringer because the "AI overview" is its own content, not just a list of search results. Google's AI overviews had falsely tied two publishing companies to scams...
[A]t Google's scale, it means millions of wrong answers every hour"
