Mar Hicks

Historian of technology & labor. Professor now, sysadmin before. Tells dad jokes (sorry). Find me on the other sites too.

[Mar Hicks @histoftech]

The 2025 dad joke thread is over on the other app 🦋

[Mar Hicks @histoftech]

The dad joke thread for 2024 begins:

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

When people start to write postmortems of the GenAI crash, this will be a popular statistic:

https://t.co/3GY85FQ4gp

[Céline Keller @krustelkram]

The guy who directed the killing of 250.000 trees in Finland for Google now with a nopology + "We don't think it would be useful to start debating this publicly."

[Ms. Thang 😷 @Skibbles70]

Covid is a vascular disease. It's why so many people are having heart attacks and strokes at such at a young age. The next infection could be the one that does you in, is it worth the risk? Mask up 😷

[‏ً @justjargons]

So if I purchase a DVD and digitize it, that’s copyright infringement. But if an AI company buys my book and scans it to train their system, that’s perfectly fine? Once again, corporations are allowed to play by their own rules. I’m so sick of the hypocrisy.

[neil turkewitz @neilturkewitz]

“The models were trained on creative works from writers, artists & others who frequently weren’t compensated (& who didn’t give consent)…Meanwhile, the development of the systems has empowered & enriched a small number of people leading, working or investing in these companies.”

[Mar Hicks @histoftech]

instead of hearing about ai more can you just punch me in the head until I pass out

[Mar Hicks @histoftech]

The robot boss in everyone’s pocket may not be right, but will always be trusted by the person trying to use its veneer of automated authority to get the upper hand.

[Mar Hicks @histoftech]

“Too often, artificial intelligence is presented as an all-powerful solution to our problems, a scalable replacement for people.”

[Mar Hicks @histoftech]

A wise person once told me: if you shenan once, you will shenanigan.

[Mar Hicks @histoftech]

And honestly, this whole project of extracting & strip mining expertise so more power can be centralized in the hands of corporations who already have too much—and then giving every working stiff with a phone a little taste of the grift—is meant to lead to exactly this.

[Mar Hicks @histoftech]

“As part of our new union contract, Current Affairs recently adopted one of the strictest anti-AI policies in the publishing industry. No text that is AI-generated may be published in our magazine. No AI-generated art may be used as a Current Affairs illustration.”

[Andrew Curran @AndrewCurran_]

Quest Diagnostics has been hacked. Patient data was exposed. They serve roughly half of U.S. hospitals and physicians. Investigation ongoing.

[Cher Scarlett 🌌 @cherthedev]

No one believes weather models and protein predictors are conscious. It’s because they generate first-person narrative prose and were designed to replace customer service workers.

[Charlie Warzel @cwarzel]

70% of the internet was vulnerable yesterday to very bad security flaws inside a coding language. Turns out, *one volunteer* is mostly responsible for maintaining that code & helping push updates. Yesterday Ondřej Surý saved the internet. So I called him up. He rules. https://t.co/DusKs8P0Em

[Jason Koebler @jason_koebler]

wrote about "Black October," the PHP vulnerability, and the AI-fueled dread and panic I'm seeing among almost all of the cybersecurity experts I've ever known:

https://t.co/hBpkhlGxci

[Mar Hicks @histoftech]

When the allergen source is directly in front of the fan because he likes how it feels🫠

[Will Oremus @WillOremus]

Voters who Googled how to donate to Talarico got an AI answer that led them to give to someone else.

A network of fake news sites seeded messaging about state and local candidates that AI answers picked up on.

My story on how the AI midterms are going: https://t.co/tIRBpd7d70

[Mike Ryder @RobotTheory]

Just had a meeting with the Dean of my Faculty alongside the Head of Employee Relations... Apparently I am under official investigation for writing a blog about how bad universities are at marketing. You literally couldn't make this stuff up.

[@timnitGebru (@dair-community.social/bsky.social) @timnitGebru]

Exactly. We have companies that have unleashed malware and viruses world wide, whose CEOs should be arrested and prosecuted, who have somehow been able to change this crime into a marketing gimmick instead.

[Mar Hicks @histoftech]

If you’re at the Society for the History of Technology virtual conference tomorrow come see our panel on updating “Kranzberg’s Laws” for the present day. It’s at 8:30am though, unfortch.