Mar Hicks

@histoftech.bsky.social

53370 Followers 3434 Following

Historian of technology, occasional dad jokes. www.marhicks.com

misa! @misak1nz i sentence you to joy Picture of a cute corgi
Two people in KN95s (one is me) on the lakeshore with the Chicago skyline in the background
A small gray rabbit on a rug, sniffs a pair of binoculars
@miyaacacia who is white, on Instagram showing her face and the similar “white-Asian” face made by ai without her consent by an unrelated account called @pinkwasian
Cyclosporiasis from cdc website Treatment options Trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole (TMP- SMX) (sold as Bactrim,* Septra,* or Cotrim*) is the treatment of choice for cyclosporiasis. Dosage for adults TMP 160 mg plus SMX 800 mg (one double strength tablet), orally, twice a day, for 7 - 10 days. Patients infected with HIV may need longer courses of therapy. Dosage for pediatric patients ≥2 months to 18 years 8 - 10 mg/kg TMP and 40 - 50 mg/kg SMX per day, orally, in 2 divided doses for 7 - 10 days.
(A) Male (incorrect drawing of bike) (B) Female (incorrect drawing of bike) (C) Female (incorrect drawing of bike) (D) Male (incorrect drawing of bike) Figure 3. Four drawings from the bicycle drawing task (see Figure 1). Drawings show pedal and chain errors in (A) and (B), frame and chain errors in (C), and the rare triple combination of frame, pedal, and chain errors in (D). The four participants stated that they (A) cycled at least once a month, (B) never cycled, (C) cycled most days, and (D) rarely cycled.
Tweet quantified (br)other @hypervisible When you say "no one knew" with regard to tech, what that almost. always means is "I wasn't listening." 4:10 PM • 3/29/21: Twitter Web App 143 Retweets 21 Quote Tweets 798 Likes
A coloring book page of cartoon trexes who appear to be slow dancing, colored in by a kid
Maria, the robot from metropolis
I guess she decided to wait to go on TV instead after the primary was over. What she didn't do was go to the police. Since you feel that Platner is a rapist because of the Judge Jake Tapper show, what is your suggested punishment. I feel rapists should be sent to prison.
Waves breaking on the shore of Lake Michigan, partly cloudy at dusk
@uss_sadboy speaks direct to camera about how women are contradicted whether they claim to be ugly or pretty, leading her to believe the only thing most people really believe is that women are always wrong, no matter what they say about themselves.
Cartoon of a person holding a smaller person: The Tech Bro (“religious man” is crossed out and tech bro replaces it) fashions a God he can handle… A small replica of himself
Night skyline of Chicago from the lake
2colde: it's thousand yard stare summer
Video of a 12 foot skeleton in a yard whose arms and ribs have gotten broken off by a windstorm but now looks even creepier (from @moonlotushandmadedesigns)
ettingermentum @ettingermentum nice argument. however i have already portrayed myself as the sleek FDR bullet train and you as the seething coal locomotive. (Images showing cartoon of both trains) 1:47 PM • 28 Mar 23 • 127K Views
Scene from “widows bay” tv show: man with curly hair says “it’s only a 12 hour experience”
Screenshot of Aranet app with 2 CO2 meters: fart meter and shart alert
The tops of buildings at night in Chicago. One is lit up rainbow for Pride, another is lit red white and blue.
seal on beach, lying on back looking at camera, photo by Julie Larson, from https://blog.wcs.org/photo/2014/08/08/patagonia-pinnipeds/
Scene from widows bay, three people in an office, patricia in the center
A miniature horse with caramel color hair and blond mane, hooked to a cart
@headquarters on tiktok: video shows a bunch of New Yorkers, adults and kids, jumping into a pool to “open” it. Mayor Mamdani jumps in with them, in a suit.
@itzettromero tiktok talking about nyc rent freeze and how much it’s improved her life
@folaisfine on tiktok discusses the attention economy and how the media reacted to Trump, and how they’re reacting to DSA wins
@tylersteff on tiktok: A man holds up a banana and says hey the phone is for you
372 comments Butters and Ajax: this is the stupidest comment I have ever read. and I have been on the untamed internet since 1995. 6h Reply • 105
Dr Girlfriend from The Venture Bros. sits typing on a computer
An error occurred while uploading the video. Server does not have enough capacity to handle uploads, try again in a little bit (bsky screen)
Sunset lake view through trees
Widows Bay poster art done in the style of Jaws cover, by @iamthewong on instagram
Black Mirror: Demon 79 “This is a horror black-comedy Not a bleak episode about technology, in case Black Mirror unsettles you too much” From @fashiongurumaddie Poster shows Black man with an Afro and Indian woman above, against a cartoon background of orange fire and missiles in a seventies style.
Sunset at a Bahai domed temple in Evanston IL
Graffiti on Lake Michigan rocks says “ I ♥️ trans people so much.” Lake and sunset in background
@yan.piano on tiktok plays “champagne coast” on a piano at his school (in a fancy looking room with a chandelier)
Rainbow lights on a building in downtown Chicago
A white Miata with the license plate “DA ANSWR”
White woman wearing a bizarre animal and antler headdress looking upset and confused (Patricia from Widows Bay)
@lifegavemeoranges: video of a cat knocked out in the back of a car on dramamine. the driver asks if the cat is OK, and the cat says yeah.
“Mamdanis timeline: written over an image of the New York skyline, showing cartoon unicorns and dolphins and mamdani’s face on the sun
Two large eastern cottontail rabbits hop around a front yard, trailed by 6 baby bunnies.
A cute fluffy gray cat, eyes wide, being held up against the night sky: “i forget the probphecy”
Graffiti on a wall says MESSY with a love arrow through it
Four young men play a Philip Glass composition on saxophones while standing in a dock at sunrise or sunset
ABSTRACT LLMs hallucinate, yet some confabulations can have social affordances if carefully bounded. We propose critical confabulation (inspired by critical fabulation from literary and social theory), the use of LLM hallucinations to "fill-in-the-gap" for omissions in archives due to social and political inequality, and reconstruct divergent yet evidence-bound narratives for history's "hidden figures". We simulate these gaps with an open-ended narrative cloze task: asking LLMs to generate a masked event in a character-centric timeline sourced from a novel corpus of unpublished texts. We evaluate audited (for data contamination), fully-open models (the OLMo-2 family) and unaudited open-weight and proprietary baselines under a range of prompts designed to elicit controlled and useful hallucinations. Our findings validate LLMs' foundational narrative understanding capabilities to perform critical confabulation, and show how controlled and well-specified hallucinations can support LLM applications for knowledge production without collapsing speculation into a lack of historical accuracy and fidelity.
A dad is sleeping and dreaming about two children saying: did you hear? Turns out old power cords are really valuable! Good thing dad kept kept them! We never should’ve doubted him! Cartoon by Ellis Rosen
A green dinosaur on a gas station awning (Sinclair gas)
Small gray rabbit peeking over somebody’s shoulder
A small gray rabbit cleans his face with his front feet
Be gay do crimes graffiti written in old English font
Frogs on rocks in a drainage area—some still have tails
Call for Abstracts: Special Issue: New Perspectives on Computing History (50th Anniversary Issue) Editor: Mar Hicks, University of Virginia, mhicks@virginia.edu "New Perspectives on Computing History" is the second of two anniversary issues to celebrate the upcoming 50th anniversary of the IEEE Annals. This special issue will focus on where our field is, and where it is heading-materially, methodologically, intellectually, and ideally. To do this, the issue is designed to encourage and platform the voices of newer and upcoming scholars in the field of the history of computing, and aligned disciplines, and ask them to reflect on where the field has been, and where it is going. This issue invites a broad variety of scholars and practitioners to reflect on the past and present of computing's history, through research-informed short articles (or practice-informed, in the case of practitioners). The envisioned length is roughly 2000-4000 words. This issue seeks to expand the network of writers beyond just those who have frequently written for the IEEE Annals in the past, to ensure that this issue represents our changing field and welcomes in more voices as we embark on our next 50 years. For example, scholars in media studies, information studies, and a range of allied fields (see, for instance, Melissa Villa-Nicholas and Tonia Sutherland) have produced critical scholarship related to the history of computing, while practitioners in other fields (for example, Clarissa Redwine and Meredith Broussard) have written about the computing's historical and present enmeshment with social, political, and economic change. Essays that touch on issues like these—and beyond —would be welcome in this issue. While historical in nature, in alignment with our journals' mission, this call for papers also welcomes topics, methods, and fields related to the history of computing, and its likely future. Some of the topics and methods welcomed for this issue include, but are not limited to:
A man stuck in a hole converses with the grim reaper, who cannot kill him because the hole is too small to enter
Beige Mercedes SL convertible with a power hard top and the NC license plate “POWERTOP”
@nakkaylah on TikTok: a small ray in a tank seems to dance to that old song “send me a kiss by wire”
Mixture of the ingredients listed in a shallow bowl
@jennajennajenn does a skit if she plays two parts, a young girl, calling her mother at work, and the receptionist trying to figure out who the mother is
A man plays two parts pretending to have time traveled from 2016. By @jackkeddy1 on tiktok.
David Sanchez, a 33-year-old from Chicago, posted this amazing tribute to Dippold's iconic Babadook Halloween disaster. david sanchez @gotham146 Tbt to Halloween when I went to my friend's house for a grown ups drinking wine party but there was more of a babadook vibe. Images of a woman without a costume sitting at a party where everyone else is dressed like a babadook.