Richard

@rwpickard.bsky.social

236 Followers 242 Following

Reader, tree-hugger, teacher, preserver of foodstuffs. Canadian. Deleter of rwpickard from Twitter/X. http://boughtbooks.blogspot.com

A screenshot of my blank reply screen to this text. Although every word in the original text was in English, the post was marked by Bluesky as "written in Catalan," which was a surprise to me
A photo of the cover of the December 1979 issue of Hiballer Forest Magazine, featuring a bearded man wearing an orange hardhat who is walking toward the camera along the trunk of a felled Douglas fir tree
An alleged quotation from Evan Solomon, Canada's minister for AI, in a Canadian Press story: "Building is risk, which is why the Prime Minister said we cannot be risk averse in this moment. We're going to take on an element of risk, but you also have to do that boldly and responsibly. Risk cannot come at the expense of our values, sustainability. "In this moment, do we want a country that is not taking risk to bet on Canada? Do we want country that's not taking a risk to bet our own innovation, our own energy systems, our own cities, our workforce? Absolutely not."
Screenshot of Bluesky's main page, with an inexplicable overlay reading "Forbidden"
A screenshot of my own Bluesky menu, on logging in today, showing more than 30 notifications. I never get that many notifications.
A screenshot from the Twitter user at L To The Lucy, saving that her favorite PR pitch was called "Understanding Millenials - How Do Potatoes Fit Into Their Lives?". It was from the United States Potato Board
Screen shot of a conversation about whether Bluesky is showing all replies in the Following feed, or only some of them
A screenshot from Mashable, with a typographical error in the subhed. The subhed reads "Mozilla offers a refreshing counter-example to endless AI integrations. Will other bowser makers follow suit?" It should read "browser," not "bowser". The main title reads "Firefox browser to add 'AI off-switch,' bucking industry trend"
A screenshot of the Bluesky sidebar menu, showing that I had more than 30 notifications on logging into the platform today. It's rare that I have more than two
A screenshot of four seemingly non-existent citations, from an article entitled "Integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence and 3D Immersive Environments in Competency-Based Higher Education." The four suspect articles are as follows: - Prinsloo, P. (2023). Generative AI, higher education and the futures of academic integrity. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 20(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-023-00420-8 - Selwyn, N., & Macgilchrist, F. (2022). Should we be worried about generative AI in education? Learning, Media and Technology, 47(4), 373–377. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2022.2150626 - Smutny, P., Vaculík, J., & Procházka, D. (2023). The role of ChatGPT in higher education: Opportunities, challenges, and ethical dilemmas. Education and Information Technologies, 28(6), 6615–6635. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-023-11813-0 - Williamson, B. (2021). Education governance and datafication. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429286794
This is a screenshot of an article from Time Magazine. The article is entitled "It's Time to Rage Against the AI Music Machine." Unfortunately, there's a pop-up window that reads "Explore the full archive of TIME, a century of journalism, insight, and perspective, with AI that helps you research, connect ideas, and uncover stories across every era and topic. Ask me anything!" The pop-up, of course, interferes with my ability to actually read the article, because it floats over some of the text I want to read
A screenshot from the article, reading as follows: "currently, genAI does little, in our opinion, to help individuals develop expertise in a domain. It does not help learners build domain and topic knowledge in a meaningful way, it does not scaffold the necessary surface- and deep-level processing strategies necessary to become proficient in a domain and does not help to increase situational or individual interest for an individual. In the future it could, but for now it is very limited in the usefulness for helping students develop sustained learning of a domain or topic"
Cheerful poster announcing a six-presenter talk, including me, on the topic of generative AI and departments of English. I have cropped the names of the other presenters out of the image, in case they don't want to appear on social media
Screen shot from an April 2025 KPMG report, of a smiling KPMG partner saying transparently irresponsible and illogical things about AI in higher education.
Your humble correspondent, looking grumpy and wearing a t-shirt that reads "Keep Humanities Human." It also has a raised fist holding a pencil, and the letters A and I inside a circle with a line through it.
Screenshot showing account @doiyoiyoiski.bsky.social behaving like an AI and acting on instructions
A list of websites that Blogger.com inexplicably thinks are my top referring sites: Lowe's, Walmart, Binance, Science Mag, etc
A photo of the late, lamented David McFadden, who was enthusiastic about almost everything and should not be blamed for any of the current technological fascism, fetishism, and social destruction. It's just that I love everything about this picture of McFadden sitting at his 1980s computer that he has set up outside on a picnic table, so I use it at the slightest provocation.
The cover of Tim Lilburn's 2023 book Numinous Seditions: Interiority and Climate Change, which was published by the University of Alberta Press
A screenshot from Cosmos Magazine, showing that they've removed the article in question because it didn't meet their editorial standards. My point is that they should be more precise than this: what went wrong, what was the story about, and who was the writer
A screen-shot from COSMOS Magazine, showing that the article in question has been taken down while, in their words, they review some queries about the content
An uncut loaf of gluten-free sourdough bread, on a bamboo cutting board in front of a Mason jar of gluten-free sourdough starter
James Spader and Susan Sarandon, heating up the screen in White Palace (1990): looking into each other's eyes while standing at a bar, with bottles on the bar, with the image in black and white to make them look a bit Bogart and Bacall. Screenshot from IMDb
Screenshot from 338Canada.ca, showing the projections for the Victoria riding as of April 27, 2025. They're arguing a 94% chance of a Liberal win in the riding; 6% for the NDP; and <1% for the Conservatives.
A screenshot showing that for some reason, I've had more than 30 notifications since logging in last, only a few hours ago
A screenshot of two skeets: one by Matthew Kirschenbaum, reposted by Shannon Mattern, and one by @oksettledown.bsky.social, reposted by Alex Hanna. Both skeets have a lot in common with my own feelings about AI, which is that it's a toxic scam being wielded by fascists
Looking southeast from behind a ponderosa pine, just north of Oliver BC, with arrow-leaf balsamroot blooming in the grass behind the big pine. Vaseux Lake is in the deep valley behind the second row of hills, before the distant mountains
A single blossom of arrow-leaf balsamroot near Oliver BC. Usually they bloom in clumps, but on exposed rocky ground, you'll sometimes find singles like this one.
The poster's father, looking south from a hilltop towards Oliver, BC
A photo taken just north of Oliver, British Columbia. The view is south across Stag Hollow vineyard and Vaseux Lake to McIntyre Bluff, also known as nʕaylintn (pronounced nye-lin-tin)
A screen-grab from the Wikipedia page about the 1917 film Big Timber, from the novel of that name by Bertrand Sinclair, commenting that it was remade in 1924 under the same title
A screenshot of the Bluesky menu at the bottom of the screen, showing that there are 30+ notifications
Easter lilies, blooming in early April 2025, in Victoria BC
A beer can in front of a Canadian flag. Specifically, a can from Wildeye Brewing called Oberon's Elixir Dark Blackberry Sour
A screenshot demonstrating a spreadsheet that tracks the various beers I've sampled over the last four years. The image shows six stouts and one scotch ale, with alcohol values between 5.5% and 10%. The best of these is Boombox Brewing's Midnight Train Milk Chocolate Coconut Stout, at 8.8%.
A tall can of beer with a label that looks like a Christmas sweater. It's called Chocolate Minute Winter Beeracle, from Dead Frog Brewery in Langley, British Columbia
Two accounts loosely supportive of AI, talking about Homer, Odysseus, and Odysseus's sexual exploits
Pierre Poilievre behind a fake sign, generated by the website verb dash the dash noun dot com
A bookshelf photo, featuring the 1968 book THE NEW ROMANS: CANDID CANADIAN OPINIONS OF THE US, edited by Al Purdy, with some other book spines visible around our
A data table from the analytics firm OAG showing how flight bookings have changed between March 2024 and March 25. For each of the next six months, from April 2025 through September 2025, bookings have decreased by between 71.4% and 75.7%
Screenshot of the BlueSky icons, showing that I have 24 new notifications from being away for just over an hour
Screenshot of an "official" new follower, who has never posted or replied, has zero followers, and uses a photo of a woman I should probably recognize, except that I don't
In which Jordan Weissman, self-described reporter at Yahoo! Finance, keeps using the word "fuck" in anger at people questioning his position on whether America might annex Canada
A Bluesky post where, in late 2024, Jordan Weissman confidently explained that the American federal workforce under Trump would shrink mostly through "hiring freezes and attrition." This casts some doubt on his qualifications to assert, as he's persistently doing these days, that Trump would never annex Canada, and certainly never invade. That's why he keeps saying "Fuck you" to his readers (and that's a quotation. He's said exactly that many times in these recent threads).
Google has begun using the term "state park" to refer to Canada's provincial parks: here, Gowlland Tod Provincial Park
Google has begun using the term "state park" to refer to Canada's provincial parks: here, Gowlland Tod Provincial Park
A ceramic mug meant to look like a block of wood, with a handle that looks like an axe. A souvenir from British Columbia's Interior Logging Association
A screenshot from Zoom's email today, in which they promote what they call "an AI-based and consolidated technology approach for communication in higher education." The poster and email misspells the word "February."