Finished reading: Rocket Men by Robert Kurson 📚With the Artemis II launch coming up, I thought it might be nice to read a book on the first manned space mission Apollo 8 which has some similarities with the Artemis II mission. Aside from being sickeningly jingoistic, this was a good account of the mission.

…it hit us harder because trust is the product.:

Within hours, we got a taste of what we’d only heard rumors about. The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn’t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they’d find us. We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough. When you can’t trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you’re seeing are real, you’ve lost the foundation a community platform is built on.

Establishing new habits is such hard work. Those nasty old habits are always lurking in the shadows ready to pounce when you are the least bit vulnerable. Deep respect for those out there who have won that battle.

This article advocating for changes to pay university students for undertaking placements is important. I have been hearing directly from students who have been withdrawing from courses or moving into different fields because they are unable to afford long unpaid placements in social work. Students also tell me they are working long extra shifts in order to build a ‘buffer’ for when they are on placements. This impacts on their studies, it is impacting on their families, and it is impacting on their mental health. We need to do better.

Week 11 of the trimester today and going into the biggest period of marking. Always difficult to get through this part of the year, but looking forward to getting to the end of trimester.