Since AI is what everyone's talking about... I could add my two cents regarding CHOP (chat oriented programming), which I first learned about (the acronym that is) at a Python User Group here in Portland. I've been chopping and hacking and finding Gemini in Google Colab more helpful than just StackOverflow. I love the term "chop slop" and plan to keep using it.
However, my use of chatbots is more of a natural language processing flavor in that I'm not looking for source code prototypes as often as I wanna lurk in on gossip. For example, I made up a query about spin doctors wanting to rebrand these LLMs as "whisper chambers" and getting back a lot of inside scoop on how marketers are thinking these days, when it comes to sounding sincere.
Beyond lurking in on the disciplines, I like to mine history. If you prompt the right way, giving a lot of proper names and context, you're likely to get back something that hangs together. I was able to overlay what we call the Naga Story in my classrooms, with something more scientifically credible, and yet still a myth, as the book that includes it comes up as poetical in its approach. Hello Ezra.
One of the big stories I've been trying to tell is the Westward Ho! migration, eventually along the Oregon Trail, of European high culture, such that Portland, Oregon would become a capital of open source and glass bead games. German Idealism via Kant and Hegel, forking to Marx, with another fork through Pragmatism, yet reuniting with a Transcendentalism. Emerson. Whitman. Back to Coleridge and Kant.
You might be thinking: these paths are all known. Romanticism was a backlash against the ugly side of industrialism (automating stuff) after which New Englanders followed, with their first take on Transcendentalism, already encountering more Asian thought patterns, foretelling the Californian subcultures, theosophy and so on. Yes, true, but such complicated stories bear retelling with the benefit of hindsight. Call it revisionist if you like, but lets keep it neutral on whether "revisioning" is a bad thing. That depends. Could be enlightening.
The evolution of the women's movement in the context of voting democracies figures in, along with two world wars galvanizing their participation in both the factory and the office space, blue collar and white, thereby finding out first hand what their husbands had been doing. Have men been exploring in the other direction. The roles need to be studied and experienced from all sides for the society to understand itself well enough to cohere. I start with women more than equal to men as intellectuals. That's a reference to my Graph Theory slide deck.
