Why I like Grok – Knowledge in the AI Age
When it comes to LLMs, I have always had a positive view of Grok. The other day, I asked the free version of Grok using its “thinking” mode the following…
How Digital-Age Scholarship is Different
All fields are different, but the field I am most active in now (looking at early Southeast Asia through Chinese sources) is very different today than it was just 10…
The Gradual Advance of AI
When technology advances gradually, we tend to not fully appreciate the scale of the transformation that it brings. This is because we adapt to its gradual changes, and lose track…
Infinitely Scrolling Through the Past
Last night I was looking through documents from British North Borneo and came across a record from 1886 about the murder the previous year in Palawan, then under Spanish rule,…
Grokipedia and the Hồng Bàng Dynasty
On October 27, 2025, Elon Musk’s company xAI released the first version (version 0.1) of an alternative to Wikipedia, called Grokipedia.It appears that the creation of Grokipedia was the result…
They’re Coming!!
When I was working in the US, I never got an email from a predatory/scam journal.Then I went to work at a university in Southeast Asia, and I immediately started…
You Don’t Think AI is a Threat, but You are Also Using the Wrong Model
I see a lot of academics brushing off AI, thinking that it’s not a threat. How do they reach that conclusion?As far as I can tell, in many cases they…
Professors Will be Eliminated by Progressive Logic
The other day an opinion piece from The Conversation popped up in my news feed with the title, “Some unis are moving away from in-person lectures. Here’s why that’s not…
Long-Form Immersive Literacy is Coming to an End
The other day, I went into a bookstore. There was a section on “classics,” which was essentially a section of works of nineteenth and twentieth century literature.I saw volume after…
What Students are Learning but Many Profs Perhaps Still Aren’t
A few years ago, I used to teach a session on “writing a literature review” for a general “methods” course that was offered to incoming graduate students in various humanities…