a woman is crying with the words you 're going down a path i can 't follow below her Alt: a woman is crying in star wars she says you're going down a path i can't follow.

when I see someone I used to work with doing AI garbage (except how I say it isn't so much unhappy as aggressively hostile)

you’d really think an industry pretty openly saying “we intend to make most of humanity useless” would actually get more backlash

I took my partner, who does not play DnD, to see this in theatres, and even she thought it was great!

This thread is art.

A simple gold coloured (it is not actually gold) ring sitting on my desktop.

I found this ring in the parking lot this morning.

I was going to turn it in at the information office, but I dunno, maybe I’ll hang on to it. For a while.

Hey Canadians, this is a huge issue. This mine will pump out millions of gallons of sulphuric acid that will flow into Quetico Park, Rainy River, right up to Lake Winnipeg. It's 40km from the border. It could be Sudbury all over again for Canadian lakes. And our governments are doing nothing. read:

Doug Ford nixes idea of grocery surveillance pricing ban in Ontario Ontario Premier Doug Ford is nixing the idea of banning so-called surveillance pricing on groceries, as Manitoba has proposed.

What a surprise. Ford shows yet again he is perfectly fine with letting his corporate owners screw over the people of Ontario.

www.cp24.com/politics/que...

Why the AI backlash has turned violent And why it's probably only going to get worse from here.

Last week, a 20 year-old man threw a molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's mansion; two days later, people fired a gun at it. Earlier that week, someone fired gunshots into an city councilman's house who approved a data center.

Why the AI backlash has turned violent:

I’ll jump into the “good econ, bad public vibes” debate w/ individual-level data: a 10/2024 YouGov survey by @cccr.bsky.social.

I was inspired by Elliot’s analysis below, which shows sustained high prices are probably one cause, even w/ low year-over-year increases now. 1/ bsky.app/profile/gell...

Uranium dioxideperoxide Uranium dioxideperoxide | H2O4U | CID 29645 - structure, chemical names, physical and chemical properties, classification, patents, literature, biological activities, safety/hazards/toxicity information, supplier lists, and more.

Sounds delicious

pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/29645

A windowed storefront for Simply Pure Water, with an external dispenser labelled "H₂O₄U 24 hour", presumably meant to be read "H₂O for you" but written as if it's a molecule that contains hydrogen, oxygen, and uranium.

The lack of scientific literacy will destroy us all. I wonder if the people who designed the sign that says "H₂O₄U" even know what they have written.

#NewPaperDay!
PeerJ Obligate faunivorous megatheropod size class patterns across the Jurassic-Cretaceous Periods peerj.com/articles/210... @peerj.bsky.social

Analysis Finds That Google's AI Overviews Are Providing Misinformation at a Scale Possibly Unprecedented in the History of Human Civilization A new analysis commissioned by The New York Times suggests that Google's AI Overviews are wrong an astonishing percentage of the time.

This is catastrophic.

Good.

The idea that high oxygen levels led to the appearance (and eventual disappearance) of giant insects in the Carboniferous has been weirdly difficult to kill, even though insects stayed quite big for quite some time afterward. This, hopefully, puts a bullet through it

Lystrosaurus embryo!

Benoit J, Fernandez V, Botha J (2026) The first non-mammalian synapsid embryo from the Triassic of South Africa. PLoS One 21(4): e0345016. doi.org/10.1371/jour...

LOOK AT THE BABY LYSTROSAURUS

A museum patron takes a photo of a model of Homotherium serum at La Brea Tar Pits with text, "Sink your teeth into a new era! / La Brea Tar Pits Museum closes for renovations July 7. / Get Tickets", with the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum logo.

🐾 Sink your teeth into a new era!

For nearly 50 years, La Brea Tar Pits has been one of L.A.’s most beloved treasures, and it's about to become something even 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 extraordinary—thread.

“We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter,” said Altman, laying out an intensely dystopian future as just another business development. “One of the most important things in the future is that we make intelligence, to borrow an old phrase from the energy industry that didn’t quite work, ‘Too cheap to meter.’” When I first heard what Altman had said, I was shocked and bewildered. How does someone even conceive of metering (and monetizing) intelligence if they’re not a tech billionaire with an intense antipathy toward humanity? It was clearly not something that would ever be achieved in practice. But it did hint at a much deeper issue with these AI tools, what they’re doing to our cognitive capacities, and the broader ideology underpinning the industry’s effort to force AI into every facet of our lives.

Altman made this declaration at an infrastructure summit hosted by BlackRock. It’s the latest in a long line of outrageous statements he’s made to try to justify the rollout of generative AI and the massive cost to power it.

disconnect.blog/make-em-dumb...

Bloody hell. Researchers invented a disease, published two fake papers to see if LLM’s would ingest them and kick them up as fact — and then it broke containment and all the major AI’s bought in. Information pollution.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Make ‘em dumb, sell ‘em smarts Sam Altman wants intelligence to be a utility that you pay him for

Sam Altman has a new plan to make money from generative AI: he wants intelligence to be treated like water or electricity — and we’ll all have to pay him for it.

His chatbots are degrading people’s ability to retain information and think critically. Now he wants to sell smarts back to us.

So, in those spaces where AI is viewed as a useful tool, the narrative is generally that it is what you use for the unimportant things so you can get onto what matters.

I’m not averse to that framing, because it allows the use of AI to communicate to me what something thinks is unimportant.

As AI Breathes Down Our Necks, It’s Time for a Luddite Renaissance Nineteenth-century textile workers longed to stay human in a machine age. So do we.

The Luddites were the good guys!

Technically skilled masters of their textile crafts, they opposed wealthy industrial speculators who forced workers (including children) to give up control over their future and toil in Blake’s “dark satanic mills.”

In this AI moment, we can learn a lot from them.

No one should have to compromise their safety for their career, and vice versa. @societyofvertpaleo.bsky.social needs to add an online option.

I think AI is poison to paleontology. I've seen it create fake citations in scientific papers. I've seen it create garbage art, stolen from talented artists.

Paleontology doesn't need AI.

Get out of my timeline. I don't have any patience for this bullshit today.

*Blocked*

I know the tweet is Al generated when they use " ," before and.

“I will NOT sacrifice the Oxford comma. We've made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They assimilate the em dash and we fall back. They capture ‘not just X but y’ and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!”

"The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing. Not a dramatic collapse. Not Skynet. Just a generation of researchers who can produce results but can't produce understanding."

Fossilized leg bone of an extinct long-legged, predatory bird, along with an illustration of its possible life appearance.

New phorusrhacid (terror bird) Eschatornis aterradora: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... From the Late Pleistocene, making it one of the youngest known members of the group. 🪶🧪 (📷Machado et al., Zeinner de Paula)

A grey rock that has a beautiful fossil trilobite. The rock is rough, but the trilobite sections are smooth. One of the main features is a compound eye, made of of many lenses.

The beautiful preservstion of trilobite compound eyes will never cease to amaze me. On this little 400ish million year old Phacops you can see all the little lenses - each one a rigid calcite mineral crystal! Together they had excellent 360° vision, perfect for finding lunch on the seafloor.