Straight up milking the market

A moth shaped and coloured like a broken piece of twig perched on a grey cardboard egg tray from my moth trap. It's long and thin, with mostl greyish brown flecked colouration, and a light brown wing tip and face. The main colours mimic bark and the pale brown at the ends mimic the wood inside at the broken ends of a twig. Perfect camo moth pal.

The twig moth from the previous pic, now perched on the end of a dried plant stem held in my hand. Next to it I'm holding a short length of broken twig to show the similarities.

A top down view of the twig moth from previous pics, showing that it's even more twiggy from above. You can't see its legs or face. No tasty moth here, move along please birds, move along.

65. Buff tip.

Another from yesterday's trap. Best broken twig mimic, A+ camo, no notes.

butterfly-conservation.org/moths/buff-tip

I'm not joking when I say mRNA technology is more important than "AI" and it's a tragedy we're throwing billions into one while our government is aggressively defunding the other.

Constantly reminded of this Ted Chiang passage on capitalism, technology and progress from the New Yorker whenever I see the tech “elite” snowflaking about criticism.

A white garment with some kind of food stain. Humiliating.

A pair of dirty hands rest on a car engine. Rough, tough, cool.

Here is an easy solution:

Food stains are humiliating, as they suggest you're a little baby who can't feed themselves.

Oil stains, such as those you'd get from working on your car, suggest you're tough, independent, and skilled.

Thus, simply cover your food stains with used motor oil.

Chinook salmon found naturally hatching in Upper Klamath River for first time in a century The Klamath Tribes are celebrating evidence of Chinook salmon spawning in Klamath River tributary.

After big dams on the upper Klamath River in far northern CA were removed in 2024, Chinook (king) salmon migrated upstream for the first time in 100+ years--and now they have hatched.

Trying to explain St Augustine to the pope, the former head of the Augustinian order, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Augustine, on his way back from celebrating mass at the Basilica of St Augustine in Annaba, Algeria, overlooking the site where Augustine lived is peak Adult Catholic Convert.

Doe had broken up with the user in 2024, and he used ChatGPT to process the split, according to emails and communications cited in the lawsuit. Rather than push back on his one-sided account, it repeatedly cast him as rational and wronged, and her as manipulative and unstable. He then took these AI-generated conclusions off the screen and into the real world, using them to stalk and harass her. This manifested in several AI-generated, clinical-looking psychological reports that he distributed to her family, friends, and employer.

For months, her then-fiancé and partner of several years had been fixating on her and their relationship with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In mid-2024, she explained, they’d hit a rough patch as a couple; in response, he turned to ChatGPT, which he’d previously used for general business-related tasks, for “therapy.” Before she knew it, she recalled, he was spending hours each day talking with the bot, funneling everything she said or did into the model and propounding on pseudo-psychiatric theories about her mental health and behavior. He started to bombard the woman with screenshots of his ChatGPT interactions and copy-pasted AI-generated text, in which the chatbot can be seen armchair-diagnosing her with personality disorders and insisting that she was concealing her real feelings and behavior through coded language. The bot often laced its so-called analyses with flowery spiritual jargon, accusing the woman of engaging in manipulative “rituals.” Trying to communicate with her fiancé was like walking on “ChatGPT eggshells,” the woman recalled. No matter what she tried, ChatGPT would “twist it.” “He would send [screenshots] to me from ChatGPT, and be like, ‘Why does it say this? Why would it say this about you, if this is not true?'” she recounted. “And it was just awful, awful things.”

Shortly after moving out, the former fiancé began to publish multiple videos and images a day on social media accusing the woman of an array of alleged abuses — the same bizarre ideas he’d fixated on so extensively with ChatGPT. In some videos, he stares into the camera, reading from seemingly AI-generated scripts; others feature ChatGPT-generated text overlaid on spiritual or sci-fi-esque graphics. In multiple posts, he describes stabbing the woman. In another, he discusses surveilling her. (The posts, which we’ve reviewed, are intensely disturbing; we’re not quoting directly from them or the man’s ChatGPT transcripts due to concern for the woman’s privacy and safety.) The ex-fiancé also published revenge porn of the woman on social media, shared her full name and other personal information, and doxxed the names and ages of her teenage children from a previous marriage. He created a new TikTok dedicated to harassing content — complete with its own hashtag — and followed the woman’s family, friends, and neighbors, as well as other teens from her kids’ high school. “I’ve lived in this small town my entire life,” said the woman. “I couldn’t leave my house for months… people were messaging me all over my social media, like, ‘Are you safe? Are your kids safe? What is happening right now?'”

A woman sued OpenAI last week alleging that ChatGPT reinforced the obsessive, violent delusions of her stalker (her ex-boyfriend.)

This woman's claims (as detailed by TechCrunch, left) are chillingly similar to those of a completely different woman whose story Futurism reported on in Feb (right):

Yeah, Mackenzie Scott is a fascinating case. She is literally ignoring the SOPs of philanthropy in order to give away wealth as quickly and efficiently as possible and she’s still getting richer. At her level it is impossible not to make money. Tax billionaires, A LOT.

A little while after deleting the post from his social account, Trump staged a press event at the White House in which he had two bags of McDonalds food delivered to him by a lady wearing a red T-shirt with the words "Doordash Grandma" on the front. Look man, all I can do is describe these things. I am not responsible for the world being like this.

defector.com/president-ex...

Swollen RFK Jr. Warns Americans Not Eating Enough Bees WASHINGTON—After manually prying his eyelids open to read from a report he had prepared on the matter, a badly swollen Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gave a speech Tuesday in which he warned that Americans wer...

She’s just following the latest nutritional guidance.

A photo of a sprig of wisteria in a small crystal vase on a wood table. Two strings of purple blossoms are draping down the left side, a bare bit of branch stretches up to the right.

From the garden today - feels early for the wisteria to be blooming, but it’s been so warm, I’m not really surprised. #flowers #bloomscrolling

Yesterday morning was peak Saguaro! 🌵 🌼 (13 blossoms?!)

An mRNA treatment for PANCREATIC CANCER was in trials, among many other uses. Choosing to end this research is choosing to sentence millions to an early, painful death

we could just be the space country. we could be the country where when someone says the name people are like "oh yeah the ones that go to space all the time and don't blow things up for no reason"

I talked to a guy who cleaned Dragon capsules and they were apparently rank afterwards.

YES, A FAILED IMPEACHMENT MEANS REPUBLICANS APPROVE OF TRUMP'S CONDUCT. THAT'S THE WHOLE REASON TO DO IT

Preach, brother. And tell my gynecologist, who always prescribed 12x 28-day packs of the pill as if that covered a year.

Mint and Chocolate is a stupid combination. Its like someone thought it’d be a good idea to put toothpaste on a chocolate bar

We can't mine the moon for helium or it will stop floating and crash into the Earth

I should really just log off for the next 2.5 years

🐝

This is a great thread whose bottom line is:

The first qualification of being a Big Tech CEO today is being a sociopath who is willing to lie and break any and all moral rules.

Mid-13th century door from the undercroft at Wells Cathedral in Somerset. 📸 My own. #AdoorableThursday #WellsCathedral

“Prediction markets” are websites where you take the money you worked hard to earn, and give it directly to the friends & family of White House insiders.

A WHOLE CIVILIZATION WILL DIE TONIGHT My son needs lunch, and I have to put his backpack together, but a whole civilization will die tonight, so I'm wondering if they've closed their schools. Like, a snow day, maybe, except instead of snow it's "keep your children home so if you die, you die together" — instead of "well open back up once the plows have cleared" it's "we don't know if we'll be here tomorrow, hold your babies tight." It's just "talk" I'm told, which I've been told before. "It's how the president makes his deals." But I've never heard anyone talk about other human beings this way, and I'm not certain I can look my son in the eyes if we all agree to stomach it one more time. A civilization will die tonight, but as I zip up his backpack and kiss him off to school I think: if this is what we call leadership then I'm not entirely sure ours isn't already dead. @michaelfdubois Mukad A QuBoy @michacifdubois

Brutal.

if you offload your thinking to a machine, you get worse at thinking without the machine

Constitutional lawyer here. I don't think it would violate the Constitution for the VP/Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment, but the intended constitutional remedy for this behavior is impeachment & removal. The fact that that remedy is politically impossible is a scandal and a crisis.

Snapping turtle with head retracted into numerous neck folds. Toe claws are enormous. The animal is covered in mud.

We encountered this fellow crossing the road on our way home this morning...