This is a really interesting feature on vertical farming in Alaska—where fresh food can be limited and expensive—but I keep getting hung on the first sentence about a town with 1,000 residents that is expected to accommdate 1.3 MILLION cruise visitors every summer.

In Remote Alaska, the Promise and Limits of Vertical Farming

As the vertical farming industry reckons with failed investments and broken business models, one small Alaska farm is finding a niche by solving a very local problem.

civileats.com

Achieved via ELITE PROMPT ENGINEERING TECHNIQUES

Grace@gracekind.net · 10h ago

You can simply ask Claude to make you a barebones SVG editor

When I was younger and felt invisible and like I had no chance of having an impact on the world, at least social media was there to allow you to talk about it. Now even that is mostly gone.

NEW: Flock has said for years that its cameras "cannot track individuals." We found the code for its new AI tool. It's preloaded w/ prompts like "Find me witness" & "find relatives." One tracks visitors of multiple hotels, another if you visit banks after midnight. www.wired.com/story/flock-...

Hey I'm teaching a course "AI, Creativity & Slop" to first-year students this fall which includes readings in lit/philosophy, history + cog sci/comp sci. Does anyone have recs - essays they love in any of these areas - to help me finalize the syllabus? Would really appreciate any suggestions, thx!

Not just taxi drivers. "Those living in spatially complex surroundings – the kind that force active map building, such as dense street networks with numerous intersections, diverse points of interest, and multiple path options – were less likely to develop Alzheimer’s." I delight in getting lost.

Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer’s – how complex mental maps and spatial reasoning protect your brain

Working with and living in spatially complex environments may help delay cognitive decline, though more research is needed.

theconversation.com

We have data on this. The blue is all the non-ag human use:

And then there is the looming unprecedented biohazard crisis that is the 85 million pounds of soon-to-be rotting meat inside the facility. 75,000 pallets stacked 50 feet high of beef and poultry, it's about to get very, very nasty beyond the burning insulation.

The contamination and pollution from the fire in Boyle Heights is much, much worse than Los Angeles political leaders are admitting to. This is a huge scandal. So many people are getting genuinely sick.

The Spanish town Sigüenza, where we saw last week’s eclipse, has a lovely pair of tiled maps in its train station. Hard to capture in a photo, but they have a lot of 3D detail. But railway construction meant bus substitution, so we spent more time figuring that out than looking at the maps 😭

If anyone reading this happens to be thinking about looking for adjunct instructors in architecture in NY for Spring 27 or other semesters, I'd imagine it doesn't hurt to mention I've been sending out application queries. I'd be open to teaching in other fields that could use my background as well.

I have many theories of slop, but my current Theory of Slop is that what makes slop "slop" and not just "bad art" is that slop only ever aims to sate a desire created by past experiences of art rather than to create a new experience to be desired.

Political and professional thought is easily nudged towards cruelty as the people think that rationality will be kind not cruel. They let rationality strip other people of their humanity. It’s why human rights and value need to be made explicit in treaties, laws and bills of rights. T

Seeing this is making me miss living in Florida. Or at least this part of the experience of being there, which isn’t nearly as bad as the politics.

worm@rfksbrainworm.bsky.social · 4d ago

the little legs kicking

idk why we keep doing retrospectives on woke 1, but it's starting to feel like forced driven oscillation and i suspect nothing of value will be scavenged

One thing which feels lost with current structural social media changes, and by this I mean a general overall feeling, is it no longer feels like you are in an environment of ambitious people. Even if many of the people are the same. That may be the biggest loss that came from the death of Twitter.

Check it out! Lea is live and open to the public 🥳 Lea is an experiment to build better social media by researchers and for researchers, where we own our own data and can build our own feeds, events, and communities. This is still very much a proof-of-concept; we welcome ideas + collaborators!

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒@eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · last wk.

For the past six months @mariaa.bsky.social and I have been working on creating an improved research experience on atproto. It's now live! Check out: lea.ac

more evidence AI hate is a western - and predominantly American - phenomena

conputer dipshit@davidcrespo.bsky.social · 5d ago

lol welp www.bloomberg.com/features/202...

Have to reshare this every time I see it. Raymond Chandler mocking science fiction in 1953 and sounding cool as hell. He should have written some space stories.

citylimits.org/nycha-tenant... missed this, NYCHA residents suing over use of free Internet program being used to expand NYPD surveillance

NYCHA Tenants Sue Over Police Access to Surveillance Cameras, And What Else Happened This Week in Housing - City Limits

The lawsuit accuses the NYPD and NYCHA of violating residents' rights by using an internet program to give police access to surveillance cameras.

citylimits.org

A must read for all grad students and advisors. Practically, I'm especially interested in the parts about PhD assessments and milestones. At a higher level, I'm more pessimistic about rewards (we can all think of people whose sloppy work gets over-cited) but generally I agree with this post.

Eytan Adar@eytan.adar.prof · last wk.

I wrote a post about the emergence of AI-native students who do their research using GenAI tools. I think that there are some real risks to job prospects and the likely changes in their fields.

I think one thing that AI and social media have made me realize about capitalism, is how addiction is at the center of business models. Not a byproduct, not just a structural incentive. Without significant utility, and even with it, dependency is at the heart of the model.

Is this a sign that I need to try to figure out Threads??

Techmeme@techmeme.com · last wk.

Similarweb: Bluesky's mobile MAUs fell 27% YoY to 10.4M in June and DAUs fell 26% to 3M in July; X's mobile MAUs fell 3% to 302M and DAUs fell 7% to 123.7M (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

Every time I read a “academia is uniquely bad” essay I think about my wife’s twenty years in corporate America.

Writing advice - turning fears into opportunities to stretch the writing muscles!!

Kingfisher & Wombat@tkingfisher.com · last wk.

Whenever people tell me that they aren’t creative or don’t have a good imagination, I ask if they’ve driven behind a logging truck and imagined what would happen if one came loose. It’s the same muscle! You just gotta do some different stretches.

I have started a new todo list system where each week if something fills me with a sense of immense dread and guilt it goes on a separate Shame List and as soon as I've done one thing from the Shame List each week I don't have to look at it or think about it again until the following Monday

Something that’s very underrated is a lot of elite universities have basically decided certain topics are irrelevant or unfashionable so vast swaths of the American economy simply had no questions asked about them.

Stephen Jacob Smith@stephenjacobsmith.com · last wk.

Sidebar: one of the highest-value things anybody could do for building code reform in America would be for an Ivy League or other equivalent university to snap up Mike Eriksen and all of his collaborators, to show other academics that research into building codes will be rewarded. Zoning reform...

This is a triggering image of a museum display in the natural history museum in DC about life before smartphones. Me and a fellow 40+ person were laughing at how we are now LITERAL MUSEUM PIECES. MY teen was like did you have a clear phone? An address book? A book of maps. Yes, yes I did. 🫠🫠🫠

Seems like a development to keep up with given how many other smart city initiatives have failed to be realized. Also interesting that the innovations being explored by partner companies include not just transportation & infrastructure, but also domains like “soundscapes” and “food cultures.”

@gquaggiotto.bsky.social · 2w ago

Somehow i missed that Woven City has officially launched woven.toyota/en/news/2025...

like there used to be a time where you just could walk around and not worry about being recorded somehow, you could just... exist. You didn't have to consider how every single second of your public life couldn't be trotted out to ridicule you. No wonder everyone's neurotic are you kidding me