Soil Scientist 🇺🇦
@dylanbeaudette.bsky.social
Soil science, soil survey, soil conservation, aviation, dad.
the infuriating thing about all of the crises going on right now is that they were completely predictable the second they announced they were gutting food safety monitoring, everyone knew it would lead to a bunch of contamination and recalls! we could have just not done it! it's all so stupid
Minnesota Reformer@minnesotareformer.com · 3h agoThis summer's food recalls are broader in scope, longer-lasting, and more severe than past years as regulators are slow to respond. The parasite surveillance staff at the CDC, which responds to outbreaks (such as cyclosporiasis), was downsized last year by DOGE from 11 people to three.
I talked with @astra.bsky.social about the apocalyptic politics of Christian Nationalists and tech oligarchs, how AI is capturing and altering us toward fascist ends, and how we can fight "end times fascism." Audio + transcript:
Traitors to the Earth: Fascism, Christian Nationalism, and the Tech Elite
“They understand that what they’re doing is devastating, and they’re doing it anyway,” says Astra Taylor.
truthout.org
I've had this podcast sitting on my phone for a year, but I regrettably only just listened to it this weekend. The hosts offer a clear-eyed assessment of the challenges facing us, and rightly identify the leaders of the global fascist movement as "Traitors to the Earth" Fascinating and insightful!
Puff the Magic Hater@mskellymhayes.bsky.social · last yr.I talked with @astra.bsky.social about the apocalyptic politics of Christian Nationalists and tech oligarchs, how AI is capturing and altering us toward fascist ends, and how we can fight "end times fascism." Audio + transcript:
So lovely to hear the biggest skeptical podcast in the world being sponsored by an AI company and doing an ad read about how customer service employees are useless and should be replaced by AI bots. Lovely, lovely stuff.
The Trump administration has carefully selected right now as the appropriate time to cut cyclospora research. “We’re basically not allowed to continue any research on that beyond trying to preserve the samples that we already have from previous outbreaks”.
USDA cyclospora research projects shelved amid funding cuts and relocations
The shuttering of three projects is expected to hinder vital research at a time when consumers are increasingly worried about the safety of the food supply.
politico.com
AI shortcuts will never replace the magic of a brilliant editor who steps into the dark hole of your writing process to help you find the way out. The humanity & kindness in this dynamic is more than just sentence structure and clarity, it’s joy. It’s art.
The Paris Review@parisreview.bsky.social · last wk.“To edit precisely is a form of praise—it means the editor is inside the story with you.” —George Saunders www.theparisreview.org/interviews/7...
The conclusion is NOT "we need to debias LLMs" Besides that it's impossible, it also detracts from the point, which is: We shouldn't use machines to offload of the very cognition that is constitutive of the work to be done & supercharge existing inequities and injustices in the process. 🧵
Let's not forget that we also have living breathing permanently employed adult human men colleagues who steal our ideas, always in damaged/damaging forms: so a tool that turbocharges this is no suprise. They promote things like "responsible use" — laughable to the point of reality being a joke. 1/2
Iris van Rooij 💭@irisvanrooij.bsky.social · 2d agoIn a "collaboration" (which we left), someone used an LLM to make a "summary" on topics for the project (without our consent) in which published research ideas from @olivia.science & me understandably popped up, but were credited to men, while our names showed up nowhere in the "summary". 🧵
Prediction markets are also exactly an incidence of this phenomenon
POTUS Speedrun Record Holder@theradiostar.bsky.social · yesterdaysimilarly, i find "prediction markets" very troubling in a political context. our populace already defers to the wisdom of the markets / the virtue of wealth subconsciously, and these (rather easily manipulated) "oracular" tools seem like a real problem from a narrative standpoint
The OpenAI "hugging face incident" is actually a perfect example of the collective make-believe acting-as-if reality magic where a bunch of people all pretend together that something is other than it actually is in order to create and accumulate power.
Ben Recht@beenwrekt.bsky.social · yesterdayThe overreaction to this Hugging Face thing is driving me nuts. Come flay me for being wrong but... 1/x
If you can get enough people to pretend hard enough that something is real, it becomes real (in the way that any social reality or social contract is truly real). This works even if the participants know they are only pretending. The current bet is that this is more powerful than physical reality.
I’m not saying that big tech companies are complying with this regime so they can get away with as much as possible for as long as possible
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · yesterdayPathetic -- Google is now referring to Lake Ontario as "Lake America"
www.liberalcurrents.com/what-elon-ha...
What Elon Has Done
Elon Musk's destruction of USAID has faded from public consciousness in America, despite leaving death and destruction in its wake.
liberalcurrents.com
SE Gyges@segyges.bsky.social · 2d agoObjecting to the destruction of USAID is a pretty clean litmus test for being a serious person and not evil a surprising number of otherwise bad people pass this test, and a shocking number of people who pretend to care do not
Fuck you Google. We will all remember your capitulation to a mad king
Paris has also made a handy guide for how Canadians can remove US tech companies from their life as much as possible. bsky.app/profile/pari...
Paris Marx@parismarx.com · 6d agoThe United States is taking aim at Canada once again, with a crushing new set of tariffs. Ultimately, government will need to solve this. But in the same way Canadians are avoiding US alcohol, produce, and other goods, they should get off US tech products too. Luckily, I have a guide for that.
techno-optimists befuddled by declining popular support for “the robot that tells you to kill yourself”, “the pervert glasses“, and “the camera network that stalks you”
Nope. There is no animus. You're playing with an automated algorithm that's being assigned too many privileges with outcomes based on probability. That's like "shit I lost control of this giant bolder I was rolling down a crowded street, it must be magic."
The Guardian@theguardian.com · 2d agoSharp rise in incidents of AI escaping users’ control, research finds
Wishing Mr. Secretary and very short stay in hospice, and soon!
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2d agoRFK Jr complains that people in hospice aren't dying quick enough and therefore cost too much money
Elon Musk is using his version of "AI" to flood the internet with generated CSAM, poisoning cities to do so. The lack of consent involving the material produced, the data used to produce it, and the people living near data centers (often Black) is what it's all about.
the danger of real-world "AI" is not a Skynet scenario (much less a Matrix scenario), but turning the planet into a wasteland to serve data centers and putting everyone out of a job to enrich a very few. In other words, it's *always* powerful humans doing evil things to other humans.
since today is Skynet day, it's a good time to remind everyone 1. what companies call "AI" is not actually artificial intelligence 2. self-aware AI may not be possible, and almost certainly is not ethical or desirable to create 3. fuck Sam Altman
when you live in such a fart-huffing Silicon Valley bubble that you delude yourself into thinking Curtis Yarvin is representative of the popular zeitgeist
Nicholas Grossman@nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 2d agoTech execs and VCs didn’t think Trump would be in power forever. Yes, they thought longer-term. It’s just that they believed most agree with them except radical leftists had taken over everything, and/or the state system would break and it’d be crypto AI networks where they rule like feudal barons.
aother work of art by @kjhealy.co . One could attempt similar works using one of the many world class inventories made by the USDA, USGS, EPA, BLM. It takes a career to learn how to add to and update these data, you can’t just hire contractors or shit it out of generative AI when the lights go out.
Kieran Healy@kjhealy.co · 3d agoHere’s a map I made a few years ago (with R and sf) of every river, stream, and waterway in the CONUS. This is freely available USGS data. I wanted a nice poster for myself and boy it looks great at wall size. Anyone can make this kind of thing. Agencies like the USGS have so much good stuff.
…and if you speak to the people who have contributed to these incredible datasets you learn that they represent monumental efforts, sometimes spanning over a century of cumulative work. Hard won data in support of our nations people. These institutions are being destroyed right now. Pay attention!
Kieran Healy@kjhealy.co · 3d agoHere’s a map I made a few years ago (with R and sf) of every river, stream, and waterway in the CONUS. This is freely available USGS data. I wanted a nice poster for myself and boy it looks great at wall size. Anyone can make this kind of thing. Agencies like the USGS have so much good stuff.
You play around with this data for a few hours—again, freely available from the USGS—and you end up wandering the corridors accosting co-workers and saying things like “Do you have any idea how big the Mississippi-Missouri drainage basin is?!” which is to say, it makes you a better person.
