Ian Ramjohn
@iramjohn.bsky.social
Wikipedia expert at @wikieducation.bsky.social. Plant ecology Ph.D. 🇹🇹Trinbagonian in exile https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2910-0526 (if you want to verify my account's authenticity)
This is great. But it's also quite funny that apparently egg producers can pay their fines in eggs.
New York Attorney General Letitia James@newyorkstateag.bsky.social · 2d agoMy office is proud to deliver over 280,000 eggs to City Harvest in Brooklyn to help families across our city. We secured these eggs after holding major egg producers accountable for illegally colluding to raise prices at the expense of hardworking New Yorkers and Americans.
"Significant underlying health conditions" As in "don't panic, you'll be fine" Or "it's only those sick people" But really, whose underlying health conditions are significant, and whose aren't? We're going to minimise ours, because we want to feel indestructible. This is to our detriment.
The New York Times@nytimes.com · 2d agoBreaking News: Two deaths in Michigan have been linked to cyclospora. Both people who had the parasite also had underlying health issues.
Interesting read.
Lawfare@lawfaremedia.org · 2d agoA growing body of legal scholarship argues that large language model outputs are not “speech” under the First Amendment and therefore may be regulated without the scrutiny ordinarily applied. @beccabranum.bsky.social explores how this no-speech position could burden human speech online.
Did Larry Nasser author this bill? Because it seems like the kind of thing he’d be all for.
Gillian Branstetter@gbbranstetter.bsky.social · 2d agoAn initiative on the ballot in Washington state in November would require all athletes seeking to play girl's sports from kindergarten to high school to undergo "genetic screening, a testosterone-levels test, or an examination of their reproductive anatomy" before they can play
There's a persuasive argument that based on conventional liberal principles (central planning, market distortions, coercion, interference in hiring, trade, manufacturing, mergers & acquisitions, etc.) this is the least market-friendly administration since FDR. Possibly ever.
Eric Columbus@ericcolumbus.bsky.social · 2d agoThe Trump administration is so opposed to socialism that it has acquired — sometimes by coercion — equity stakes in 30 companies so far. www.cato.org/blog/governm...
Grim. You could also ask why the National Gallery has ended up with nearly all-white staff in London because that is a choice.
Anna H@athenepallas.bsky.social · 3d agoWell this seems as close to straight-up racism (and classism) as makes no difference. I hope PCS drag them right over the coals and then some: www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...
Mental health providers are increasingly using AI technology to record conversations, raising privacy concerns among patients and practitioners.
Your medical provider might be recording your mental health care visits – The Markup
Mental health providers are increasingly using AI technology to record conversations, raising privacy concerns among patients and practitioners.
bit.ly
Historian of abolition here 💯Garrison always called it the slaveholders rebellion, that’s the correct term. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/02/o...
Opinion | The ‘Civil War’ Is a Lie. Let’s Call It the ‘Slaveholders’ Rebellion’ Again. (Gift Article)
To face our own history, we must be honest about it.
nytimes.com
This is an excellent encapsulation of one major type of LLM problem.
Epitome Tagg's Sexy Mother@readyuser.one · 5d agoIf OpenAI made tables they would cost $100,000 and an entire forest to manufacture , they'd sell them for $10,000. Most of them would have the wrong number of legs stuck in at odd angles , surfaces that do not obey euclidean geometry and they'd occasionally induce suicide.
1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.
The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science
As a labor-augmenting technology, large language models (LLMs) have the potential to accelerate scientific activity across the research pipeline. But even if LLMs perform on par with human experts at ...
arxiv.org
Happy Emancipation Day! It was 188 years ago today that legal enslavement ended in the British Empire. Freedom took longer, and is still wanting in many ways, but this ended the legal fiction that allowed people to be "property". Remember the enslaved. Their suffering, and their resistance.
Another paper from our NASA-funded project on ferns has dropped! UWyoming MS student Fern (really!) Holian, developed a new schema for classifying fossil ferns, which are understudied. 🧪🌿☄️
Application of a novel schema for describing fossil fern foliage and investigating taxonomic and morphological change across the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary in western North America
Premise The Chicxulub asteroid impact at the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) boundary triggered a mass extinction 66 million years ago. Ferns thrived in the aftermath of the extinction, evidenced by the.....
bsapubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
If you’re a science communicator and you use AI, read this. This is about what’s happening to Hank Green.
Update: Journalists, human rights advocates and open source analysts recoiled in horror at the initial decision: "The opportunities for abuse and disinfo are literally boundless," said one.
Google pauses AI satellite images, after fears of deepfakes in the sky
Journalists, human rights advocates and open source analysts recoiled in horror at the initial decision: "The opportunities for abuse and disinfo are literally boundless," said one.
n.pr
I used to do some work on the ethical use of satellite and drone imagery for aid and disaster response, and it is genuinely hard to express in words what a dangerous, stupid thing Google is doing by making it easy to use GenAI to create faked satellite imagery:
How to plant a nuclear plant in Iran
The question is: what on earth is Google doing?
digitaldigging.org
The #BronzeAge #UptonLovellShaman's burial in Wiltshire has long been considered an important religious figure & metalworker. It's been barely questioned someone of such status must be male. But now #aDNA analysis revealed that the body is in fact: a woman. 🏺 www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
The Guardian view on ancient DNA: a female shaman exposes our flawed assumptions about the past | Editorial
Editorial: Thanks to new technology we are are acquiring insights into earlier times, and realising how little we truly know
theguardian.com
minnesota state rep jess hanson rides elon musk for filth for trying to defend his pervy app: "when the richest man in the world hangs out with the epstein class... we cannot act surprised when he's trying to protect the number one tool used to make child sexual abuse material"
Oliver Willis@owillis.bsky.social · last wk.minnesota state senator directly taking on musk and his big pockets PRECISELY HOW DEMOCRATS SHOULD BE DOING IT
do not anthropomorphize software, episode 7,000
AI Doomsday Bullshit Is Getting Tired
The "rogue AI" narrative continues to help obscure very ugly and avoidable human failures.
karlbode.com
This headline is beyond hilarious. Mind you, he isn't wrong, but when a monopolist like Zuck complains about something like this, you know it's just because *he* wasn't the one able to corner the market.
It's Global Tiger Day! By the 1960s, they were heading towards extinction, but that was stopped in large part by the work of Kailash Sankhala Definitely one of highlights of my life to see these amazing animals (I watch my videos over and over) From Pench National Park
This is perfect. Gmail actually used to be good at this stuff, once upon a time.
Alex Selby-Boothroyd@alexselbyb.bsky.social · last wk.Impossible to put into words how useless Gmail search is. No wait, these guys did it!
So basically Superfund for AI? Asking the public to clean up the messes they’re making, while they continue to make the messes worse? They should be obligated to post bonds to clean up the mess they’re making.
Reuters@reuters.com · last wk.Tech employees call for US-backed global effort to manage risks of advanced AI reut.rs/4vTwTQK
My handsome dad would have been 100yrs old today.He was an adventurous, talented and clever man who opened his children’s eyes to the world. He & my beloved mum inspired, motivated and encouraged us to be successful in our chosen professions. He may be gone but never forgotten ❤️
