"There is more to duty than the ability to manipulate algorithms." - Wise words from Captain Janeway of the USS Voyager (Came across some old screenshot folders from 2017-2019. This was one of the more amusing relics...)
Marius Watz
@mariuswatz.bsky.social
Art and code since 1994. The time to resist is always.
Who knew relying on businesses to self-report environmental damage would result in <1% of incidents being reported? (Good of satellite imagery, though.) www.theguardian.com/business/202...
Only 0.5% of 90,000 oil slicks reported over five-year period, analysis finds
Pollution incidents reported between 2014 and 2019 were compared against scientific study that used satellite imagery to count slicks
theguardian.com
“What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.” Joseph Weizenbaum (creator of ELIZA), 1976 99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-...
The ELIZA Effect - 99% Invisible
Throughout Joseph Weizenbaum’s life, he liked to tell this story about a computer program he’d created back in the 1960s as a professor at MIT. It was a simple chatbot named ELIZA that could interact ...
99percentinvisible.org
Since 2008, CAN has defied big tech’s dominance, nurturing a global network of artists, designers, educators, hackers & makers—proving alternative networks not only exist, but flourish!
Remember the 2003 invasion of Iraq? The US said they were trying to avoid damaging public infrastructure, nonetheless collateral damage (power, water, sanitation) set Iraqi society back decades. In Gaza, there is no attempt at restraint. Damage to public infrastructure is a clear goal.
Minor win in the AI scraping arms race. Opt-in should be the default setting for life. www.cjr.org/analysis/clo...
Cloudflare Blocks AI Bots from Scraping Web Content Without Permission
The move is a win for media publishers.
cjr.org
Oddly amused by forensic bite / cut mark evidence in archeology. First it was cannibalism in starving Jamestown, now gladiators get their bragging rights confirmed. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...
Bite marks on York skeleton reveal first evidence of ‘gladiators’ fighting lions
Study offers rare insight into human-animal combat during Roman empire
theguardian.com
10 years ago today, we dropped a thing that people still ask me about regularly. The question "What's Really Warming the World?" still has the same answer. With Blacki Migliozzi, in conversation with NASA GISS geniuses @climateofgavin.bsky.social and @drkatemarvel.bsky.social 🎁🔗
What's Really Warming the World?
What's Really Warming the World? Climate deniers blame natural factors; NASA data proves otherwise
bloomberg.com
Introducing VizDex! An ever-growing library of personal and independent blogs and newsletters dedicated to data visualization. vizdexproject.com
VizDex
A library of personal and independent blogs and newsletters dedicated to data visualization.
vizdexproject.com
And here we are. The US is bombing Iran.
Marius Watz@mariuswatz.bsky.social · last yr.Watching old Clancy movies and thinking that however dumb their plots are, they sure aren’t far off the current situation. Trump moving B2’s with nothing but yes men and conspiracy theorists in the wings is not a happy thought.
To think only a few years ago people (myself included) were nauseated by performative corporate Pride efforts. Now the backlash against DEI and LGBTQ+ rights is so widespread, I worry about what kids are learning. And I'm in Norway, a relative liberal stronghold. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/20/o...
Opinion | We’ve Reached Rainbow Capitalism’s End
nytimes.com
Watching old Clancy movies and thinking that however dumb their plots are, they sure aren’t far off the current situation. Trump moving B2’s with nothing but yes men and conspiracy theorists in the wings is not a happy thought.
As much as I dread wide-spread AI adoption (because of humans and capitalism, not really AI), I'm still delighted by the weirdness of AI anthropology. Case in point: Golden Gate Claude www.anthropic.com/news/golden-...
Golden Gate Claude
When we turn up the strength of the “Golden Gate Bridge” feature, Claude’s responses begin to focus on the Golden Gate Bridge. For a short time, we’re making this model available for everyone to inter...
anthropic.com
4 years ago, I set up my indexer because those of HEN, Objkt and fxhash were regularly falling or lagging. This has not been the case for a long time now and maintaining my own indexer is time-consuming, and increasingly difficult. ⬇️ 1/4
Paolo Uccello (1397 - 1475), "Vase in perspective" Recreated (right) in Blender by u/Subushie on Reddit. www.reddit.com/r/blender/co...
Can’t believe it took me two years to finally bother to learn how to snap vertex to vertex while moving edges and points in Blender. That UI is dense, sometimes I learn stuff by pressing keys at random.
Gil Scott-Heron's "Whitey on the Moon" (1970) ought to be quaint and outdated by now, an artifact of a less civilized time. But here we are, 50 years later. Only real change? The goal is now Mars, or a 10 minute selfie ride. www.youtube.com/watch?v=otwk...
Not sure if this is just a drop-shipping hustle for fairly mid T-shirts, but the IG AI reels of a future dominated by Azerbaijan Technology and their EuroShrimp GMO farmers are pretty dope. Link to the reels, the Children of Khan site is where the merch lives. www.instagram.com/lucamaxiim/r...
Blender files from on-going series: ~300 files of sketches + iterations, taking 1-8hrs each to render just so I can reject 90% on sight. This is just the one project, I have 3-4 more folders just like it. Render addiction? Possibly. Still worth it. Proof: Elysian Fields release (2024)
Listening to my Uni’s plans to add AI chatbots to every class on Canvas pre-tuned to the subject and readings to “be an always ready TA to answer questions” and instead I want smaller classes where I have time to make sure every student is in touch with what we are doing.
*Maybe authors should *deliberately include* those AI prompts in the romantasy as a kind of Greek chorus www.404media.co/authors-are-...
Authors Are Accidentally Leaving AI Prompts In their Novels
‘I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with the J. Bree style’ appeared in the middle of a tense scene with a scaled dragon prince.
404media.co
reminds me that i should probably finish xenoblade chronicles. i got halfway through and then got a little overwhelmed!
VGC@videogameschronicle.com · last yr.Monolith Soft says using procedural asset generation for Xenoblade Chronicles 3 "reduced man-hours considerably", freeing up time to focus on graphics and gameplay. The studio says it's impossible to manually maintain games with 100,000+ assets. www.videogameschronicle.com/news/monolit...
A few years ago, Jeff Bezos asked people on Twitter what was something he could do with his vast resources that would have a significant effect and I said it was a trivial amount of money but that he should consider funding LGBTQIA+ helplines more. thehill.com/homenews/lgb...
thehill.com
Pocket, the save-for-later app for reading articles and news, is shutting down. Previous archive exports indicate I've used it at least since 2014. I'm getting back in the habit of using a feed reader, hopefully @inoreader.com will fill the void. via @404media.co www.404media.co/pocket-app-s...
Pocket, One of the Only Apps I Ever Liked, Is Shutting Down
Pocket, the app for saving articles to read later, announced it is shutting down on July 8.
404media.co
The Rowboat CSV explorer by @fathom.info is a wonder. No need to open Excel, fix formatting and create the same old formulas to find min/max/median. Skip setting up a test app to see basic graphs. Just drop it in Rowboat. rowboat.xyz
Rowboat
Welcome to Rowboat–a lightning fast tool for understanding large datasets. Sign in or create a free account to get started.
rowboat.xyz
Fathom Information Design@fathom.info · 2y agoAll three top runners in the women's division of the Boston Marathon crushed the previous time record this year! We took a look at the trends in finish times over the race's history, and were struck by the rapid leaps in record breaking over the first two decades women were allowed to compete.
Curious how many data vis blogs / sites from the 2010's are gone. Visualcomplexity.com is spam, thefunctionalart.com and infosthetics.com gone. I guess people burned out or won the influencer game? Still, @flowingdata.com remains a solid resource, informationisbeautiful.net, too.
Information is Beautiful
Distilling the world's data, information & knowledge into beautiful infographics & visualizations
informationisbeautiful.net