i wrote about rfk jr's dubious supplement advice, hypervitaminosis A in the antarctic, and contend that no one deserves to be lied to, and no child deserves to be made ill on the strength of those lies:
buttondown.com/theswordandt...
The Poisoning of the American Mind
The winds at Cape Denison on the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, photographed by Frank Hurley, 1912 In the emptiness of Antarctica, on a desolate stretch...
We are seeing multiple instances of reviewers doing manuscript reviews via use of AI/LLM.
If you don't want to do a review the old-fashioned way, better to decline the request.
Giving someone else's manuscript to AI is a violation of intellectual property rights/laws; the manuscript isn't yours...
Out with Skeppsholmsgården's school ship and my fellow students. Practising cross bearing, dead reconing and man over board manouvers.
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Tråd:
"Klart är att bilderna inte verkar ha varit svåra att få tag på. Från okänd avsändare har de även nått min mejlkorg" skriver
@torbjornnilsso.bsky.social i SvD
www.svd.se/a/jQExrL/kri...
Den formuleringen förändrar bilden av DN:s avslöjande och vad det är som hänt...
Kristersson har satt ett svårslaget rekord | Torbjörn Nilsson
KOMMENTAR. Ulf Kristersson sätter ett svårslaget rekord i jakten på Henrik Landerholms efterträdare. Tobias Thyberg hann bara vara nationell säkerhetsrådgivare i tolv timmar.
Last year I was involved in designing a series of crisis scenarios and wanted to include Orbán moving on Transcarpathia. It was left out because it was felt to be going too far to be plausible. Apparently it's not.
1/ The US government has ordered the Swedish city of Stockholm to end its diversity, inclusivity and equality (DEI) programmes within 10 days. The city authorities say the demand is "bizarre" and they won't be complying. ⬇️
US embassy sends contract to Stockholm city planning office demanding they sign end to any work promoting equality, diversity or inclusivity.
www.dn.se/sverige/usas...
USA:s ambassad kräver lydnad av Stockholms stad: ”Bisarrt”
USA:s ambassad kräver att staden slopar mångfaldsarbete
declaring a moratorium on “I bet you could get Trump to do X” posts, the risk is too great
not saying anyone should, but I bet you could convince Trump to re-open Alcatraz in under 20 minutes
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Always funny to me that Yarvin is held up as the great intellect of the New Right and then when he argues for stuff it's this - here's some etymology for a synonym of a word you're using, so we gotta have a tyrant -- checkmate libs. Behold the philosopher.
Here is Curtis Yarvin’s “Gray Mirror” blog post where he accused the Trump administration of failing to understand that “regime change”, requires that “Every existing institution of science” be “fully cremated” & replaced w/ a “new scientific establishment.”
open.substack.com/pub/graymirr...
Barbarians and mandarins
"As soon as it stops accelerating, it stalls and explodes."
Such vapid court sycophants are a standard feature of the courts of kings and dictators; a free people has no use of them, but they thrive in the company of would-be autocrats who love their flattery and worship and care little if the underlying ideas are any good.
They very rarely are.
So Curtis Yarvin is a fool, so it will not surprise you that 'executive' is not, in fact, a 'literal synonym' of 'monarchy.'
Executive is just "that which carries out" from Latin exsequor, 'to follow to completion.' There is no etymological reason the executive needs to be a single person.
Always funny to me that Yarvin is held up as the great intellect of the New Right and then when he argues for stuff it's this - here's some etymology for a synonym of a word you're using, so we gotta have a tyrant -- checkmate libs. Behold the philosopher.
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Something lovely to start the week! 🐙🏺❤️
I revisited Heraklion Archaeological Museum a few days ago to see these fabulous clay pots with octopus decoration. Made by artisans from Bronze Age Crete about 3,500 years ago!
📷 by me
#Archaeology 🏺
Imagine writing yet another article about that weird pro-natalist incest sibling couple and not mentioning that time the brother slapped his toddler hard in the face, in front of a journalist, in public, in the middle of answering a question
Buy books. But not from Amazon. Buy them from
Bookshop.org, the independent site. This move by Amazon is shameful.
Here is a link to my book on
Bookshop.org.
bookshop.org/p/books/the-...I'll say this as many times as it needs to be said.
Save our Freaks.
Don't mine the Deep.
(also maybe unfollow NOAA. They're a disinformation account at this point. Fuck.)
When I took the history reporter job, I told my editor I would never "both sides" the Civil War, Confederates or slavery. I never did.
But here, ChatGPT (pic 1) has turned my work (pics 2,3) into whitewashed pablum and put MY FUCKING NAME on it.
I am livid, I am shaking. I don't know what to do.
Gonna be real with you, this feels like an advertisement for spiritual death
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The conservative movement has turned against reality on every scientific issue of our time, from gun violence to climate change to epidemiology.
If campuses are ideologically homogenous, it's not because academia has ostracized conservatives. It's because conservatives have ostracized academia.
I read the New York Review of Books. Every single f***ing article about "academic freedom" or "the crisis of the university" seems to be contractually obligated to include a paragraph (or more!) about how the university has become too ideologically homogenous or something similar. Even now!
Some would say this is a list of people who found common cause with obvious fascists and are now trying to tiptoe away from the consequences of their actions, much too late
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Welp, after 3 months of trying nothing meaningful to end the war they promised would be over within 24 hours, the Trump administration is exhausted and giving up.
Absolute clown show.
⚡️ US may soon abandon Russia-Ukraine ceasefire efforts, Rubio says.
The U.S. will cease its attempts to negotiate a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia unless there is clear progress within the next days, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on April 18, Reuters reported.
US may soon abandon Russia-Ukraine ceasefire efforts, Rubio says
Speaking after meeting European and Ukrainian officials for ceasefire talks, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Trump is interested in reaching a deal but has other priorities.
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My story breaking this news exclusively was 7K+ words and had almost all of this in it, and more:
www.npr.org/2025/04/15/n...
A whistleblower's disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data
A whistleblower tells Congress and NPR that DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data and hid its tracks. "None of that ... information should ever leave the agency," said a former NLRB official.
🧵 THREAD: A federal whistleblower just dropped one of the most disturbing cybersecurity disclosures I’ve ever read.
He's saying DOGE came in, data went out, and Russians started attempting logins with new valid DOGE passwords
Media's coverage wasn't detailed enough so I dug into his testimony:
The Russians are now openly promoting the idea of an American-Russian alliance against Europe.
UPDATE: It happened. In an 11:15 meeting, employees were told that the office has been eliminated and their positions will be terminated.
SCOOP: sources tell me that the State Dept plans to eliminate its only office to counter foreign disinformation, as soon as today, delivering a win to foreign governments like Russia, Iran, and China—and the office's mostly conservative critics.
www.technologyreview.com/2025/04/16/1...
US office that counters foreign disinformation is being eliminated, say officials
Conservative critics have long accused the department of helping to censor the American right.
As a biologist, I'm appalled at pride the White House takes in willful ignorance.
In yesterday's executive order about NPR and PBS, their first example of "the trash that passes for `news' at NPR and PBS" is the statement that "banana slugs are hermaphrodites."
But this is unequivocal fact.
The NPR, PBS Grift Has Ripped Us Off for Too Long
For years, American taxpayers have been on the hook for subsidizing National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which spread
I gotta say, “women are going to space” sounds a lot nicer than “the ultra rich are taking hyper-polluting joyrides to space while the planet descends into climate chaos”
I’m sorry but if your students use AI to write papers and you use AI to grade them zero school is happening. You are running together on a hamster wheel
Why even have a brain, any ideas, any ability to express them, any kind of communication with other people, any desire to solve problems or invent anything, any reason to learn, any use for your eyes or your heart, or any reason to teach or create
I think one thing chatGPT's invention has revealed is how many people - including some very important people in society - find just basic reading and writing to be laborious and cumbersome to perform, and how oddly closely that type of strained literacy correlates with having other shitty opinions.
"Even worse, when you Google one of these slop-squatted package names, you’ll often get an AI-generated summary from Google itself confidently praising the package, saying it’s useful, stable, well-maintained. But it’s just parroting the package’s own README, no skepticism, no context."
1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but
2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but
3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So
4. Now the LLM code points to malware.
LLMs hallucinating nonexistent software packages with plausible names leads to a new malware vulnerability: "slopsquatting."
LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything
: Hallucinated package names fuel 'slopsquatting'
Saturday fun - Fox in a Box escape rooms in Solna with friends. Two very good rooms. Great puzzles, fun themes
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You can try the Microsoft just released a Quake 2 demo that runs on genAI.
It forgets where you are you each time you look at the floor and soft-locks when it's to dark. A technological marvel.
You can try the "Copilot Gaming Experience" here:
copilot.microsoft.com/wham[Not loaded yet]
This is a 12 alarm fire for the economy. If being friends with the president and giving him kickbacks makes you exempt from large import taxes Vs your competitors, it will stratify the whole economy and push corruption and loyalty and political controls deep into the private sector
markets soar as investors realize that mommy didn't actually disappear, she was just hiding behind her hands
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Is it good when I log into my bank app to check my retirement savings and get a popup that says "Disturbances in services may occur due to heavy load on the systems"?
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