Bohdan Widła

Unexpected laughs thanks to the gargantuan opinion in Getty v. Stability AI (the stuff below concerns the application of the standard of average consumer in trademark law)

Stop giving Ridley Scott ideas for another presequel.

YouTube video by Weebl's Stuff Narwhals : animated music video : MrWeebl

Which, again randomly, reminds me of this. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykwq...

I should get back to work.

a drawing of a purple pony with a unicorn horn ALT: a drawing of a purple pony with a unicorn horn

Which randomly reminds me of a certain (failed) attempt to convince a court in Warsaw to grant an injunction prohibiting the sale of toys depicting "ponies with distinctive colorful manes, fancifully outlined eyes, and tails with long colorful hair".

I wonder if the unicorn:
- just gave up
- consulted a lawyer and gave up upon advice
- lost the case ON COPYRIGHT GROUNDS

The worse problem is that any of those is plausible.

In a UN speech today, President Trump said that "all of these [climate] predictions were wrong".

Back in 2019 I led a research effort to digitize old climate model projections and assess how well they did. Turns out they got future warming pretty spot on!

Very fine people on both sides!

<approvingly gnaws on wood>

To be fair, the article says it quite directly and lists all the names of killed journalists.

August 29, 1981 - New York Times editorial “Heating up the Atmosphere” - All Our Yesterdays Forty four years ago, on this day, August 29th, 1981, a week after a front page story “Study finds warming trend that could raise sea levels,” the New York Times editorialised For years there have bee...

On this day 44 yrs ago (Aug 29 1981) the New York Times editorialised

"7 scientists from NASA claim to have found evidence that C02 has already been warming the Earth for a century. They predict it will produce ”unprecedented” warming in the next century."

1/n
allouryesterdays.info/2025/08/28/a...

Surely if we invest more in AI, we will solve it, won't we.

NEW CHART: Trump's "big beautiful bill" & other efforts to dismantle climate policy means the US will add an extra 7bn tonnes of emissions to the atmosphere from now until 2030, compared to meeting its former climate pledge under the Paris Agreement 🫠

www.carbonbrief.org/...

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers.

The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

Line graph time series of 2025's daily Arctic sea ice extent compared to decadal averages from the 1980s to the 2010s. The decadal averages are shown with different colored lines with purple for the 1980s, blue for the 1990s, green for the 2000s, and white for the 2010s. Thin white lines are also shown for each year from 2000 to 2024. 2025 is shown with a thick gold line. There is a long-term decreasing trend in ice extent for every day of the year shown on this graph between May and August by looking at the decadal average line positions.

🚨 Friday ice update - #Arctic sea ice extent is currently the *lowest* on record (JAXA data)

• about 340,000 km² below the 2010s mean
• about 1,020,000 km² below the 2000s mean
• about 1,640,000 km² below the 1990s mean
• about 2,270,000 km² below the 1980s mean

More: zacklabe.com/arctic-sea-i...

If they have entrenched opinions, I feel there's nothing I can do. If they just repeat something that they may have heard somewhere, but don't really care that much, I just say "I wish what you said were true, but sadly it is not" and sincerely explain my own fears. Does it work? I wish I knew.

‘This is a fight for life’: climate expert on tipping points, doomerism and using wealth as a shield Economic assumptions about risks of the climate crisis are no longer relevant, says the communications expert Genevieve Guenther

"If the risk of a plane crashing was as high as the risk of the AMOC collapsing, none of us would ever fly because they would not let the plane take off." (@doctorvive.bsky.social).

Exactly, this.

Unprecedented heat in the North Atlantic Ocean kickstarted Europe’s hellish 2023 summer. Now we know what caused it Parts of the Atlantic Ocean are again much warmer than normal, priming Europe for more extreme heat this summer.

Read the story behind our new study published yesterday in Nature, unfiltered straight from the scientists: 🌊
theconversation.com/unprecedente...

Zomgwtfbbq. Well that's a phrase I've not seen in a sentence in a long time.

Rapid butterfly declines across the United States during the 21st century Numerous declines have been documented across insect groups, and the potential consequences of insect losses are dire. Butterflies are the most surveyed insect taxa, yet analyses have been limited in ...

How about this - total butterfly abundance in the USA fell by 22% across the 554 recorded species within 20 years. 20 years! Obviously it's not only about butterflies, but everything that depends on them.

And here we are, discussing growth, deregulation, blah-blah.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I only just noticed the title of the show in the 'Hackers' which Zero Cool stops after telling the racist anchor 'Yak, yak, yak...get a job'.

My brain apparently still lives in the 1990s and it's hard to get used to the fact that the tech-savvy racists actually pretty much run the show now.

Hmmm.

Hm.

On the same day, I read about EU wanting to "cut the the eco-related red tape" and this. Crystal blue lakes in Greenland turning brown and becoming CO2 sources, not sinks. Just like that, abruptly. But yeah, let's keep worrying about "competitiveness" and "red tape".

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

My lukewarm reaction to all the debates around "making Europe competitive again", "listen to Draghi" and "why so much regulation" are pretty much summed up by this - in a not-so-long run, it's just not gonna matter.

Realny i najwyższy stopień zagrożenia Co robią urzędnicy, jeśli bardzo nie chcą zrealizować wniosku o informację publiczną? Zaczynają siać strach, wątpliwości i niepewność!

A Polish court claims that if you grant access (via freedom of information laws) to source code of a program that pseudo-randomly matches judges with new cases, it leads to a "real and highest level of threat". More in this post by @infzakladowy.bsky.social informatykzakladowy.pl/realny-i-naj...

In line with my rebellious nature, I finally deactivated my 'professional' X account. Which leaves me with only one more, the one used solely to follow Polish politics (what this says about my nature, I don't even want to know).

Simulated reconstruction of December #Arctic sea ice thickness since 1901. Large interannual variability, but watch what happens in recent years...

Information about this data: doi.org/10.1175/JCLI.... Data set only available through 2010.

47 stars on 25 December in #AdventOfCode - I think this is my personal best or close to it. One more task to go, but it's gotta wait for another day.

I should say that I wasted a lot of hours in December on this, but it makes no sense to call this effort a waste. Better than any crossword puzzle!

I still haven't solved today's Advent of Code, so I must post about law :( What's the status of text and data mining of code under EU copyright law? The article may or may not include words such as 'lexer' and 'tokenizer', and only a very small part is about genAI. academic.oup.com/grurint/adva...

Still in the game! #AdventOfCode