Eva Amsen

Weird support bot hallucinating a date that didn’t exist

Still reeling from the Stanford report on Brexit. Reduced GDP by up to 8% and investment by as much as 18%. The UK Treasury would have £40 billion more each year if Britain had remained in the EU. Devastating self-immolation.

Anyway, we found another way to get through and now have an appointment for the very real date of Friday the 28th.

a woman is talking to a man and says because i didn 't think march 31st existed . ALT: a woman is talking to a man and says because i didn 't think march 31st existed .

It suddently said "Oh, sorry, I made a mistake. Friday is the 29th of November. I booked your appointment for Friday, 29th of November, 2025."

Friday is NOT the 29th, it's definitely the 28th. Everything was going right and then the AI just hallucinated a date that doesn't exist.

The weirdest AI hallunication happened today: My partner was struggling to interact with a bot over the phone, trying to book in a repair for our fridge. After much back and forth, the bot agreed to book something in on Friday November 28th. But then!

I had one on Twitter and applied for one here as well, but I think I lost my relevance in the meantime! (Didn’t get it)

What's in your local university's museum? Is it a collection of old science objects, or is it a day trip destination for families? Can it be both?

New Mixture, in which I muse about university museums. 🧪 mixture.substack.com/p/whats-in-y...

What's in your local university's museum? Is it a collection of old science objects, or is it a day trip destination for families? Can it be both?

New Mixture, in which I muse about university museums. 🧪 mixture.substack.com/p/whats-in-y...

A man in a Batman costume and a pregnant woman in a crowded subway car, their faces obscured by pixelation. Text on top of the image reads: "Fig. 1: An example of the experimental setting, with Batman and a woman simulating pregnancy stand in a crowded metro"

Science will often take you to unexpected and delightful places. In this study, researchers hypothesized that riders in a crowded subway car would be more likely to offer their seat to a pregnant person if there were someone in the subway car dressed as Batman 🧪🦇

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

mitochondria watercolor

no ai only brain watercolor

blue neuron scarf

My shop is once again open for all your #sciart needs! Clickety-click! artologica.etsy.com

Was she on the side of wanting to live with the leeches or getting rid of them?

It’s so cold today. Not objectively (it will be colder, still) but the temperature dropped by about 15 degrees in just a few days. This morning it was literally freezing and yet somehow there was still a guy wearing shorts. I was giving him confusing stares from behind my own five layers of shirts.

Don’t worry, they usually only have 18!

Last night it was very close to someone's house, but I see that they already dragged it further away this morning!

Escaped flamingo from Cornwall doing 'extremely well' in France An escaped flamingo is showing the skills and resilience needed for the wild, keepers say.

A young flamingo flew away from a zoo in Cornwall even though it had its wings clipped. A few days later it was spotted in France. It can't go back to its family because of avian flu concerns, but flamingo experts seem to think it will be fine! 🧳🦩https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rpykye4qxo

Thank you! I just discovered that my borough has a website specifically for reporting things like this, so I've raised it there. "Forest bike" had its own category so it's clearly not the first time...

Back then a broken bike would also have been a lot quieter. This one crunches LOUDLY. There is also an alarm but that's not as noisy. It just goes CRONCH CRONCH wee-oo-wee-oo CRONCH CRONCH and has been doing so since last night. People already moved it away from the houses a bit.

If it’s still there when i’m home I can film the noise and post it to Instagram with a tag on their account. That’s my only remaining contact route I think

Something similar previously happened when an out of battery zipcar was stuck on the street. I do have that app and noticed that the system wasn’t even registering the car anymore. I did report that one and Zipcar took it away so now a Forest user needs to do the same for that bike.

So now I just wait for a Forest user to find and report the bike I guess.

London problems: there is a broken Forest bike on my street making loud crunching noises since last night. The only way to report this is through their app, which I don’t have and don’t want. Their instagram messages are closed to strangers as well. I can’t post it publicly because it’s my street.

Libraries buy the books, and in several countries authors get paid for how often their books were borrowed.

And it all makes “the best party wear of the season” look extra frivolous.

A wise investment

elmo from sesame street standing in front of a wall ALT: elmo from sesame street standing in front of a wall

You just made the same joke I already made about myself

a man wearing glasses and a tie is sitting in front of a computer and says what is going on ? ALT: a man wearing glasses and a tie is sitting in front of a computer and says what is going on ?

Do I actually have to explain that the joke was that this was just such a minor inconvenience? Do you actually think that I thought that it was a big deal?

I'm affected by the Cloudflare outage in the sense that I wanted to upload a better selfie to a website for a work thing but the upload site is now down so they're going to use my ugly selfie that I took rushedly at 8AM before I washed my hair.

Screenshot of the OpenMoji project homepage. The text says OpenMoji 16.0.0 Open source emojis for designers, developers and everyone else! with a Search emoji box below and a lot of random emojis scattered on the page.

I don't think this science communication resource gets enough love.

OpenMoji offers 4,000+ free, #opensource emojis (CC BY-SA 4.0), with categories for healthcare, climate, UI...

Challenge: find Greta Thunberg and a Viennese coffee house. ☕

🔗 openmoji.org #SciComm #Design

Cartoon of two guys whose eyeballs are falling out and they’re playing racketball with one of the loose eyeballs

Cartoon of a bald guy with two empty eye sockets. From one socket an eyeball is hanging loosely by its optic nerves.

Seen at Utrecht University Museum. Don’t you hate it when you randomly lose your eyes?

I don't want AI generated art, I want AI emptied dishwasher