Samuel Pizelo

Being a Luddite Is Cool and All, but Have You Seen the Hilarious Tapestries These New Looms Are Making? Don’t get me wrong, I’m as invested in keeping my job as the next weaver. When the boss brought in that big new power loom, I was pretty skeptical....

"The new waterwheel they built to power the loom made the river undrinkable, and when the boss cut my hours in half, I couldn’t buy food anymore, which really made the whole rickets situation get out of hand. But that’s exactly the sort of time you need a laugh, right?"

📣Join us next week for Trip Out!, our third annual graduate-faculty research symposium.

‘Study after study shows that students want to develop these critical thinking skills, are not lazy, and large numbers of them would be in favor of banning ChatGPT and similar tools in universities’, says @olivia.science

www.ru.nl/en/research/...

Exclusive | OpenAI Employees Raised Alarms About Canada Shooting Suspect Months Ago The ChatGPT maker opted against informing Canadian authorities about Jesse Van Rootselaar’s descriptions of violence last June.

OpenAI employees pushed for the company to inform Canadian police about a user they thought would engage in real-world violence months before the person did just that, killing eight people in a horrific attack in Tumbler Ridge.

The company only reached out to police after the shooting had occurred.

this makes it clear how it's basically the tetris effect (or the same for tower defense/resource management games)

Suggestions for how to do that here, btw:

firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

w/ @nannainie.bsky.social and Peter Zukerman.

'The poorest among us, owning no factories, private jets, or oil rigs, are hardly a glimmer in the rearview mirror of the ultrarich as they race toward emission rates previously unseen by humankind.' futurism.com/scientists-w...

How to un-Big Tech your online life Plus, in this week’s Installer: a new Mario Tennis, Sony’s great new buds, a wild time-travel movie, and much more.

Big thanks to @davidpierce.xyz for featuring my guide to getting off US tech (and my phone home screen!) in the latest issue of Installer. I think I’ll also be grabbing a pair of those new Sony earbuds soon 👀

Posts from @weratedogs.com continue not to disappoint.

I find this question about whether chatbots are “alive” to be truly, truly boring. You can torture a definition of “life” so that it includes chatbots or you can listen to actual, unequivocal flesh-and-blood people talking about harm it does them *right now*.

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts Medical device makers have been rushing to add AI to their products. While proponents say the new technology will revolutionize medicine, regulators are receiving a rising number of claims of patient ...

“Researchers from Johns Hopkins, Georgetown and Yale universities recently found that 60 FDA-authorized medical devices using AI were linked to 182 product recalls, according to a research letter published in the JAMA Health Forum in August.”

Very excited about this book!

It Turns Out Waymos Are Being Controlled by Workers in the Philippines During a Congressional hearing, Waymo's chief safety officer, Mauricio Peña, was grilled over the company's reliance on overseas workers.

Once again, it turns out “fully autonomous” means “a guy in the Philippines.”

Flawed economic models mean climate crisis could crash global economy, experts warn States and financial bodies using modelling that ignores shocks from extreme weather and climate tipping points

“Current economic models can give estimates of losses that look precise but which the scientists said were wildly optimistic.” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

recently purchased a 260gb ipod on backmarket and transferred all my old mp3's backed up from when i was collecting music in high school / college...and then i downloaded soulseek and started ripping shit like crazy again

RETVRN

Plastic = Fossil Fuels in a cheap suit

New study: Plastic-linked health disasters are cutting 83m years of healthy population life

Recycling won't save us. Only a total system overhaul and production bans will. Everyone: kindly wake the hell up!

t.co/e59eLHktNj

Greenland tensions harden Europe’s push for energy independence Nine countries agree to build joint offshore wind projects and cables in the North Sea

The North Sea is officially becoming Europe’s green engine.

10 countries just signed a historic pact to build 100GW of offshore wind - enough for 143m homes

A new subsea "supergrid" will connect nations directly, securing energy independence and 90k+ jobs

www.ft.com/content/e9c9...

"AI didn't just increase its footprint in Washington in 2025. It ate tech lobbying whole." www.axios.com/2026/01/23/a...

I'm sorry. As a technology writer, I'm supposed to be telling you that this bet will some day pay off, because one day we will have shoveled so many words into the word-guessing program that it wakes up and learns how to actually do the jobs it is failing spectacularly at today. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding horses to run faster and faster, one of them will give birth to a locomotive. Humans possess intelligence, and machines do not. The difference between a human and a word-guessing program isn't how many words the human knows. I'm sorry. I know that when we talk about "digital sovereignty," we're obliged to talk about how we can build more data-centres that we can fill up with money-losing chips from American silicon monopolists in the hopes of destroying as many jobs as possible while blowing through our clean energy goals and enshittifying as much of our potable water as possible.

Córy Doctorow with another verbal bullseye: pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/n...

Tweet by Jatin @jatinkmalik The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist and to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible

How clean energy could save us trillions – DW – 01/07/2026 As clean energy prices fall, a fast transition to renewable energy is the cheapest option on the table. Experts say it could save us trillions in energy costs alone.

A shift to renewables by 2050 could save the global economy at least $12 trillion in energy system costs -

What are we [still] waiting for?

www.dw.com/en/fossil-fu...

The rise of AI denialism Computer scientist Louis Rosenberg argues that dismissing AI as a “bubble” or mere “slop” ignores the tectonic technological shift now unfolding.

Not sure why this dross, dated Dec 1, seems to be circulating now (and why it didn't cross my feed a month ago), but wow what a terrible essay.

A few comments, in a short 🧵>>

bigthink.com/the-present/...

Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance Scientists have long debated the origins of exceptional human achievements. This literature review summarizes recent evidence from multiple domains on the acquisition of world-class performance. We re...

Really interesting research showing that while ultra-specialization in a single discipline might lead to better results early in one’s career, multi-discipline training and practice pays off big time in the long run. This applies to a range of professions from scientists to athletes and more

"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future."

- @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit.

Incredible words.
Listen to all of it!

Microsoft Scales Back AI Goals Because Almost Nobody Is Using Copilot Google's Gemini is on pace to push Copilot into third place.

“tests from earlier this year found that AI agents failed to complete tasks up to 70% of the time, making them almost entirely redundant as a workforce replacement tool.”

—

Microsoft Scales Back AI Goals Because Almost Nobody Is Using Copilot :: Extremetech

www.extremetech.com/computing/mi...

Incredible book, if you haven’t seen it. I think about the “technologically precocious boy” all the time.