John Lewis

Robin Williams' daughter has some quality thoughts on AI slop

Front and back cover of the Zine sitting among Japanese maple leaves. Front cover has the title "Human Perspectives on the Latest AI Hype Cycle" with subtitle "AI Sucks and You Should Not Use It, Volume 2" along with the date of October 2025 and author Lauren Woolsey. Back cover has the text "References available on the back of this unfolded sheet and at padlet.com/laurenUU/antiAI" along with a QR code to that link. Then it has the text "Share with a friend, light the world! Connect w/ me: @cgsunit.bsky.social"

Pages 2 and 3 of the Zine, open among tree leaves. Page 2 starts with handwritten "First...some backstory!" and then the text reads as follows: "Version Volume 1 of this zine, (June 2025), is called “Why GenAI Sucks and you should not use it.” I gave copies to my friends, did swaps at Grand Rapids Zine Fest, and shared the digital scan with hundreds of folks. It’s been great to connect with a community of humans who also think AI sucks! Since June, more great folks have added to the conversation. Let me introduce a few here..." Page 3 is titled Anthony Moser and has the following text: "“I am an AI hater. This is considered rude, but I do not care, because I am a hater.” So opens this most excellent essay (posted August 2025). You absolutely need to read it. Also, it has 24 linked resources, if my Zine v1.1 list wasn’t enough to get you started being a hater."

Pages 4 and 5 of the Zine, open among tree leaves. Page 4 is titled Olivia Guest and has the text: "1. Look at Guest’s incredible collection promoting Critical AI Literacy (CAIL): olivia.science/ai . 2. Discover a framework to define AI in “What Does 'Human-Centred AI' Mean?” (July 2025). 3. Share with educator friends Guest et al: “Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia” (September 2025). Such a helpful paper for advocacy!" Page 5 is titled Ali Alkhatib and has the following text: "“AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power.” -from his essay Defining AI. Ali is on my recent radar because he’s starting “AI Skeptics Reading Group” the same month that this Zine launches (October 2025)! If you're a reader, check out the book list on p. 7 here!"

Pages 6 and 7 of the Zine, in partial shadow from tree leaves and surrounded by Japanese maple leaves. Page 6 is titled Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute and has the text: "Great projects DAIR supports: Data Workers Inquiry (work led by Dr. Milagros Miceli), Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 (by E. Bender and A. Hanna), Possible Futures workshop and Zine series. Timnit Gebru is founder and executive director of DAIR and co-author of the “TESCREAL Bundle” research paper. (Read it!) Page 7 is titled Further Reading and has a drawn stack of books with the following titles and publication months: Resisting AI (08/22), Blood in the Machine (09/23), The AI Mirror (06/24), Taming Silicon Valley (09/24), Why We Fear AI (03/25), More Everything Forever (04/25), The AI Con (05/25), Empire of AI (05/25). There are notes for The AI Con that the authors run the podcast mentioned on page 6 and that it is the book that the Reading Group from page 5 started on 10/13/25. The page ends with the text "Authors and full titles in reference list!" and a signature from Lauren "Double U."

Today's the day for my anti-AI zine volume 2: "Human Perspectives on the Latest AI Hype Cycle" 🎉

Enjoy the fruits of my focus these past few months and learn from many great people!

Scanned zine to print your own and the full text and references are available at padlet.com/laurenUU/antiAI

Three images of Saturn from top to bottom: First, a standard RGB color image showing the rings nearly edge-on at about a 30 degree angle. Middle, a black and white image similar to above, but a little sharper taken with a filter that allows only wavelengths longer than 850nm. Lastly, at bottom, the rings seen as starkly white and the planet dark. This is a very narrow wavelength range of about 20nm centered on 889nm where methane absorbs light, making Saturn itself appear dark and the rings bright.

Been imaging Saturn while its rings are nearly edge-on and tried some infrared filters. At this 889nm methane band, Saturn strongly absorbs light, whereas its rings scatter equally across wavelengths.

Also a good visual demo of how astronomers measure exoplanet atmospheres!

🔭🧪 #astrophotography

A black and white photograph of Henrietta Swan Leavitt. She is wearing a white blouse with a large lace collar that covers her shoulders, upper chest, and neck. Her hair is pulled up and she is looking directly at the camera. She has dark eyes in tis photo, strong eyebrows, and a long, thin nose.

Astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt was born #OTD in 1868. She established the period-luminosity relation for Cepheid variable stars, an essential tool for understanding the scale of our Universe. 🧪 👩‍🔬 🔭

Image: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Photo plate of Hubble's famous "VAR!" discovery. This is a photonegative plate of an image of the Andromeda Galaxy, with several small annotations made in grease pencil. One of them was previously marked "N" for "nova," but the N has been crossed out and replaced with an excited "VAR!" to indicate a Cepheid Variable.

VAR!

In the early morning hours #OTD in 1923, Edwin Hubble took a photo plate of M31 that showed a Cepheid variable star.

Using Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s distance-luminosity relationship, Hubble concluded that M31 is another galaxy outside the Milky Way. 🧪 🔭 ⚛️

Image: Carnegie Observatories

🎉 Happy paper publication day! 🎉 Our third catalog of binary black hole simulations, now published in Classical and Quantum Gravity. And it's open access!

Scheel et al. 2025 Class. Quantum Grav. 42 195017
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

Also on the @arxiv.bsky.social at arxiv.org/abs/2505.13378

Educational Program Coordinator II - East Lansing, Michigan, United States Position Summary The program coordinator will maintain the planetarium, present live shows, and create new planetarium visualizations. In addition, this position will assist customers, assist in educa...

If any of you fine folks are planetarians in (or want to be in) mid-Michigan, the Abrams Planetarium is hiring a full-time-staff position for the first time in 11 years!! Come work with the astro, scicomm, and informal ed folks at MSU!! 🔭 🧪 (reskeets welcome) careers.msu.edu/jobs/educati...

At least two people were killed and eight others were wounded in a shooting at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan, police said.

Follow live updates: https://cnn.it/42gDOb3

Long-time tech reporter on Tesla & climate tech beats here. The e-waste questions are real and come from within the climate movement tbh. Oil & gas / autos promoted ideas like EVs and batteries use power from the coal & gas powered grid anyway. And promoted "intermittent" sources as "unreliable."

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin ✨ figured out what stars are made of ✨ when she was just 25. 🔭🧪

Her PhD thesis basically established the Harvard astro department — at a time when Harvard didn't officially allow woman students.

I wrote this little profile to mark the 100th anniversary of her thesis:

a man with red eyes and the words " i 've found this whole experience to be very enlightening " below him ALT: a man with red eyes and the words " i 've found this whole experience to be very enlightening " below him

I love how Grand Admiral Thrawn “genius strategized” himself into irrelevance in another galaxy #StarWars (no hate on Chiss genius though)

iPhone 15 (!) photo of Scorpio and Sagittarius. The skies are SO BEAUTIFUL here.

Exactly Six Months Ago, the CEO of Anthropic Said That in Six Months AI Would Be Writing 90 Percent of Code Exactly six months ago, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei claimed that in six months, AI would be "writing 90 percent of code."

The big problem is investors will keep pouring money because *if* one of them hits, it's going to be worth an unfathomable amount.

A lot saw that as a matter of when, and hoping to hitch to the right horse.

Now I wonder how much is just sunk cost fallacy at play.

futurism.com/six-months-a...

ExoClock ExoClock is a project to monitor the ephemerides of transiting exoplanets. Everyone with a telescope and a CCD camera can participate!

Hearing about the very cool Exoclock project, which has more than 10000 amateur observations of transiting exoplanets - hugely important to keeping track of our known planet population: www.exoclock.space #EPSCDPS2025

Elizabeth Warren on people who say Dems needs to tone down their rhetoric: "Oh, please. Why don't you start with the president of the United States? And every ugly meme he's posted and every ugly word."

I wrote this story because the case of the Guatemalan children hasn’t received nearly as much media attention as it deserves.

I wanted to highlight the full extent of the government’s depraved conduct.

I hope you’ll read and share. Don’t look away.

www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-...

"Kavanaugh could have explained his position without showing his whole hood" ~ @lizdye.bsky.social 😲

Three people critically wounded in suburban Denver high school shooting, authorities say The shooting happened around midday at Evergreen High School in Evergreen, about 30 miles west of Denver, Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Jacki Kelley said.

Three teens have been hospitalized in critical condition after a shooting at a suburban Denver high school, authorities said Wednesday.
https://to.pbs.org/3VK0r3I

At least 2 students shot at a Denver-area high school, authorities say | CNN At least two students have been shot at Evergreen High School in Evergreen, Colorado, according to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office.

JUST IN: Three people are in critical condition after a shooting at Evergreen High School in Evergreen, Colorado, according to St. Anthony’s Hospital. https://cnn.it/46fImzg

Charlie Kirk Shot at Utah Valley University Event Turning Point USA cofounder Charlie Kirk was shot at an event at Utah Valley University on Wednesday. He later died from his injuries.

Breaking: Charlie Kirk Is Dead After Utah Valley University Shooting

Whew this is an intense read. Grateful to all the judges and lawyers who are working so hard for basic due process.

The Judicial Learning Curve by Anna Bower on Lawfare "District Court judges watch each other struggle with the Trump administration--and adapt."

NEW: The law is supposed to protect unaccompanied migrant children from being summarily whisked out of the country by ICE in the dead of night.

But that didn't seem to matter on Labor Day weekend, when the Trump administration tried to do just that.

My latest: www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-...

a great line from 1976 on the ELIZA effect: "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, "Computer Power and Human Reason"

this is absolutely wild!!!

Their Figure 2, showing the densest part of the Corona Australis cloud between 2017 (dark red) to 2021 (dark yellow), with two epochs in between. The entire bottom-right of the cloud is consistently moving towards the bottom and left.

Our galaxy is full of clouds of dust and gas. We can guess that they probably move, but it's hard to tell for sure. Until now!

A groundbreaking new paper by Martin Piecka et al. at @univie.ac.at presents the first *ever* direct measurement of the proper motion of the ISM! 🔭☄️🧪 #galactic

Clean Economy Tracker The Clean Economy Tracker (CET) tracks private-led investments and jobs in clean energy and technology manufacturing as well as non-manufacturing, commercial scale deployment projects in the United…

One-stop shop. Track private-led investments and jobs in US clean energy manufacturing and deployment, and related public statements by members of Congress, with The Clean Economy Tracker, developed by Atlas Public Policy and Utah State University.

Emergency Hearing over the Removal of Unaccompanied Minors to Guatemala Anna Bower Sunday, August 31, 2025, 3:29 PM Share On: f X in $ 6 B A play-by-play of Judge Sooknanan's hearing where she blocked the Trump administration's plans to send hundreds of unaccompanied children to Guatemala.

When the government tried to summarily deport dozens of migrant children to Guatemala last weekend, DOJ’s Drew Ensign said the following to a federal judge:

“All of these children have their parents or guardians in Guatemala who are requesting their return."

🧵

www.lawfaremedia.org/article/emer...

The total eclipse of the Moon at about 21h, here in Vienna

A lot of things about society suck a whole lot but one of them is that some single person will get filmed being a dickhead and then we’ll spend a full week hyperfixating on them.

It’s like the entire internet has pathological rumination.

the ruling and the footnotes are a really good read.