Mads

One bit In my new environment design book is demonstrating staging techniques, now live on Kickstarter! www.kickstarter.com/projects/190...

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

The Absolute Units art. Three giant sheep hover over the English countryside.

🐏 New Absolute Units 🐏

Same-sex relationships have always been part of rural England, but they've been underrepresented in our collections.

In the first of 2 episodes, @timjerrome.bsky.social shares his work tracing queer rural lives in The MERL archives.

merl.reading.ac.uk/explore/abso...

basically if you do not have an extremely resilient sense of self/theory of mind and a strong willingness to repeatedly impose behavioral rules on the agent, extended interaction with the free tier of chatgpt is designed to make you psychotic. its psycho-affectively akin to licking a car battery

A telescopic view of stars and a blue-green comet. The comet has a wispy dust tail that extends up and to the left.

A black and white version of the previous image of the comet showing its tail extending upward and to the left.

Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) as seen this morning. I kind of feel the black and white version brings out more detail in its tail. #comet 🔭

Not region locked for the US! VERY fun song

Ahead of the case caption, a handwritten note: "Trump has pardons and tanks . . . . what do you have?" Judge Young's reply: "Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous, Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People of the United States –- you and me -- have our magnificent Constitution. Here’s how that works out in a specific case –- "

AAUP v. Rubio is out, and look at how it starts. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Collage de 9 photos de fleurs en papier crépon : des zinnias, des roses, des tulipes, une dahlia, deux pivoines, une hortensia, des pois de senteur.

Ma petite collection de fleurs roses 🌷💕

#paperflower

The persecution! The disrespect! The gall! How could the librarian not realize this dude is the main character

I need to go back to my roots. Be the bitch I wish to see in the world.

In this spirit of fraternity, hope and caution, we call upon your leadership to uphold the following principles and red lines to foster dialogue and reflection on how AI can best serve our entire human family: Human life and dignity: AI must never be developed or used in ways that threaten, diminish, or disqualify human life, dignity, or fundamental rights. Human intelligence – our capacity for wisdom, moral reasoning, and orientation toward truth and beauty – must never be devalued by artificial processing, however sophisticated. AI must be used as a tool, not an authority: AI must remain under human control. Building uncontrollable systems or over-delegating decisions is morally unacceptable and must be legally prohibited. Therefore, development of superintelligence (as mentioned above) AI technologies should not be allowed until there is broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and there is clear and broad public consent. Accountability: only humans have moral and legal agency and AI systems are and must remain legal objects, never subjects. Responsibility and liability reside with developers, vendors, companies, deployers, users, institutes, and governments. AI cannot be granted legal personhood or “rights”. Life-and-death decisions: AI systems must never be allowed to make life or death decisions, especially in military applications during armed conflict or peacetime, law enforcement, border control, healthcare or judicial decisions.

Independent testing and adequate risk assessment must be required before deployment and throughout the entire lifecycle. Stewardship: Governments, corporations, and anyone else should not weaponize AI for any kind of domination, illegal wars of aggression, coercion, manipulation, social scoring, or unwarranted mass surveillance. Responsible design: AI should be designed and independently evaluated to avoid unintentional and catastrophic effects on humans and society, for example through design giving rise to deception, delusion, addiction, or loss of autonomy. No AI monopoly: the benefits of AI – economic, medical, scientific, social – should not be monopolized. No Human Devaluation: design and deployment of AI should make humans flourish in their chosen pursuits, not render humanity redundant, disenfranchised, devalued or replaceable. Ecological responsibility: our use of AI must not endanger our planet and ecosystems. Its vast demands for energy, water, and rare minerals must be managed responsibly and sustainably across the whole supply chain. No irresponsible global competition: We must avoid an irresponsible race between corporations and countries towards ever more powerful AI.

I was part of a working group on AI and Fraternity assembled by the Vatican. We met in Rome and worked on this over two days. I am happy to share the result of that intense effort: a Declaration we presented to the Pope and other government authorities

coexistence.global

What an expertly called shot

“[Minority] doesn’t use AI! How could this be???”
At MINIMUM - we know that we can’t get away with the same vibes based approach to facts that others can. We’ll get full blame for any uncaught mistakes in the AI output.
Seeing this play out w/ a ND male friend of mine right now.

Not stuff wise: a simmer pot with some spices and half an orange. Nice smells are a very underrated form of homeyness.
Stuff wise: Facebook is a pit, but I’ve found local buy nothing groups to be occasionally fruitful if I put the time in.

These are spreads for McCall's magazine by Andy Virgil, 1959. Each spread was paying about $1,500 at that time. Today that would be between $9,000-$12,000. The average price of a brand new car in 1959 was $2,200.

I’m not an Absolute Coffee Guy so maybe Mr Cena is full of it but this absolutely cracked me up.

GOOD NEWS! Researchers at the University of Florida have developed a UNIVERSAL vaccine that dramatically BOOSTS the immune system’s ability to fight tumors- even WITHOUT targeting a SPECIFIC cancer type. It has the potential to do away with chemotherapy, surgery AND radiation treatment.

Norwegian home invasion.

I keep catching strays from "technology is neutral" people, so let's set things straight.

1) Technology is not neutral, especially the subset of technology called "algorithms"
2) The form-factor that makes a technology into a tool is not neutral
3) How tools are productized is not neutral

[rant]

The cover of a book featuring a spider in the middle of a spider web, surrounded by snakes. The top reads: THERE'S DEATH IN THE POT and is accompanied by a skull.

"There is Death in the Pot" — front cover for an early 19th-century book on culinary poisoning.

Social Scout Find your accounts across hundreds of platforms to clean up your online presence

Final comment is a reminder that this exists, which attempts to track down your internet footprint so you can manage it. It also does NSFW sites optionally for adult performers

It’s buggy and there’s false positives; going to try to improve it soon. There’s also an issue with Russian clone sites.

5 questions for Danielle Citron

Read this interview with a personal hero, Professor @daniellecitron.bsky.social: "we have essentially presumed that data collection is a good...We have long ignored this important inclination that collection itself is endangering our privacy and civil liberties" www.politico.com/newsletters/...

My photo shows a small Roman flask made of translucent cobalt blue glass in the form of a mouse, viewed in profile with head to the left. The neck of the flask (on the right) is funnel-shaped and slightly up-turned to look like a tail. The body of the vessel is rounded and has four tooled trails for feet. A separate blob of glass forms the head with eyes, ears, and a pointed nose. The flask surface is decorated with distinctive trails of glass which have been flattened and notched, using a technique known as ‘snake thread’. Dimensions 6.3 x 5.1 x 14.6 cm.

Something lovely for the weekend! A 1,800 year-old Roman glass flask shaped like a little mouse 🐭 💙

The Met 📷 by me www.metmuseum.org/art/collecti...

#Archaeology

💯💯💯

Many ancient homes all over the world had no private kitchens/food prep spaces, period! Especially if you were poor!

This is why the discovery of a largely-intact "fast food" shopfront in Pompeii was such a huge deal, a few years ago. These places rarely survive the passage of time.

In Renaissance Italy (my specialty) many small apartments had a fireplace for heat but no oven or food prep space. One could buy bread, a chunk of meat, and “sauce” to take home and roast the meat on a spit, very like buying a microwave meal today. For complex things (stews, veggies, pies) takeout.

Authoritarians love "Gen AI" because it
- Sounds confident even when factually wrong
- Broadly conforms to & reproduces their biases, off the shelf
- Lets them create bespoke realities (text, audio, moving & still image) which agree w/ their biases
- Degrades trust in knowledge/evidence/expertise…

I see grocery/takeout shaming discourse going around again, so this is your periodic historian reminder that cooking from scratch daily while working has never been sustainable, and for millennia everyone either relied on takeout & restaurants or ate in huge households w/ big dorm-like group dining.

Background paintings from Castle in the Sky (1986), dir. Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli

Pieces painted by Nizo Yamamoto, Toshiro Nozaki and Mutsuo Koseki

Oh, this is a good topic!

There is an element of 'consent' to pitched battles, but it's not the old myth of generals agreeing to have a battle before tea time.

And to the question - a better Roman general would presumably have refused battle at a place like Cannae.

But let's talk about it. 1/