If you made a Venn diagram of every weird person I knew in Silicon Valley during the first dot-com boom, centrifuged it, extracted the pellet, and re-suspended it in high-proof eugenics with a splash of AI, you'd end up with something like this. It'll take a strong stomach to read this "gift" link.

Wip 🐾

One example of how Grok is being used to target women. Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch being sexualised, degraded, and humiliated step-by-step by Grok. All the images accurately reflect the prompts provided.

The varying brightness of red supergiant Betelgeuse could be explained by Hubble’s latest reveal: The bright star in Orion’s shoulder has an elusive companion star orbiting it in its extended atmosphere, leaving a “wake” of dense gas: https://news.stsci.edu/4sunaQH #AAS247 🔭

Sebastian Raschka has dropped a year in review on LLMs in 2025 together with predictions for 2026, and as always there's some really insigthful thoughts, here's the summary from Sebastian himself: magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/state-of-l... #ML #MachineLearning #ArtificialIntelligence #AI

Daily sketch 🪾🌕🥷🐈‍⬛️ Can you spot the cat ? Yes, the houses are crooked #art #artsky #ink #sketch

🖼️ original oil painting by Ukrainian artist Alisa Onipchenko-Cherniakovska.

This excellent film may start a little slow, but stick with it. It's a powerful short documentary about neo-colonial exploitation in the digital economy.

Pretty cool www.bbc.com/news/article...

The Waterfall Nebula apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap25123... What created the Waterfall Nebula? The origin is still being researched. The structure, officially designated Herbig-Haro 222, appears in the region of NGC 1999 in the Great Orion Molecular Cloud complex

I must link, with relation to this, at least one of Natee's tributes to these horses which are truly incredible. bsky.app/profile/himm...

I've been tracking the spread of nonconsensual deepfakes on X for more than two years. Here's a timeline of how Musk's leadership allowed the practice to flourish from a once-underground market to a viral trend, with little recourse for victims or legal enforcement. spitfirenews.com/p/grok-csam-...

2020s: AI "System Prompts" are lengthy, carefully constructed sets of expert rules about a particular domain, created by "prompt engineers". 1980s: AI "Expert Systems" were lengthy, carefully constructed sets of expert rules about a particular domain, created by "knowledge engineers".

Vous êtes des grands malades 😱 ➡️ l.humanite.fr/iSt

Happy New Year, everyone! This is a @theguardian.com books cartoon from a few years ago.

For New Year’s Day 2026, a hellenistic glass vase shaped like a pomegranate. 2nd century BC - 1st century AD. A symbol of abundance and good luck for the year ahead! 📷 Phoenix Art phoenixancientart.com/work-of-art/... #Archaeology

Making reading plans for 2026? The @barnesandnoble.com Pre-Order Sale is on until January 1st and is the perfect opportunity to snag THE LAST CONTRACT OF ISAKO for 25% off with PREORDER25 so that it's in your hands on release day

Trump Writes Netanyahu Strongly Worded Check

starmer is unpopular because he is not meaningfully different than the tories. labour voters want labour policies, not tory policies. mystery solved

i get why ppl want ai checkers to be a real thing but they are effectively just random number generators. i don't think it's because of ai being trained on existing books, it's because detection is just a parallel grift. that's where we're at: the technological countermeasures to scams are scams

Neurologist Sarah Tabrizi is leading the clinical effort that generate the first gene therapy to treat Huntington’s disease. She’s part of Nature’s 10 for 2025. 🧪

📢 We're hiring a postdoc (33 months) in human evolutionary genomics / paleogenomics / statistical genetics, Paris 🇫🇷 Project on selection on disease-associated variants, integrating ancient genomes, GWAS, and Ancestral Rec. Graphs. Start May 2026 (flexible). Apply here: emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/U...

Une explosion cosmique rare s'apprête à secouer notre galaxie et sera visible depuis la Terre : préparez vos télescopes ! www.geo.fr/sciences/une... #Space #Science #Innovation #Astrophysics #GalacticEvent #SupernovaAlert #JWSTData

​​Antarctica’s melting ice is raising global sea levels, worsening damage from floods and storm surges. Our reporter explains why the Thwaites Glacier is crucial for scientists who are trying to pin down how much extra water to expect, and how soon. Learn more: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/c...

More evidence that the Trump administration is cozying up to cybermercenaries. The Treasury Dept has removed three people closely affiliated with Intellexa, the company that makes Predator, off a sanctions list: therecord.media/treasury-san...

🧵 The Boomerang Nebula, with a temperature of 1 degree Kelvin, is the coldest natural place known in the Universe, colder than the cosmic microwave background (about 2.73 Kelvin), which is the faint afterglow of the Big Bang. ➡️ public.nrao.edu/news/alma-re... 🔭 🧪 #cosmology #science

“This could look like a user asking how much ibuprofen to take for a headache receiving a promoted ad for Advil in the chatbot’s response. Meanwhile, actual results on correct dosage may be brushed to the side, or buried under a mountain of ad text…”

🚅 Eurostar announced on Tuesday the suspension of "all trains between London, Paris, Amsterdam and Brussels" until further notice, following a double technical incident under the Channel Tunnel involving the tunnel operator Getlink.

We also have open positions on Tenure Track and Associate Professor. Please help boost this post. Tenure-track assistant professor: https://www.vacancies.aau.dk/scientific-positions/show-vacancy/vacancyId/882630 Associate professor […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

We see what you did there, Pluribus.

If you see this post a random fact about yourself: I helped discover one of the six quarks. ⚛️

Bernie Sanders: "We need to be thinking seriously about a moratorium on data centers. You gotta slow this process down. It's not good enough for the oligarchs to tell us 'you adapt.' Are they gonna guarantee healthcare to all people? What are they gonna do when there are no jobs? Make housing free?"

David Attenborough [whispering]: “Like a grain of sand in a vast desert, the predator blends seamlessly into its environment, nearly imperceptible to the naked eye.”

En 1989, un couple de chercheurs publiait une sociologie urbaine des classes dominantes qui marqua par son effet de dévoilement d’un entre-soi absolu. Enfin réédité, « Dans les beaux quartiers » des Pinçon-Charlot annonçait déjà la sécession des riches. www.mediapart.fr/journal/cult...

Amazingly, reaction times using screens while driving are worse than being drunk or high—no wonder 90 percent of drivers hate using touchscreens in cars. Finally the auto industry is coming to its senses.

very much captures the experience of using generative AI to write for you instead of learning how to write

It is surprising to me that none of the major platforms have actual _parental control_ features so that we can limit the amount of time that our parents can spend online, and which apps they’re allowed to use. I don’t worry about my teenager’s use of the internet at all, just my octogenarian dad’s.

Kristina Gjerde, defender of the deep ocean, has died

Anybody who has dealt with somebody with dementia should know that confronting them with evidence they’ve effectively lost a cherished memory can make them extremely sad or even trigger a breakdown

This year, I’d like to say a special thank you to our incredible emergency services who are working hard to keep Londoners safe today and during the festive period. You are London at its very best.

When student loan borrowers are in default, how does the Trump regime respond? By garnishing their wages. When billionaires see their wealth hit record highs, how does the Trump regime respond? By extending their tax cuts. This is what I mean when I say the system is rigged.

A new year’s wish that we all start framing paying taxes as positive and patriotic contribution to a better world for all. Thank you Anthony Joshua! I’ve just paid mine too. They were quite a lot less than yours, but for some reason most historians don’t earn £68.5m.

So I am going to say something about romance as a genre. A lot of people think that romance is ignorable because <insert thing they think about romance> and romance authors don't count because <insert thing they think about romance>. This thread is not about whether you have to like romance.

It's Trump policy that U.S. tech must be globally dominant. It's also US policy that its tech corps must be free from: Regulation. Taxation. Fact checking and monitoring for hate lies, disinformation. All are now being treated as attacks on the U.S. itself. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

US bars five Europeans over alleged efforts to ‘censor American viewpoints’ https://aje.io/tr548o

This cosmic butterfly is IRAS 23077+6707, the largest planet-forming disc seen around a young star yet!  Hubble has revealed it to be an unusually chaotic specimen, with wisps of material flying far beyond the disc 👉 https://esahubble.org/images/opo2606/ 🔭

“As a writer…you are the freest person that ever was.” Don’t let genAI ever take away this freedom.

Step on snek #cat #linocut

𝐒𝐰𝐞𝐝𝐞𝐧 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐧𝐨𝐰𝐲 𝐎𝐰𝐥. 💔 For the first time in 20 years, a bird species has disappeared from the country.