Common Cause sued a North Carolina county board of elections in federal court Wednesday, claiming the state’s legislature passed discriminatory measures to impose new electoral districts. #nccourts #ncpol @courthousenews.bsky.social www.courthousenews.com/north-caroli...

Users: Can we have a search engine that works? Google: How about an AI summary you didn’t ask for? Users: No, thank you. Accurate search engine? Google: How about if we make the summaries wildly unreliable? Users: Please, no. Google: Take it take it take it take it…. Users: WTF?

Yet another way that tech billionaires are stealing from us while getting richer off of planetary destruction (in addition to data centers being unbearably loud, noxious, water hogs that are driving up local utility prices):

NEW: Income isn’t supposed to play a role in how much housing assistance FEMA gives families. But in some North Carolina counties, the highest-income homeowners received two to three times as much money after Hurricane Helene as those with lower incomes. With @theassemblync.bsky.social

! www.propublica.org/article/kris...

The power went out before stuff got really bad, so you only see a tiny fraction of what was to come for us here in the High Country. Helene was the worst fear I have ever experienced. I haven't been the same since Sept 27, 2024.

A morning at the grocery store for Helene’s survivors ncnewsline.com/2025/09/22/a...

Checking out alternative locations for our geology field methods field trips this weekend, and the Helene damage is still so stark, even one year later. This is a landslide off the trail of one of the few locations that's still even passable.

this exists it is called thinking

North Carolina is anticipating a data center boom. Will residents face higher utility bills and more polluting gas plants as a result?

"The conclusion of this experiment is that ChatGPT Plus did not meet SciPak’s standards" You don't say.

Will LLMs someday predict renewable electricity output, or guide dispatch decisions, as well as today's (far less resource intensive) systems? It's possible. Will the incremental performance improvement be worth all the pollution and power grid strains/costs from data center buildout? I doubt it.

If a dude offered to help you write crappy memos and essays, and you found out they were also helping children kill themselves, would you keep working with that dude?

I’m proud to say that @noaa.gov and NCEI has released a 1 year retrospective on #Helene using ESRI Story Maps. arcg.is/aqCD4 Here is a brief thread of how this came to be and how NOAA can still do good things (even while wearing pajamas).

Whoa, kind of mind-blowing. The rocks above the end-Cretaceous mass extinction look different than the ones below it because of the ways that dinosaurs modified the environment. www.nature.com/articles/s43...

As of this morning, the Department of Homeland Security has released the $64 million, Sen. Budd has been fighting for. Last week, Budd announced he would prevent DHS noms from moving foward while DHS Secretary Noem delayed payment to NC. #ncpol charlotteobserver.com/news/politic...

We are so deeply fucked.

I'm listening to this right now as an audiobook and it's fascinating. The early human history stuff in particular, plus the whole way everything is tied together is 👍

People. This book is SO GOOD. Truly -- I am about 70% the way through and the way Peter explains and synthesizes and expands and provides fresh perspective is truly stunning.

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Not enough people know about Homer City. The single largest fossil fuel plant that's being built *explicitly* to power a data centre. This isn't a future projection, or some hollow marketing. This is physical stuff happening right now. bsky.app/profile/keta...

Something I didn't get to say yesterday: We heard over and over during the event about "human-centered" approaches to "AI". But if refusal is not on the table (at every level: individual students and teachers right up through UNESCO) then we have in fact centered the technology, not the people.

I really don't think we've barely begun to come to terms with how tech companies have actively decided to destroy the basic infrastructure of human information to juice their share price

We built a calculator that doesn't work, but don't worry, it's also a plagiarism machine that will tell you to kill yourself. It runs on the world's oceans and costs 10 trillion dollars.

"The world just doesn’t have the ability to pay for this much AI...When shareholders finally wake up to the fact that AI isn’t generating cash flow, only burning it, the guillotine will fall." The venture capitalists are turning on AI, this is akin to porn. pracap.com/global-cross...

Thinking about an analogy: gen AI is like microwave ovens - full of features which no-one asked for, designed by people who don't understand how cooking works, which are replicated and amplified until the public think it's the only option.

The Department of Homeland Security is holding up more than $100 million preapproved dollars intended to help hurricane-battered North Carolina clean up storm damage and fix infrastructure, according to documents obtained by The Post.

I beg rich AI pushers to actually show an example of AI working at a certain task before demanding that we replace large parts of our government with it

Over 100,000 voters face disenfranchisement, but all North Carolinians can assist in making sure that doesn’t happen. ncnewsline.com/2025/07/21/w... #ncpol #nc #ncga

Making NIH advisory council members political appointees, overturning the tradition of using a scientifically diverse collection of the best and brightest minds available, will literally destroy US medical science. Scientific general strike, anyone? www.nature.com/articles/d41...

When Helene hit Western North Carolina, social media was flooded with fake content, lots of it photoshopped or AI generated, heavily promoted by paid influencers and foreign interests. The reason that largely hasn't happened now? Easy - no big election coming up. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/c...

Also funny how the masters of AI are not using it as a shortcut to riches but instead are trying to sell it as a shortcut to riches.

This is pure evil.

"Numbers released in May by the National Science Foundation (NSF) indicate that...the number of early-career researchers it supports could fall by 78%...'It’s a nightmare,' Simon says. 'I really fear for the future of science.'" @science.org www.science.org/content/arti...

I’m divorcing QR code menus at restaurants, on biblical grounds

Once a rural hospital closes, it’s not coming back. We’re looking at irreversible damage to healthcare for rural Americans. Every story should mention this.

are toilets BIVALVES

The next time someone says "AI democratizes expertise" to me, they are going to have to watch these horrific videos -- and be warned, they are awful -- and then repeat that claim. We have free Prejudice Replicators now at scale.

This app is filled with people who styled themselves as "resistors" or "antifascist" but use Gen AI for memes, seemingly not caring that the people behind it are technofascists and that it's sucking up valuable resources for the lulz

A contender for the most “Show me your budget and I’ll tell you who you are” bills in modern history. An act of breathtaking moral monstrosity and nearly unprecedented self-sabotage for the country.

White Collar crime is legal in the US if you're rich and until that is fixed, the US will always be a backwater country that fails to live up to its full potential.

“Alligator Alcatraz” will begin operations on Wednesday. This is your reminder that a prison without due process is a concentration camp.

A few months ago, Nature published how-to guide for using ChatGPT to write your peer reviews in 30 minutes. This is, of course, a horrible idea. Here’s my response with @jbakcoleman.bsky.social .

Alexa, show me what a total disdain for science looks like. www.scientificamerican.com/article/trum...

OMG. STOP. AI is not the answer to situations where students can't make up their minds, or change their minds, got talked into dual enrollment without understanding the consequences, etc.

This is horrible.

Has anyone calculated the groundwater resources that will be decimated if these go thtough?

it’s even more demoralizing when the history you’re repeating is history you were around for the first time