#Bugsky 🐙🌿 Shared with me by a fof in SoCal - this is a gynandromorph (both male & female) valley carpenter bee (Xylocopa sonorina). Females are black, males orange, so the extreme color dimorphism really stands out. Per Doug Yanega at UC Riverside, bee gynandromorphs he’s seen are mosaic instead—

Welp, this is a goddamn nightmare.

Counterpoint: right wing fascists are burning down the world.

It's weird, mamdani and Polanski are the most liberal leftists around

Its just anthropic. What do they know?

Huge W for S&P 500's credibility. No special rules for the special Nazi boy's fraudulent cash grab to keep his deeply indebted company alive. Well done.

"Pornography is a national security threat" is a sentence with a newspaper headline in 2026.

Amen.

"It takes one to know one."

AI referrals now account for about 44% of web traffic for some businesses. AI chatbots are "shallow readers" whose responses can be manipulated. And they increasingly are.

Nuts but not surprising.

really he's just going to coffee with friends. excel mistakes everything for a date

Will this socialist nightmare never end?

This picture looks like Elon is having acupuncture with lightsabres.

Is there a word for being sexually attracted to an aesthetic, rather than a gender? 'cos I think that's what Trump has. The aesthetic of power has many expressions, many of which override more conventional ones.

A novel pill doubles survival in pancreatic cancer, a disease that has been extraordinarily difficult to treat. Results from the RASolute 302 trial herald a new standard of care for patients who had failed previous therapy. Results reported at the American Society for Clinical Oncology

The Platner (and MTG) situations are fascinating to me, because people are so unpredictable when they are trying to evaluate lesser evils against greater evils.

I'm adding Piker to my list of people who attract completely unreasonable amounts of societal hate, along with Greta and Meghan and Amber Heard and Blake Lively.

Thinking about why women might not want to use a product that has forced itself into every software interface to confidently shout things that are wrong

Working in finance becomes incredibly frustrating when you realize that the rules you are taught to abide by are not universal.

Turtles all the way down.

Yeah, it's good to be able to read, it's also fine to consume books using audio, and since that phrase is clunky, it's fine to say you read the book. Gatekeeping is wack.

If someone asks you if you've read Canterbury Tales, then an audiobook is reading. If your optometrist asks you if struggle to read, then an audiobook is not reading. If I sit on a table, it's a chair (by purpose if not design). Sometimes I think the people having these arguments don't read. 🤪

rude af

assuming a lifespan of 80 years, the length of the entire human civilization is only about 70 people old. The US Civil War was two people ago and the Ottomans sacked Constantinople seven people ago. Not very long!

Speaking as a South African, winning cases against the government is nice, but even losing cases consumes government resources that should be doing something else.

Judging from some examples I've seen, a fully anesthetized brain can *create* a podcast singularityhub.com/2026/05/18/t...

More telling is that he doesn't realize his version of Claude is merely reflecting his biases, as my version of Claude does mine.

took some time this week to read and process Chicago Bob's full A.I. encyclical for myself—and took away something way more interesting, and fulsome, than either its detractors or proponents would have you believe

As expected, the Gaza genocide case will take years. South Africa's reply is now due November 22, 2027. Israel's rejoinder is now due May 22, 2029. www.icj-cij.org/sites/defaul...

(Remind me to make sure non of my investments have spacex exposure.)

On the 'bright' side, there is no risk whatsoever that the Trump admin will bail anyone out (except close friends and family), so the 'too big to fail' era is very much over.

Investors moms: If all your friends jumped into a fire, would you also jump into a fire? Investors: Better we all get burned. (This is so SO dumb.)

Okay but they were some very expensive explosions. Sorry, impressive explosions.

One whole rain!

Tourists are lining up for Alabama culture.

Jay Bhattacharya has been a constant critic of the CDC and of public health strategies to protect the public from infectious disease. After mass firings of expert staff, he’s now looking for untrained volunteers to screen airport passengers for Ebola symptoms. A lot could go wrong with this.

So we’ve been cooking up some thoughts on Gen AI at @amnesty.org and I’m ecstatic to finally see it out in the world! Our 🗝️ conclusion: standalone gen AI systems, built on unlawful web scraping, constitute mass invasions of privacy by design & should be prohibited www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ne...

Trump and the Republicans are answering the question of “what if Mussolini didn’t make the trains run on time?”

Vermeer’s Girl With The Pearl Earring will be shown in Osaka, later this year, and the press conference was as Japanese as you’d expect #Vermeer

1000% chance Ebola gets to the US now, though we can expect some more boat related wars crimes against 'Ebola boats', probably.

"Lifestyle choices"

I really think Trump II is going to rock up 20th century dictator bodycount when all is said and done and all accounted for, Leopold in the Congo kinda stuff here. Just wildly evil.

Good economic indicator for who?

I would not bet money against the Iranian team being deported.

This is why I bothered to grow up, damnit.

Icon Cape town 18-19 July iconcpt.co.za