René Walter

A joke 44 years in the making.

knowyourmeme.com/memes/cow-to...

Cow Tools | Know Your Meme

Cow Tools refers to a cartoon from Gary Larson's The Far Side, originally published in 1982 in multiple newspapers. The specific comic depicts a cow standi

Daniel Benneworth-Gray @danielgray.com

COW TOOLS COW TOOLS COW TOOLS

Back-scratching bovine leads scientists to reassess intelligence of cows

Brown Swiss in Austria has been discovered using tools in multiple ways – something only ever seen in humans and chimpanzees

21st Century Warfare is fully gamified, trains drone racing skills on GTA Mods and comes with tactical Labubus.

I feel old.

William Gibson @greatdismal.bsky.social

21st Century warfare: Sylph-child uses Nintendo-style pad to direct miniature explosive drones into enemy tanks, hundreds of miles away, detonating them, killing the crew.

"The White House responded by sending (...) this this message: (...) Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue."

@bildoperationen.bsky.social #MemeFascism applies.

Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social

twilight zone

White House posts digitally altered image of woman arrested after ICE protest

Guardian analysis shows images are the same, with Nekima Levy Armstrong looking composed in original but sobbing after alteration

"Analysis of 41 million papers finds that although AI expands individual impact, it narrows collective scientific exploration".

This is the science-equivalent to "Generative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Generative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content

Generative AI can enhance the creativity of short stories but may limit the variation in diverse outputs.

Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social

This analysis of papers from 1980 to 2025 goes beyond LLMs, but notes one challenge that arises when research questions rely on the same tools and datasets: “the adoption of AI seems to induce authors to converge on the same solutions to known problems rather than create new ones.”

AI has supercharged scientists—but may have shrunk science

Analysis of 41 million papers finds that although AI expands individual impact, it narrows collective scientific exploration

"Elon Musk posted twice as often on UK race and immigration as about SpaceX in IPO run-up"

Gotta have priorities, i guess.

Elon Musk posted twice as often on UK race and immigration as about SpaceX in IPO run-up

Guardian analysis of X feed shows how keen world’s richest person was to air his views and ‘interfere’ in British politics

The loss of awe in the face of wishfulfilment is indeed a crucial observation. When everything's possible, nothing is interesting.

Roland Meyer @bildoperationen.bsky.social

Deepfakes, synthetic media, AI slop etc. have often been discussed in terms of a «crisis of truth» or an «erosion of trust». Fair enough. But in my impression, there’s something else that gets lost in waves of AI slop flooding our screens: a «sense of wonder» – surprise, amazement and awe 1/

"The intestinal pedestal erected so the guests of honor from TikTok, Meta, Amazon, and SpaceX can properly show fealty by licking your pustuled tentacle was a particularly nice touch."

You gotta ❤️ McSweeney's!

McSweeney's @mcsweeneys.net

"The gears of this Great Nation grind on, no matter who or how many people beg us to stop and reconsider. My only responsibility today is to pass the torch that will help illuminate a new era that’s somehow more hauntingly grotesque, bleak, and horrifying than your first."

Welcome Home, President Nyarlathotep

Please allow me to take your umbrella, Dread Lord. My advisors informed me this morning during my final daily presidential briefing that Hell had f...

Reply to @rawx.bsky.social

I made a starter pack for Cultural AI based on this conference, if you have any names I should add, feel free to suggest go.bsky.app/5Cn68mW I'm getting the sense that this is a great synthesis of Critical AI and research and a good way forward for a conversation stuck in partisan clichéd hottakes.

I finally got around to write down my take on AI as Interpolatable Archives. It got quite out of hand (14k words), and i had to split it into four parts. Here's the first: open.substack.com/pub/goodinte...

The Skeleton Library

On Interpolatable Archives, Part 1: Compulsions to Connect, Warburg, Borges and Goldsmith, Cultural Technologies and Digital Oralities

New article about consciousness being encoded in the brains electromagnetic field: www.scientificamerican.com/article/cons... (archive: archive.ph/OwYBG).

It's research like this that make me eyeroll at any claim of consciousness in current AI-systems. #ai #consciousness #cogsci

Consciousness Might Hide in Our Brain’s Electric Fields

A mysterious electromagnetic mechanism may be more important than the firing of neurons in our brain to explain our awareness

"CrankGPT is a fully offline and off-the-grid AI box (...) You can feel that load curve through the crank: when LLM inference and speech synthesis run together, the crank gets a lot harder to turn." squeezlabs.github.io/handcrank/

Reply to @rawx.bsky.social

That was David Lynchs soul crashing a nazi spacecraft.

AI-generated "fake memories" for people suffering from dementia is... something else.

Bec Shaw @brocklesnitch.bsky.social

The comments on this are all about how sweet it is and I feel insane. Using AI to make fake memories of your grandma with dementia and telling her they happened and then filming her reaction

You gotta ❤️ McSweeneys.

McSweeney's @mcsweeneys.net

"INTERROBANG!? IT has the word BANG in it, and that sounds VERY POWERFUL. SO they are ALLOWED!?"

A Memorandum from the Newly Established Department of Grammar Efficiency

TO: Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies FROM: Department of Grammar Efficiency (DOGE) RE: Guidance on grammar The federal Government is eli...

Paper on "cognitive surrender" extends Kahneman’s "thinking fast and slow" by adding system 3: artificial cognition.

"In cognitive surrender, system 3 is the deafult and you barely engage system 1 (and 2 not at all); in cognitive offloading, system 2 is engaged, even if not as much as without AI."

Frank Pasquale @frankpasquale.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy

“The most extreme form of cognitive surrender is what the authors call “autopilot,” which is basically automating yourself.” A New Wharton Study on AI Warns of a Growing Problem: Cognitive Surrender https://www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/a-new-wharton-study-on-ai-warns-of via Instapaper

A New Wharton Study on AI Warns of a Growing Problem: Cognitive Surrender

Casual users should pay special attention

Oh look at this old fav of mine. The only thing better than typography is typography on pencils.

Hacker News Top Stories @hackernewsbot.bsky.social

Typography on Pencils (2023) | Discussion

Typography on Pencils, 1-5.

It wouldn't be Pencil Day without a round up of our pencil typography photos. Check out our current stock of new & vintage pencils here.  Please do credit us if you use these images anywhere. Thank you.

"Do they get to live in the repossessed houses of Australian coal mining executives?" (@geoffreyharris.bsky.social)

David Ho @davidho.bsky.social

The first planned migration of an entire country due to climate change is happening! Tuvalu, a Pacific island nation, is at risk of being submerged under rising sea level, so it has signed an agreement with Australia to allow 280 Tuvaluans to settle in Australia as permanent residents each year.

The First Planned Migration of an Entire Country Is Underway

The Pacific island nation of Tuvalu could be submerged in 25 years due to rising sea levels, so a plan is being implemented to relocate its population to Australia.

Language is not the primary driver of thought: "Inner experiences can be dreamlike and elusive. They can include inner speaking, inner hearing, sensory stimulations, feelings, or even just a wordless sense of knowing or thinking something."

I Didn’t Know My Mind Was So Strange Until I Started Listening to It - Nautilus

I took part in an experiment to decipher my inner thoughts.

Musks desinformation machine works.

Elizabeth Jacobs, PhD @elizabethjacobs.bsky.social

A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right. Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement. This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.

Reply

bsky.app/profile/rawx...

René Walter @rawx.bsky.social

"Analysis of 41 million papers finds that although AI expands individual impact, it narrows collective scientific exploration". This is the science-equivalent to "Generative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content" www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Generative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content

Generative AI can enhance the creativity of short stories but may limit the variation in diverse outputs.

This is the way. Language was synthetic long before the advent of LLMs and AI, and it's roots are bureaucracy, PR and marketing which infected so much of our daily communications, foremost political speech and business communications and, ofcourse, all the advertising and other bullshit.

This analogy is better than i want it to be. Ouija boards "work" based on the "vibes" of the participants, which collectively move the pointer over the board based on subconscious (or conscious) feels, while the output is constrained by shape of the board and the alphabet.

What's the higher economic impact of climate change, the cost of flooding, or the cost of "managed retreat"?

Stories like this gonna become ubiquitous in the coming decade, and they will appear in every country with a coast, not just some island nations and effing Miami.

Brynley Heaven @brynleyheaven.bsky.social

Skegness may be abandoned

Migration from Skegness among flood risk options - council boss

A council boss says "we have to look at" all options including a managed retreat from the coastline.