The current situation is that AI is negatively affecting the globe’s societies on various levels. Be it by having disastrous ecological costs attached to it, by having disastrous psychological effects on many people and by completely shifting how information is generated, distributed and verified. Where even more knowledgeable people totally misunderstand how AI works and make critical decisions based on its outputs. And you want to discuss this tiny minority of people who are fundamentally against AI? I agree that these people certainly are motivated by their own biases instead of only facts, but so are you and I. Why is it so important for you to have this discussion in favor of AI then? You don’t really seem to understand the limitations of AI and seem biased yourself. It would certainly be a more productive discussion to directly focus on your feelings towards AI (some kind of hope I’d guess?) than trying to focus on why others are of a different opinion. And maybe just so you can learn why the anarchist utopia where AI plays a big role isn’t a realistic one.

I experience the opposite even when I’m under time pressure (running late for something). When I discover some small, unrelated problem my brain will switch to problem solving mode and focus on this new task instead. This way I totally loose track of time, even though I was totally stressed out about it a second ago. This can happen with stuff like a broken tool but also if I happen to look at a sudoku.

Great read, thanks for sharing!

Ah OK, didn’t connect this to the post somehow, sorry

Same latitude doesn’t mean same climate though. North America is much colder at the same latitudes as Europe for example. The climate also depends on how far away you live from the ocean and many other factors.

Haha took me a while to read it

Is this an isopod? :O

Haha, made me immediately think of this album

According to the Wikipedia article fascination can be caused by random mutations, bacterial or other infections as well as environmental stresses. So I’d say it totally depends. Only genetic mutations should make the plant give this characteristic to its offspring.

Most plants that I’ve seen with this characteristic are also not uniformly affected by it.

Haha I immediately had the exact same thought!

I’m currently helping organizing a film festival and it basically works like this. We got hundreds of password protected links to movies for screening, most of them on vimeo. I wouldn’t hand them out though because these are all small productions.

Not necessarily. I don’t consume any social media that algorithmically serve me content, but my sleep schedule is still utterly fucked up. I can easily do an offline puzzle for hours instead of going to sleep for example

I guess most people are definitely negatively affected by manipulative algorithms. But I think what is discussed in the article is contributing even more strongly to our society-wide sleep deprivation. That is, spending the vast majority of our time inside.

The whole series is really fun! (But it’s unfortunately not very long). You can find it on dropout tv and it is called wtf 101.

I don’t think it is real. It seems to be the oversimplified and overexaggerated story of what is really happening. The guardian says that the US Forest Service will move headquarters from Washington DC to Salt Lake City:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/31/us-forest-service-washington-dc-salt-lake-city

This seems to cause many of its research facilities to (temporarily?) close:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/03/climate/forest-service-research-stations.html

Eww… yet another state with imperialist and fascist history that has done many genocides (none of which it has ever acknowledged). And you are proud of that?

In times of authoritarian and fascist uprising, I think we should be careful what ideas we spread. The telling of a “German” or “Russian” people that are “natural” ethnicities is not far from right wing ideology. Why would you even use “Germans” and “Germanic people” synonymously? That’s anachronistic and they don’t really have anything to do with each other. Some Germanic people also lived where Ukraine is now btw.

It isn’t even clear if “Germanic peoples” existed as a distinct group of people:

Different academic disciplines have their own definitions of what makes someone or something “Germanic”.[3] Some scholars call for the term’s total abandonment as a modern construct, since lumping “Germanic peoples” together implies a common group identity for which there is little evidence.[4] Other scholars have defended the term’s continued use and argue that a common Germanic language allows one to speak of “Germanic peoples”, regardless of whether these ancient and medieval peoples saw themselves as having a common identity.

Oh, and the Nazis did synonymize both Germans and Germanic peoples as well:

The publishing of Tacitus’s Germania by humanist scholars in the 1400s greatly influenced the emerging idea of “Germanic peoples”. Later scholars of the Romantic period, such as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, developed several theories about the nature of the Germanic peoples that were highly influenced by romantic nationalism. For those scholars, the “Germanic” and modern “German” were identical. Ideas about the early Germans were also highly influential among members of the nationalist and racist völkisch movement and later co-opted by the Nazis. During the second half of the 20th century, the controversial misuse of ancient Germanic history and archaeology was discredited and has since resulted in a backlash against many aspects of earlier scholarship.

To synonymize “Russians” with “Slavic people” is also wrong, as Slavic people where a diverse group of very different people living in different regions of the world. We also don’t know where the early Slavic people lived exactly.

That anecdote doesn’t make any sense though. Like who are “the Russians” and why didn’t they have prior knowledge of other ethnic groups before? And “the Germans” is a very recent group of people that isn’t ethnic at all.

Hm, I think there is a clearer ethical distinction between vegetarians and vegans. But this doesn’t necessarily translate towards the participation in our capitalist system.

For example, I’m a long-time vegan but due to my financially very limited resources I mostly buy cheap conventional food, even vegan meat substitutes from actual meat companies (they are way cheaper). In contrast, a friend of mine is living vegetarian, but she works on an organic farm. So she works towards a more sustainable agriculture while also consuming nearly only organic products.

Eating eggs -> financially supporting a system where male chicks get either immediately killed after birth or more rarely are later killed for their meat. Also it is supporting a system where chickens are bred to produce as many eggs as fast as possible, which means a life of torture to them

Drinking milk -> financially supporting a system where cows are continuously impregnated against their will and where their offspring is immediately taken from them and killed for their meat (I think this is done yearly). Also it is supporting a system where cows are bred to produce as much milk as fast as possible, which means a life of torture to them

There are certainly many more atrocities happening, but I’m trying not to think too often of that stuff

You’re totally right! I forgot that this is very dependent on where you live. In the area where I usually collect boletes, there are zero poisonous ones and only some that are hard to digest or bad tasting.