This morning, during some chaos, this zipped by on one of my feeds. Maybe it was here? Maybe it was BlueSky? Hard to overstate how much this made my day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver-engineered_dam_in_the_Czech_Republic

Chat Control and Age Verification laws aren't about protecting the children. They're about mass surveillance and rising authoritarianism.

These laws endanger everyone,
including the children,
and including democracy.

#HumanRights #Privacy #Democracy

It's Friday and it's #NationalMojitoDay!

Here's some of the chemistry behind this refreshing minty cocktail 🍹 https://www.compoundchem.com/2020/07/10/mojito/

What does it take to tell the greatest story never written down? Human brings our untold origin story to life—spanning 300,000 years, at least six human species, and one remarkable survivor: us. Turns out, we’re 100,000 years older than we thought.

#anthropology #humanorigins #evolution #history #prehistoric

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73NQuGXaM_w

As someone who works in higher-ed and also has taught middle school and high school aged kids, my opinion is not that LLM use is exploding among students because they're lazy or stupid or anything else

it's because our educational system has prioritized a very transactional "do this bullshit, and you get the credentials you need to have a life" approach for

well

maybe forever, really

and no one should be surprised that adversarial approaches by teachers and administrators are being met with an adversarial approach by students

"The idea that Musk teamed up with Trump because of his deeply held belief in streamlining federal spending is naive at best and journalistic malpractice at worst.

His people are still in position across multiple departments in the US government. DOGE is going nowhere. And the real point of DOGE is not to save American taxpayers money. It’s a fundamental re-writing of the social contract, the relationship of US citizens to the state, and the state to private enterprise.

Musk’s operatives have been systematically gaining access to databases across the US government and are now merging them. ...these datasets are now being merged into a giant surveillance machine. A giant surveillance machine presided over by the dark lord of Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel." https://broligarchy.substack.com/p/the-dark-lord-of-silicon-valley