It has been a BUSY fortnight!!

My little red Rust-bucket passed the MOT test.

My presentation about moths went quite well, 18 people showed up, and they asked some really good questions, so I almost forgot to be nervous.

I helped put up four bat roosts in a local forest as a stopgap measure until hollow trees become available.

I have been invited back to Kær Vestermark for another year of mothing, and the owner of the forest where we put up bat roosts asked if I would care to go mothing there as well, so that pretty much fills up this season.

In between I still had time to rearrange leaf litter, find critters and smell the flowers. Spring is off to a good start.

#Bats #Conservation #FunnelWeaver #Spider #BloomScrolling

Imagine if every AI data centre was a library. Full of readers of every age and demographic, reading everything and anything - romantic bestsellers, pop science, reference books, magazines and newspapers, the poetry and philosophy of every culture imaginable. People exercising their actual intelligence, thinking for themselves rather than generating endless slop.

Then consider who would be most scared by this.

I will ask chat GPT
I will boil the last of our drinking water
Salt the soil of the scrub-lands
Tear the pages from books and feed them to my fire

I will ask copilot
I will scramble your library
reanimate and puppet the faces of your dead ancestors
I will bury you in poor copies of your dreams

I will ask grok
I will fall silent and never speak to you
I will talk only to myself lost in a maze of my own fantasies
I will forget all who cannot compliment me
I will decouple my soul from this world.

MIT’s NANDA initiative interviewed 150 business leaders, surveyed 350 employees, and analyzed 300 public AI deployments to come to the conclusion that 95% of generative AI deployments fail to generate any measurable business value.

It looks like productivity gains may be coming from layoffs and having people do more work for the same pay and not AI.

https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/?itm_source=parsely-api

Read this.

Seriously. Quit scrolling, shut the hell up, and read this.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-open-letter-to-robert-f-kennedy-jr-who-thinks-my-daughter-is-a-tragedy

Firefox now has Terms of Use! This'll go over like a lead balloon.

You give Mozilla all rights necessary to operate Firefox, including processing data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice, as well as acting on your behalf to help you navigate the internet. When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/

Update: See below in the thread for their clarification.

DEI.

My @smh @theage cartoon.

A summary of the last few days in the US, written in the same way the US press covers other countries, from journalist and historian Garrett Graff.

warning, there’s no going back to who you were before you read this, sorry

https://www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/musk-s-junta-establishes-him-as-head-of-government