Fletcher Thompson (🔬+🐝)

Listening to a report about Google chopping down a quarter of a million trees in Finland to build a data centre while washing out yoghurt pots for the recycling

For decades we were told that this plant could exist because “carbon capture and storage” was going to sequester carbon in bedrock — Dear Reader, they told that lie so they could sell gas.

Wait, wait, is it happening? No not *that* it. Also welcome though.

$1200-1800 for a console is such commercial suicide I can't even muster a "get the fuck outta here" about the news aftermath.site/xbox-helix-nex...

Enshittification rolls on. Gotta make room for more annualised sports titles with $5k skins to please the Saudis. Fuck me. Never buying an EA game again (until the enterprise is inevitably gutted, falls to pieces and fire sales all its IP but then I guess it won’t be EA anymore).

I literally don't have words for the news of EA closing Bioware. Unconscionable, incompetent, soulless decision-making. May everyone involved in these decision suffer Renegade interrupts for the rest of their lives.

Yes, immediately with joy and absolutely zero trepidation.

Dang, if the owners don’t like it then maybe they could live there or else sell the house and fuck off.

Maria Bamford is still so special. www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8py...

Uh oh, did someone’s website and personal account experience a big drop in activity after Ukraine hit a Russian data center?

I hope Google Sheets experiences pain

My beautiful idiot boys @generozity.charity are singing sea shanties at @paxaus.bsky.social for charity right now. Go on ye scurvy landlubbers. www.twitch.tv/pax3

While paying subscribers are our lifeblood, did you know you can also sign up for a FREE Aftermath membership? It'll get you 2x the free stories per month, as well as newsletters sent straight to your inbox. aftermath.ghost.io/?ref=after...

Amputechture by The Mars Volta is 20 years old. Still a wild and incredible album best enjoyed start to finish (as all TMV albums are). God damn I’d love to live in Omar Rodriguez-Lopez’ head for a day and figure out how he plays guitar. music.apple.com/ie/album/amp...

ah damn, RIP Margaret Hamilton. she took safety-critical software engineering seriously, and got people to the moon and back. news.mit.edu/2026/margare...

“You are infringing on the time and brainpower of people by pushing "your" content that little/no of your brainpower went into” is such a banger

Free newsletter: Outside of major hyperscaler backstops, I estimate that Anthropic and OpenAI would get a speculative B or CCC credit rating, which would be insufficient for the $50bn-$100bn a year they need, in an era of historically high interest rates. www.wheresyoured.at/credit-crunch/

Spend less time processing cell images with the Allen Cell Structure Segmenter. This #OpenScience python-based toolkit helps #cellscience researchers navigate complex images by automatically capturing the boundaries of structures. Access at: https://lnkd.in/gpWA7xWH

Holy crap, new Yes album?! music.apple.com/ie/album/aur... Thank you very please!

The original WipEout soundtrack still goes hard *31 years later*. Incidentally, my hip is killing me.

🚮

"The big problem with AI is that Grandma, Dad, Sis and the dog are not upbeat enough about our nerve-shredding wails of pain next to our titanic Moloch" *The AI Age is growing old just like the Space Age and the Atomic Age. How do you off-the-wall weirdos expect this situation to play out

Please read this article on the massive weirdos who are largely running the massively powerful and big-money AI industry in the U.S. today.

Eye popping. Court just unsealed Summary Judgment motions in New York Times v OpenAI / Microsoft. Easy to see why the AI companies had so many redactions (pink). Their own people wrote the lede for NYT, the "largest theft of labor in human history"... "more and more substitutive..." /1

Hundreds of imaging satellites photograph every point on Earth every day. But which ones watch your sky? Satellite Eye tells you exactly when they pass, their camera sharpness, and shows real Sentinel-2 and NASA imagery. Get your surveillance score now: https://orbitalradar.com/satellite-eye…

New research shows Poverty Kills Me for #PointLive live.thepoint.com.au?post=7543a9e...

*How many lives have been lost to drones in the many years since? It's like lighting up the city's sky with killer video-grenades

It’s so fucked up they let Zuck do shit after the Metaverse. You shouldn’t be able to run a company after that shit.

I am serious that today’s journalism ecosystem would be fooled if they played war of the worlds on the radio. It would be on CNN within hours

If Bluesky has proven anything it’s that the average instagram user will be underwhelmed after their diet of hyperfixation scrolling. At least until they then follow 3000 accounts, etc. Cry harder Mosseri.

Government regulation of toxic algorithms? Impossible! Or is it? www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Hey. You may be having a bad day. But at least you’re not having as bad a day as whoever owns this boat.

Trade xkcd.com/3290/

My career…. 2009 Melb heatwave, Black Saturday, TC Yasi, Black Summer, 2022 NSW/SE Qld flood, 2019 Aus hottest and driest year (despite no El Nino), TC Alfred. Never the time to discuss climate change mitigation …

‘Scary’: how misinformation and AI hallucinations are infiltrating Australia’s parliament - Guardian analysis reveals that dozens of policy submissions from across the political spectrum incorrectly summarise real research and invent or wrongly cite sources www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Ben-Gvir's AI-generated ad for a fucking concentration camp is one of the worst things I've ever seen (I admit I've had that thought a lot recently!). If you're still supporting these pricks, or haven't opened your mouth against them, your cowardice/evil has no limit, no red line

Parenting done right

Large language models #LLMs hallucinate websites and domains that sound plausible, but aren’t useful. Criminals are setting up malicious websites under those domains, in a new scam called “slop squatting.” spectrum.ieee.org/ai-cyberatta...

Booooo. Bloody Queensland.

AND TIM CURRY?! Fucks sake, 2026. Start hitting some of the shitty 80+ year olds.

"AI will speed up development!" "AI will liberate creative tendencies!" then why has it been 4 years and all we've seen is wildly unpopular wet dogshit