Agreed, that’s the only reason I’d want a huge amount of money. Conservation easements and land trusts all day.

She’s on the roof!

A lot of the time they simply can’t adapt, not quickly enough at least.

Yes, that’s the key point. Individual species take a long time to adapt through evolution, and ecosystems can adapt at the cost of losing some species, but nothing can adapt at the speed and scale with which humanity is reshaping the Earth. A huge portion of the planet is no longer suitable for anything other than generalists, scavengers, and invasives.

I see this less as a kit for arguing with folks in real life (or worse, on the internet), and more of an exploration/dissection of common arguments put forth by the pro-AI crowd. So the next time you see those points pop up in an article or editorial, you can more easily evaluate whether or not they hold water.

Seems like you’d just lift up the mattress like they did for this picture.

What exactly did they mean by “germ-free”? Over half the cells in our bodies are non-human microbes.

Just deleted my account. This was the final straw.

There have been a lot of articles coming out recently (as in, in the last 24 hours) that indicates that spell might be breaking:

• Is the AI bubble about to burst – and send the stock market into freefall? (Guardian)
• Nvidia Q2 Preview: AI Bubble Is Popping (Seeking Alpha)
• Is this an AI bubble? (NY Times)
• Say farewell to the AI bubble, and get ready for the crash (LA Times)
• Is The AI Bubble Bursting? Lessons From The Dot-Com Era (Forbes)
• Credit fuels the AI boom — and fears of a bubble (Fortune)

That “someone” is pretty much everyone’s stock portfolios/pensions/retirement plans, as about 60% of stock market gains in 2025 have come from AI megacaps. The “magnificent 7” make up about 35% of the entire stock market at this point, and they’re all heavily invested (overleveraged) in speculative AI. When this bubble pops it’s going to be nasty.

There’s no such thing as a “Republican state,” nearly every state is split somewhere between 51/49 and 60/40. There are “Republican-run states,” but inside every Republican-run state is a “Democrat-run city” which has been a convenient narrative for Republicans of late. Houston’s mayor is a Democrat, and Harris county has more registered Democrats than Republicans; in 2024 metro Houston voted for Kamala over Trump.

Whether Abbot or Whitmire is more to blame for Houston’s violence is just a political distraction. Both bear some responsibility and I’m tired of both sides running finger-pointing narratives rather than trying to find constructive solutions.

Same with Google Workspace. Just got an email last month saying prices are increasing to reflect “new AI features,” all of which I have disabled because (A) I don’t use them, and (B) they’re another privacy nightmare.

At this point we’re all just subsidizing the shareholders. The vast majority of generative AI being tacked on to subscriptions is useless, it’s just corporations jumping on the hype train to boost their stock price.

This is an absolute travesty. The NCA5 was some of the most comprehensive data on climate change in the US, and included sets of projections for multiple degrees of warming. This erasure (and the termination of scientists working on the NCA6) is a huge blow to anyone looking to build resilience in this country.

I had a feeling this was coming, so I pre-emptively archived both the data sets and the reports. You can access them with the links below:

• Reports (Google Drive)
• Reports (Proton Drive)
• Data (Google Drive)
• Data (Proton Drive)

You can access a snapshot of the page here; I’ve also posted analyses of this data (along with interactive maps) here, here, and here.

Agreed, title updated!

You could see it as a modern form of animism, or pantheism/panentheism. I actually subscribe to the latter as it seems clear that matter is an emergent property of consciousness (not the other way around), but I would ascribe AI as much consciousness as the silicate minerals it’s derived from. Sentience can only truly be self-identified so we do have to go off the honor system to some degree, but if we look around at everything else that self-identifies as conscious, AI doesn’t even remotely resemble it.

Dave Karpf is a great reality check in this field.

Update: they won! Development has been halted.

Agreed. I shared this not to promote Blair’s viewpoint, of course, but to demonstrate how climate denial talking points are shifting away from “it’s not happening” to “it’s happening, but we can’t stop it.”

To be fair, it’s going to be incredibly difficult to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels, especially when we look at it from a game-theoretic perspective. But the alternative isn’t implementing techno-fixes like carbon capture, it’s the collapse of the biosphere (and the resulting decline and collapse of industrial civilization). Elites like Blair continually stop one step short of acknowledging this (likely because they figure their wealth will insulate them, and/or they’ll be dead before it gets that bad).

I got banned from r/Sustainability for saying I was in favor of lowering birthrates. (Cue the accusations of eco-fascism and eugenics, rather than any meaningful discussion.)

For what it’s worth, I don’t believe governments should have the power to dictate our ability to give birth, that’s immediately dystopian. But we need to acknowledge that overshoot is a function of population x per-capita consumption, and we can’t just look at one side of that equation.

Choose your adventure! A: Poison the rain, soil, and groundwater with endocrine-disrupting/fertility-lowering/cancer-causing toxins for generations to come. BUT! You don’t have to preheat your pan. Worth it?

Eh, corporations are people at the top, people in the middle, and people on the bottom. Someone had the idea, someone OK’d it, and someone carried it out. Incorporating just frees up a little responsibility/liability.