Marcello Seri

Residents Say Elon Musk's AI Facility Is Like Living Next Door to Mordor Residents of a once quiet Mississippi town complain that Elon Musk's AI facility is constantly emitting a horrible noise.

“This was not a thoughtful, phased development. It was an industrial surge imposed on our residential community.”

[Scene is a kitchen - a middle aged woman called JANET is boiling peas at the stove. A younger more colourfully dressed woman named LIZ approached her.] JANET: Ugh... LIZ: What's up? JANET: I am so bored of cooking peas! LIZ: Have you tried... AI peas? JANET: AI peas? LIZ: They're peas with AI! [Liz holds up to us a packet of peas labelled: Pea-i AI - Peas with AI]. LIZ: Al-powered peas harness the potential of your peas JANET: What LIZ [Now a voiceover as we cut to a whizzy technology diagram of peas all connected by meaningless dotted lines] Why not take your peas to the next level with Al Peas' new Al tools to power your peas? [Show a techno diagram of a pea with a label reading 'AI' pointing to a random zone in it] LIZ: Each pea has Al in a way we haven't quite worked out yet but it's fine [Show Janet and Liz now in a Matrix-style world of peas] LIZ: With Al peas you can supercharge productivity and make AI work for your peas! JANET: What LIZ: Shut up LIZ: Our game-changing Pea-Al gives you the freedom to unlock the potential of the power of the future of your peas workflow From opening the bag of peas to boiling the peas to eating the peas To spending millions on adding Al to the peas and then having to work out what that even means. JANET: Is it really necessary to- LIZ [Grabbing Janet by the collar]: THE PEAS HAVE GOT AI, JANET [Cut to an advert ending screen, with the bag of peas and the slogan: AI PEAS: Just 'Peas' for god's sake buy the AI peas. [Ends]

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You can follow @gmvandeven.bsky.social here on bluesky!

YAG Pub Lecture Series poster featuring two drinks (a cocktail with lemon slice and a lemonade with lemon slices) on a blue and beige background. Event details include talks by Gido van de Ven on "Forgetting in brains and machines" and Jamal Williams on "Music-evoked memory reactivation and its effects on later retrieval." Event takes place at Vin Natuur on March 4, 2026, with arrival at 16:30, followed by two 15-minute talks with Q&A, and drinks at 18:00. Hosted by University of Groningen and Young Academy Groningen.

If you are in Groningen, don’t miss tomorrow’s #YAGPubLectures! Focus is on the brain, with Gido van de Ven on "Forgetting in brains and machines" and Jamal Williams on "Music-evoked memory reactivation and its effects on later retrieval."

As usual we will start at 17.00 at Vin Natuur!

Which will in any case have a limited impact. Maybe a mix of the two and pushing for more and better competition on the various spaces

I think besides dropping the service, which is probably too hard to achive, I think it boils down to putting limitations in place for these virtual monopolies. I don’t know how else this can be done besides drafting appropriate laws

Digital products and services are getting worse – but the trend can be reversed – Forbrukerrådet A new report from the Norwegian Consumer Council shows how enshittification affects both consumers and society at large. Luckily, it‘s possible to turn the tide.

More details on howthe trend can be reversed at www.forbrukerradet.no/news-in-engl...

The Enshittificator Digital products and services keep getting worse. In the new report Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, the Norwegian Consumer Council has delved…

This is brilliant: the enshittificator. A video on our internet and a plan to work for changing it

vimeo.com/1168468796

Black and white illustration featuring a forest setting with central hippo like creature, hedgehog in the foreground and birds flying overhead

Illustration from Tove Jansson's book 'The Moomins and the Great Flood' (1945) #Womensart

More on that footnote: bsky.app/profile/sust...

Clear message from the Trump regime to European clients* dependent on US tech companies: those will be brought under control.

*) like the Dutch tax authority preparing to outsource all of its VAT collection.

Odido hackers release more data; check if your email was stolen - DutchNews.nl The cyber crime group that hacked into the customer service database of telecoms firm Odido published more of the millions of lines of data it has stolen on Friday on the dark web. Odido refused to…

Odido refused to pay a ransom for the information and the hacker group, known as Shinyhunters, is now publishing the info from millions of present and past customers online.

Hey, season 3 of It's Not Just Numbers is back! Tune in for the first two episodes of the year. Last in the row, an episode on study associations creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/...

#mathSky

What better than looking back to a 9 year old mistake for a train trip? I think, after all, it turned into a quite fun blog post: www.mseri.me/fixing-an-in...

Ghosts of the tenement: a satirical cartoon from a 1901 edition of 'Puck'.
#PhantomsFriday #Victorian #satire #illustration #artsky

Okay but can we all agree ChatGpt must be incredibly shitty if the War department is holding a gun to Anthropic’s head and saying misalign your AI. OpenAI would do it for free.

Watching the video it looks more like a ps5 controller :P

A user refusing to use the official app, use claude code to reverse engineer the API and suddenly was driving 7k vacuum cleaners with the xbox controller… 😂

Man accidentally gains control of 7,000 robot vacuums | Popular Science Sammy Azdoufal just wanted to steer his DJI Romo with a gaming controller.

It could not be better than what it is… The producer built an API with zero device ownership verification, so any valid token works for any unit on the planet: www.popsci.com/technology/r...

#security #epicfail #enshittification

Next academic year's teaching will consist of group conversations around a fireplace, with a glass of cognac.

In the meantime the German trains app believes that all trains are punctual (including the one that left us on the way) so there is no alternative plan for our trip, despite being stranded in the middle of nowhere since two hours #tooMuchNow

#NS I can live with delays for random disruptions, but at least don’t fool us. After a substantial delay, we have been sent to wait for phantom replacement buses for 1h only to be sent to the next train in 30 min because it should go…

Dopolavoro Matematico lancia un progetto di ascolto di storie matematiche! https://maddmaths.simai.eu/comunicare/dopolavoro-matematico-storie-matematiche/

AI Takeover Today's editor's choice

'I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.' - Joanna Maciejewska. Cartoon by Tjeerd Royaards.

Source: open.substack.com/pub/cmdailyc...

Read our open letter to the Board on governance and faculty mergers.

The Board likes to say there is no alternative. That leaves us with no alternative but to vote "no".

People talk about this stuff in terms of how much it'll suck for gaming and I hate to inform you how many MRI machines, X-Rays, all sorts of other vital machinery are just a Windows IoT Edition PC in a beige plastic box with a big magnet/accelerator/whatever attached.

'Er is te veel bureaucratie, maar fusie is niet de enige oplossing' Het college van bestuur neemt binnenkort een voorlopig besluit over de fusieplannen voor faculteiten. De Wetenschapsfractie in de universiteitsraad bepleit in een open brief een tussenweg; er zijn mee...

Het college van bestuur neemt binnenkort een voorlopig besluit over de fusieplannen voor faculteiten. De Wetenschapsfractie in de universiteitsraad bepleit in een open brief een tussenweg; er zijn meer manieren denkbaar om de RUG minder bureaucratisch te maken. ukrant.nl/er-is-te-vee...

An outdoor sign for a conference is positioned in front of a large tree and a classic stone building. The sign features the title "Bridging Visualization and Understanding in Geometry" and specifies the dates as February 16th to 20th, 2026. It also mentions the Amphitheater Hermite at the Institut Henri Poincaré.

Hugo Parlier, a person wearing a checkered shirt, stands at the front of a classroom. They are gesturing with their hands while presenting a slide titled "Quadratis puzzles," which displays a 3x3 grid and a colorful square pattern. Behind them, a chalkboard contains conference webpage details and a note to respond using a flower emoji.

Érika Roldán, a person dressed in a dark shirt, is giving a presentation in a lecture hall. They stand in front of a projection screen showing a slide titled "Dominatrix — Polyomino Domination," which features a white geometric shape composed of squares. The chalkboard behind them is covered in handwritten mathematical formulas and conference information.

Martin Skrodzki, a person wearing a light-colored shirt and glasses, stands at the front of a wooden lecture hall. They are presenting a slide titled "Embedding high-dimensional data into (non-)Euclidean spaces (fast)." The slide includes the TU Delft logo. Several other people are seated in the amphitheater benches, seen from the back as they watch the presentation.

This week: Second conference of the #illustratingMath trimester at Institut Henri Poincaré, titled "Bridging visualization and understanding in Geometry and Topology." Talks are by Hugo Parlier, Érika Roldán, and yours truly. Play with Hugo's app here: quadratis.app/playPuzzle.h... (1/2)

A large yellowish blob in the upper-left centre, with two dimmer dots to the lower right marked by arrows. These dots are giant exoplanets. The remaining dots without arrows are background stars, and the features around the main blob are imaging artefacts.

See those two dots with arrows pointing to them?

They're giant gas planets orbiting their star, located 307 lightyears away.

These are directly imaged exoplanets.