AI is fundamentally a labor issue - and if after reading these testimonials from educators that @bcmerchant.bsky.social has collected you're not convinced it's time for a Luddite praxis in K-12 and higher education, then shit, I'm not sure what else to tell you.
I just peer reviewed an article and spent too much time verifying that the references exist & were referenced accurately, all while being paranoid that the article was written by an LLM. it's not worth the effort. And then i see this kind of slop getting published and i wonder why i even bother.
Tong, H.; Li, L.; Ke, Y.; Wang, Y. Nanhsiungchelyid Turtles from the Nanxiong Basin, Southern China, and the Cretaceous–Paleogene Mass Extinction. Foss. Stud. 2026, 4, 6. doi.org/10.3390/foss...
Thoughts on TMT? Any new cards caught your eye?
Podarcis bocagei on a rock. He has mottled stripes of alternating black and green down his back and gray and black symmetrically mottled markings on his back and tail. He’s male so he probably has around 18 torso vertebrae, whereas a female would be more likely to have 20.
We tend not to think about lizards as exemplars of sexual dimorphism, but there are multiple examples from different clades of females having more vertebrae than males.
It’s usually 1 or 2 more vertebrae in the torso. Probably so there’s more room for babies!🦎🧪
📷Podarcis bocagei by nachoperez
I don't think a lot of people realize that the plan is for the personal computer to be phased out in favor of a subscription model remote terminal that uses AI to harvest every piece of information about you.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7a8...
phylogenetic tree of crocodiles, showing the relationships between the paleoafrican and neoafrican crocodile lineages
This paper is the next one in an ongoing deep dive I'm part of into the crocodile diversity of east Africa. Many of the sites with hominins also have crocs in them, but the reptiles haven't received the same level of research interest as the mammals.
📸 Brochu et al., 2026
paleoart of a crocodile lurking at the water's edge while a hominin drinks some of the water
crocodile skull photographs in dorsal,ventral, rear, and lateral view on the left, line drawing interpretations of the same skull and the same views on the right
Live from the field (and by 'field' I mean 'camping with my kids over spring break'), meet Lucy's Hunter: Crocodylus lucivenator. 🧪
📸 Tyler Stone - paleoart and Brochu et al., 2026 - skull figure
I'm suing Grammarly over its paid AI feature that presented editing suggestions as if they came from me - and many other writers and journalists - without consent.
State law requires consent before someone's name can be used for commercial purposes.
www.wired.com/story/gramma...
AI writing is banal, lacks perspective, and robs of us the intellectual rigor and the creative process. I wrote about my exasperation with those who treat AI as a replacement to which to outsource the real work rather than simply treating it like what it is: a tool. substack.com/@mirandayave...
A figure depicting the relative abundance of different prey items among two species of felid (e.g., monkey, small bird, agouti), derived from scat. The x axis is labeled "PoO (%)."
I would like to interrupt your doomscrolling for an important announcement: This figure from Ellen Dymit et al., 2025, depicts the proportion of vertebrate prey in felid scat, recorded as a Proportion of Occurrence (PoO). 💩
we all knew it was going to say something like this, but it's both funny and vindicating that the report the tin-hat cookers pushed for so hard went "yeah it was pretty good actually. if anything we should've gone harder"
MCG proudly refuses the use of AI in art, writing, and all of our products and communications—including social media! Yes, I'm a real person :)
I think this might actually be a pretty pivotal difference between the US and Canada. We are so alike in so many ways, and yet, we are also seemingly extremely different in how we see the world and ourselves.
One reason climate reporters are pushed out of the newsroom: their editors refuse to allow them to tell the truth about the problem.
Case in point: only 8 percent of all corporate broadcast climate segments in 2025 mentioned fossil fuels, the main driver of climate change.
Huge props to @linusmediagroup.com, Kioxia, Reboot Rewind & Disappearing Inc. for saving an incredible part of computer animation & Canadian history.
BTS of the restoration of the single copies of the Reboot master tapes stored on an almost extinct format.
The hallucination alone is a dealbreaker, obviously. But I was much more disturbed by the effect it had on my own sense of communication. Words are for connection. If you continually threw a rope into the darkness and no one caught it, you'd begin to think there was something wrong with the rope.
These repeated attempts to "communicate" with AI left me feeling adrift from my own language. I thought of the opposite of poetry. Poetry sets you adrift from language in service of connection to meaning and other people; this is how it recreates language. This set me adrift in service of nothing.
Details to come from SVP but big changes are being made to the ethics process. Hopefully these changes will be effective but I'm cautiously optimistic.
It’s a brilliant building, it embraces Toronto’s ravines, a rare, beautiful thing. Also, unlike Ford’s planned Miniature Science Centre, it’s not on rush hour row in downtown Toronto — it’s easy for school buses and families from out of town to visit. It is The *Ontario* Science Centre, after all.
Full article: The ontogenetically youngest known pachycephalosaur (Dinosauria: Ornithischia) postcranium www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Digital models of the skull and hindlimb bones of a duck.
Drivers of skull and hindlimb skeleton evolution in waterfowl: academic.oup.com/sysbio/advan... 🪶🧪 (📷 @raychatterji.bsky.social et al.)
New in things you can't opt out from, now at the company level.
"AI will make you all unnecessary and unemployable, reducing you to homeless beggars within five years" could be a factor as well.
It's always framed as an issue of "perception" or "narratives" to these guys. They can't possibly admit to themselves that much of the backlash is legitimately caused by their repeated, terrible judgement
just spitballing but some of it might have something to do with 15 years of sociopathic behavior culminating in the enthusiastic embrace of violent fascism
This scandal presents Carney and Solomon the perfect opportunity to pivot away from the AI boosterism that has defined this Liberal government to recalibrate their AI policy and start taking on the harms that have come of generative AI (and other digital tech).
I do not expect them to take it.
