@robotowilliam
He/him | 38 | Lifelong explorer and learner 🦋 Reylo ⏹️ Stop AI Teacher, MSc Animal Behaviour (Queen's University Belfast), interested in animal cognition and social behaviours https://linktr.ee/robotowilliam
"Some details were fudged. For example, the functions of several dozen JCVI-syn3A genes still aren’t known, so Thornburg’s team modelled them as inert spheres."
Love that for them. Inscrutable.
MORE GREEK GODS NEEDED IN INTERNATIONAL POLITICS.
1/2 Rodents enjoy gnawing
In this study, they find neurophysiological and functional evidence that there is a reinforcement circuit associated with dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens.
(paper) www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
Humpback whales playing with dolphins (March 9, 2026; Maui)
The whale in the front is a female; the ones behind her are males competing for her attention. The female seemed more interested in playing with the dolphins
(full video) www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkoV...
by Craig Emmerich
Deepdale #lakedistrict
On this topic, I do think that the show is showing us that the world becomes inconceivably boring when there is, essentially, only one other person in the world to talk to, a single homogeneous, obsequious personality, no edges
Self-own of the decade: BuzzFeed pivots toward AI slop, loses everything.
futurism.com/artificial-i...
A rather lofty #FoxOfTheDay today , shared by Angela Douglas on Facebook !
From @jakelikesonions on Instagram
4-panel comic Panel 1: "Jogging from the perspective of animals" Panel 2: A dog looking at a jogger. "What are you running from, apex predator?" Panel 3: "Are you chasing prey? You need to conserve energy." Panel 4: A second dog peers over. "The hell is that guy doing" "I don't know I don't understand."
Unknown Facebook user: "Olympics are for the best athletes in the world to compete against each other to determine who is the best. Having retards competing is doing the opposite!" Arnold Schwarzenegger: "As stupid and evil as this comment is, I'm not going to delete it or ban you (yet) because it's a teachable moment. You have two possible paths ahead. Right now, I guarantee you that these athletes have more courage, compassion, brains, skill- actually more of every positive human quality than you. So take their path -you could learn from them, and try to challenge yourself, to give back, to add something from the world. Or you can stay on your path, and keep being a sad, pitiful, jealous internet troll who adds nothing to the world but mocks anyone who does out of small-minded jealousy. I know what you really want is attention, so let me be clear. If you choose to keep going this way, no one will ever remember you."
And as a fun related legal fact, the failure of a commander to punish war crimes by his subordinates is also a war crime under the doctrine of command responsibility.
Published by the Naval War College in 2021:
digital-commons.usnwc.edu/ils/vol97/is...
Every war involves killing. Any war means. death, and pain, and grief. For centuries the civilized nations of the world have attempted to reduce the death and suffering by observing the laws and usages of war. By international conventions and agreements, such as the Hague and Geneva Conventions, and by general custom, certain practices are internationally regarded as cruel, inhumane, and criminal. Such barbarities include the killing of s,urrendered belligerents, the refusal of quarter, and torture or other ill-treatment of belligerents or inhabitants of occupied countries. Such acts are crimes and, if they result in death, are murders.
From the "High Command Case" at Nuremberg:
(1) The accused declared, ordered, or otherwise indicated that there shall be no survivors or surrender accepted; (2) The accused thereby intended to threaten an adversary or to conduct hostilities such that there would be no survivors or surrender accepted; (3) It was foreseeable that circumstances would be such that a practicable and reasonable ability to accept surrender would exist; (4) The accused was in a position of effective command or control over the subordinate forces to which the declaration or order was directed; and (5) The conduct took place in the context of and was associated with hostilities.
✋ Former USG war crimes lawyer here.
Apropos of SecDef's remarks this morning:
Denial of quarter—even the declaration of no quarter—is a war crime.
And recognized as such by the US Government.
From DoD's Manual for Military Commissions.
Hegseth: "We will keep pushing, keep advancing. No quarter, no mercy for our enemies."
No quarter is the refusal to take prisoners and instead just execute everyone. It's been considered a war crime for over a century.
I have a friend, who specialised in how genetics is taught, whose grant was axed by one of these men. His life is in tatters, and his work matters.
Very Christian
Again, leaders of other countries don’t talk this way. The glee with which our current leaders talk about killing people is not normal, and nor is their lack of concern for who exactly we’re killing. American bombs incinerated 100 kids in Minab. Were those the “right people”?
The Matrix Resurrections was so good it makes me happy :>
We need more sequels like this!
Sad that this is from 8 years ago and we're still stuck in this hellscape
An illustration of a large T.rex at sunset. Its jaws are opened wide, and a flock of tiny birds surrounds its head, with a few brave individuals landing in its mouth, to pick scraps from the huge teeth.
T. rex tooth cleaning time.
#SciArt
New poll shows the public clearly wants superintelligence banned, amid warnings from experts that the technology could cause human extinction.
Plus: The Pro-Human AI Declaration, Evaluation Awareness, and more!
I have watched 6 hours of a DOGE bro deposition. The whole thing, start to finish. It's a fascinating, and horrifying, look at the people who caused so much damage, didn't really achieve anything at all, while still being so sure they are right. Here's what they said: www.404media.co/i-watched-6-...
Every god damn "innovation" capitalists churn out ends up just being "what if we could have slavery or near-slavery, but hide it?"
This is the best lede I've seen in a tech story in...years? There should be an award just for ledes.
An image showing a tanker dropped off on one side of a landmass at the start of a trolley problem leading to two pickup points, circumventing the closed strait of hormuz
Could this be a solution?
Lawyer: You don't regret that people might have lost income?
Cavanaugh (DOGE): No, I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit from two trillion dollars to close to zero.
Lawyer: Did you reduce the federal deficit?
Cavanaugh: No, we didn't.
By the way, one of the things that bothers me most is that I think LLMs *are* cool. In grad school, I was in comp neuro journal groups with some linguistics nerds when LLMs started rolling out and we were all very excited for the potential for parsing and analyzing language.
1/
UK 3 pin plug
Put the Type G, 3-pin, BS 1363 standard UK plug on a bank note.
It's something we can all agree warrants national pride, it's a design classic, and very clearly superior to other international alternatives.
