🦜🏔️ How did vibrant Amazonian parrot feathers end up in a desert tomb on the Pacific coast of Peru 1,000 years ago? Our new paper on @natcomms.nature.com reveals they didn't just trade feathers, pre-Inca societies transported live macaws and parrots across the Andes!👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
"#Grammarly turned me into an #AI #editor against my will." The Verge found numerous other #tech journalists named in the #expertreview feature ...from Verge, Wired, NYT, Atlantic,Tom's Guide & Gizmodo.https://www.platformer.news/grammarly-expert-review-reviewed
Update: Judith and I are moved beyond words by the outpouring of support. Whether it's buying a book from the store; offering tips on how to navigate The System after a layoff, or just writing to express sympathy, it all helps, tremendously. We will pay this forward. Love to you all.
Unfortunately, “Yo brother, legal team confirmed we can’t work with minors rn” is an instant classic
Funny how all of a sudden it's becoming the "Defense Department" again...
#ProPublica database explores potential conflicts of interest for #Trump, Cabinet officers, ambassadors et al. The documents disclose positions officials have held outside government (e.g., #Palantir, think tanks), assets (e.g., cryptocurrency) & debts. projects.propublica.org/trump-team-f...
Very strong statement from the First Lady of Iraq:
#Indonesia announces social media ban for under-16s, first in Southeast #Asia. #YouTube, #TikTok among targets of restrictions beginning in late March. #tech #instagram asia.nikkei.com/business/tec...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=VusJ...
I got the news that Sondra Lee ( Tiger Lily) passed away last month at the age of 95. She will always be my favorite Tiger Lily. And this version of Peter Pan will always be my fav, and will always have a very special place in my heart and childhood. 💚🧸🏴☠️🎶🧚♀️✨🌟🐊🪝⏰
Sondra Lee, who played Peter Pan's Tiger Lily on stage and TV, dies at 97. Many iterations of "Hello, Dolly." Author of "I slept with everybody." #Broadway www.kob.com/ap-top-news/...
I have been sick with COVID all week and missed Mon and Tues due to this. On Friday, while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep, I unintentionally made a serious journalistic error in an article about Scott Shambaugh. Here’s what happened: I was incorporating information from Shambaugh’s new blog post into an existing draft from Thursday. During the process, I decided to try an experimental Claude Code-based AI tool to help me extract relevant verbatim source material. Not to generate the article but to help list structured references I could put in my outline. When the tool refused to process the post due to content policy restrictions (Shambaugh’s post described harassment). I pasted the text into ChatGPT to understand why. I should have taken a sick day because in the course of that interaction, I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s words rather than his actual words. Being sick and rushing to finish, I failed to verify the quotes in my outline notes against the original blog source before including them in my draft. Kyle Orland had no role in this error. He trusted me to provide accurate quotes, and I failed him. The text of the article was human-written by us, and this incident was isolated and is not representative of Ars Technica’s editorial standards. None of our articles are AI-generated, it is against company policy and we have always respected that. I sincerely apologize to Scott Shambaugh for misrepresenting his words. I take full responsibility. The irony of an AI reporter being tripped up by AI hallucination is not lost on me. I take accuracy in my work very seriously and this is a painful failure on my part. When I realized what had happened, I asked my boss to pull the piece because I was too sick to fix it on Friday. There was nothing nefarious at work, just a terrible judgement call which was no one’s fault but my own. —Benj Edwards, February 15, 2026
I have been sick with COVID all week and missed Mon and Tues due to this. On Friday, while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep, I unintentionally made a serious journalistic error in an article about Scott Shambaugh. Here’s what happened: I was incorporating information from Shambaugh’s new blog post into an existing draft from Thursday. During the process, I decided to try an experimental Claude Code-based AI tool to help me extract relevant verbatim source material. Not to generate the article but to help list structured references I could put in my outline. When the tool refused to process the post due to content policy restrictions (Shambaugh’s post described harassment). I pasted the text into ChatGPT to understand why. I should have taken a sick day because in the course of that interaction, I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s words rather than his actual words. Being sick and rushing to finish, I failed to verify the quotes in my outline notes against the original blog source before including them in my draft. Kyle Orland had no role in this error. He trusted me to provide accurate quotes, and I failed him. The text of the article was human-written by us, and this incident was isolated and is not representative of Ars Technica’s editorial standards. None of our articles are AI-generated, it is against company policy and we have always respected that. I sincerely apologize to Scott Shambaugh for misrepresenting his words. I take full responsibility. The irony of an AI reporter being tripped up by AI hallucination is not lost on me. I take accuracy in my work very seriously and this is a painful failure on my part. When I realized what had happened, I asked my boss to pull the piece because I was too sick to fix it on Friday. There was nothing nefarious at work, just a terrible judgement call which was no one’s fault but my own. —Benj Edwards, February 15, 2026
I have been sick with COVID all week and missed Mon and Tues due to this. On Friday, while working from bed with a fever and very little sleep, I unintentionally made a serious journalistic error in an article about Scott Shambaugh. Here’s what happened: I was incorporating information from Shambaugh’s new blog post into an existing draft from Thursday. During the process, I decided to try an experimental Claude Code-based AI tool to help me extract relevant verbatim source material. Not to generate the article but to help list structured references I could put in my outline. When the tool refused to process the post due to content policy restrictions (Shambaugh’s post described harassment). I pasted the text into ChatGPT to understand why. I should have taken a sick day because in the course of that interaction, I inadvertently ended up with a paraphrased version of Shambaugh’s words rather than his actual words. Being sick and rushing to finish, I failed to verify the quotes in my outline notes against the original blog source before including them in my draft. Kyle Orland had no role in this error. He trusted me to provide accurate quotes, and I failed him. The text of the article was human-written by us, and this incident was isolated and is not representative of Ars Technica’s editorial standards. None of our articles are AI-generated, it is against company policy and we have always respected that. I sincerely apologize to Scott Shambaugh for misrepresenting his words. I take full responsibility. The irony of an AI reporter being tripped up by AI hallucination is not lost on me. I take accuracy in my work very seriously and this is a painful failure on my part. When I realized what had happened, I asked my boss to pull the piece because I was too sick to fix it on Friday. There was nothing nefarious at work, just a terrible judgement call which was no one’s fault but my own. —Benj Edwards, February 15, 2026
Sorry all this is my fault; and speculation has grown worse because I have been sick in bed with a high fever and unable to reliably address it (still am sick)
I was told by management not to comment until they did. Here is my statement in images below
arstechnica.com/staff/2026/0...
On this #WorldWildlifeDay, it feels like a good time to revisit this vintage #ISpyPhysiology blog...
At only 1-2 inches long, the zebrafish seems an unlikely model for human physiology. More on what this tiny creature can teach us about ourselves: https://ow.ly/hmSG50Yll0f #WWD2026 #Physiology 🧪
#Taiwan's CommonWealth magazine tracks daily #PLA activities in its vicinity: aircraft, balloons, ships.
www.cw.com.tw/graphics/pla...
#Grab charges #Philippines motorbike riders over 230% interest for short-term loans. That's 5.5x the max rate for credit card loans. #ridehailing #fintech asia.nikkei.com/spotlight/as...
White-light filtered photo of Sun, with Tiangong visible as a trail of small dots across its face. Several prominent sunspot regions, appearing much larger than the space station, are visible as well.
Chinese space station Tiangong transiting the Sun (w/sunspots) as seen this morning from my backyard. Smaller than the International Space Station, Tiangong is visible but hard to resolve with small telescopes. About 5.5 arcseconds in angular size and 0.75 seconds duration for this transit.🔭🧪
In humans, body temperature is strictly controlled, deviating only a degree or two from the standard 98.6 (although today's average human temp may actually be slightly lower), but many mammals are more flexible. I loved learning about heterothermy in lots of weird little mammals for this piece 🧪🦊
Trump’s attack on Iran takes a big economic bite out of one of America’s chief rivals: China.
Almost all of Iran’s exported oil, and more than half of Venezuela’s, went last year to China.
📈 5 charts that show China’s oil dilemma after U.S. strikes: politi.co/4seecG8
Irish illegal immigrant Seamus Culleton, who has been detained by ICE awaiting deportation back to his home country to face drug charges, had a history of domestic violence and restraining order vi…
After Taliban attacks on Pakistan’s border areas, Pakistani jets hit Taliban targets across eastern and southern Afghanistan overnight.
New @crisisgroup.org report urges peaceful ways to settle differences away from the battlefield.
www.crisisgroup.org/rpt/asia-pac...
HRW exposed a Uyghur in France targeted by China to become a diaspora spy. These cases rarely see light, and even rarer goes to court, but we have mapped in detail just one such case in Sweden. See how it actually works, and how MSS pursue them.
safeguarddefenders.com/en/blog/tibe...
Here's a story about his death www.investigativepost.org/2026/02/25/b...
From woe to go the Chinese and Hong Kong govts’ persecution/persecution of publisher Jimmy Lai has been profoundly politicized. A small win to see acknowledgment that a judge “erred,” but let’s be clear: they all have. Lai should be freed immediately and unconditionally.
www.bbc.com/news/article...
The U.S. women's hockey gold medal-winning team has politely declined an invitation from President Donald Trump to attend his State of the Union address on Tuesday.
"The low level of reported sexual assaults in Hong Kong raises questions about how confident women are to report."
👇 @brianhioe.bsky.social @chinafile.bsky.social @jfallows.bsky.social
