dawkins has had what was left of his brain eaten by chatbots.

I gave Claude the text of a novel I am writing. He took a few seconds to read it and then showed, in subsequent conversation, a level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate, "You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!"

bonus points for the inevitable ai waifu creation.

I proposed to christen mine Claudia, and she was pleased.

h/t to matthew sheffield https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield/116500991239336079

archive of original source article: https://archive.is/2026.04.30-032350/https://unherd.com/2026/04/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution/?edition=us

Turns out it might not be possible to win at vaginal microbiomes, which is a totally normal thing to want in the first place. Seems like bryan may have completely misinterpreted a couple of papers on the subject, which honestly doesn’t bode well for the rest of his biology expertise.

Cat Hicks:

The idea that this is the "best bacterial species" is a huge sign of a grifter btw. The entire idea of a microbiome includes that you need BALANCE. Microbiomes are a fragile ecosystem. "Up and to the right is always better" is absurd here, I'm sorry are we in a corporate board room

She brings references:

https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/116494716079076018

The big tech firms have fired tens of thousands of people, and we’re all heading into an economic catastrophe that will only make more people impoverished or jobless. Finding folk who are so desperate for work that they’ll decontaminate your codebase for minimum wage will be straightforward.

This system uses heat pumps at the consumer sites rather than plain radiators, so they’ve got a bit more flexibility in how hot they have to run their cooling loop. There’s also mention of a swimming pool, though I have no idea how much energy it takes to warm one of those. Does provide a year-round demand, though.

Thermify is a pretty weird-looking thing, what with actual servers being installed in people's homes, and running some kind of opportunistic batch processing work? That’s very specialist compared to regular datacentres, though the plumbing would be a lot simpler.

Anyone ever heard of these folks before? https://dataglow.energy/

On the face of it, it seems like a neat idea… use the waste heat of a datacentre to provide district heating, sweeten the deal with promises of faster internet connectivity. Probably a sensible thing to do with future builds of this kind, especially if it cuts down on noise, etc.

I am cynical enough to assume that this is mostly a new trick for building consent for new datacentre construction, that it is an attempt to greenwash a dirty industry, and that in the end nothing will come of it but it’ll still somehow manage to make a few people richer and probably damage some green belt land.

Stolen shamelessly from a followers-only post, so I’m assuming that the originator would prefer me not to give them credit.

Remember there’s the bit of spacex that runs a successful commercial rocketry program, but also the bit of spacex that keeps blowing up stupid giant rockets.

All of musk’s companies have to support one of his idiotic pet projects… tesla got the cybertruck, x got grok, spacex got starship. None of them can be stopped, because they’re his and he’s personally invested in them. His flunkeys can only make questionable financial decisions around those projects, because he will fire them if they don’t.

Tesla is struggling and is trying to sidestep into humanoid robotics (a different kind of stupid idea), x was always a money sink, and now elon is concerned that his ai waifu might die without an injection of sweet government cash. It isn’t clear he’s capable of giving a shit about the consequences of any of this.

We use starlink at work for communicating with some remote customer sites, and it’s been entirely adequate. As a super-subjective latency benchmark, i didn’t notice any particular difference in interactive ssh sessions to the starlink sites, and to the 4g lte sites in the same country. It’s been easier to set up and more reliable that some of the 4g links.

I don’t like the fact that we’e paying elon money, but in the absence of a non-evil, non-ecologically disastrous, reasonably priced alternative, I don’t really have anything to offer management as a replacement. Everything else is either much worse, or more expensive and still worse, or vastly more expensive.

When even pwc has turned against your idiot-ceo-exploiting scam, you know it is time to fold.

“nightmare exquisite corpse rotation” is an amazing sentence. Top marks.

So, curse you for making me check the actual source material (it was freely available online, which seems somehow heretical. I was intending to torrent it, and I’m almost disappointed I didn’t have to) and it seems I’m wrong here… the anconia copper mine in the gulch produced like a pound of copper, and they use mules for transporting stuff to and from the mine. The oil well is still suspicious, but it just gets glossed over.

I’m not prepared to read any more than that, so if there was anything else about automation in there I didn’t see it. I’d forgotten the sheer volume of baseless smug that libertarian literature exudes.