@mhedney It was great to put a voice to your avatar picture. Was I correcting in noting an underlying British accent?
🖥️ **AI ‘slop’ and the end of the internet**
"_The internet that once held great promise to bring humans universal knowledge, connectivity, freedom and education will have been turned into a wasteland of unreal, unbelievable, and untrustworthy slop._"
🔗 https://www.brandonsun.com/opinion/columns/2025/07/14/ai-slop-and-the-end-of-the-internet.
#AISlop #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Technology #Tech #Internet
🖥️ **Evidence of a social evaluation penalty for using AI**
"_Through four experiments with over 4,400 participants, we reveal a social penalty for AI use: Individuals who use AI tools face negative judgments about their competence and motivation from others._"
J.A. Reif, R.P. Larrick, & J.B. Soll, Evidence of a social evaluation penalty for using AI, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (19) e2426766122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2426766122 (2025).
#OpenAccess #OA #Research #Article #Psychology #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Technology #Tech #Academia #Academic @psychology
🖥️ 🖋️ **AI Can’t Gaslight Me if I Write by Hand**
"_We all have concerns about property infringement, the loss of jobs, the banality of ideas only formulated by the clunky cobbling together of what’s already been written and fed into the maw of the large language model (LLM)._"
🔗 https://electricliterature.com/ai-cant-gaslight-me-if-i-write-by-hand/.
#Essay #Writing #Handwriting #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Technology #Tech #LLM #LLMS
How GLP-1s Are Breaking Life Insurance
Turns out semaglutide, tirzepatide, and relatives are wrecking the insurance underwriting industry's model of human mortality trends
https://www.glp1digest.com/p/how-glp-1s-are-breaking-life-insurance
🇺🇸 **The evolution of import tariffs: Rates and revenue as a percentage of GDP**
"_Both rates jumped noticeably in 2018 during the first trade war, more or less doubling by 2022. Despite this increase, tariffs still make up only a small part of federal revenue: about 0.3% of GDP per year, far too small to close the gap in the federal deficit, which has been close to 7% of GDP annually in recent years._"
🔗 https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2025/07/the-evolution-of-import-tariffs/.
🇬🇧 🌡️ **Why the UK's extreme weather is 'new normal'**
"_Climate change means there will be longer, hotter summers as well as more powerful storms and floods across the continent, so can anything be done to stop it?_"
#Video length: nine minutes and twenty-three seconds.
🔗 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hffmQ5UoDU0.
#Climate #ClimateChange #Environment #Weather @climatechange
**Everything Has a Price: The Commercial Gaze and the Origins of Corporate Empire**
"_As travel narratives from the early days of the English East India Company—1601 to 1611—show, the mature form of the British Empire took shape via a commercial gaze that increasingly rendered the world as inventory. By the end of this period, such narratives focused obsessively on the dry heights of markets, merchandise, and profit—even when the journeys themselves had been harrowing._"
🗺️ 📻 **The history of mapping takes 50 years to tell**
A radio interview with @mhedney on the Larry Meiller Show discussing the history of cartography.
https://www.wpr.org/shows/larry-meiller-show/ais-mixed-success-and-the-history-of-cartography.
🖥️ "New research suggests the chorus of techno-optimism is based on falsehoods"
#Research #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Technology #Tech #GiftLink #GiftArticle
The UK Environment Agency has some tips for the public to help conserve water, including
> Deleting old emails to reduce pressure on data centre servers
I kid you not.
@GinevraCat I did not realise this was such a divisive issue. I prefer reading as opposed to listening to a book as it helps me in retention; however, I do not begrudge those who prefer listening to audiobooks.
**Political Bibliography**
For those interested in a reading list that incorporates academic articles concerning the politics of the European far right, please look no further than: https://fediscience.org/@kaiarzheimer/114847310894179596, complied by @kaiarzheimer.
#Bibliography #Reading #List #ReadingList #Politics #FarRight #Europe
Collecting #AncientCoins, particularly those from Rome is popular. But how much do you know about the #Roman #banking system? Invicta has you covered with this 19 minute video on the banking system in #Ancient #Rome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nw-TszklK-g (Not much mention of specific coins, but an interesting discussion on how it worked)
#Numismatics #Historian #Histodons #CoinCollecting @numismatics @histodons
nihte-gala, m.n: nightingale (lit. ‘night-singer’). (NI’HT-uh-GA-la / ˈnɪxt-ə-ˌga-la)
Image: Aberdeen Bestiary; England, c. 1200; Aberdeen University Library, MS 24, f. 52v.
#OldEnglish #WOTD
📵 A good #idea?
**Flag: American Party, 1844-1860**
#History #Flag #KnowNothingParty #AmericanParty #USPol #Politics #Nationalism #Nativism #Populism
#Image attribution: American Party (1844-1860), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Page URL: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Digital_Reproduction_of_the_Know-Nothing_Party_Flag.jpg.
Please report any account that tells you that you need to verify your #Mastodon account to continue using it through a private message. It is a scam. We do not require identity verification. Real staff accounts either have a special role badge on their profile or are verified through the joinmastodon.org domain and will typically never reach out through private messages.
@rolandmcs.bsky.social Just slightly?
31 Maria-Elisabeth Brunert/Nadir Weber: Diplomatic Reporting: Negotiating the Truth in Westphalia and Beyond
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110672008-033
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Not a bot, just a fifty-year-old male who reads occasionally.
Toots are humanities, science, non-fiction, books, maps, charts, and graphs related. Some toots containing videos may also find their way into the timeline.
Toots or follows or boosts or mentions ≠ endorsements of any particular notion or notions.
Finis