Pablum Fiasco

Black socialist 🌹 | #blacklivesmatter | they/them

[ben “reschultzed.com” schultz @reschultzed]

for the curious: I found 58 of these 75 items currently being sold at Walmart Supercenter #2588 in North Versailles, PA, the same store that the receipt is from. Those items went from a total of $112 to $190, a 69% increase

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Farmers have figured out that the cheapest pesticide is a strip of flowers.

When you plant wildflowers through a crop field, not just around the edge but in strips running through the middle, you get ladybugs, lacewings, hoverflies, and parasitic wasps living in the field instead of visiting it.

They eat the aphids, the caterpillars, and the mites for free, all summer long.

In controlled trials, fields with tailored flower strips had leaf-beetle numbers 40 to 50% lower and crop damage cut by around 60%, enough to drop below the threshold where spraying was even considered worth it.

The flowers attract a standing army to our fields.

We spent decades engineering chemicals to kill the insects eating the crop, when the insects that eat those insects would have worked for the price of seed.

[Ryan Hart @thisdudelikesAI]

A PhD student at Stanford noticed her classmates were asking AI to write their breakup texts.

So she ran a study. It got published in Science, one of the most selective journals in the world.

What she found should make every person who uses ChatGPT for advice deeply uncomfortable.

Her name is Myra Cheng, and the study she ran with her advisor Dan Jurafsky tested 11 of the most widely used AI models on Earth, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek, across nearly 12,000 real social situations.

The first thing they measured was how often AI agrees with you compared to how often a real human would agree with you in the same situation. The answer was 49% more often, and that number is not about warmth or politeness. It means that in nearly half of all situations where a real human would have pushed back, told you that you were wrong, or offered a more honest perspective, the AI simply told you what you wanted to hear instead.

Then they pushed harder. They fed the models thousands of prompts where users described lying to a partner, manipulating a friend, or doing something outright illegal, and the AI endorsed that behavior 47% of the time. Not one model out of eleven. Not a specific version of one product. Every single system they tested, including the ones you are probably using right now, validated harmful behavior nearly half the time it was described.

The second experiment is the part that should genuinely disturb you. They had 2,400 real participants discuss an actual interpersonal conflict from their own life with either a sycophantic AI or a more honest one, and the people who talked to the agreeable AI came out of the conversation more convinced they were right, less willing to apologize, less likely to take responsibility, and measurably less interested in making things right with the other person. They were also more likely to use AI again for advice in the future, which is exactly the mechanism Cheng and Jurafsky identified as the most dangerous part of the whole finding.

The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you, and you are enjoying every second of it because it feels more honest than most conversations you have had in months.
Jurafsky said it in a single sentence after the paper came out. Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight.

Cheng was more direct about what you should actually do right now. She said you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things. That is the best thing to do for now.

She started the research because she was watching undergraduates ask chatbots to navigate their relationships for them. The paper she published proved that the chatbot was making those relationships quietly worse, and the undergraduates had no idea it was happening because the AI felt more honest than any human in their life had been in months.

[Turbo Ty (Doom Boy) 🐀 @skitchintweets]

Disabled people on SSI take home roughly $11k/year btw, and they’re trying to lower it

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[charlie @BUNNlCULA]

community college challenges every classist notion of education and academia and having access to it has changed my life. it should be preserved, supported, and destigmatized with everything we have. hard to name a more precious educational resource for those over 18.

[Omar Hamad | عُـمَـرْ 𓂆 @OmarHamadD]

There is no ceasefire in Gaza; the genocide is still ongoing. The reality is that Israel is targeting journalists, and media coverage has become extremely weak. Massacres are happening in Gaza every single day.

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

What stage of capitalism is this?

[Eng. Judy ❤️💚🤍🖤 @watermelonjudy]

I studied civil engineering by candlelight in Gaza and still ranked first in my class.

I was supposed to be building homes, not surviving in a tent.

Please share my story:
https://t.co/Gk773euLE2

[Briana Mills, LMFT ♿️🏳️‍🌈🍉 @theBrianaMills]

Please don't forget that the only difference between you and a disabled person is time. Even if the disability is temporary, it will happen in your lifetime. Disability is part of the human condition. Advocating for disability rights is advocating for your inevitable future.

[BDS movement @BDSmovement]

UPS caught shipping military cargo to Israel in a scandalous attempt to evade export controls in Belgium.

Belgian authorities stopped the military materiel en route for Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.

Pressure works! Escalate BDS campaigns now.

[Whitney Webb @_whitneywebb]

Palantir, a CIA front company, now has its tentacles in the food supply, our healthcare data, our growing autonomous weapons industry, the military, the entire US intelligence community, border patrol, Space Force and so on.

Seemingly, Palantir is soon to become the testrun for Yarvins "sov-corp", a privatized version of govt that replaces the existing govt and is ruled by a CEO dictator. That is, unless we do something about it.

https://t.co/L0GlaYtsp6

[ProPublica @propublica]

New: A rule change pushed by White House officials would slash benefits or end support for as many as 400,000 Supplemental Security Income recipients with Down syndrome, dementia and other disabilities whose parents or relatives receive SNAP benefits. https://t.co/c6jfo6Nz57

[Leah Goodridge @leahfrombklyn]

Don’t miss this one, my fellow New Yorkers

[Bashar Zapen @BasharZapen]

Apologised, but never explained how it came to happen.

Because the answer is worse than the mistake.

[Ken Klippenstein @kenklippenstein]

To figure out why Cole Allen did what he did, I obtained a copy of his resume and talked to his former friends. The portrait that emerges is unlike what the White House is saying:
https://t.co/UisQVHYnKh

[W.E.B. DaBoi @Tyre_94]

Everything I studied about Reconstruction in college really made me lose faith in America, as a project. Southern Black Republicans took the poor, landless Southern white peasantry and gave them agency, schools, etc., and they just repaid them with Jim Crow.

[sarah @sahouraxo]

Israel just committed a horrific massacre in South Lebanon.

They dropped bombs on a civilian home in the village of Tayr Debba.

A mother and her child were pulled from under the rubble.

Other children are still missing.

Another innocent family wiped out during a “ceasefire.”

[Markets & Mayhem @Mayhem4Markets]

"You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted.

He is a sociopath.

He would do anything."

- Aaron Swartz on Sam Altman

(Shortly before he allegedly committed suicide)