@[email protected]

[Nahel Belgherze @WxNB_]

Seismic waves from the M7.2 and M7.5 Venezuela earthquakes crossing Europe. Each dot represents a seismic station (GMV).

[hattie @oh_that_hat]

There's a fruit fly walking around right now that was never born.

@eonsys just released a video where they took a real fly's connectome — the wiring diagram of its brain — and simulated it. Dropped it into a virtual body. It started walking. Grooming. Feeding. Doing what flies do.

Nobody taught it to walk. No training data, no gradient descent toward fly-like behavior. This is the opposite of how AI works. They rebuilt the mind from the inside, neuron by neuron, and behavior just... emerged. It's the first time a biological organism has been recreated not by modeling what it does, but by modeling what it is.

A human brain is 6 OOM more neurons. That's a scaling problem, something we've gotten very good at solving. So what happens when we have a working copy of the human mind?

[Chris Gore @ThatChrisGore]

I used to marvel at new tech and now I'm just over it. This encapsulates how I feel about any new app or tech device these days.

[Matt Black @matthewjablack]

Just encountered one of the most convincing Google account takeover scams I’ve seen.

Perfect American accent. Calm. Professional.

They start the call by saying someone tried to hack your Google account using a fake death certificate, then ask if you recognize a recovery email or phone number.

They ask if you’ve received any recent Google emails about an account you don’t recognize trying to recover access.

And sure enough, there’s a legit Google security email.

Here’s the trick.

The attacker isn’t trying to hack your account.

They create a throwaway Google account, set your email as the recovery email, then try to recover that account. Google sends you a real security email.

The scammer calls you live, references the email, and even tells you to verify the headers since it comes directly from Google.

The headers are real. That’s the point.

Then they tell you they’re locking down your account and that you’ll get a recovery prompt on your phone. You just need to approve it to stay safe.

The giveaway was the device and location in the prompt didn’t match me. When I pushed back, they claimed it was from their servers, which obviously makes no sense.

At that point I hung up. I have a personal rule to never approve anything I didn’t initiate, especially while on the phone.

Extremely well executed social engineering. I’m sure this works on a lot of people.

And if someone calls you about account security, assume it’s a scam

[RandomSprint🧭 @RandomSprint]

The children of exceptionally nice people are usually less nice. This process is called "regression to the mean."

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

Agreed.

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

The US owes him an apology!

[Paras Chopra @paraschopra]

It’s funny cuz it’s true!

[Prof Sarah-Jayne Blakemore @sjblakemore]

I was explaining to my Ukrainian colleague the phrase ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’. She told me the equivalent in Ukrainian is ‘The only free cheese is in the mousetrap’ - which is so much better

[Earth @earthcurated]

Crashing waves off the coast of Ireland 🌊

[AJ Thurston, PhD @AJThurston]

I have officially found the most cursed #dataviz 🤮

[Patrick S. Tomlinson @stealthygeek]

President Petro responded with threats of 50% tariffs on American imports.

Trump immediately folded like a cheap suit and withdrew his demands to use military planes to transport deportees, which, again, was the only difference from what Biden had done. 4/

[Fred Lambert @FredLambert]

Incredible takedown of Elon Musk by his former friend and colleague, Dr. Philip Low.

[Restonian 🇺🇲 @restonian_va]

Exactly. As a grade-schooler learning about the Holocaust, I felt scared—not of Germans, but of what could happen here in America. I saw how a highly educated society, with leaders in science and a strong middle class, could be manipulated by one person to commit unthinkable evil.

[Sabine Hossenfelder @skdh]

I don't know why so many Americans have this idea that Germans all feel guilty about WWII. I don't know anyone my generation or even my parents' generation who feels this way. I think this is a story that Americans are telling themselves.

What is true is that at least the Germans I know feel a responsibility to make sure what happened in Nazi Germany doesn't happen again, not here, and not anywhere else. I certainly do.

This is why we are scared by what we see happening in the United States. The concentration of power, the streamlining of opinions, the normalization of evil, and the populism to excuse it. These are all warning signs we were taught to recognize.

Americans have this idea that the Holocaust happened in Germany because something is especially wrong with Germans. We're just somehow especially evil. This is why the bad guys in Hollywood movies are always Germans. This is why they make jokes about our supposedly military sounding language.

I strongly disagree. What happened in Germany could have happened anywhere. It's just that Hitler was the first to exploit this weakness. He was a master of mass manipulation (probably strongly influenced by Le Bon's "The Crowd" -- worth a read if you don't know it).

Now we have new masters of mass manipulation. And of course Germans worry about it.

Don't confuse what we feel is our responsibility with guilt.

Yes, ugh, "responsibility". That sounds terribly German, doesn't it. I'm sure you read this wiz a Schermen eksent.

No, I'm not proud to be German. Why would I? I didn't do anything for it, I just happen to have been born to two Germans. But I am glad I am German because all things considered it's a good country.

But if it was possible to just identify as Earthling and not belong to any country, that's what I'd want to be.

[MathMatize Memes @MathMatize]

|fuck you|

[George from 🕹prodmgmt.world @nurijanian]

Engineers-turned-PMs keep making the same fatal mistake in stakeholder meetings:

They think logic will save them.

After mentoring a few folks, I've noticed a pattern no one talks about:

[George Lakoff @GeorgeLakoff]

How to keep democracy alive in 2025:

1. Be Brave. Avoid helpless/hopeless talk. Authoritarians want you to feel powerless because it makes their work easier. Courage, faith, and optimism are essential. Fascism feeds on cynicism and pessimism. Starve it.

[Sigma Sreedharan @sigmas]

Wow, #Seattle absolutely crushed it ringing in 2025! Epic lights and fireworks, and that Drone show was total next-level!!! Even the weather was on point, blowing the smoke away from the show unlike last year. Cheers to starting the new year with a bang! #alaskaairlinesNYE #spaceneedle #nyeneedle

[Amanda Knox @amandaknox]

I’m writing this from the Panama Hotel and Cafe, which sheltered the valuables of Japanese-Americans forced into internment camps during WWII, and which sheltered me during one of my darkest periods. This is a letter of gratitude to the Japanese.
/thread