Lesley Jacobs ☮️

on Post at @lesleyjacobs on Mastodon @[email protected]

[CONSEQUENCE @consequence]

Ronny Chieng had one message for Harvard grads during his commencement speech: destroy AI.

"Look, a lot of other respected graduation speakers in colleges around America are talking about you guys needing to master AI for the future. I'm here to tell you the mission of your generation is to destroy AI...

"And I know, I know there's someone sitting out here right now who’s just like, 'Well, you know, what about the use of AI to pioneer breakthroughs in medicine and physics?' Well, first of all, shut up, nerd. I'm not talking about that. Obviously, if you're using it for that purpose, you're not the problem.

"I'm talking about the accumulation of cognitive debt due to excessive use of large language models according to a study by MIT published in 2025. That's right, MIT. MIT did that study. I guess you guys were too busy giving each other A's. Feel free to boo MIT, by the way, and AI, and yourselves, I guess.

"Look, this is actually good news, okay? This is why you guys shouldn't be scared of AI, because I think AI is just going to end up making mediocre people dumber. Have you heard how dumb people brag about how they use AI? They're always like, 'Hey, did you know that AI can now read my email, summarize it, and drop a response?' Yeah, you know who else can do that? Me. I can do that. You can't do that? How useless are you? You need artificial intelligence just to match me? I'm a dumb*ss who couldn't get into Harvard.

"From what I can see, getting an actual advantage from AI in the future will require a minimum escape velocity of intelligence that I'm assuming you guys from Harvard have. Everyone else who can't match that is just going to get dumber, and that's when you run up the score on them, assuming we still have a functioning society, of course.

"But to run up the score, you’re going to have to master your craft. And AI can be the fuel, but fuel is useless if you can't kindle the fire. For example, I recently used AI to use regression analysis to prove that a certain race of people are mathematically terrible at sports. I won't say which race, but thank you for not inviting Hasan Minhaj to Harvard. My point is, learning the fundamentals still matter. If I didn't know what a regression analysis was, and if I wasn't fundamentally racist, would I have been able to do any of that? No.

"Untalented people love bragging about using AI to help them draft their speeches and their scripts and their podcasts and their promo videos for UFC fights at the White House, which to be fair, even if they had filmed that for real, it would still have looked like AI. But what they're missing is this: the creating is the fun part. The best part of comedy writing is figuring out the puzzle pieces of a joke and getting the self-regard from having accomplished a difficult thing. Why would I want AI to take that away from me?

"You know what problem I want AI to solve? I want the problem of AI making everything look like sh*t. I want AI to solve that problem. How about that?

"Or how about, can AI take away the part of comedy writing where my TV pilot gets passed on and when I ask if I can pitch it to someone else, the network says, 'We don't want it, but we also don't want anyone else to have it. We just want you to be sad.' Can AI solve that?

"I recently tried to introduce my friend to Buddhism through a book called Buddhism Made Simple. It was literally a book about Buddhism made simple. And instead of reading it, he used AI to summarize it in 10 seconds. Believe it or not, he didn't reach enlightenment. It turns out speed running Buddhism is completely missing the point.

"And I know this platitude is almost worthy of AI, but the reason shortcuts to skip to the end aren't always good is because the journey isn't just how we acquire skills. The journey is the point of all this. It is! It turns out maybe the real Harvard was the friends we made along the way.

"Look, I know this won't apply to everyone's industry, but I'm just saying whatever your chosen profession is, please don't let AI rob you of the fun part of it.

"I think your generation's upcoming battle won't be humans against AI. That's at least two months away. It's going to be people with substance versus people with shallow knowledge. It’s going to be mastery versus faking it. It's going to be people with good taste versus tacky. I trust you will put in the work necessary to be on the right side of those battles."

[Michelle Maxwell ™ @MichelleMaxwell]

With everything we are hearing right now about ticks this seems like good information to share.

“Here’s what I’ve learned after more ticks than I care to count.
First, whatever your uncle told you, forget it. No matches. No nail polish. No Vaseline. No soap on a cotton ball. All of those do the same terrible thing, they stress the tick out, and a stressed tick empties its gut back into the bite before letting go. Which, if you think about what that actually means for a second, is literally how Lyme and the rest get transmitted so you’re not speeding up its exit. You’re making it throw up into you.
Fine-tipped tweezers. Grip right where the mouthparts enter the skin, not the body, the head. Pull straight up, steady, no twisting, no jerking. It’ll feel like it’s resisting because it is, the mouthparts are barbed. Just keep the pressure on and it lets go in a few seconds. If a piece breaks off in the skin, leave it alone. Your body pushes splinters out. Digging around with a needle does more damage then the fragment ever would.
Clean it with alcohol or soap. Wash your hands.
Now here’s the part most people skip: don’t flush the tick.
Tape it to an index card. Clear packing tape right over the body, write the date and where on your body it was, and stick the card in a drawer. If you come down with anything weird in the next 30 days, rash, fever, joint pain, that flu-that-isn’t-flu feeling, that tick goes with you to the doctor. Some labs will test the tick itself, which is faster and often more reliable than waiting for antibodies to show up in your own blood. A dated tick taped to a card is one of the most useful things you can hand a doctor who’s trying to figure out what’s wrong with you.
The other thing worth saying out loud: if the tick was engorged when you pulled it, and you can’t swear it was off your body within 24 hours, call your doctor that same day. Don’t wait for a rash. Fewer than three out of four Lyme cases even produce the classic bullseye. A single preventive dose of doxycycline within 72 hours of a deer tick bite cuts the Lyme odds way down, and most docs in tick country will write that prescription without giving you a hard time, especially if you walk in with the tick taped to a card and a clear timeline.”

[tern @1goodtern]

https://t.co/dUdXvbrUnE

[Kevin → Plant Daddy @KevinEspiritu]

While everyone argues about data centers and water, California almonds quietly use up to 80x more, AND the whole industry only survives because of trucked-in "livestock"...

Every February, beekeepers transport nearly every commercial honeybee colony in the United States (around 2.8 million hives) to California to pollinate almonds.

It's the largest "managed-pollination" event on the planet. Almonds cover 1.4 million acres and need bees to pollinate so they set nuts.

So why do we need to truck them in? Well, almonds are grown in huge monoculture orchards, meaning the native bee species are all but eradicated...there's nothing for them to eat most of the year.

To fix the problem WE created, we ship in bees from across the country. I interviewed the creator of the 2019 documentary The Pollinators, which followed this migration and brought a lot of this story into public view.

First off, honeybees aren't native to North America. They were brought from Europe in the 1600s. The "bee crisis" you read about, with national colony losses around 55% last year and some commercial keepers losing 60 to 70% in a single season, is happening to a managed, introduced species.

It's a livestock collapse driven by long-haul transport, pesticide exposure at bloom, hives packed together spreading mites and viruses, and a monoculture diet.

Meanwhile, North America has roughly 4,000 native bee species. Most are solitary, don't make honey, don't sting, and quietly pollinate everything from squash to blueberries.

Research out of UC Davis and UC Berkeley has been direct about this: when blue orchard bees, bumble bees, and other natives forage alongside honeybees in almond orchards, fruit set goes UP, not down.

The presence of wild bees changes how honeybees move through the trees and makes the honeybees themselves more effective pollinators.

So the fix isn't more honeybee hives. It's hedgerows, wildflower strips, bare ground for ground-nesting bees, and uncut field edges, aka habitat for the natives who were doing this work long before we started trucking in livestock.

Honeybees are livestock. Native bees are the wildlife, and we should be planting to include them in our agriculture.

[Mike Hoerger, PhD MSCR MBA @michael_hoerger]

There is nothing yet in the data to suggest a national summer wave peak widely departing from Sept 5. Forecasts beyond a few weeks are not reliable. We're just not seeing an early rise like in 2022 and 2024.

Levels have also apparently flattened in the CDC and Biobot data, rather than continuing to decline markedly, which is consistent with transmission patterns in 2021, 2023, and 2025. Peaks those years were Sept 1, Sept 7, and Sept 6, respectively. The PMC estimates of the peak new daily infections those summers were 0.7 million, 1.3 million, and 1.5 million new daily infections, so peak magnitude is an area of considerable uncertainty.

In any event, it's like picking the Super Bowl winner two games into the season. ESPN has Seattle #1 in the power rankings. If they start 2-0, that's consistent with the expected performance, but it would be uninformed to expect anything other than some other team taking over. Always pick the field.

There are two main points of uncertainty, in my view. One is minor. Labor Day is later than any of the past 5 years. That could push back the peak a week. The second is more uncertain, the World Cup. People considerably overestimate the importance of discrete events on national SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Namely, people with riskier behaviors tend to engage in those behaviors more often on average (personality), so the person flying to the WC, going to stadiums, and bar hopping may well do a lot of that already; they may have gotten infected a month ago and be at below average infection risk. Instead, I think about what gets the less-risky people experiencing more exposures at a broad level, and that tends to be things like weather, schools starting, and travel to see family in late Nov through late Dec.

July 17 is when you'll probably have a good sense of what's happening. A 40% increase from June 27 to July 11 would be my practical benchmark for "typical." If it's the expected trajectory, that's the day you'll get the good post-Independence Day data for those dates. You'll hear a lot of physicians and epidemiologists who have minimized COVlD in the past doing so again, at least through then, and probably another couple weeks after, because they don't track wastewater data closely and think SARS-CoV-2 is more about hospitalizations than cumulative infections & Long COVlD. I saw this a lot with the past two waves. A worse case scenario would be the WC pushing the wave forward a little. The better case scenario would be that you don't see that big increase from June 27 to July 11, not in the July 17 data, and that it still doesn't shoot up by 30% or more in the July 24 data. If there's no big increase evident by July 24, we would be headed into a different state of SARS-CoV-2.

[Lesley Jacobs ☮️ @lesleyjacobs]

@DonEford Thank you Don for continuing to advocate for Nuvaxovid. I am hoping they extend the expiration to 9 months. It is very difficult to get in on a six month vaccination schedule when pharmacies stop carrying it in the springtime. Frustrating.

[Brad Desmond @BradDesmond2]

Stephen Colbert goes out showing the best revenge is not success, but joy. Pure joy.

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

The sun coming out and spring arriving makes you feel good because you are a creature, not a machine. You have more in common with grass and tides than with a device in your hand. You move in rhythm with the sun and the moon, not on demand like AI. You are a creature.

[Tara Dublin aka Winona Spyder™️ @taradublinrocks]

This is GLORIOUS

David Letterman & Stephen Colbert on the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theatre bringing back the classic @Letterman routine one last time

This is how you go out, @StephenAtHome! 😂

And may @CBS implode literally the same way without you

[Harry Spoelstra @HarrySpoelstra]

Tissue-specific autoantibody signatures reveal immune alterations undetected by routine serology in long COVID

🚨83% of long COVID patients have rogue autoantibodies attacking their own heart, lungs & blood vessels, and every standard blood test misses it completely. VERY INTERESTING!

➡️In a UNIQUE Hungarian cohort of 114 long COVID patients versus 36 pre-pandemic controls, tissue-specific Western blotting detected autoantibodies in 83% of cases, with strong cardiovascular dominance,

➡️Vascular autoreactivity was markedly higher in long COVID (34% vs. 8%, p<0.05), cardiac (54%) and pulmonary (34%) signals trended elevated but did not reach significance( cohort size?),

➡️Autoantibodies were predominantly IgM-skewed, polyreactive (up to 8 bands per patient), and persisted longitudinally (mean 141 days), with new isotypes emerging over time,

➡️Standard ANA testing showed no group differences and zero clinical correlations, rendering it useless for detecting these alterations,

➡️Cardiac autoreactivity associated with hypertension and headache, overall autoreactivity correlated with anosmia/ageusia, female sex, CRP, BMI, creatinine, and troponin levels,

➡️The study used human cardiac, pulmonary, and vascular tissue homogenates.

➡️Findings were independent of routine serology and highlight an under-recognized immune component invisible to current diagnostics.

➡️“This persistent, IgM-skewed profile suggests ongoing immune dysregulation and may reflect a previously underrecognized component of the immunological response in long COVID, highlighting the need for targeted immunodiagnostic approaches beyond routine serology.”

‼️Why this is shocking:
It proves that in 83% of long COVID patients, the immune system is actively producing autoantibodies that directly target their own heart, lung, and especially blood-vessel tissues, yet every standard blood test (ANA HEp-2) comes back normal.
These rogue antibodies are polyreactive, IgM-dominant, persist for months, and keep evolving.
They correlate with real symptoms (anosmia, hypertension, headache) and lab markers of damage (troponin, CRP).

‼️In other words:
The majority of long COVID sufferers have smouldering, organ-specific autoimmunity that is completely invisible to routine diagnostics. Doctors are flying blind while patients’ tissues are quietly under autoimmune attack.

🤔As far as I know, this is the first direct evidence of hidden, cardiovascular-dominant tissue autoimmunity driving the chronic L0ngC0vid phase! #BookMark
#AvoidSars2 #AvoidReinfections
https://t.co/3n4gS7gZVI

[Dr. Sean Mullen @drseanmullen]

There are now more than half a million scientific publications related to COVID-19 and a rapidly growing body of evidence linking SARS-CoV-2 infection to immune dysregulation, microvascular injury, autonomic dysfunction, clotting abnormalities, viral persistence, and measurable cognitive changes.

And to the people constantly sick, exhausted, dizzy, forgetful, exercise intolerant, waking up to feeling like you got hit by a truck on the daily or suddenly developing strange inflammation, heart issues, GI problems, or “mystery” symptoms after repeated infections…

At some point you and society as a whole must confront the reality that repeated infection with a vascular and neurotropic virus was never as harmless as everyone wanted it to be.

I choose to live in reality.

That virus is still here. It is still spreading through the air. And it is still associated with long-term vascular, immune, and neurological consequences for many people.

Protecting yourself from that threat — through cleaner air, better ventilation, filtration, vaccination, and high-quality masks in high-risk settings — also reduces your risk from many of the other respiratory pathogens constantly circulating around us.

And if you are tired of watching people suffer while being told this is “normal,” then start demanding urgency.

Ask why Long Covid clinics are closing instead of expanding.
Ask why immunologists, virologists, neurologists, vascular scientists, and pathologists are not being funded at Manhattan Project scale to investigate viral persistence, immune dysfunction, clotting, mitochondrial damage, and cognitive impairment.
Ask why billions can appear overnight for almost anything else, but millions living with chronic illness are told to “pace themselves” and move on.

Support researchers (the ones who are still focused on Long Covid that don’t conflate the disease)
Support clean air initiatives (two strong efforts happening in Illinois right now! Help us!!).
Support disability advocacy.
Pressure institutions to improve indoor air quality.
Stop mocking people for protecting themselves.
And stop accepting “everyone is sick all the time now” as a normal feature of modern life.

[Colin McCarthy @US_Stormwatch]

Lake Powell, the 2nd-largest reservoir in the US, is over 80 feet lower than it was 8 years ago and 170 feet lower than the last time it was nearly full in 1999.

Spring snowmelt inflows are projected at just 13% of normal, the lowest on record. The lake could fall to 3,490 feet as soon as August, roughly 30 feet below the previous all-time low.

3,490 feet is "minimum power pool," the level below which Glen Canyon Dam can no longer generate hydropower for 5 million people across 7 states.

In a desperate move by the Bureau of Reclamation, up to 1 million acre-feet, nearly a third of Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Wyoming, will be released downstream to stabilize Powell.

This water crisis facing the Southwestern US will affect tens of millions of people, and it's not going anywhere.

[Lesley Jacobs ☮️ @lesleyjacobs]

@froglet80 I am happy you are making progress Froglet!

[Ribz of Tik Tok @ribzoftiktok]

Get this man a cooking show, pronto Tonto!

[Lesley Jacobs ☮️ @lesleyjacobs]

@nbcsnl SNL brilliance in comedy in this sketch.

[Saturday Night Live @nbcsnl]

a scene from the crumbling marriage of two auctioneers

[SEATTLESUBMISSIONS @SEATTLESUBMISS]

I-5 was fully closed for over an hour last night with all lanes blocked by police. While drivers sat at a standstill, an impromptu street band formed on the freeway sousaphone, accordion, trumpet, and all. #SEATTLE 🎷 (video credit u/Kirby223)

[Care Not COVID Chicagoland and Illinois @CareNotCOVIDChi]

NATIONAL CALL-TO-ACTION—Help us enshrine the right to wear medical respirators in Illinois. Let's make sure this forward-thinking bill becomes first-in-the-nation law: fill out a proponent witness slip! And you don't need to live in IL to do it 🧵

[Rebekah Jones @GeoRebekah]

We did it!!

Our internet hate campaign against the Laurehurst community has stopped these rich assholes from governing how often and under what circumstances children can be flown to the Seattle's Children Hospital for emergency medical care.

Great job, everyone!!

https://t.co/wClH1J9DGa