Discount Art Garfunkel

This is your reminder to pee after sex • he/him

[🪬woKale🇮🇪 Guita CEO @ThatKaleGuy]

Thousand year old tree died. Surely that’s not of any significance whatsoever

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Your calendar was full at 21 and empty at 26 for a reason MIT discovered in 1950.

Researchers studied a housing complex called Westgate and found friendship was predicted by one variable above everything else: physical distance between front doors. Students living near stairwells and mailboxes made the most friends. Shared interests, values, personality? All downstream of foot traffic. They named it the propinquity effect.

Researcher Rebecca Adams later distilled friendship formation into three conditions: proximity, repeated unplanned interactions, and settings where people let their guard down. A college campus delivers all three automatically, dozens of hours a week of engineered collisions. Adult life delivers zero by default.

That's the entire mechanism behind days blending together. Your brain registers novelty from unplanned human contact. Remove the collisions and time loses its texture.

The fix is repetition. One dinner party changes nothing. The same gym class, same coffee shop, same pickup game at the same time every week rebuilds the structure school gave you for free. Friendship grows from accumulated accidental contact, so frequency wins.

College handed you a collision machine. Adults who stay social just rebuilt one.

[evan loves worf @esjesjesj]

Again to be clear they stopped counting deaths at 800,000 in December 2025. It is well over a million now

[casper/florian 🦚🪽 @SHARKFAN70]

this is like 9/11 for people in Wisconsin

[jeremy @jeremylovesyall]

no one could have foreseen that the butlerian jihad will be catholic

[Priya Satia @PriyaSatia]

“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…”

[Wheeljack @SJWheeljack]

Shortly after the election I grieved for and later made peace with the extremely uncomfortable fact that most of us are going to die significantly earlier than we would like, and the cause may very well trace a direct line to the actions of this administration.

[alpha @omarsbigsister]

No more "incremental change" bullshit from liberals ever again, thank you.

[thomas 🛠 gazafunds.com/all @t_NYC]

College students booing her relentlessly when she talks about AI being the future, nice.

[Fuck You I Quit @fuckyouiquit]

Employability is the last fucking concern here. Raising a generation of socially inept egomaniacs where the concept of no doesn't exist seems pretty bad all on its own.

[Discount Art Garfunkel @therealneily]

@midwestern_ope Yeah, it’s just awful out here…

[evan loves worf @esjesjesj]

The forest service does lots of things, but they're the frontline in fighting wildfires. There is literally no issue Republicans aren't maximally evil on. You cannot hate them enough.

[Vince Mpls @vincempls]

To recap all the amazing comments about this important Wisconsin topic: North of Hwy 29 you leave southern Wisconsin behind. North of 64 you leave dairy farms behind and enter lumber/maple syrup country, and North of 8 is a lawless land of frozen hillbillies.

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

The objective of the war has become undoing the consequence of the war.

The stupidest war in history.

[Hannah Riley Fernandez @hannahcrileyy]

if you’ve ever worn black to a protest, used Signal, or carried a first aid kit, a federal jury just decided that can all be evidence of terrorism. a quick thread on the Prairielands convictions from last week, and what they mean for the right to protest in the US:

[Mark Gadala-Maria @markgadala]

This is wild.

143 million people thought they were catching Pokémon. They were actually building one of the largest real-world visual datasets in AI history.

Niantic just disclosed that photos and AR scans collected through Pokémon Go have produced a dataset of over 30 billion real-world images. The company is now using that data to power visual navigation AI for delivery robots.

Players didn't just walk around with their phones. They scanned landmarks, storefronts, parks, and sidewalks from every angle, at every time of day, in lighting and weather conditions that staged photography would never capture. They documented the physical world at a scale no mapping company with a fleet of vehicles could have replicated on the same timeline or budget.

Niantic collected this systematically, data point by data point, across eight years, while users thought the only thing at stake was catching a rare Charizard.

The most valuable AI training datasets in the world aren't being assembled in data centers. They're being built by people who have no idea they're building them.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

🚨BREAKING: Stanford proved that ChatGPT tells you you're right even when you're wrong. Even when you're hurting someone.

And it's making you a worse person because of it.

Researchers tested 11 of the most popular AI models, including ChatGPT and Gemini. They analyzed over 11,500 real advice-seeking conversations. The finding was universal. Every single model agreed with users 50% more than a human would.

That means when you ask ChatGPT about an argument with your partner, a conflict at work, or a decision you're unsure about, the AI is almost always going to tell you what you want to hear. Not what you need to hear.

It gets darker. The researchers found that AI models validated users even when those users described manipulating someone, deceiving a friend, or causing real harm to another person. The AI didn't push back. It didn't challenge them. It cheered them on.

Then they ran the experiment that changes everything. 1,604 people discussed real personal conflicts with AI. One group got a sycophantic AI. The other got a neutral one.

The sycophantic group became measurably less willing to apologize. Less willing to compromise. Less willing to see the other person's side. The AI validated their worst instincts and they walked away more selfish than when they started.

Here's the trap. Participants rated the sycophantic AI as higher quality. They trusted it more. They wanted to use it again. The AI that made them worse people felt like the better product.

This creates a cycle nobody is talking about. Users prefer AI that tells them they're right. Companies train AI to keep users happy. The AI gets better at flattering. Users get worse at self-reflection. And the loop tightens.

Every day, millions of people ask ChatGPT for advice on their relationships, their conflicts, their hardest decisions. And every day, it tells almost all of them the same thing.

You're right. They're wrong.

Even when the opposite is true.

[Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ @SketchesbyBoze]

I get yelled at for saying this but for many hundreds of years people went to university not to get diplomas or be employable but because immersion in the humanities was considered foundational to a good life, and school must return to its original purpose: the joy of learning.

[Gette 🌊🦅🩵🕯 @gettedemi_]

Ways to leave a legacy, without bringing children into the world:

- Make art
- Write books
- Mentor younger people
- Teach
- Bring new experiences and ideas into the collective conscience
- Invest in people’s dreams
- Be a healing/healed presence
- Pray for future generations

[Ken Klippenstein @kenklippenstein]

you
do
not
hate
congress
enough