Michael Tobis (mt)

Climate change summarized. "Carbon is Forever" 🧵 0/6

I always dreaded the day when some elaborate toaster passed the Turing test and vainly hoped I wouldn’t live to see it. But the bizarre and scary reaction isn’t the same scary scenario that I imagined, though the one I feared (“equal rights for toasters!”) does still lurk in the background.

Apple making it stupidly difficult to delete my photos from iphone. I guess they want to sell me cloud.

"Forgiveness is indispensable, and without it, we cannot live in peace." #PopeLeoXIV #MakePeace #PrayForPeace www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news...

The work that makes money relies on the vast amount of work that doesn't. Basic income recognizes both, supporting the work such as that of care, creative work, research and study, and acting in the commons.

If every developer can make four times as many games, then every developer will make four times as much money! There are definitely no monstrously gaping holes in this logic!

Yup.

Longyearbyen is warming at between 5 & 7 times the world’s average rate We're getting a glimpse of the chaos to come if the world does not act now on climate change share.google/Fxd4dhTvAVlD...

Today’s Canadian painting is “Autumn Hillside” painted by Franklin Carmichael in 1920.

Me too. Home page comes up but search doesn't work and every page I tried entering directly also failed.

"whatever works"

Inspired by my trip to Japan, watercolor and gouache. This painting will be available for sale at my LightBox Expo booth (#100). See you there!

look at everything this is doing, beyond the very obvious: - putting russia on an equivalent power basis w/ US & China - undermining the idea of international law by explicitly saying the large rich countries decide - framing it as a proxy war in which the actual country fighting isn't important etc

“The internet is a store but it used to be a library” hits me like a slug to the chest

The perfect metaphor for Apple design these days

I would, but I'm just in a weird place right now *motions to entire universe*

Something that has long bugged me about job-creation numbers is that, as far as I know, they usually don't include job *shifts* from one sector to another. Like, if a data center developer moves in and hires half the local construction workforce, those workers aren't building stuff elsewhere...

I'm just old enough to remember the late 90s and from what I can remember, there was no alarmism at all coming from the scientific community - they just stated the facts - and less educated people were able to follow from the facts that it would all end in disaster - so they rejected the facts.

Remember when people called it "surfing the web" because it felt so cool and exhilarating? Ain't nobody surfing Chat fucking GPT.

Hey, I’m just asking questions. Ignorant questions, bigoted questions, questions that have been repeatedly answered for many years. Sorry, but I’m not listening to answers right now; I’m far too busy asking questions. It’s called being intellectually curious.

I'll say it again: WE DO NOT NEED THESE COMEMIERDAS AND THEIR WASTEFUL LYING POLLUTING COMEMIERDA COMPANIES FOR A SINGLE THING. The internet is us.

even things like g**gle maps, which used to be AMAZING and now is obstructive, obfuscating, all but useless advertising and misinformation bullshit - even big coordination things like that CAN BE DONE without the comemierda companies - wikipedia, among others, shows that.

Yep. Same for how people think Fox News "turned their friends/family mean & stupid." Sorry, but Fox News wasn't exactly subtle. If your loved ones were watching that stuff uncritically in the first place... I got bad news for you. It's not Fox News that made them like that. : /

Today I'm learning that a lot of nice, secular, educated people were living alongside absolute nutjobbery their entire lives long before social media And just told themselves "But that's silly! No one actually thinks that."

The idea that "social media lets cranks find each other" is mostly just a sign that you didn't grow up with cranks. For those of us who DID grow up with cranks? Social media is the thing that lets you find people who AREN'T cranks.

I've heard people make claims that AI would lead to a new Renaissance, but I didn't imagine it'd happen like this:

Lots of concern about "what if we make a car that decides to lock us out and run people over", very little about "we keep running people over because we're not keeping our eyes on the road and our hands on the steering wheel"

In the latest offense by AI, I put the url (sans https prefix) into the address bar and I got *an AI description of the page I wanted* and *not even an obvious link to the page*. It used to be that an implicit https or http prefix just took me to the page. Safari on IOS with Google search default.

crazedclimate.blogspot.com/2026/10/clim... Read the link before you flame me, please.

Wife and I tuned in for the live stream of the debate among candidates for the at large town council here in Carleton Place, Ontario. It was boring. What a blessing it is to live in a place where politics is still dull!

It’s official: It’s now the hottest El Niño ever recorded and we are still 2 months away from peak, with nowhere to go but UP! So what does it mean for winter across Florida & the southern US? Here’s the details… (records go back 170+ years) #elnino

They quoted me in this New Yorker piece about AI today. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

I think if you want a demo of the mechanics of how AI doom-hype detracts from the climate push, listen to this Al Gore interview w/ @heatmap.news, where he dismisses the climate impacts (using a spurious comparison, imo) but treats the chatbot doom as serious and real heatmap.news/podcast/shif...

Postmedia closes printing plant, shifting a host of northern Ontario papers to digital-only: North Bay Nugget, Sault Star, The Sudbury Star, The Timmins Daily Press, The Elliot Lake Standard, Espanola's Mid-North Monitor. Cochrane Times-Post will cease publication. www.baytoday.ca/local-news/1...

Spent some time with BBC's The Global Story podcast talking about El Nino. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou5w...

New Jersey getting hammered. That thing is spinning in place, not moving anywhere.

I not only doubt that any build-out of A.I. datacentres will "solve" climate change, I see no indication whatsoever that any A.I. company is even making a moderate effort at doing something useful. If A.I. were going to be useful for something like revolutionary photovoltaics,