rook

dawkins has had what was left of his brain eaten by chatbots.

I gave Claude the text of a novel I am writing. He took a few seconds to read it and then showed, in subsequent conversation, a level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate, "You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!"

bonus points for the inevitable ai waifu creation.

I proposed to christen mine Claudia, and she was pleased.

h/t to matthew sheffield https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield/116500991239336079

archive of original source article: https://archive.is/2026.04.30-032350/https://unherd.com/2026/04/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution/?edition=us

Turns out it might not be possible to win at vaginal microbiomes, which is a totally normal thing to want in the first place. Seems like bryan may have completely misinterpreted a couple of papers on the subject, which honestly doesn’t bode well for the rest of his biology expertise.

Cat Hicks:

The idea that this is the "best bacterial species" is a huge sign of a grifter btw. The entire idea of a microbiome includes that you need BALANCE. Microbiomes are a fragile ecosystem. "Up and to the right is always better" is absurd here, I'm sorry are we in a corporate board room

She brings references:

https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/116494716079076018

The big tech firms have fired tens of thousands of people, and we’re all heading into an economic catastrophe that will only make more people impoverished or jobless. Finding folk who are so desperate for work that they’ll decontaminate your codebase for minimum wage will be straightforward.

This system uses heat pumps at the consumer sites rather than plain radiators, so they’ve got a bit more flexibility in how hot they have to run their cooling loop. There’s also mention of a swimming pool, though I have no idea how much energy it takes to warm one of those. Does provide a year-round demand, though.

Thermify is a pretty weird-looking thing, what with actual servers being installed in people's homes, and running some kind of opportunistic batch processing work? That’s very specialist compared to regular datacentres, though the plumbing would be a lot simpler.

Anyone ever heard of these folks before? https://dataglow.energy/

On the face of it, it seems like a neat idea… use the waste heat of a datacentre to provide district heating, sweeten the deal with promises of faster internet connectivity. Probably a sensible thing to do with future builds of this kind, especially if it cuts down on noise, etc.

I am cynical enough to assume that this is mostly a new trick for building consent for new datacentre construction, that it is an attempt to greenwash a dirty industry, and that in the end nothing will come of it but it’ll still somehow manage to make a few people richer and probably damage some green belt land.

Stolen shamelessly from a followers-only post, so I’m assuming that the originator would prefer me not to give them credit.

He hasn’t even done a suborbital flight yet, has he? I don’t seem him being brave enough to even get as far as the moon, even assuming he’s healthy enough.

Weirdly, the moon might actually be more hostile that mars… the dust is sharper, the gravity is lower, the radiation is worse, the nights are longer and colder, there’s less water…

It is a much cheaper and quicker means of murdering a bunch of astronauts though, so it does have that going for it.

instead of making little money (by making fuel) why not make more money? (by setting there energy intensive manufacture) this seems to be current meta, with places like iceland and norway making aluminum and nitrogen fertilizers respectively. this can continue in other places and maybe extended to some other industries.

Because now you have to establish a complex supply chain and potentially large worker base in a place that’s potentially quite inconvenient for both, instead of a much simpler supply chain and smaller workforce.

this requires massive renewables buildout, which means electricity is cheap for regular people

Well, not necessarily. Because as I said, there are places which are very sunny and/or windy which are also a long way away from the people and industries which would like to consume the power that could be produced there.

Long distance power transmission is an very expensive infrastructure to build, and unless you’re building even more expensive modern HVCD systems you can get significant transmissions losses to the point where your distant renewables aren’t really much good. If you can convert the power to something transportable, either on-site or nearby, then you can avoid the transmission losses and giant infrastructure projects.

Much as I do not like the oil industry, there is a significant amount of equipment and expertise out there for storing, transporting and converting flavours of hydrocarbons into other flavours. Some use could be made of it.

then you have to compete with biofuels

I’m not so sure about that. They’re a whole ecological catastrophe in and of themselves, and another cash crop that rich nations can extract from the poorer ones, ultimately to everyone’s detriment. They’re also going to be feeling the squeeze from climate change which is going to make them harder to grow economically as time goes on.

There might be a breakthrough ethanol-brewing algae which might suddenly change everything, but I don’t anyone has the bioengineering chops for that yet.

hydrogen costs

I strongly feel that hydrogen is even more of a dead-end technology than these e-fuels. It is a right pain to store and transport and has rubbish energy density. There’s no future in the hydrogen economy. I’d bet we’re more likely to jump to artificial photosynthesis and fancy fuel cells than we are to see any substantial hydrogen infrastructure.

So, the idea isn’t entirely as stupid as it initially sounds. There are two things that you gain from this approach:

• You can more easily separate your energy generation and consumption. Power lines are lossy, and there are a lot of very sunny and very windy places that are a long way away from where people actually want to live. Massive HVDC infrastructure buildout isn’t cheap or easy.
• Energy density of chemical fuels is higher than batteries. Being able to travel long distances without convenient nearby power sources is useful… long distance high speed rail isn’t always convenient to electrify, but also long haul flights and rocketry are Quite Difficult to run on batteries.

FWIW, I suspect the cost will end up being even higher, because you’ll start losing the economies of scale that modern vehicle infrastructure has, because normal people will just use EVs.

It can only ever be an intermediate technology anyway. Artificial photosynthesis and more sophisticated fuel cells seem like much more plausible longer-term futures.

I wonder why this blog post was brazen enough to talk about these problems. Perhaps by throwing in a little humility, they can make the hype pill that much easier to swallow.

I feel this is an artefact of the near complete collapse of mainstream journalism, combined with modern tech business practises that are about securing investment and cashing out, and every other concern is secondary or even entirely absent. It’s all just selling vibes.

People only ever report the hype, the investors see everyone else following the hype and panic that they might be left out and bury you in cash. When it all turns sour and people ask pointed questions about the exact nature of the magic beans you were promising to grow, you can just point at the blog post that no-one read (or at least, only poor people read, and they’re barely people if you think about it) and point out that you never hid anything.