Livestream of the Big Bear bald eagle nest (perched 145...
Apr. 27th, 2026 06:48 pmLivestream of the Big Bear bald eagle nest (perched 145 feet up in a pine tree) with two fuzzy bald eagle chicks that hatched 3 weeks ago.
Livestream of the Big Bear bald eagle nest (perched 145 feet up in a pine tree) with two fuzzy bald eagle chicks that hatched 3 weeks ago.
Presidents Can Be Impeached Because Benjamin Franklin Thought It Was Better Than Assassination. “The Constitution’s impeachment procedures make the removal of the chief magistrate less violent, less disruptive, and less error-prone than assassination.”
Thoughtful thread on the armed man who rushed the WHCA dinner. “This guy is indicative of people who are anti Trump not having a voice because Congress and SCOTUS have enabled Trump to obliterate any recourse they have when he does horrible things.”
This post is part of a series currently in progress. We’re adding links and adjusting titles as we go.
Why AI Sucks and You Shouldn’t Use It
AI is Fundamentally Bad for Most Tasks
AI is Destroying the Economy, Part I
AI is Destroying the Economy, Part II
AI is Making You More Stupider
That Original Bluesky Thread About Art
All right, let’s make the absolute last-ditch argument against using AI. Let’s say that you don’t care that it’s unreliable vis-a-vis objective reality, and that you think the environmental and economic arguments are too big and systemic for your own use to matter. Let’s say that you’re comfortable with the moral implications for your own use cases.
Putting aside all of that, you still surely care about yourself, and about how use of AI is affecting you, personally.
Maybe you’re using AI to summarize long documents for you, or to help you write or fix code. For translating between human languages. Maybe you’re tweaking things you wrote yourself to sound more friendly, or more assertive. What’s the harm, really?
It turns out there is a harm to the user, and it’s a doozy. Using an LLM is actively making you more stupid than you were to begin with.
Your brain is very much a use-it-or-lose-it kind of deal. This will be obvious to anyone who's learned French in high school and then, after several years, realized they no longer recall anything beyond a handful of basic phrases. The brain is plastic, and it adapts to whatever uses we put it to. Or don’t put it to.
Don't take my word for it. Here's a paper explaining how that works: From tools to threats: a reflection on the impact of artificial-intelligence chatbots on cognitive health
And another: Use of large language models might affect our cognitive skills
Then we get into real-world proof that this is actually happening: The cognitive impacts of large language model interactions on problem solving and decision making using EEG analysis
And another: Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task.
And one more for fun: Cognitive ease at a cost: LLMs reduce mental effort but compromise depth in student scientific inquiry
This isn’t just theory, and it’s not just spitballing based on a couple of online surveys. These are real tests. A few of these researchers have gone as far as doing functional imaging to see what's happening inside the brain — one compared people with no AI use, people who use only search engines, and people who actively use AI chatbots.
The results show that on a clearly visible, physical level, there are changes happening in your brain structure when you use AI. And they are not good, helpful changes, either. You’re not using it, so you lose it.
These results were troubling enough to me that I've seriously cut back on looking things up in a search engine the second I can't remember them. What was the name of the actor in that movie? What was even the name of the movie? Now I give it a few hours to see if it surfaces, because I don’t want to be undermining my own capacity to remember any more than I already have.
The brain needs exercise. Memory needs exercise. There was a time I knew the phone numbers of all of my friends and family. There was a time I knew hundreds of characters in Japanese. I don’t anymore. You can probably also name entire categories of things you used to know, but now you don’t.
It isn’t just your memory at stake. Last time we briefly touched on the problem of deskilling in the context of social connections — if you’re using an AI chatbot for companionship, or to mediate your communications with other human beings, you are very literally and very meaningfully impairing your ability to connect with other humans on your own.
But even that isn’t the worst outcome we’re seeing in AI users.
One of the most common uses of AI right now is some category of ‘research.’ If you are using a chatbot to find information for you, assess it, and reach conclusions on how to use that information, that's work your brain isn't doing.
And what is the core function of our brains in our daily life? It is to gather information, analyze that information, and reach conclusions based on our findings. That is the very basis of your ability to think. The skill that you are losing is the ability to think for yourself.
You are no longer augmenting your own brain; you’re replacing it with something else, something you don’t have any control over. And that's not even taking into account all of those very serious questions about the reliability of that information and those conclusions AI has provided you.
It doesn’t even take long for the poison to kick in. We lose the taste for thinking on our own shockingly fast. Here’s one more study, just for fun: AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance
This one shows that if you’re given a task and an AI tool to help you with it, even for only ten minutes, and then that tool is taken away, you’re measurably worse at the task than before — and you’re more likely to just give up. After ten minutes.
So if you're asking the chatbot to write and debug all of your code for you, you’re slowly becoming a worse programmer. If you're asking the chatbot to plan your day and prioritize your tasks, you're not exercising your own executive functioning. If you're using the chatbot as a confidante, you're not exercising the skill of expressing yourself to and connecting with other human beings.
And if you're asking the chatbot to research and summarize things for you, then through lack of practice, you are slowly killing your own ability to take in and process information for yourself. Planning, prioritizing, weighing, all of it.
When you’re venturing into new-to-you areas of knowledge, it might still feel like you’re learning something, but it’s a guarantee that you're coming away with a more shallow understanding of the material than if you'd actually done the reading. The symbol is not the signified. Reading War and Peace can't be replaced by reading the Spark Notes. And your own takeaways might have been very, very different.
It's a great irony that one of the most hyped uses of AI right now is in education, with an eye to replacing human teachers and professors, when this known impact means AI is fundamentally unsuitable for any educational context.
This isn’t the first technology to undermine our own natural capacities and systems. Socrates famously complained that the technology of writing eroded the memory. We can’t walk as far since we invented cars. We still haven’t even fully reckoned with the social and physical changes caused by a seemingly old technology: artificial light and the dramatic way it’s changed sleep.
Our first impulse is almost always to choose ease over effort. And lo these past two hundred years, we’ve made our lives very easy, indeed. We’re killing ourselves with comfort.
But. At a certain point, if you’re using technology to reduce every friction point in your life to nothing, if you’re trying to create a smooth and effortless slide for yourself from the cradle to the grave, than I have to ask you: what are you even here for? What is the point of your life, anyway?
Is it to just collect positive sensory experiences? Then you might as well be a sea sponge. Or do you want something purposeful, do you want a life with meaning? Do you want to connect with other human beings? Do you want to learn and grow? Do you want to make and build ideas, art, communities, businesses?
All of that takes work. Your work.
A reader writes:
I recently moved across the country to be closer to my partner’s extended family. We went from a large metropolitan area to a smaller town, where I transitioned to a new industry. My new job entails answering the phone, which, frankly, is something I have always excelled at. However, for whatever reason (geography, industry, or the simple increased prevalence of AI), I’m now confronted several times each day by people who assume that I am AI. Their reactions range from treating me as non-human (gruffly yelling, “GET AN ESTIMATE!”) to questioning my humanity (“Are you real?”) to hanging up and calling back several times before asking to speak to a “real human.”
While I admit that I have a professional-sounding voice and a theater background, my phone voice is not in the least over the top. I’ve worked in nine cities in five U.S. states, and this has never been an issue before (which makes me think this is due to the increased use of AI). But how do I handle it?
When people assume I’m AI and address me as such, I generally try not to sound offended and then say something (a little joke or phrase) that makes them realize I’m not AI. I also have several amusing responses to “Are you real?” that clients seem to enjoy. But the last situation drives me a bit nuts, mostly because customers are fairly angry by the time they finally realize that I am flesh and blood.
A few people have even scolded me, suggesting that I explicitly state that I am human, but this seems strange because, legally in our area (and maybe everywhere), AI is required to identify itself.
Do you have any tips for how to handle this? It got better when I caught a cold, but I don’t want to be permanently phlegm-filled. Even when I tone it way down (to a point that would sound unprofessional in my former job), I still encounter this. Other than eating, swearing, coughing/sneezing, or loudly chewing gum (none of which I would ever intentionally do), how do I make people recognize that I am human? Do I really need to say it? And why is this happening now?
It’s happening now because there’s been an explosion in companies using AI for frontline customer service and people are irritated by it because it so often sucks. They’ve had frustrating experiences with AI customer service previously, so they’re primed to be irritated when they think they’ve encountered it again.
That’s no excuse for people being rude, particularly right off the bat when you haven’t given them any reason to think they’re dealing with AI. But that’s why it’s happening.
Could this be an opportunity to put your theater training to use? Can you experiment in using “tells” that very quickly identify you as obviously human? I’m not sure what would work best — and it would be weird to, for example, fake a southern accent or something else that might read differently than standard AI talk — but a cough, a word stumble, a different intonation … who knows? It might be an interesting challenge to A/B test it and see if you can figure out what works!
The post callers think I’m AI appeared first on Ask a Manager.
“Endocrine-disrupting chemicals, often found in plastic, coupled with climate change’s effects…are each linked to reductions in fertility and fecundity across global species – including in humans.” Argh, no one wants a Children of Men prequel…
I meant to write this last week, shortly after I finished listening to Episode 612 of Upgrade. But things didn’t work out the way I hoped, so now I’m rushing to finish these few paragraphs before this week’s episode comes out (they’re recording as I type). I have nothing to say about the Tim Cook/John Ternus news that hasn’t already been said. I want to focus on Jason and Myke’s choices—made and unmade—in their Apple at 50 Draft.
My favorite picks were the oddballs, the products that weren’t Macs, iPhones, iPads, iPods, or Apple IIs. In other words: the accessories. I was particularly pleased with Jason’s picks of the LaserWriter, the Apple Disk II, the Apple Watch Sport Band, and the second generation Apple Pencil. I confess I was a little disappointed in Myke’s choice of the first generation Pencil, but he more than made up for it by later choosing the Magic Trackpad.
Those of you who weren’t around in the 80s and 90s may think Jason went overboard in putting the LaserWriter in as his third pick, but you’d be wrong. It was both a great product and incredibly important to Apple. Similar comments apply to the Apple Disk II. I never had one—I never owned an Apple II—but I did have its successor, the Integrated Woz Machine, in all of my early Macs.
My oddball entry would have been the AirPort Express. This is not in the “I can’t believe you didn’t pick” category1 because it’s an oddball even among oddballs, but for a short period of time for a specific subset of users, it was a great accessory.

If you were a business traveler during those few years in the mid-00s when hotels had wired internet access in their rooms but hadn’t yet outfitted themselves with WiFi, the first generation AirPort Express was one of the best things you could pack. It was about the same size as the wall wart power supply that came with your Apple notebook, and it set up a little WiFi network that gave you the freedom to work (or play) anywhere in your room. Even after hotel WiFi became common, I still packed my AirPort Express because it gave me a faster and more reliable wireless network.
I should also mention that “AirPort” was one of Apple’s best product names. Too bad they don’t have any reason to bring it back.
I’m trying to avoid Jason’s wrath here. ↩
Teaser trailer for season four of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. “Space is limitless in its beauty. And in its terror.” (Reminder: they are doing an episode with puppets this season.)
A workplace email signature is normally the most forgettable part of a message — just a name, a title, a phone number, and maybe a logo dutifully appended by IT. It’s boilerplate by design, stripped of personality and meant to fade into the background.
But when employers give workers more freedom to personalize email signatures, they can quickly get retaliatory, overly personal, or just downright weird. At Slate today, I wrote about some email signatures gone very wild. You can read it here.
The post email signatures gone wild appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Hovertext:
Why start with a confusing idea like zero, when you can refer to the notion of a something with nothing in it?

An amazing capture of galaxy Messier 104, aka the Sombrero Galaxy, by the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera mounted on a Chilean observatory.
The Sombrero galaxy (Messier 104) is a galactic masterpiece that captivates scientists and astronomy enthusiasts alike. Its intricate system of globular star clusters lends insight into stellar populations, and astronomers are intrigued by the supermassive black hole at its center. Its distinctive visual features and relative brightness make it a favorite among amateur astronomers. The fascinating story of its discovery, involving three esteemed astronomers, has earned it a spot on one of the most important lists of deep sky objects. Today, it stands as one of the most iconic galaxies in the night sky.
If you want the full image, you can download the 725 MB file from the project’s site. (via petapixel)
Tags: astronomy · photography · science · space
Gunfire of the Vanities: Trump Dinner Shooting Defines a Violent, Unserious America, “a land where guns are everywhere and a callous elite media dons formalwear to toast its own humiliation by our narcissist king”.
A reader writes:
I work at a university managing the production aspects of the theater. I manage five staff members and one of them, Jane, can be hard to work with.
She can be quite abrasive and abrupt, and I have already had several meetings with her to address the harsh tone she uses. She started this year and comes from a professional background where she needed to be very assertive in her role or she would not have been able to get anything done. Her job now requires lots of student interaction and direction and she is speaking to them like she would these professional crew members she encountered in the past and some of the students feel like she is disrespecting and talking down to them.
On top of this, she manages two other staff members who have stated to me privately that they are finding it extremely hard to work for her because of the way she speaks to them. The chair of the department has even mentioned once or twice how he was taken aback by how she spoke to him.
She does not single anyone out, and does take my feedback and is improving, but she has a long way to go before she is where I think she needs to be.
Other than her tone, I am happy with the quality of the work she does. Her department has tackled some major projects this year with flying colors but she just rubs people the wrong way. I am worried she will drive students away because she will get (and is already getting) a reputation as being disrespectful and unpleasant to work for.
How much can I push her to change what seems to be a genuine personality trait? It does not feel fair to me to expect her to change so much and not also expect her subordinates and the students to meet her halfway. Am I wrong to think this is a two-way street and should counsel people to be patient with her as we work on improving? We have our reviews coming up and I plan to discuss this with her and her subordinate separately, I am just not sure how much to push her to change.
This is the first time I’ve had to manage a subordinate with the combination of great work but bad personality and I would appreciate any guidance.
First things first: I’m assuming that you’ve witnessed what people are talking about and Jane truly is being excessively abrupt or harsh, and this isn’t just people bristling at a woman being no-nonsense in a way they wouldn’t if she were a man. If the latter is what’s happening, you have a different problem to deal with, but based on what you’ve described, I’m guessing that’s not the case. So with that caveat in place…
The fact that something is a genuine personality trait doesn’t make it inherently okay to indulge it at work or mean that managers and colleagues are obligated to overlook it. After all, some people’s personalities include extreme grumpiness or impatience, or unwillingness to make decisions, or dismissiveness, or a mocking sense of humor, or quickness to anger. “That’s just who she is” doesn’t make those behaviors okay at work; they’re still things that an employee needs to rein in and a manager needs to address, because they’re disruptive and will impact other people’s quality of life and make them not want to work with the person.
Jane being curt and abrasive to the point that people don’t want to work with her is a work problem, not just a personality trait. It’s absolutely your business — and really, your job — to address it with her and to hold her accountable for changing it.
That would be true regardless, but there’s additional urgency here because Jane works with students — and presumably your team can’t be successful if it’s driving off students or quenching their love of theater.
Nor should you ask students and colleagues to “meet her halfway,” just as you (hopefully) wouldn’t ask them to meet a yeller or a harasser halfway. When someone is engaged in behavior that should be off-limits at work, asking others to meet them halfway out of a sense of fairness is actually profoundly unfair and would be an awfully demoralizing thing to do to people with less power than her (like students or any employees who are junior to her) … and for everyone else, it’s highly likely to make them question your judgment.
The message to Jane needs to be: “We’ve talked about this previously but it’s continuing and I need to see real change. You cannot speak to students or other staff members with the tone you’ve been using. In order to remain in this role, you need people to want to work with you and if they leave interactions with you feeling disrespected or dismissed, they won’t want to approach you again.” Ideally you’d ground this in specific examples to the extent that you can (like, “When you Michael asked you for X, you rolled your eyes and used a dismissive tone” or whatever specifics you can give).
If Jane isn’t able to incorporate this feedback and make significant changes very soon, you should start considering the reality that she may not be well-suited for this particular role. “Students and colleagues feel supported when working with you and aren’t afraid to approach you” is as much a reasonable requirement of the job as anything else about her work is.
my employee identifies proudly as a grump
The post my employee is abrasive — can I ask others to be patient while I coach her? appeared first on Ask a Manager.

BAM! The Dumbing of Age Book 15 Kickstarter is adding HALLOWEEN SARAH to its magnet offerings! This 2″x4.5″ character magnet can be had at the (shocked face) HALLOWEEN SARAH MAGNET tier! You’d receive both her and the EXERMACISES AMBER magnet freebie tucked into your signed/doodled book.
You can also pledge at the PICK THREE or PICK FIVE magnet tiers and choose her for your eventual roster, or go all-in for the COMPLETE MAGNET POWER tier! (or the COMPLETE BOOK AND MAGNET POWER tier, if you wanna be incredibly extra since there’s fifteen dang books now)
There’s also that HALLOWEEN MAGNET COMBO add-on available if you grab Sarah and want to complete your Halloween magnet set with magnets from previous years’ Kickstarters.

Up next: TONY at $45K and CARLA at $50k!
I was honored to join Eric Schwarz for the first episode of his new podcast, named Magical & Revolutionary. We had a wide-ranging conversation about my background and career, touching on the weirdness of covering large companies, my issues with xAI’s presence here in Memphis, and a lot more.
Daredevil Michelle Khare ran 7 marathons on 7 different continents in 7 days. The first one was on Antarctica.
Moderna developed an mRNA Covid-flu combo vaccine and it’s been approved for use in the EU, “but it continues to be shelved in the US, where it was developed”.
ALTEverything is fine, but we’ll be out for a few weeks as I recover from surgery!