I’m trying a new thing. Well, it’s really an old thing, but it’s new for me. About six billion years ago, people used blogs to share links they thought were cool. Then social media killed blogs and people started sharing links on Twitter. Now, social media is unbearable so I’m sharing them here.

AI is a failed technology, but perhaps not in the way you think:

This is where I think approaching “AI” as a failure becomes useful, even vital. it underscores that the technology’s real value isn’t improving productivity, or even in improving products. Rather, it’s a social mechanism employed to ensure compliance in the workplace, and to weaken worker power. Stories like the one at Zapier are becoming more common, where executive fiat is being used to force employees to use a technology that could deskill them, and make them more replaceable. Arguably, this is the one use case where “artificial intelligence” has delivered some measure of consistent, provable results.

The far-right has intensified its war on Wikipedia with Charlie Kirk’s killing as the excuse:

Some conservative backlash seems to come from the idea that Kirk’s page should double as an online memorial, smoothing away his edges out of respect for the ghastly way he died. But Wikipedia is not a shrine. The site’s biographical articles are meant to be factual, not flattering, and even widely admired historical figures do not have whitewashed pages. For instance, Abraham Lincoln’s entry details his controversial suspension of habeas corpus, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s page covers both his graduate school plagiarism and his extramarital affairs. The reason Wikipedia articles aren’t hagiographies is because they’re not supposed to be.

Corn facts (h/t, MetaFilter):

Corn plants whisper messages to each other to defend against their enemies. When they are very closely planted, they release a volatile substance that induces their neighbors to produce chemicals that halt their growth, but activate their defenses against plagues. And that’s not all — they also modify the soil’s microbiota, leaving a defensive legacy that preps the immune system of the next generation of plants. This discovery, published in Science, opens the door to the use of the plant’s own components as pesticide.