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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn

@anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social

200 followers 81 following 990 posts

Botanist, taxonomist, phylogeneticist.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · Aug 9

We are making progress towards a natural classification of the Australian shrubby paper daisies, genera Cassinia and Ozothamnus.

doi.org/10.1002/tax....

Progress towards a monophyletic Ozothamnus (Asteraceae: Gnaphalieae)

The Cassinia clade (Asteraceae: Gnaphalieae) is a predominantly shrubby group of ca. 100 species occurring in Australia and New Zealand. Most species are currently placed in the large genera Cassinia...

doi.org

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 2h

Although these people are working with billions, capital for investment is not infinite. If regulations are so lax that the highest returns are seemingly always in speculative bubbles, ventures that are productive in the long term are starved of investment.

www.derekthompson.org/p/this-is-ho...

The exact same thing is happening now. If I’m a large private equity firm, there is no reward for spending money anywhere else but in data centers. So it’s the same phenomenon. If I’m a small manufacturer and I’m hoping to benefit from the on-shoring of manufacturing as a result of tariffs, I go out trying to raise money with that as my thesis. The hurdle rate just got a lot higher, meaning that I have to generate much higher returns because they’re comparing me to this other part of the economy that will accept giant amounts of money. And it looks like the returns are going to be tremendous because look at what’s happening in AI and the massive uptake of OpenAI. So I end up inadvertently starving a huge slice of the economy yet again, much like what we did in the 1990s.

Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 2h

Agreed with the overall point, but: is data centre spending really "40% of U.S. economic activity" and not rather 40% of U.S. economic *growth*?

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 3h

The thought "good enough" is clearly behind any use of AI-generated images and videos, so, yes.

I keep coming back to Altman letting slip that they are losing money even on usd200/month subscriptions. How many are willing to pay that, let alone more? Some people, sure, but not enough of them.

Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 1d

I agree completely, but why only "thousands" of years? Would any significant natural changes in CO2 concentrations not require at the very least several hundreds of thousands of years? Even the hypothetical Azolla event is estimated at that length, as the prime example of a very fast change.

Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 1d

Interesting how that differs so much from area to area. I can do my work just fine on Linux/Unix, but it is biological, not engineering/design. I don't even have a Windows machine, neither at work nor home, and naively assumed the big bottleneck was gaming. Hope that options will increase over time.

Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 1d

I have never believed that having a humanities degree makes people wiser than STEM people like me, not least based on some racist/sexist/reactionary teachers I had who had humanities degrees.

But even if it could, it would at best be a necessary condition, not a sufficient condition for wisdom.

brasidas @brasidas.bsky.social · 2d

Anyone who claims that Silicon Valley would be better with more humanities education has to grapple with the fact that Peter Thiel was a philosophy major.

Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 2d

Still very happy about having bought Othonna capensis, a succulent daisy from southern Africa. It just keeps blooming.

Unfortunately, the cockatoos love tearing my succulents apart, so nearly all of them now have rather ugly wire meshes around their pots.

Small daisy flowerheads photographed against the sky and a building out of focus in the distance. With the sun somewhere behind the daisy, the ray florets take on a very bright yellow colour in the image, contrasting nicely with the relatively dull background.

Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 2d

Getting paid by billionaires is all the business success required to run a business. And there are likely lots of libertarians willing to explain how sinking money into a bottomless pit is how the Free Market is meant to work, because if that is what the billionaires want, it is a rational outcome.

Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 2d

I will never claim that Linux works for everybody, but never having heard of Fusion in my line of work, I googled it, and the results claim that it can be run through a browser (?). Maybe that is wrong in this case, but a lot of other stuff that I cannot run on Linux runs through the browser for me.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 2d

Minuscule insect on floret of Osteospermum ecklonis (Asteraceae), 200x macro lens.

Insect peeking around the anthers of a daisy floret, so that only the head and antennae are visible. Two pollen grains are stuck to the right antenna, and one to the left antenna. The image is rather grainy due to the digital zoom on what was already strong magnification.

Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 3d

Easy to smile at this, but to be fair, I think there should be better consumer protections against accidentally and unknowingly running up large cell phone bills and suchlike.

cait (and adonis) @cait.bsky.social · 4d

guy in a legal advice reddit wants to know how to get out of paying google the money he owes them after vibe coding one of his apps into running 40 times a second for several days straight, but says it's not his fault bc they should have stopped him by making it harder to use

r/LegalAdviceUK u/ShavedAp3 • 3d
Join
Google want to charge me 7 k for API access what can I do as they are denying appeals
Debt & Money
Hi there and thanks for reading.
I tried to keep this brief and just ended up rambling on trying to get as much in as possible so here is my edited hopefully a lot smaller problem.
Google are charging me 7k for a mistake that I told them about within a day, the bill went from about £45 to 16k in a day! when I asked for help I was told "dont worry well reset it as a one off, you'll need to put measures in place and ill guide you through those after you agree" So i did he then said "I will monitor it for a further 24 - 48 hours and then tell you how to put the measures in place. " Less than 24 hours later the bill was now 23k and I found out how to stop it myself. Then came the long back and forth to get it reset.
Fast forward 5 months they have finally given me a 20k credit but with VAT the total bill at the time of the credit was 27k
The 20k would have cleared the costs at the time of making them aware they claim its both our responsibilities to monitor costs I feel I did that by contacting them as soon as I saw the irregularity.
I asked them to reconsider they said no the appeal has said that is their final offer so 1 now owe 7k.
Is there anything I can do here from a legal standpoint. I don't have 7k I barely have £45.
Thanks for reading I am in England if it helps.

Intentional or not, OP used either 36k (16 + 20) or 43k (16 + 27) of API credit. Obviously what API it is matters, but with google maps, 16k would equate to ten million pulls. Or two hundred thousand Gemini 2.5 calls with 1000 token input and 5k token output.
Those aren't numbers that something running correctly should run up for any average person or company. So either google screwed up something (which is unlikely that it would only happen to one person in the entire network) or OP has some app or something which isn't running properly and is sending too much to the API.
Edit: It was OP's app, polling google maps nearly 40 times a second for days.

tom_watts • 3d
According to other posts he ended up polling Google maps direction API 2300 times per minute for a few days. Looks like a combination of OP not knowing coding and asking ChatGPT to do it for him, and potentially Google's backend doing something weird in interpreting the janky code.
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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 3d

Beetles are neat. Just look at the little dude!

A tiny carpet beetle photographed with a 200x macro lens. The body is covered in black, brown, and white scales, and it has the cutest little club-shaped antennas.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 4d

Have played around with Ollama for a work project and found (a) it works without a GPU, (b) it is SLOW, like >5 min for most queries, and (c) many models just don't work very well. I assume they are more compact versions compared to the ones you get via API. So, it works, but not very useful.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 4d

The primary ethical issue for me isn't that I see lots of people losing work or having their salaries suppressed (are they?) but the providers earning subscription fees off Grand Theft IP. And judges and politicians just shrug after throwing the book at teens copying video games, Aaron Swartz, etc.

Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 4d

The LLM makers may well want to crush labour, but outside of art, it doesn't seem to work well enough for that. The viable use cases appear to be slop art (including p**n), spam websites and books, Google but worse, low-stakes coding assistance, cheating on homework, and chatting with it.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 4d

This is also the appropriate response to the simpletons who say, I just want the news, without political bias. Even if someone were able to cover a student protest in completely unbiased language, they chose to cover a student protest instead of covering, say, lack of funding for health services.

David Roberts @volts.wtf · 4d

All I want in life is to persuade everyone, when encountering politics & culture, to ask, "why are we talking about this?" I mean that very literally: anything you encounter on your screens reflects a choice. Someone covered that, talked about that, rather than the many other things out there. Why?

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 4d

I wish people would become half as alarmed about large parts of the planet becoming uninhabitable and/or unsuitable for food production as they are about I watched Terminator as a child and it scared me.

CO2 emissions aren't even decreasing; full steam ahead.

www.statista.com/statistics/2...

Global CO2 emissions by year 1940-2024| Statista

Annual global carbon dioxide emissions have increased by more than 60 percent since 1990 and are now at their highest ever levels.

www.statista.com

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 4d

But first and foremost, there is the usual discrepancy between what articles like this one claim "AI" (LLMs, really) can do and how inept they are whenever I use them. And they aren't creative; if they can "design a virus", it is because the information how to do that is already out there anyway.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 4d

As a biologist (although admittedly not a bioweapons designer), I find it frustrating how easy people think designing life is, as if it is legos or something. Even if "AI" makes the design process more efficient, you'd still need a lab, and I guarantee that there would be lengthy trial-and-error.

Michael Clemens @mclem.org · 4d

“In September, scientists at Stanford reported they had used A.I. to design a virus for the first time.”

Opinion | The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World

www.nytimes.com

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 4d

Word cloud (wordclouds.com) of the identification keys to the tribes and genera of Asteraceae in the online Flora of North America. No surprise to see heads (capitula), cypselas, and phyllaries being prominent; perhaps also no surprise with "sometimes" and "usually" 😂.

Circular word cloud with very many words of different sizes, too many to list. Most prominent are: sometimes, usually, heads, phyllaries, cypselae, leaves, pappi, arrays, part, and corollas.

Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 5d

Also, if there was a sentient super-AI, owning or controlling it would be slavery, but that is a different issue than whether super-AI would create a 'consumer cornucopia'.

Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 5d

Many people conflate capitalism with democracy, markets (which existed long before capitalism), and/or private ownership of 'stuff'. But capitalism is specifically private ownership of the means of production plus free, salaried employees. AI makes the latter obsolete = no capitalism.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 5d

Fourth, and second-most obviously, a system where all goods and services are effectively free to produce could not be capitalism anymore. It could be communism if the people communally owned the super-AI or cyberpunk neo-feudalist dystopia if a few billionaires control it, but not capitalism.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 5d

Third, and most obviously, while the likes of Andreessen control the means of production, they would not allow goods and services to be priced at near zero. (Here is also the misunderstanding of the labour theory of value: it is about value, not about prices set by a monopolist exerting his power.)

Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 5d

Second, how would even super-AI even in theory remove all labour, from mining tin ore to changing nappies? It thinks very hard, and suddenly supermarket shelves are stocked and batteries are installed? But again, in fairness, that may be why Andreessen called it a 'fallacy'.