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Reposted by Dylan McConnell

derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 1d

in 2011, the president of antifa hired me to give fashion consultancy to the organization. i recommended everyone wear navy suits with tan shoes, dress sneakers, and golf polos with slim chinos. if you arrested everyone today wearing these things, you'd destroy antifa

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Dylan McConnell @dylanjmcconnell.bsky.social · 1d

..they have committed $1.6 billion to something Electricity Maintenance
Guarantee (for safe, reliable and efficient operation of the stated owned plants)

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Reposted by Dylan McConnell

Nikkolas Smith @4nikkolas.bsky.social · 2d

after millions of views and shares of my Portland Frog art. (thank you all🙏🏾) I got requests to highlight priests, and chickens, and Chicagoans, and T-Rexes, and more… all of us who refuse to bend the knee. so this is for US.
𝚂𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚃𝚊𝚕𝚕.
𝚆𝚎 𝚆𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚆𝚒𝚗.

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Dylan McConnell @dylanjmcconnell.bsky.social · 1d

This is just such an incredible figure for the QLD Gov to highlight and basically celebrate in the year of 2025

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Jessica Kant @jessdkant.bsky.social · 2d

One curious thing on this site about speaking out against the encroachment of LLMs is that inevitably you get accused of being anti-tech. I don’t hate technology. I’ve used machine learning in my own code before. But I also recognize that oligarchs are so hellbent on pushing this tech for a reason.

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 2d

look at what covid lockdowns did to Australia's transport emissions

australia's transport emissions rising consistently until 2020

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Jonathan Green @greenj.bsky.social · 2d

This is utterly … what’s the word? Oh yes … fucked.

www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

Former Wallabies star David Pocock booted from parliamentary sports club

Exclusive: Senator accused of bringing social club into disrepute after raising concerns about its association with betting lobby

www.theguardian.com

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 3d

So late to this, but this @bloomberg.com piece on the impact of sudden surges in power demand from new data centres on local electricity prices is really, really good - lots of original analysis.

So many still shrug this off as a non-issue. Tell it to these ppl

www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...

a chart shwoing price impacts near data centres

a photograph of a man sitting on some stairs o nthe street

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Reposted by Dylan McConnell

David Roberts @volts.wtf · 3d

Nothing to worry about here, no sir.

Scoop: Dominion Voting sold to company run by ex-GOP election official

Dominion is one of the biggest election equipment providers and was used by 27 states during the 2024 election.

www.axios.com

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Reposted by Dylan McConnell

Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 3d

Please enjoy this executive at one of America's biggest gas companies openly admitting that expanding supply leads to increased demand for fossil fuels

He is not wrong: frantic expansion of fossil fuel supply worsens climate change. Tax it, cut subsidies, wind it down

www.ft.com/content/5ba8...

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour.
https://www.ft.com/content/5ba8caec-61d3-4aa9-a877-9b200ef4b5b0

Will Jordan, chief legal and policy officer at EQT, a leading US gas producer, also thought that any glut would be temporary, and said US demand was also rising on the boom in power-hungry artificial intelligence data centres.

Recommended

Oil & Gas industry
BP’s new chair signals more asset sales and demands faster restructuring

“Supply leads demand — you put the supply on the market and demand gets created.,” he said. “Over the long term we’re very bullish.”

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Dylan McConnell @dylanjmcconnell.bsky.social · 3d

It's like reverse Poe's Law or something

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Dylan McConnell @dylanjmcconnell.bsky.social · 3d

Thought this was going to be a parody piece, based on the title

www.smh.com.au/national/nuc...

Nuclear-powered villages could be on the moon within 10 years. Where do we fit in?

The world is also firmly in the grips of Space Race 2.0 as the US and China battle to occupy the moon – and beyond.

www.smh.com.au

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Dylan McConnell @dylanjmcconnell.bsky.social · 3d

The internet suggests she did

Reposted by Dylan McConnell

Matt Ryan @mattdjryan.bsky.social · 3d

This is incredible news, and shows the incredible power of collective action. The fight against the neoliberal university (my own included) goes on, but its nice to hear some good news for a change.

Dr Liz Allen @drdemography.com · 3d

#Breaking | ANU College of Arts & Social Sciences will not face structural changes at this time. No renaming, merging, or disestablishment of areas. Change management appears to have been halted, even walked back completely. It’s unclear the impacts of this announcement on the school of music.

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Justin Baragona @justinbaragona.bsky.social · 4d

Incredible.

Jack Posobiec references the earliest version of antifa -- the anti-fascists in the Weimar Republic who were opposed to the Nazi Party -- as the bad guys.

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Dylan McConnell @dylanjmcconnell.bsky.social · 4d

Lot's of RE curtailment in the NEM - just ticked over 6TWh for the last 12 months

Not every electron is sacred - but there's plenty of room for improvement!

More words and lots of figures in the piece below -

💡🔌

theenergy.co/article/lear...

Learning to live with curtailment

Rising curtailment is playing havoc with the economics of new wind and solar projects

theenergy.co

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Reposted by Dylan McConnell

Collaboration on Energy and Environmental Markets (CEEM) @ceemunsw.bsky.social · 4d

💡🔌A new article from Ben Potter explores curtailment of renewable generation in the NEM with the help of CEEM's Dylan McConnell and some illuminating charts, as spring rolls on and curtailment reaches new peaks. ☀️

🔗 Check out the full piece here: theenergy.co/article/lear...

Learning to live with curtailment

Rising curtailment is playing havoc with the economics of new wind and solar projects

theenergy.co

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Reposted by Dylan McConnell

Joshua Basseches @joshuabasseches.bsky.social · 6d

Union of Concerned Scientists report out with some nice recommendations for how to avoid captive residential customers paying for the infrastructure needs of data centers owned by tech giants (which is currently happening):

Customers in 7 PJM states paid $4.4B for data center transmission in 2024: report

Transmission lines built for data centers fall into a "regulatory gap,” with utility customers on the hook for the costs, the Union of Concerned Scientists said.

www.utilitydive.com

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Reposted by Dylan McConnell

Kevin J. CREATURE @kevinjkircher.com · 6d

$16 billion. That's how much the PJM market monitor estimates that electricity ratepayers will pay via increased utility bills to subsidize interconnection of data centers owned by Big Tech. A massive give-away to some of the most profitable companies in the world.

www.eenews.net/articles/dat...

Data center boom sparks sticker shock for PJM ratepayers

New analyses show that costs passed on to utility customers to guarantee future electricity demand are rising rapidly.

www.eenews.net

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Reposted by Dylan McConnell

Costa Samaras @costasamaras.com · 6d

"At its peak, Musk had around 35 natural-gas turbines at the site, capable of producing 420 megawatts of power, enough to power the roughly 250,000 homes in the Memphis city limits"

35 (!) full-sized power plants for this one data center run by the world's worst poster.
www.wsj.com/tech/elon-mu...

Elon Musk Gambles Billions in Memphis to Catch Up on AI

xAI aims to win the tech arms race with its “Colossus” data centers, thrown up at lightning speed. The city is divided over the massive power and water demands.

www.wsj.com

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Reposted by Dylan McConnell

Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 6d

You can have a situation with rising renewable absolute output and percentages of total (and falling emissions intensity!), but also stagnant or even rising greenhouse gas emissions: when *demand* itself is rising fast.

This is very clearly the case in Aus, and it should trigger alarm bells

IN GOOD NEWS...
Renewables overtake coal for the first time on a monthly basis in Australia's main grid!
CCLIMATE COUNCIL.ORG.AU
|
...
. crowd-funded science information

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Dylan McConnell @dylanjmcconnell.bsky.social · 6d

.. are you looking at Q3 to Q3 numbers?

Black coal numbers are up Q3 to Q3 (for both 2023 to 2024, and 2024 to 2025) - including on open electricity

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Rick Morton @squigglyrick.bsky.social · 6d

De Brouwer made the exact same argument two years ago after the Robodebt Royal Commission report was delivered. This is how I treated it in Mean Streak: "Grow up."

Screenshot of the book Mean Streak by Rick Morton. The text reads:

for the past decade and half, when conclusive certificates were
discontinued, is counterproductive to the Parliament’s intent.
‘When it comes to deliberative material, FoI does not ensure
transparency (because advice is not being written) and it
undermines integrity (because advice is not being written).’
So officials don’t put things in writing because they might get
released under Freedom of Information laws, therefore the FoI
laws aren’t working?
Grow up.
De Brouwer is not alone in his views. Former secretaries have
been doing the rounds making exactly these kinds of noises, as if
the outcome of poor professional behaviour is the result of some
law and not … poor professional behaviour.

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Josh Taylor @joshtaylor.bsky.social · 6d

Makes me wonder how many more of these can be found...

Guardian Australia @australia.theguardian.com · 6d

Deloitte to pay money back to Albanese government after using AI in $440,000 report

Partial refund to be issued after several errors were found in a report into a department’s compliance framework * Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Deloitte will provide a partial refund to the federal government over a $440,000 report that contained several errors, after admitting it used generative artificial intelligence to help produce it. The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) confirmed Deloitte would repay the final instalment under its contract, which will be made public after the transaction is finalised. It comes as one Labor senator accused the consultancy firm of having a “human intelligence problem”. Continue reading...

www.theguardian.com

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