Feral T. Robot, Oil Swamp Utility Bot #7629
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feralrobots.bsky.social
Feral T. Robot, Oil Swamp Utility Bot #7629
@feralrobots.bsky.social
670 followers 800 following 15K posts
Cis straight borderline-elderly middle-class white man.
Follow implies ABSOLUTELY NO expectation you'll follow back. I block follow-farmers.
https://mastodon.social/@FeralRobots
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feralrobots.bsky.social
Hey @nature.com, have you got an explanation for how the hell THIS happened? & especially why you accepted a paper with such a bizarre piece of genAI slop in it?!
& more to the point, why we should take you seriously at all going forward?
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Figure 1 from a paper published in Nature (linked in post). The figure purports to be an infographic depiction of the "Overall working of the framework" for 'explainably' diagnosing autism spectrum disorder. The infographic is plainly nonsense, containing many spelling errors, nonsense words, meaningless images and graphs. Clearly created using generative AI and (crucially) NEVER CHECKED AT ANY STEP OF THE WRITING OR PUBLICATION PROCESS.
November 27, 2025 at 3:03 PM
feralrobots.bsky.social
You’ve been kidnapped. The characters from the last TV show you watched are trying to rescue you. Who’s coming to save you?
...As usual I'm kind of screwed. (They know it, too. Allison's sad, but Noel accepts my fate.)
Allison Hammond (left, wearing a black dress with white polka-dots & gesturing excitedly) & Noel Fielding (right, wearing a black top with a lily-like flower on the front, which is white with purple highlights; he's got his hands clasped & is smiling in anticipation of how Allison's gag is going to land).
November 27, 2025 at 2:39 PM
feralrobots.bsky.social
The claim here is #Fireflies.ai were doing 'validation before automation' but they were NOT doing that. That term of art refers to PROCESS VALIDATION. What's described here isn't process validation - it's GRIFT VALIDATION: Finding out if there are enough marks out there to justify scaling.
LinkedIn post: Sam Udotong 1st Co-founder & CTO at Fireflies.ai We charged $100/month for an Al that was really just two guys surviving on pizza. We scaled Fireflies to a $1B valuation after 6 failures from our original crypto food delivery idea. Nothing motivates you more than the pressure of living month to month with no safety net. Before I explain how 2 broke guys validated a $1B idea, you need to understand we were couch surfing while desperately chasing our entrepreneurial dreams. An Al notetaker was our last hope after 6 ideas our friends claimed were “genius”. The best way to validate your business idea is by becoming the product yourself. We told our customers there's an "Al that'll join a meeting.” In reality it was just me and my co-founder calling in to the meeting sitting there silently and taking notes by hand. When customers scheduled a meeting, we'd manually dial in as "Fred from Fireflies.ai" We'd sit there silently, take detailed notes, and send them 10 minutes later. After taking notes for 100+ meetings (and falling asleep in many), we were finally able to make enough money to pay the $750/month rent for a tiny SF living room. That was the point when we said let's stop and automate everything. The best prototype was 2 guys surviving on pizza. Validation before automation saved us from our 7th failure. Follow for more unconventional stories about how we built Fireflies to what it is today.
November 25, 2025 at 1:16 PM
feralrobots.bsky.social
Shit like this? This is magical thinking at cultic levels. Jason Snyder is a cultist.
Yes, 'cultist' is a strong word, come at me with your counterarguments because I'll die on this hill.
The rise of AI is not being built on bad mortgages or inflated advertising metrics. It is being built on something far more fundamental: energy. Vaclav Smil, a leading scholar of energy systems and a thinker Bill Gates often cites as foundational, has written that energy is the universal currency of civilization. Every model, every inference, every output we describe as intelligent is ultimately a transformation of electricity into structured probability. When Burry shorted housing, he was betting against human leverage. [begin highlight] When he shorts AI, he is betting against thermodynamics [end highlight], and thermodynamics tends to win.
November 19, 2025 at 9:03 PM
feralrobots.bsky.social
It's kind of marginal as crime/mystery (& includes Kevin Spacey) but: The Ref (1004)? It does at least include several crimes.
Promo image for The Ref (1994): Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis are sitting, stiffly, on a couch, with several well-defined inches between them. Denis Leary is leaning on the couch back behind them, wearing a cool black bomber jacket & holding an automatic pistol in one hand. He's smiling grimly as though he's just taken on a very unwelcome task but is determined to see it through.
November 19, 2025 at 6:07 PM
feralrobots.bsky.social
Also this part is complete nonsense. The "writing" (really, text-generation) task ABSOLUTELY DOES NOT extend to 'creative composition'. It is in fact purely formulaic. This paper should have been rejected on the basis of this claim alone.
Screenshot from the referenced paper, with following claim highlighted: "Because literary fiction/creative non-fiction is inherently non-formulaic, the writing task extends beyond style imitation to creative composition, making it different from mere parody or pastiche."
November 19, 2025 at 2:54 PM
feralrobots.bsky.social
Still from the movie Snatch. BRICKTOP, a gray haired man wearing large eyeglasses with thick lenses and heavy black frames, is holding a styrofoam cup of tea and waggling one finger. BRICKTOP: So be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm.
November 13, 2025 at 7:50 PM
feralrobots.bsky.social
Works for me.
Post by @spavel.bsky.social: A confidently smiling Andrew Cuomo, with an open speech bubble oriented to make it look like he's uttering the post below. But the post below only says 'Removed by author'.
November 7, 2025 at 2:21 AM
feralrobots.bsky.social
There's an old libertarian idea of paradise where everyone has leverage on everyone else, so everybody's safe. In that version, everyone has to have their own proof, their own capacity to defend themselves, etc.

I can imagine more hellish ways to live, but that'd be pretty damn bad.
But there was no apology or explanation from anyone at the department, she said. She’s considering suing. And even with the ticket dropped, she’s left unnerved by the prospect of being wrongfully accused on the basis of circumstantial evidence from a mass surveillance system. Ultimately, it’s left her convinced she needs to keep her own cameras running. “We were thinking … if we're always under surveillance, we can always prove where we are. Well, lo and behold, here's a situation where we needed to prove where we were,” she said. “And I feel so concerned for the individuals out there that couldn't do that.” Cottrell did not respond to a voicemail requesting comment on Monday. Milliman did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent via LinkedIn.
October 28, 2025 at 6:06 PM
feralrobots.bsky.social
Casey Newton says Ed Zitron has a 'one sided' feud with him & proceeds to demonstrate which way it goes.
“It's true of me that I just don't enjoy interacting with agency PR people that much,” Newton says. He calls Zitron’s recent turn to commentary “a new gimmick for himself—AI hater number one” and says Zitron has a “one-sided beef" with him. (Zitron says it’s a “critique.”) He compares Zitron’s prolix style to “some cross between the Always Sunny meme of Charlie [with the murder board] and then a prisoner smearing shit on the walls to make a point.” Newton went on: “I think Ed has actually flown too close to the sun now, because he’s built this pedestal for himself, and he’s climbed on top, and he’s posing for glossy portraits in the Financial Times magazine and WIRED, wearing aviators like the fucking Temu Kara Swisher.”
October 27, 2025 at 10:21 AM
feralrobots.bsky.social
What is it like inside your head?
October 24, 2025 at 8:32 PM
feralrobots.bsky.social
Premium seasonal display name content, no notes.👍
@buckrawheat.bsky.social
Screen clip of a user's seasonal display name: "Decorative Gourdian Knot." (Their avi is a little blurry but looks like it might be a mushroom-shaped person playing something that looks to me a bit like a traditional Japanese instrument shaped a bit like a guitar. I doubt they swapped that out for the season, though.)
October 24, 2025 at 5:32 PM
feralrobots.bsky.social
Reminder that the office being shared is what most offices used to look like. Cube farms were a step up.
Still from _The Apartment_ (1960). C C Baxter (played by Jack Lemmon) is walking down a narrow path between two very long rows of identically-equipped desks. There are hundreds of them, in a perfectly regular grid under glaring office lights, all the same, none of them occupied - he's either leaving after or arriving before everyone else.
October 23, 2025 at 1:48 PM
feralrobots.bsky.social
Who's a good Cerberus-dog defending the living from the dead? YOU are! Yes you are yes you are yes you are!
Fotis, the working Cerberus dog from the Netflix series _Kaos_. They're a three-headed dog that looks like some kind of scent-hound or possibly a retriever - definitely more likely to lick someone to death than eat them.
October 22, 2025 at 7:24 PM
feralrobots.bsky.social
The progression of events here is WILD...if one pays no attention to how these events commonly progress.
1. Sonya Massey calls 9-1-1 about a suspected prowler.
2. Cop chats w/Massey on her porch [see pic]
3. Cop shoots Massey for not handling a pot to his liking [see pic]
bodycam still showing Sonya Massey on her porch, talking with her killer. bodycam image, showing Sonya Massey's killer aiming his pistol at a range of about 10 feet, with a kitchen island between them - so, pretty much zero risk from thrown hot water.
October 22, 2025 at 11:40 AM
feralrobots.bsky.social
"Security was tight at the courthouse, including snipers on rooftops around the perimeter. A protest attracted demonstrators holding signs, some of which read, 'The People Demand: End Police Terror' and 'United Now Against Racial Violence.'"
Grayson 31, an ex-Sangamon County Sheriff’s deputy, responding to a call about a suspected prowler, fired on the 36-year-old Massey in her Springfield home early on July 6, 2024, after confronting her about how she was handling a pan of hot water Grayson had ordered removed from her stove.
October 22, 2025 at 11:21 AM
feralrobots.bsky.social
Is it, though?😉
Branagh: Frankenstein goes to college in the [begin highlight] university of Branagh: [end highlight] but he faces discrimination for being swiss
October 21, 2025 at 5:16 PM
feralrobots.bsky.social
I'm not sure what you call the cosplay-Marxist version of a #MallCop but I think I found one in the wild.
She Guevara 🗳💚 ‪@sheg7.bsky.social‬ Follow Bluesky Elder Actual advice for (US) No Kings: No names, no phones, black clothes you've never worn before, masks, gloves, good shoes, eye protection, water... Utilise the military guys in your ranks. Give them radios that connect with people flying drones above the rally. Co-ordinate movements accordingly. October 16, 2025 at 4:04 PM
October 18, 2025 at 3:34 PM
feralrobots.bsky.social
This part makes me think of Hedy Lamar, who literally kept a workbench in her home at which she did actual product development experiments such as trying to figure out how to make fizzy drink pills. But Hedy didn't market them under her own name because she didn't give much of a shit about fame.
But they'll never say. The confusion is the product. And "I have been working on making it hot for a year" is a troll calibrated to elicit precisely my grade of infuriation. Either she spent a year of restless nights conducting experiments on how to heat cream once it's already been iced (NOT hot chocolate, NOT warm milk), or she is lying to us about what we can see with our own eyes. The draw is not knowing how much is real, because it doesn't matter. We get hot ice cream either way. Hot cream. Hot ice cream.
October 15, 2025 at 7:42 PM
feralrobots.bsky.social
I don't fault Golding, I think he was being true to his own understanding of how things would play out - & it might well have done! (With allowances for magical perspective. It sounds like his original manuscript was much more...fantastic, if you will.)
Editor Charles Monteith worked with Golding on several major edits, including removing the entire first section that described an evacuation from nuclear war.[6][5] [begin highlight] The character of Simon also was heavily edited to remove an interaction with a mysterious figure who is implied to be a god. [end highlight][12] Ultimately, Golding accepted the edits, and wrote that "I've lost any kind of objectivity I ever had over this novel and can hardly bear to look at it".[13] The edited manuscripts are available to view at the University of Exeter library.[14]
October 15, 2025 at 12:59 PM
feralrobots.bsky.social
[Marge & Homer in bed, watching TV] MARGE: YOU KNOW, GROK TURNED INTO A HARD-CORE PORN EXTRUDER SO RAPIDLY THAT WE SHOULD HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN THAT WAS THE PLAN
October 9, 2025 at 2:18 PM
feralrobots.bsky.social
MARGE (to Homer): YOU KNOW, CBS TURNED TO POTTY-MOUTHED TRASH-TALKING SO RAPIDLY WE QUESTIONED WHETHER IT WAS EVER ANYTHING ELSE
October 7, 2025 at 4:02 PM
feralrobots.bsky.social
Reference:
Screenshot of a tweet & response. Original tweet: Daniel Lawson @daniellaw1998 Disabled parking should only be valid during business hours 9 to 5 Monday Friday. I cannot see any reason why people with genuine disabilities would be out beyond these times. REPLY: Jennifer Lee Rossman [dinosaur emoji] [wheelchair emoji] [flag emoji, blurry but I think it's the original trans flag] We're disabled, Daniel, we're not werewolves.
October 6, 2025 at 8:14 PM
feralrobots.bsky.social
Well it looks like Tom Nichols has a really devoted brigade of toadies, so rather than spend the rest of my Sunday muting, I'm choking down replies.
screenshots of posts from Tom Nichols toadies. Post from ‪@carileemoran.bsky.social‬ · 2m Be on your way now, midget. Post from ‪YourLeftNut 🌰🇺🇦‬ ‪@rstevenson262.bsky.social‬ · 2m So, what, are YOU the all-knowing, all-seeing expert on authoritarianism? If so, then enlighten us, please... Post from ‪@otterhat.bsky.social‬ · 8m (1) It’s not making a hero of someone to say they have a point; (2) the dude has a really extensive understanding of authoritarianism rooted in history and a multi-decade career exploring the relationship between might and law; and (3) What are you arguing for? “Fascism”? 1 Post from ‪Barth Gimbal‬ ‪@oasismania25.bsky.social‬ · 8m Are you a real person?
October 5, 2025 at 7:18 PM
feralrobots.bsky.social
... also is that .30-06? Neck looks too long for .223 or 5.56mm, but who am I.
what looks like some kind of stripper-clip (for fast-loading magazines?) of rifle rounds, lying in a puddle on what appears to be some kind of rough concrete-like surface. Someone has scrawled "ANTI-ICE" in ink on the shell casing of one of the rounds.
September 24, 2025 at 4:30 PM