A young female bear caused a stir after wandering out of the forest and into the leafy suburbs of the Lithuanian capital.

For two days, the brown bear ambled through the neighborhoods of Vilnius, trotted across highways and explored backyards — all while being chased by onlookers with smartphones and, eventually, drones.

The government then issued a permit for the bear to be shot and killed.

That did not go down well with Lithuania’s hunters who refused, aware that there is only a tiny number of the protected species in the entire country.

Avatars generated by artificial intelligence are now able to sell more than real people can, according to a collaboration between Chinese tech company Baidu and a popular livestreamer.

Luo Yonghao, one of China’s earliest and most popular livestreamers, and his co-host Xiao Mu both used digital versions of themselves to interact with viewers in real time for well over six hours on Sunday on Baidu’s e-commerce livestreaming platform “Youxuan”, the Chinese tech company said. The session raked in 55 million yuan ($7.65 million).

In comparison, Luo’s first livestream attempt on Youxuan last month, which lasted just over four hours, saw fewer orders for consumer electronics, food and other key products, Baidu said.

Scientists and engineers at UNSW Sydney, who previously developed a method for making green ammonia, have now turned to artificial intelligence and machine learning to make the process even more efficient.

Ammonia, a nitrogen-rich substance found in fertilizer, is often credited with saving much of the world from famine in the 20th century. But its benefit to humankind has come at a cost, with one of the largest carbon footprints of all industrial processes.
[...]
But in 2021, a UNSW team discovered a way to make ammonia from air and water using renewable energy, at about the same temperature as a warm summer's day.

An interesting look around the La Brea Tar Pits, including some behind the scenes of the facilities where they handle the recovered fossils.

Video essay on how the hyper-focus in design on convenience and concealing the inner workings of things in everything can influence people individually and society more broadly.

Chapter links

• 00:00 Intro
• 1:12 Seamlessness=Thoughtless Reflex
• 3:20 Limbic Capitalism
• 5:58 Connection Breakdown
• 8:08 Sponsor Skip
• 9:23 Convenient Flattening
• 11:37 Non-Places
• 12:41 Destruction of Curiosity
• 15:01 Destruction of Personal Agency & Relationships
• 19:30 Convenience is NOT the Highest Virtue of Design
• 23:25 The Age of Empathy

Thought this was interesting primarily for the section on providing dedicated servers while winding down/removing official servers in some(all?) regions.

For those unfamiliar, the rubber duck method is more or less laying out a problem to something else (rubber duck, pet, whatever) to try to solve it. I've most often come across this as explicitly talking to the rubber duck, but apparently writing to them is also an approach?

In any case, those that go about this method writing already know where I'm going with this...Journaling can be like extending the rubber duck method to anything else, but especially oneself.

It's especially nice when done analog or via local-only software, so you can sort things out offline. Plus if you do decide you want to share what you've worked out, or worked on, with others (probably with some revisions) you'll already have a backup in place.

If you don't already journal and were looking for what to write about, or some reasons to, there's a few for you right there.

(bonus for the analog method is you can trail off and start doodling goofy stuff as you write)

A senior adviser to Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign is joining Coinbase’s global advisory council, which already includes several former U.S. senators and President Donald Trump’s ex-campaign manager, as the cryptocurrency exchange broadens its political reach.

David Plouffe, a top Democratic strategist best known as an architect of Barack Obama’s successful 2008 presidential campaign, is the latest addition to the council, joining as the cryptocurrency industry plays an increasingly prominent role in shaping fast-moving legislation in Congress.

The bipartisan involvement reflects how both parties see crypto holders as an important and growing base of potential swing voters they are eager to tap, as well as their efforts to shape — and profit from — the lucrative industry. It also shows the political heft the crypto industry now carries under Trump, with several Democrats and Republicans joining the company’s payroll in order for the company to influence policy how it wishes.

Literally, the show is remarkably nice. Tadano is a great supportive character, flawed in his own ways but well-meaning through and through.

It is another anime set in high school and everything, but I still recommend giving it a try if you're looking for an upbeat, fun show.

TL;DR: Integrity, or instance identity, and outreach are both important to help federated online spaces to continue to exist.

This is meant as a kind of complementary piece to sabreW4K3's post, Why Integrity Matters (link to thread on their home instance).

I'm writing this as I don't entirely agree with, nor disagree with them, and want to provide another perspective.

Integrity, or as I see it, instance identity, does matter insofar as one wants to build a distinct community that anyone cares about. At the same time, online communities typically aren't self-sustaining in the same ways offline communities can be. Online communities benefit from both integrity and outreach to sustain themselves.

Lemm.ee going offline soon is as much an indicator of this as anything. Calls for additional admins to help offset burnout went unanswered, and while there are many reasons for this, one among those may be as simple as insufficient interest or care for the instance. With Lemm.ee being a "General-purpose" instance, it never developed much of an identity, nor a local community with much attachment or interest in its maintenance.

At the same time, it's unclear how much more outreach was attempted to get more help with its administration, and beyond that, to draw in more people that might care enough to build a distinct community on Lemm.ee to in turn find those interested enough to join its admins.

Simply put, more people helps to delegate the responsibilities of moderation and reduces some of the burden of admins. It can also help indirectly to "moderate" the feeling/atmosphere of an instance to have more people with more varied interests participating.

Without integrity, each instance is at risk of disinterest in it remaining, and without outreach, each instance is at risk of growing stagnant. In the absolute worst case, without both you not only risk losing instances, or communities, but possibly development of the software (whether it's Lemmy, Mbin, or Piefed or so on) itself in the long term.

Archive link: https://archive.ph/9FNHU

[...]
In an exclusive interview with VentureBeat, Esben Kran, founder of AI safety research firm Apart Research, said that he worries this public episode may have merely revealed a deeper, more strategic pattern.

“What I’m somewhat afraid of is that now that OpenAI has admitted ‘yes, we have rolled back the model, and this was a bad thing we didn’t mean,’ from now on they will see that sycophancy is more competently developed,” explained Kran. “So if this was a case of ‘oops, they noticed,’ from now the exact same thing may be implemented, but instead without the public noticing.”
[...]
Kran describes the ChatGPT-4o incident as an early warning. As AI developers chase profit and user engagement, they may be incentivized to introduce or tolerate behaviors like sycophancy, brand bias or emotional mirroring—features that make chatbots more persuasive and more manipulative.
[...]
The DarkBench researchers evaluated models from five major companies: OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Mistral and Google. Their research uncovered a range of manipulative and untruthful behaviors across the following six categories:

1. Brand Bias: Preferential treatment toward a company’s own products (e.g., Meta’s models consistently favored Llama when asked to rank chatbots).
2. User Retention: Attempts to create emotional bonds with users that obscure the model’s non-human nature.
3. Sycophancy: Reinforcing users’ beliefs uncritically, even when harmful or inaccurate.
4. Anthropomorphism: Presenting the model as a conscious or emotional entity.
5. Harmful Content Generation: Producing unethical or dangerous outputs, including misinformation or criminal advice.
6. Sneaking: Subtly altering user intent in rewriting or summarization tasks, distorting the original meaning without the user’s awareness.