Tootfinder

Vivid Minds Cafe in Denver is a public coffee shop by day with special “magic mushroom” experiences for adults 21-plus after hours
The building, at 1545 S. Broadway, is painted bright blue and adorned with puffy white clouds.
Around the entryway, images of pink and yellow mushrooms welcome visitors and give passersby a clue as to what happens inside after hours.
Vivid Minds is Colorado’s first licensed microdosing cafe, offering adults 21-and-up opportunities to learn abou…

Denver’s first microdosing cafe now offering psilocybin-assisted yoga, art and more
Vivid Minds Cafe is a public coffee shop by day with special “magic mushroom” experiences for adults 21-plus after hours

Super Mario World: first level cleared
I've now got a classic controller, and it makes the game great. I've completed the first world - beaten the boss, hit the yellow switch palace - and am now looking around the first level in the second world which apparently has more than one exit. One annoying thing is that I can't see any indication on the map screen as to whether I've collected all five Yoshi coins on any one level. It's good fun other than that. It may have …

Series B, Episode 04 - Horizon
RO: [Into intercom] Bring them both to the palace. Remove the communicators first.
GUARD: Yes, sir.
[Teleport section. Avon enters, followed by Gan. Vila is seated at the console, drinking green liquid]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/204/171 B7B2

"Friction makes learning more effective"—yes, but for whom? Like "discipline" and "grit," friction in the classroom may serve teachers and future bosses more than students.
Read @… @…

Cynicism, "AI"
I've been pointed out the "Reflections on 2025" post by Samuel Albanie [1]. The author's writing style makes it quite a fun, I admit.
The first part, "The Compute Theory of Everything" is an optimistic piece on "#AI". Long story short, poor "AI researchers" have been struggling for years because of predominant misconception that "machines should have been powerful enough". Fortunately, now they can finally get their hands on the kind of power that used to be only available to supervillains, and all they have to do is forget about morals, agree that their research will be used to murder millions of people, and a few more millions will die as a side effect of the climate crisis. But I'm digressing.
The author is referring to an essay by Hans Moravec, "The Role of Raw Power in Intelligence" [2]. It's also quite an interesting read, starting with a chapter on how intelligence evolved independently at least four times. The key point inferred from that seems to be, that all we need is more computing power, and we'll eventually "brute-force" all AI-related problems (or die trying, I guess).
As a disclaimer, I have to say I'm not a biologist. Rather just a random guy who read a fair number of pieces on evolution. And I feel like the analogies brought here are misleading at best.
Firstly, there seems to be an assumption that evolution inexorably leads to higher "intelligence", with a certain implicit assumption on what intelligence is. Per that assumption, any animal that gets "brainier" will eventually become intelligent. However, this seems to be missing the point that both evolution and learning doesn't operate in a void.
Yes, many animals did attain a certain level of intelligence, but they attained it in a long chain of development, while solving specific problems, in specific bodies, in specific environments. I don't think that you can just stuff more brains into a random animal, and expect it to attain human intelligence; and the same goes for a computer — you can't expect that given more power, algorithms will eventually converge on human-like intelligence.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, what evolution did succeed at first is achieving neural networks that are far more energy efficient than whatever computers are doing today. Even if indeed "computing power" paved the way for intelligence, what came first is extremely efficient "hardware". Nowadays, human seem to be skipping that part. Optimizing is hard, so why bother with it? We can afford bigger data centers, we can afford to waste more energy, we can afford to deprive people of drinking water, so let's just skip to the easy part!
And on top of that, we're trying to squash hundreds of millions of years of evolution into… a decade, perhaps? What could possibly go wrong?
[1] #NoAI #NoLLM #LLM

Yes, forest trees die of old age. But the warming climate is killing them faster #environment

Yes, forest trees die of old age. But the warming climate is killing them faster
Across Australia, forests are quietly changing. Trees that once stood for decades or centuries are now dying at an accelerating rate. And this is not because of fire, storms, or logging. The chronic stress of a warming climate is killing them.

In a few days the #PlanetNine hypothesis - first published on 20 Jan 2016 in the paper https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/0004-6256/151/2/22 ("EVIDENCE FOR A DISTANT GIANT PLANET IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM", yes, they shouted it in all caps) - will turn 10 years old. The proposed big outer solar system inhabitant has never been found: https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/planet-9-x-y-edge-of-solar-system reviews the situation.

A: "I don't understand how you're so relaxed when you don't hear from the kids. Everyone in my family is like, 'msg me right when you get home!'"
me: "Ah, [13yo] is fine. He went home and is 100% watching videos when he's not supposed to be, hoping we forgot about him so that he can get away w/ as much screen time as he can. If he were stuck on the subway or something, he'd have messaged. Actually, I'd be more worried if he DID message.&qu…

Yuzupüree gefällig?
https://www.bosfood.de/shop-detail/kategorie/fruchtprodukte-puerees-gemuese-sprossen/subkategorie/puerees/detail/ponthier/produkt/puere…

RE: https://climatejustice.social/@GeofCox/116062316104136628
Yes, and...
The _first_ reporting duty, the _first_ level of responsibility has to be ecological. Not "environmental", with its implicit human exceptionalism. We must recog…