Tootfinder

Just saw this:
#AI can mean a lot of things these days, but lots of the popular meanings imply a bevy of harms that I definitely wouldn't feel are worth a cute fish game. In fact, these harms are so acute that even "just" playing into the AI hype becomes its own kind of harm (it's similar to blockchain in that way).
@… noticed that the authors claim the code base is 80% AI generated, which is a red flag because people with sound moral compasses wouldn't be using AI to "help" write code in the first place. The authors aren't by some miracle people who couldn't build this app without help, in case that influences your thinking about it: they have the skills to write the code themselves, although it likely would have taken longer (but also been better).
I was more interested in the fish-classification AI, and how much it might be dependent on datacenters. Thankfully, a quick glance at the code confirms they're using ONNX and running a self-trained neural network on your device. While the exponentially-increasing energy & water demands of datacenters to support billion-parameter models are a real concern, this is not that. Even a non-AI game can burn a lot of cycles on someone's phone, and I don't think there's anything to complain about energy-wise if we're just using cycles on the end user's device as long as we're not having them keep it on for hours crunching numbers like blockchain stuff does. Running whatever stuff locally while the user is playing a game is a negligible environmental concern, unlike, say, calling out to ChatGPT where you're directly feeding datacenter demand. Since they claimed to have trained the network themselves, and since it's actually totally reasonable to make your own dataset for this and get good-enough-for-a-silly-game results with just a few hundred examples, I don't have any ethical objections to the data sourcing or training processes either. Hooray! This is finally an example of "ethical use of neutral networks" that I can hold up as an example of what people should be doing instead of the BS they are doing.
But wait... Remember what I said about feeding the AI hype being its own form of harm? Yeah, between using AI tools for coding and calling their classifier "AI" in a way that makes it seem like the same kind of thing as ChatGPT et al., they're leaning into the hype rather than helping restrain it. And that means they're causing harm. Big AI companies can point to them and say "look AI enables cute things you like" when AI didn't actually enable it. So I'm feeling meh about this cute game and won't be sharing it aside from this post. If you love the cute fish, you don't really have to feel bad for playing with it, but I'd feel bad for advertising it without a disclaimer.

"We further estimate that the removal of mandates during this time contributed to 21800 COVID deaths through the rest of 2022, 9% of the U.S. total that year. "
https://www.nber.org/papers/w33849

Spillovers from Public Health Policies in Schools: Evidence from COVID Mask Mandates
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.

Montana ranked second worst in the country in terms of prevalence of mental illness and access to care, according to the non-profit Mental Health America.
Two-thirds of adults in Montana also lived in homes with guns, the highest rate in the country, according to a 2016 study from RAND, a thinktank.
The owner of the Firefly Café in Anaconda told the Associated Press that she locked up her business after a friend alerted her to the shooting.

“We are Montana, so guns are not new to…

Back to that non-traditional brand name for our chosen HVAC system. We went with Midea primarily to avoid tariff impact and the brand names (Trane, Carrier, Lennox, etc) all cost more due to market share and advertising. Our HVAC company provides a 10 year parts and labour warranty. I am familiar with Midea, a Chinese company in business for almost 60 years and well known for its A/C technology. So I wasn't put off by the manufacturer.

Did Google Maps and Apple Maps search get worse in the past year?
I keep having a ridiculous amount of trouble locating places to eat or stores in #NYC lately unless I know the precise name of a place - even very similar keywords like “burger” for a place that’s called “Blue Collar Burger” - and it doesn’t come up.
Let alone searching for nearby open restaurants or something by category… most places just don’t come up and instead I see completely irrelevant businesses.
I feel like it’s deteriorated a lot since 2024 but I also might be misremembering how easy it used to be.
#tech #Apple #Google #askfedi

This was really interesting. It's about Topaz AI, which was a denoising/upscaling solution I looked at about nine months ago, and rejected because I wasn't really prepared to make the investment at that stage ($300/yr) https://mstdn.social/@Onmyom/114779996030982643…

When the unstoppable force (YouTube) meets the immovable object (the NFL): MoneyCall https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6595688/2025/09/03/youtube-nfl-week-1-ishowspeed-moneycall/

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #MusicMap
Cécile Chaminade, Sharon Bezaly, Neeme Järvi & Hague Residentie Orchestra:
🎵 Flute Concertino Op.107
#CécileChaminade #SharonBezaly #NeemeJärvi #HagueResidentieOrchestra
https://open.spotify.com/track/4UMbJl2Hx0NAOdjEYmiCcx
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