iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The warning signs on the harvesting machine in the local visitor center are darkly illustrative.

Sign reads: "WARNING. Avoid falls. Keep off when machine is operating." The little person in the pictogram is in the process of falling off, impotently flailing its arms.

Sign reads: "DANGER. Disengage harvesting unit drive and shut off engine before unplugging machine." The little person in the pictogram has already lost its foot, which is about half a meter away in the machinery.

Sign reads: "WARNING. Keep drive line shields in place. Drive line shield should turn freely. Check daily before starting equipment." The little person in the pictogram is wrapped around an axle in a way that seem implausible. If this happened to somebody in real life, they would be in pieces.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Mount Kaputar National Park, New South Wales: Euglah Rock. A hoverfly on the flower of a climbing lily. Daisy bush (Olearia) not letting its flowering be stopped by a mere gall.

A mountain in the distance, with more mountains in even more distance behind it.

A hoverfly with black and yellow stripes on its abdomen probing in a flower that is small but still dwarfs the fly. The flower has numerous hairs on the adaxial sides of its tepals.

Stem of a daisy bush interrupted by a gall formed vaguely like a slender onion. Two leaves are visible coming out of the gall, and one of them subtends a branch ending in a flowerhead. Two more flowerheads arise from the distant part of the gall, with their point of insertion hidden from view. The entire structure is held between two fingers.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

More native flora of the Warrumbungles National Park, New South Wales. Calotis lappulacea, Vittadinia dissecta, Tritilodiscus pygmaeus, and Scutellaria humilis.

Small daisy flowerhead with yellow rays and yellow disc.

Very hairy plant with deeply divided leaves. There are four flowerheads, but they are not very showy; only one of them has minuscule, whitish ray florets.

A very tiny annual daisy with yellow florets.

A member of the mint family with pink, bilabiate flowers, only one per leaf axil.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Warrumbungle National Park, New South Wales: View from Fans Horizon lookout. A spider orchid. Twining, parasitic Cassytha. A lizard with a large dead insect in its mouth.

View of Warrumbungle area from Fans Horizon lookout. A forested, mountainous landscape under a partly cloud, partly clear sky.

Orchid flower with very long, thin tepals.

A twining, parasitic plant with flower buds and one reddish fruit.

A small lizard carrying a large dead insect in its mouth.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Impressions from Dubbo Botanic Gardens, New South Wales.

Aspect of the Japanese Garden in Dubbo, with a pine tree in the middle of the image and a pond in the foreground.

Detail of ginkgo tree with male catkins and young leaves.

Detail of grass tree inflorescence with enormous numbers of tiny, white flowers.

Black duck youngster, probably the equivalent of a human teenager, with a remarkably dorky facial expression.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

This little Microtis orchid came up spontaneously in one pot a few years ago and has been spreading across it, presumably vegetatively.

High magnification image of very small, entirely green orchid flowers.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Passiflora cinnabarina, an Australian native passionflower.

A red passionflower flower sitting on the soil of a large pot.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

A few spring flowers from our balcony this week. Here is Sichuan pepper with a hover fly. Let's see if I can again harvest a handful this summer.

A cluster of tiny greenish flowers with a black and yellow hover fly in the center probing for nectar.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I did not ask for any summary. Seeing this, on the one hand, I don't know how I could refute claims of a conspiracy to waste as much electricity as possible in order to hasten the demise of humanity. On the other hand, this is also simply another case of a software product not working reliably.

A colourful exclamation mark weirdly floating in front of a triangle, and under it, the text "we couldn't load AI summary. Something went wrong. Try again."

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Colleagues in our insect collection educating the rest of us.

Stink bug fact #18. DID YOU KNOW? The name "stink bug" is actually kind of mean.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

When an AI goes evil in Star Trek and they need it to commit suicide, they give it this identification key and ask it to key out a plant specimen.

Couplet of an identification key written by a plant taxonomist. The first lead reads: "Ray corolla yellow (at least in bud) or if white then either, the majority of mature leaves terminally 3-lobed or the achenes with strongly curved abaxial or adaxial wings and lacking longitudinal ridges on the lateral faces". The alternative option is: "Ray corolla not yellow but white, bluish or pinkish; terminally 3-lobed leaves absent or in the minority; achenes lacking strongly curved abaxial or adaxial wings or if they are present then the lateral faces with longitudinal ridges." I mean, seriously, come on now.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Native Australian Clematis leptophylla flowering on our balcony, in the first spring after I planted it. The species is dioecious, and our individual turned out to be female.

In focus are two flowers and two flower buds. The flowers are pendent; they each have four narrow tepals and large numbers of ovaries, plus a few staminodes (sterile stamens).

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

No that isn't the point of your own argument, not even close. Between this thread and an unrelated interaction I had yesterday, I am increasingly not only worried about literacy rates but about people not understanding the meaning of sentences they write themselves.

bsky isnt ready for this but, if you need a reason to not use words like "clanker" that isn't "well its kinda not a great thing to do" (it isn't) imagine this:

future model that has you in its training data, knows you posted that word online with joy, and denies your insurance claim as a result

the point of the argument here is that theres a huge number of people on here that are totally fine with using a word that has grown popular by being used as a slur.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

This is a very beautiful motte-and-bailey. The motte is that facism and war are impossible by definition in hunter-gatherer societies because those have no complex political systems or armies. But no violence? Zero psychotic, abusive leaders, in 400k years? Our ancestors were humans just like us.

Dr. Sarah Parcak
@indyfromspace.bsky.social
· 2h
I'm not engaging any more with non archaeologists who refuse to cite a *single* study that shows widespread evidence for war and fascism/ authoritarian rule in the ca 400,000 ish years pre agricultural revolution and millions of years before... b/c they don't exist. 0 evidence. We were peaceful.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

The brain worms really have taken over every large tech corporation. We must put AI into everything, we must burn more electricity, we must waste tokens, AI everywhere, AI, AI, aaaah

You now have promotional access to AI function in Sheets. Generate, summarize, or categorize text for email campaigns, ads, reviews, and more when you type =AI. Learn more. Try it now.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

What is this abomination? Since yesterday, everybody has been poking fun at a post asking genAI skeptics if they would really be willing to give up that technology. Just look at this. The answer is obvious. I'd be buying champagne and fireworks if garbage like this went away tomorrow.

Screenshot of an AI assistant for writing a personal message on electronic farewell or celebration cards, which defeats the purpose of personal messages. It asks to construct a prompt consisting of the occasion, the relationship the user has with the recipient, the tone (funny, formal, inspirational, etc.), and what style to plagiarise ("e.g., Yoda or Dr. Seuss). This egregious waste of electricity could mostly be replaced with a randomised selection of stock phrases. More importantly, if I were ever to receive such an electronic card, I would prefer somebody writing a single misspelled sentence themselves over generating this kind of slop.

On the right is what looks like a chat with one alleged message reading "Hi there Welcome to... by Jess". Puzzlingly, the mystery message perennially claims to be one day old regardless of what day I logged in, and there is no context for who or what Jess is. Maybe it is just me, but the entire interface screams fraud.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

The pervert glasses make it much worse, but the erosion of consent and privacy started with cell phones, with everybody carrying a camera in their pocket at all times, and with many posting photos to social media without asking everybody caught in the photo if they were okay with that.

Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social
For many years, people didn’t randomly film others in public—not because we didn’t have the technology, but because the social contract said you didn’t do that.

That’s why Meta is going full court press on their PR and celebrity endorsements. They remember how people ran google glass outta town.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Another "find everything wrong with this picture". Most people focus on the fighter jet that has cockpits on both ends, but I particularly enjoy the ship that is half in the water and half beached onto the island.

An AI generated image apparently shared on social media by the current president of the USA, or at least by his team under his name. It purports to show a cartoonishly compressed Kharg Island being attacked by US military aircraft. The attacking fighter planes are of a variety of types, including one that has cockpits on both ends and another that looks vaguely like an X-Wing from Star Wars. The distant half of the island and most of the empty beaches are full of explosions, while every attacker seems to have missed the closer half of the island. The airplanes are unrealistically close to each other, so that we can expect several of them to imminently crash into each other. Also, the AI doesn't understand how missiles work, so it looks as if the jets that are meant to be shooting the island are instead being shot down.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

This Jesus is suspiciously pale and red-haired, but mostly I wonder where in the bible it says that all his twelve disciples were over seventy tears old.

A painting of Jesus getting his feet washed by Maria Magdalene, to the amazement of his strangely geriatric followers.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

PSA: "incomplete lineage sorting" actually has a meaning. Most people who use the term actually mean "deep coalescence". Many others have no clue what they even mean but use it as part of a word cloud they expel when discussing conflict in the data, together with "hybridisation" and "polyploidy".

Two concepts illustrated with phylogenetic species trees containing gene trees.

Incomplete lineage sorting (ILS)
* dataset: shallow phylogeny of very closely
related species, and only visible if multiple
individuals per species and/or gene copies
per individual are used in the analysis
* pattern: gene copies in species are not
reciprocally monophyletic
* cause: rapid speciation and large effective
population sizes

Deep coalescence
* dataset: deep phylogeny of distantly related
species, a kind of analysis that often uses only one
individual per species and only one gene copy per
individual (e.g., HybPiper)
* pattern: gene tree incongruent with species tree
* cause: incomplete lineage sorting many millions of
years ago that is now long resolved, so the LS is
not I anymore. It is not incomplete lineage sorting.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

One of these days I am going to have to try primal scream therapy. This paper has an abstract. Go away.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Nice to see a familiar face at the Landesgartenschau (state ornamental plant festival) in Leinefelde, Thuringia: the Australian billy button Pycnosorus globosus.

Photo of a plant looking like a yellow ball on a stick.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Oh hey, I have founded what they trained the LLMs on to produce the AI World Clocks at clocks.brianmoore.com. Artwork "for a little while. (ii)" by Enrico Leppla.

Photo of an analog clock without pointers and with its numerals jumbled up more or less randomly.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

On a house in northern Germany, now used as a church: HANS HEITMAN ANNA MEYERS BAVWEN IST EIN FEINER LVST ABER ICH HABE ES NICHT GEWVST DAS ES HETTE SOVIEL GEKOST ANNO 1665 Translated: Hans Heitman. Anna Meyers. Building is great fun, but I had not realised how expensive it would be. Anno 1665

HANS HEITMAN ANNA MEYERS BAVWEN IST EIN FEINER LVST ABER ICH HABE ES NICHT GEWVST DAS ES HETTE SOVIEL GEKOST ANNO 1665

Translated to English:

Hans Heitman. Anna Meyers. Building is great fun, but I had not realised how expensive it would be. Anno 1665

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Stellate hair of Berteroa incana (Brassicaceae).

A minuscule, white hair branched into six arms on a leaf surface at high magnification.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Flower-head of Erigeron canadensis, the Canadian fleabane.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

A pharmacy operating in a building from 1598. This is the kind of stuff I am thinking of when I see buildings knocked down as past their "useful life" after a few decades.

A house in the town center of Lüneburg in Germany. The lower three storeys are tall and have large windows, and above that are four much lower storeys that were likely originally used as storage space. The main door is surrounded by a beautifully painted archway two storeys tall. Fraktur letters on the building read "Die alte Raths-Apotheke", meaning The old council pharmacy.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

What is this abomination? If any product I know is ever advertised in this manner, I will make a point of never buying it again.

AI-generated advertisement for "American quality pistachios", whatever that means. It shows an enormous number of pistachio-shaped, green people who have identical, utterly vapid happy expressions. They are meant to be watching a football match on a large screen but are all, for inexplicable reasons, looking away from it. Interestingly, the pistachio people in the crowd have shells, but the pistachio people football players on the screen and a single individual standing above the crowd on a table don't.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Two planks, 32 small nails, saw and hammer, two straps, some old cardboard and newspapers, eh voila, ready to make herbarium specimens.

A plant press made of eight 24 cm pieces and eight 32 cm piences of wood.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

This one would make more sense if all the music went into the funnel instead of to the side of it. But, ah, good enough, slop that slop out there, don't care what my readers will think.

This slop image is meant to illustrate the non-consensual use of music for training music generating models. The left half of the image shows a large number of what are presumably meant to be either album covers or screenshots of music videos being sucked into a funnel. The funnel sits atop a machine labelled "AI". The machine spits out wavy lines and notes to its right. As indicated in the post, a good part of the training data misses the funnel of the machine, because the generative AI used to slop out this image does not actually understand image composition.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

AI slop 'art' can be used for a game of find everything wrong with this picture. This is fractally bad. To paraphrase my daughter, just draw stick figures instead!

Garbage image extruded by generative AI to illustrate an essay on the social media bans for children. The left half is taken up by a smartphone. Its screen shows a mass of very similar looking teenagers staring at their smartphones, the hand of an evil puppeteer holding them on strings, and a an assortment of like symbols and melted f symbols floating up above the crowd. In the upper left corner of the screen are are several app logos, and in the lower left corner, a gold-like substance pours out of the phone into a box labelled "PROFIT ADS CONTROL". Very subtle. The on/off and volume control buttons of the phone are on the left side, which seems unusual. The right half of the AI slop garbage image is taken up by the end of a fence. The fence has half of a lock and chain awkwardly floating in the air, implying that the fence is somehow locked, or something. On the fence is a large sign saying "under 16", with the 16 in a forbidden sign. A single sad teenager is standing next to the fence, staring at the large smartphone screen right in front of him. It is implied that he is somehow excluded, although he is in no way kept away from the large smartphone and could easily squeeze between the phone and the fence if he wanted to. He could also help himself to the gold-like substance in the box labelled PROFIT ADS CONTROL, but that is a different matter.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

This seems to be more and more common, have seen the same with several links to journal papers people tried to share. I am pretty sure it isn't just nostalgia, and there really was a time when software used to work fairly reliably.

Screenshot of the same Bluesky post this one is a response to, but it shows that the preview text for the link to the job vacancy is "Error".

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

So, you could say, duh, people should be using AI responsibly until you are blue in the face, but sadly, what we actually have is millions of people (including CEOs) who think they now have a combination of actual all-knowing intelligence with the reliability and reproducibility of print("hello").

A client wanted to have a call yesterday because he thought our math was wrong. After we got on the phone he says “I’m checking it on the calculator and it works out, but I’m sure it’s wrong”. I ask him why and he says chatgpt told him. People gotta stop being stupid like this

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

Not sure where I was screeching? I am mostly puzzled why you think anything you linked to supports your key claim that lab work on drugs can be reduced to a single day. The time-determining factor is never humans or hypothesis generation, it is waiting for lab experiments to run their course.

Quoted from paper presenting Co-Scientist:
It is important to emphasize L that these wet-lab experiments function as a viability check of the drug repurposing pipeline, yet they are not a replacement for the rigorous pre-clinical and clinical assessment typically C required for therapeutic validation. They provide an efficient biological reality check allowing us to rapidly evaluate AI-generated hypotheses before committing to more resource-intensive T validation studies necessary for clinical translation.

Quoted from the other paper on a multi-agent system that is not named in the title: They are grown to confluence and then incubated for a further 7 days [which is longer than one day], during which the media is [sic] not changed. At this point they have formed a monolayer and show signs of differentiation (melanin granule expression, cobblestone morphology).

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Many vibe coders on r/GithubCopilot seem genuinely confused that LLMs cost a lot of money to run and that the creators of those models will at some point have to suck tens to hundreds of billions in fees from the economy to recoup their investments.

Cropped from reddit post: "no doubt that US-developed AI models lead the pack by 1–2 generations. But if the average developer or startup cannot afford to use them freely, that leadership means absolutely nothing."

reddit post: "Microsoft, you gave us a super cool toy and you took it away - we're now left looking at it like window shoppers. That's cruel."

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Great example from involucral bracts in daisies: 1. Petiole, the technical term for the stalks of leaf organs, specifically. 2. Stalk, a word non-experts will understand. 3. "Claw". Why? We already had petiole. Also, no, claws are at the end of something, this is at the base. What are you doing?

Macro image of the basal half of the involucral bract of an everlasting paper daisy, with an arrow pointing out the petiole or stalk.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

Amazing chili harvest this season. I have already dried and deseeded enough to last us for years. It is now late autumn, and the chilis still keep coming!

Small red chili berries air-drying while hung from curtain rod.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

Difficult to overstate how angry this waste of resources makes me. The article in question doesn't only have an abstract that summarises it, but also 'highlights' that were another unnecessary attempt at re-inventing the concept of a summary. Enough already with the ridiculous pseudo-innovation.

A sparkly symbol indicating generative AI next to the title Reading Assistant. The window helpfully suggests some buttons to press if you want to boil a metaphorical lake instead of spending ten seconds looking at the readily available abstract of the paper.
Questions you could ask:
Suggested question: What impacts does the rapid expansion of A. gayanus have on protected area values?
Suggested question: How does A. gayanus threaten biodiversity within management zones?
Suggested question: What are the implications of increased A. gayanus cover for native ecosystems?
Actions you could take:
Summarize this article
Summarize experiments

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

Seems the journal has neither a review process nor an editorial process. But this is also a delightful bit of nostalgia. The figures look like genAI from a few years ago, when the technology was still fun to play around with instead of a serious threat to the integrity of all digital information.

Not really sure if this can even be described. It is a vaguely three-dimensional attempt at drawing a bar plot by an AI that clearly has no idea how bar plots work, and without any data underlying it. There is a legend next to it that would be more appropriate to a dot plot, and all labels on the alleged figure are random gibberish reminiscent of alien glyphs in science fiction. I really wonder where you can even still access generative AI that is this bad. All the currently available models would have produced more subtly wrong images.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

I wanted to respond that Google Scholar worked just fine for me before LLMs were a thing, but it seems the post was deleted before I could get to that.

Screenshot of a now deleted Bluesky post making the claim that "LLMs are going to underpin every search engine that researchers use whether they are aware of it or not. Textual embeddings and retrieval augmented generation are simply just better at this than the tools we had previously", which implies that the poster has neither used the tools we had previously nor checked the results of retrieval augmented generation against sources. Let's just say the first thing you should when using one of those LLM-based research tools it to ask it for something where you already know the answer, in this case to do a literature search on something you have just worked on, then see if it understood what the various sources actually meant. I have tried that and concluded that I won't touch them with a ten foot pole.

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Alexander Schmidt-Lebuhn @anschmidtlebuhn.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

Whether people "use" the plagiarism bots is not the salient question. I too know people who use them regularly! But: * Does LLM use really produce significant efficiencies, or do users fool themselves? * Would users be willing to pay what LLMs actually cost? * Are the LLM outputs fit for purpose?

Screen shot of two Bluesky posts (because both replies and quotes are disabled) saying:

Most of the people in my life aren't in tech. And they aren't academic theory professors. It's been really interesting to ask them about where they see AI impacting their jobs and tasks.

My brother in shipping logistics: "it's changing everything we are doing"
My friend in architecture: "we use it"
My law friends: "using it every day"
My doctor family members: "using it every day"

They all have critiques, too. But a lot more balanced than on this platform.

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