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Leo Edwardsson

@leoedwardsson.bsky.social
541 followers 1.1K following 534 posts

Ausmerican. Tree hugger. Linguist. Techie. MBA Renewables (mba-renewables.de). Coffee roaster @ cuppahaiku.com, living and working on Ngunnawal country.

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Reposted by Leo Edwardsson
David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Most people are underreacting to this El Niño.
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Tim Stephens @proftimstephens.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
‘Organised crime groups are using artificial intelligence to streamline their global drug-trafficking operations and create fake documents, identities and business records to facilitate large-scale imports and money-laundering.’ www.smh.com.au/national/nsw...
smh.com.au
How Australia’s underworld is weaponising AI for drug imports
Criminals are exploiting the technology to increase the speed and scale of importations flooding Australia’s lucrative illicit market and avoid police detection.
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Alex Hanna @alexhanna.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Why isn't this on every TV screen and not the fairy tale of killer robots
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jess m. ☕🍂 @jametc.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Something AI is responsible for that doesn't get enough talk: How, when it scrapes a website to illegally steal everything on it, it uses up a ton of its bandwidth allotment, crashing it or racking up massive fees for site owners.
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ashley fairbanks @ziibiing.com · 05/10/2026
this is my favorite example ever of an interactive clearly, creatively illustrated concept
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Jessie L @jessielilley.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
If humans hacked Medicare and the NSW govt they would be arrested, prosecuted and jailed. If Russia or China hacked Medicare and the NSW govt, just imagine the international incident. OpenAI gets to call it a whoopsie and… keep doing it? Nice for some.
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Ben Eltham @beneltham.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
The neocloud bubble is wild. Aussie startup Firmus has an IPO next week forecast at $30b. Its plans include 2 data centres that will suck 15% of the electricity in Tasmania, the main customer is OpenAI, it has no audited financials, and its co-founder is a criminal www.reuters.com/business/5-b...
reuters.com
$5 billion Firmus IPO divides investors after valuation triples in two months
As Australian data centre operator Firmus prepares to ​launch a $5 billion initial public offering, the country's second-largest ever, prospective investors are questioning the firm's surging valuatio...
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Christopher Wright @chriswrightau.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
AI now seen as - "the malformed offspring of a small clique of malignant narcissists in Silicon Valley, delusional futurists toying with algorithms that promise to render redundant hundreds of millions of jobs around the world, all the while poisoning the planet"!: www.theage.com.au/national/ai-...
theage.com.au
AI data centres are springing up in communities across the country. Now, residents are fighting back
For these locals, the prospect of a vast new data centre – just one block away from a school and 16 metres from a home – was too much. So they got to work.
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Simon Rosenberg @simonrosenberg.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen stated that good journalism focuses on “Not the odds, but the stakes”. Speers is master of the odds: horserace political reporting that is all about politics, personalities and polls, and largely ignores consequences for the nation. #insiders #auspol
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Albert Pinto @70sbachchan.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
@washingtonpost reported earlier that hospitals insurance costs next year are projected to spike by the most in 2 decades, partly "due to medical providers’ increased use of artificial intelligence to find more claims they can bill for" www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...
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Colette Delawalla, PhD @cdelawalla.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I made this video *just for you*...here's a link to read the compact and if you scroll down you'll see the button to click to email your university leadership! www.standupforscience.net/sufs-compact...
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Ezra Klein asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about AI making kids worse at math and reading. Huang’s reply: “Does it matter?” Then he said he doesn’t know his own address or phone number. “We’re going to lose some fine intellectual dexterity.” www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/o...
So the message of this research out of China, where you were seeing a lot of kids using A.I. to help them, was that when they were using the A.I., they were getting things done faster. But it turned out that the skills they were learning were not holding, that their actual personal performance, at least in the way we traditionally measure it, was degrading.

What do you think when you hear that?

The last part — I completely agree. Try to get a kid to do long division right now. The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots, my goodness. Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter?

That’s my question for you.

Yeah. I don’t think it does. I don’t think it does.

But there must be some set of skills that matter.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But maybe not those. We’re going to discover new ones. Just maybe not those.

There are a lot of skills that don’t matter. My first confession, I actually don’t know my address.And I ——

I don’t really believe that to be true.

It’s completely true. Janine will tell you and Lori will tell you.

One day I had to pump gas — it was a few years ago. They needed my ZIP code, and I panicked. I didn’t know my ZIP code. I don’t know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it.

But let me take the other side because I don’t want to fall into a thing where, because some skills can be safely offloaded ——

Yeah.

I also can’t get anywhere without a mapping system now. Never could, frankly. But I’m a big reader. And one of the skills I really value, one of the capacities I have that I really value is an attention span formed on physical books.

You’re a big reader. I’ve read about the kind of reading you do. And there is, prior to A.I., a lot of concern and noticing among college professors and others that the way people use the internet has probably shortened attention spans.
Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.Some skills can be safely given away. Others are valuable. They are capacities that are needed for that flexibility, for that creative thinking, for that focus. It can’t be the case that everything can be traded off.

Yeah. Well, I think that we’re going to lose some finer intellectual dexterity, but we’re going to be better systems thinkers.

Today’s engineers are far better systems thinkers than I was when I graduated from school. But I was a much better transistor thinker.

What do you mean by systems thinker?

They think of large systems. Today’s computers have trillions, hundreds of trillions of transistors in them. When I first graduated from school, the first chip I worked on had 200 transistors. I knew every one of them by name. No engineer does that today. Most engineers now work well above the transistor, well above the functionality, and they’re cobbling things together to do things.

So you need to think much more about systems and interactions of systems. So some of the lower-level knowledge is gone.
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Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
It's funny that for years now people have been saying that using generative AI very obviously deskills you, and people kept going no no you're wrong you Luddite And now all the genAI CEO's keep coming out in public to announce they forgot how to read and do math and can't remember their address etc
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Ambassador Ken Fairfax (ret) @portlandken.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
The accounting is in: In Oregon there are 111 data centers. The TOTAL number of people employed at data centers is just 2,630, or 0.1% of the labor force. Those 100 data centers consumer 23% of all electricity used in Oregon. Meanwhile, electricity rates skyrocket as more centers are built.
opb.org
Oregon data centers by the numbers: 111 facilities consume nearly one-quarter of state’s power, according to new report
A first-of-its-kind report details the footprint of the controversial facilities.
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Commercial Solar Guy @commercialsolarguy.com · 19/09/2026
‘18 radiation sensors, 14 weather stations, 14 soil temperature & moisture probes…Grain specific weight, an indicator of quality, 3% higher than in control plot…On the coldest nights, temperatures beneath the canopy were up to 3 C higher…reduced the average daily temperature range by about 1.5 C’
pv-magazine.com
French agrivoltaic trials cut water loss, lift maize yields by 19.6% - pv magazine Global
TSE’s agrivoltaic trials in France recorded barley yields of up to 96% of those in a control plot and reduced seasonal evapotranspiration by 20%. At a separate site, maize yield beneath the canopy was...
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 16/09/2026
I don't think there's a better illustration of the incredible danger of people credulously and irresponsibly over-adopting generative AI than the use of it by DOCTORS to note vital information. This should be as illegal as fabricating notes by hand. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08...
Error by AI scribe during medical appointment leaves patient devastated
But that decision would cause her a lot of stress, with the AI scribe making up the serious but false claim that Ms Green was taking illegal drugs.

"I was gobsmacked and in tears … it made up that I take [psychedelic] mushrooms. I have never done mushrooms in my life,"  she said.
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 12/09/2026
I know this'll ruffle feathers but I agree with this Food/Water watch analysis. Diverting renewable energy away from fossil phase-out and climate adaptation and towards melting graphics card to power chatbots is the formal end of moral purpose for clean technology.
Data Centers With Renewables Aren’t the Answer
So all these power plants and “temporary” turbines are raising power prices and polluting our communities. Why don’t we just power data centers with renewables?

Many data center companies are pledging to (eventually) do just that. But even if these pledges weren’t just empty greenwashing promises, powering data centers with clean energy is utterly unrealistic. It also threatens the progress of our already dangerously slow energy transition.

Continuously powering a 1 GW data center would require nearly 20,000 acres of solar panels or 185,000 acres of onshore wind power. We cannot afford to waste the time, space, or money to build renewables for Big Tech’s profit machines. 

Already, data center growth is outstripping available renewable energy supply and redirecting renewables from other industries. It’s drawing urgently needed renewables from existing technologies and resources. We need to focus our renewable energy resources toward thos
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Dr. Lucky Tran @luckytran.com · 30/08/2026
“Why didn’t scientists warn us?”
Newspaper clipping:

Thr Rodnen & Otamatea Times
WAITEMATA & KAIPARA GAZETTE
PRIOE~10s perannum in adrance
WARKWORTE, WEDNESDAY AUGUST 14, 1912
3d per Copy.
Science Notes and News.
COAL CONSUMPTION AFFECT.
ING CLIMATE.
The furnaces of the world are now
burning about
2,000,000,000 tons of
coal a ycar.
When this is burned,
uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the carth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries.
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Brent Toderian @brenttoderian.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Are the countries claiming that they have a working deal with Trump ready to admit yet that there’s no such thing? No country can have a deal with Trump, because Trump is incapable of sticking to any deal. Suggesting otherwise is make-believe.
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Gravel Influencer @gravelinfluencer.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
This study is a good reminder that building cities where children can thrive means reducing car dependency and designing streets centered around people
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 19/08/2026
i don’t want “accelerated”, “increased-speed” or “fast-paced” research. in fact, am not interested in any shortcuts to mindful, intentional, and slow science
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Ursula K. Le Guin Bot @leguinbot.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.
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Adam Schwarz @adamjschwarz.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
When the story of why humanity didn't stop climate change is written, it will feature front pages like this. Even as the skies blacken with climate change-induced wildfires, right wing media continue their relentless crusade against measures to tackle it.
The Times: Net zero risks blackouts. Below a photo of French wildfires.
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Adam McKay @ghostpanther.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Piece I just wrote for Current Affairs. www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-mas...
currentaffairs.org
The Massive Climate Lie That Will Destroy Human Civilization
Thinking we have time left to address climate change, or that “Net Zero by 2050” will save us, is driving us toward full social collapse in ways that become more obvious with every new broken temperat...
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laura olin @lauraolin.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
But they will be
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jessamyn @librarian.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
I work at a public library. People who want to use AI seem to have no trouble doing so. People who don't want to use AI have a harder time. I crowdsourced and then finalized this document "How to disable or avoid intrusive AI" and then gave it a short URL: notoai.org Please pass along if it's useful
An aircraft passenger oxygen mask: a drop down passenger mask with air bag and yellow plastic mouth and nose cover, oxygen tube has been cut; Demonstration model used by flight attendant crew for passenger instruction. Has text on the side indicating that it's non-functional.
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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 31/07/2026
Per UBS, OpenAI and Anthropic will account for 27% of Google Cloud's 2026 revenue and more than 48% of 2027's. Investors are being sold a story about diverse AI demand that is simply not true - hyperscalers spent a trillion dollars to feed money back to themselves and pretend it's real growth.
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Boxo McFoxo @boxobark.ing · 31/07/2026
The reality is that Anthropic and Google's rental fees are keeping these obscene turbines running. They should be catching at least as much flack as SpaceX over this!
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 31/07/2026
The fact that it’s poisoning Black people is not seen as a negative to these folks.
techcrunch.com
SpaceX won’t remove all of xAI’s unpermitted turbines for another year | TechCrunch
SpaceX is building a new power plant for xAI's Colossus data centers, but it won't remove existing, unpermitted turbines for many more months.
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Boxo McFoxo @boxobark.ing · 31/07/2026
At this point I consider any article that covers this story without also mentioning that these specific turbines power the paid tier of Claude, the vibe coding tool Cursor and (soon) Gemini Enterprise, to be distorting the truth.
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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 25/07/2026
1. Incredible new title given to me by the Financial Times 2. This is a great piece about how AI skepticism feels like the consensus now ftav.substack.com/p/this-is-nu...
It might not be a complete surprise to know that Ed Zitron, the hyper-online unofficial voice of big-tech antipathy, was a recent guest speaker at Jefferies' offices; the biggest difference between his body of work and the above summary is in the profanity count.
To be sure, it's always in the Street's interests to generate insurance sales by having a few people on payroll who talk up a bear case, while their sell-side analyst colleagues remain in employment by bending to the prevailing wind. The Street's recent tone shift might be no more than a symptom of July's tech correction, in which the chip-stock momentum reversed and the spending plans of Alphabet and Tesla remained nonchalantly gung-ho.
Whichever way, AI scepticism now feels like the consensus. As for what to do in preparation for a crash, you're basically on your own. But if the music does stop playing, an awful lot of people are positioned and ready to say they told you so.
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Mother Jones @motherjones.com · 25/07/2026
A new report exposes what's behind the "clean" gas lie
motherjones.com
How fossil fuel companies made us believe gas was clean
A new report from the Center for Climate Integrity exposes "decades of deception."
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TechCrunch @techcrunch.com · 25/07/2026
At libraries around the country, "Avoiding AI" workshops have elicited unprecedented demand.
techcrunch.com
Librarians are hosting viral 'Avoiding AI' workshops for people who are fed up with Big Tech | TechCrunch
At libraries around the country, "Avoiding AI" workshops have elicited unprecedented demand.
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Dave Vetter @davidrvetter.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
Everything is on fire, but I just saw one of these drinking from the pond. We cannot let the fascists destroy our world.
A tiny round Goldcrest (Regulus Regulus), with beige-grey-green plumage, black, yellow and white wings, and a bright yellow stripe on its head, bordered in black. Photo from Woodland Trust.
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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
On top of AI brain rot, companies are proactively obliterating every trace of organizational knowledge they managed to accrue, by annual waves of mass layoffs targeting the most tenured (expensive) people.
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Greg Pak @gregpak.net · 20/07/2026
I know that most of our digital tools are controlled by awful billionaires and it's almost impossible for us to divest ourselves of all of them. But I think that X and Substack are so horribly toxic that everyone should avoid them as much as possible.
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Peter du Toit @peterdutoit.com · 18/07/2026
Yes, the smoke threatening the World Cup final on Sunday is indeed powered by Aramco “Will the Canadian wildfire smoke affect Spain vs Argentina World Cup final?” www.aljazeera.com/sports/2026/...
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON - JUNE 24: A general view of the stadium with Aramco advertising during the FIFA World Cup 2026 Group B match between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Qatar at Seattle Stadium on June 24, 2026 in Seattle, Washington. (Photo by Stu Forster/Getty Images
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Masuke🐶+rocogirl👩 @rocogirl.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
I'm Masuke, and I'm 17 years old. I went for a lively walk again this morning! Here are my plans for the three-day weekend: ① Eat ② Take a nap ③ Keep an eye on Mom while she studies for her exam Is everyone going anywhere?
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All Our Yesterdays @allouryesterdays.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
On this day (July 17) in 1819 Eunice Foote entered the world. Who she? This she. allouryesterdays.info/2022/08/23/a...
allouryesterdays.info
August 23, 1856 -  Eunice Foote identifies carbon dioxide as greenhouse gas - All Our Yesterdays
On this day in 1856 American scientist and women’s rights campaigner Eunice Foote illustrated her findings in a paper entitled, “Circumstances affecting the heat of the sun’s rays,” which was accepted...
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Amalia S. Levi, PhD @amaliasl.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
📢 Once more for the people in the back: - Most [more than 95%] of archives have not been digitized. - Most of humanity's knowledge and memory is *not* reachable by LLMs. - Believing that AI can provid you with comprehensive, definitive, "intelligent" results is folly.
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Garth Marenghi's Catbus @catbus.phd · 13/07/2026
I'm not seeing anyone speaking ill of Sam Neill, because he was a good man who harmed no one and brought joy to many RIP to a real one
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Comms Declare @commsdeclare.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
Vale Sam Neill 🥹 An actor that used his platform to raise awareness of environmental issues, including single use plastics and climate change. He spent this year fighting a mining project in Otago, NZ. A true role model. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07...
abc.net.au
Breaking: Actor Sam Neill dies aged 78
New Zealand actor Sam Neill, who starred in My Brilliant Career and Jurassic Park, has died aged 78.
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Alexandra Heller-Nicholas @horrornonna.com · 13/07/2026
This is pretty well known, but the Australian flag Sam Neill wore on his uniform in Event Horizon was designed at his request to show the Union Jack replaced with the Aboriginal flag, because he hoped in the future this is how it would actually look. A proper fucken ally in every way, this bloke.
Sam Neill on profile in EVENT HORIZON, with a patch on his jacket that shows the Australian flag but with the Union Jack replaced with the Aboriginal flag, because fuck colonialism and Sam knew that this always was, always will be, Aboriginal land
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Grant Watson @fictionmachine.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
Sam.
Sam Neill in a naval uniform as Cpt. Boradin in The Hunt for Red October.Sam Neill as John Trent in In the Mouth of Madness.Sam Neill in Death in Brunswick.Sam Neill (and horse, right) in My Brilliant Career.
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Chad Loder @chadloder.dev · 12/07/2026
The thing about being ruled by a gerontocracy is that cohort mortality is a probability density, meaning all these fuckers start dying around the same time -- in clusters. The same Weibull Distribution "bathtub curve" explains why batches of light bulbs and hard drives all die in the same month.
A line graph plotting the probability density function of a Weibull distribution over time. The horizontal axis represents elapsed time, and the vertical axis represents the probability of failure. The curve models a wear-out scenario where the shape parameter is greater than one.At the beginning of the timeline, the line starts near zero, indicating a very low risk of early failure. It remains low and relatively flat across the initial and middle stages of life. As time advances toward the right, the line curves sharply upward (called the "bathtub curve" because it resembles the back of a bathtub. It forms a steep, narrow peak that represents a concentrated cluster of failures near the end of the maximum lifespan. After reaching this maximum peak, the curve plunges rapidly back down to zero, indicating that nearly all subjects in the population have failed.
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Leo Edwardsson @leoedwardsson.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
Crapistocracy: government by enshittification
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👻 David Weiskopf believes in spooks 👻 @dave.bzky.team · 12/07/2026
Internal combustion engines
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Betty C. Jung @bettycjung.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
I am reposting this August 28, 2025 article which explains why there is this cyclosporiasis outbreak. CDC cuts back foodborne illness surveillance program. www.cidrap.umn.edu/foodborne-di...
cidrap.umn.edu
CDC cuts back foodborne illness surveillance program
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Pavel @spavel.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
You simply cannot "individual responsibility" yourself into 300 million individual-scale Centers for Disease Control
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