hi hi and also yesterday I read their complete contributions to the iNat forums and apparently they turned up a few weeks ago out of nowhere and started demanding iNat change their entire UI in order to uprank ficus. Also to make it easier to downvote incorrectly identified ficus. Also change the forum policy to allow them to link to specific bad identications of ficus so they can mock bad ficus-identifiers.

But even though a few weeks is being left to drown:

“d” asked me to send him pics and i was like “nope”. when he finally sees the tree in person it’s going to blow his scholarly socks off. he’s gonna really regret not seeing it sooner. and i’d be surprised if he didn’t write an article about it

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love me a single-minded gardener, but even when I am obsessively uploading pictures of the lifecycle of the swallowtail caterpillar eating my parsley, I’m not trying to turn a citizen science site into Polymarket.

oof.

yeah, I knew about kurzweil reading machines for years before I connected them with ray kurzweil, and I don’t know how much of his tech ended up in speech rec during the scansoft / dragon systems / nuance / lernout and hauspie katamari years, but that tech has enabled me to be an independent working adult for more than 20 years. So I owe him a debt of gratitude, but also, he needs to not be on his bullshit.

The more I look, the more I’m sure it’s just bad GenAI art. I mean, look at the random Big Ben with newspaper art extending into the ether behind it, the off-center knight-in-orb, the decomposed microscope thing, the physically impossible structural shadow on the disproportionate globe that simultaneously shows from Panama east to Borneo but somehow lacks India…

Is the header image on that page an intentional joke at the expense of GenAI, or did someone seriously make that and add it to the page? Do they autogenerate their pics?