HT to @hailey for linking this one; it's really good to see something this robust.

I think many of us have suspected that this is the kind of effect one would have when using LLMs heavily: you don't learn, you don't remember, you become a conduit for the LLM tooling. But here's some clear information.

Comparison to search engine usage is also done in the paper.

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation
of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI
Assistant for Essay Writing Task https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872

Fascinating paper. It's long, 200 pages; you can read the intro and the Discussion section and get much out of it already though, but they do their homework.

Effects of LLM usage on memory retention and task execution:

- LLM users do get judged well by human and LLM judges for their essays
- Can't remember them
- Low cognitive activation
- Essays are mostly the same

@selea oh wow!

Ode to Cleaning Robots (a song): https://dustycloud.org/blog/ode-to-cleaning-robots-a-song/

Here's a new song (by me, CC BY-SA 4.0), composed in Milkytracker using its new synthesizer feature!

Hope you enjoy! I had a lot of fun making it.

@stux the flare at the bottom of the video looks like it even spells out "HOT" right at the end

So how long are we from Night of the Long Knives 2

Because it doesn't feel very far tbh

Yes, thank you David Rees, author of Get Your War On, an anti-war comic of the George W. Bush years, for this timely image, and the memory of spaghetti

part of the trick here is you can roast them a little bit drier than you would like to eat them at, since they will rehydrate a bit when cooking. not so dehyrdrated that you can't eat them, just a bit more than you would for snacking

but if you roast them the normal amount, roasted black beans, like roasted chickpeas, are also delicious!

@pinjontall Indeed, and see also https://universeodon.com/@SrRochardBunson/114672298866993446

Just watched the videos of Sen Alex Padilla being forcefully arrested by the FBI for calmly asking a question at a press conference and what the fuck

Here's several videos:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MRR8zv4mK4A
https://bsky.app/profile/courtneymilan.com/post/3lrgs5h2ttc2s
https://bsky.app/profile/marisakabas.bsky.social/post/3lrglainv4225

@juliana look up recipes for roasting chickpeas, do that, eat them because they're delicious on their own

then try the same thing but with black beans!

(Basically, toss them in oil, salt, spices and roast at 400/425F till crispy)

very recently I realized: you can roast black beans and use them as a ground beef substitute

you want to add them towards the end of the dish so they don't rehydrate too much but yeah, it does work

It strikes me that this is particularly effective in the case where you're facing an adversary which is heavily "suited up". It's a nonviolent tactic which disarms. I wonder if we'll see more of it as mech cops appearing at protests is more and more common.

People fighting back against cops at protests by playing Splatoon (spraying them with paint) https://kolektiva.social/@clashmtl/114668349788996957 https://mtlcounterinfo.org/how-to-fill-fire-extinguishers-with-paint/

ok I got a little 90s as one of the robots starts layin' it down at the end

okay oh shit this song is starting to get good

Well the Ode to Cleaning Robots song is taking more shape. Source here if you wanna look at it https://dustycloud.org/tmp/ode-to-cleaning-robots.xm

@jackeric oh nice! meeting up maybe is possible

@erin2 if you know someone in montreal I should be hanging out with lmk

that's part of the problem