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Was in the mood to paint something green 💚

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hey slurt

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As a Brazilian, watching the club world cup is always so funny because this year a game got cancelled due to RAIN. In Brazil, the lights in the stadium need to go out, the pitch needs to flood, and a minimum of 3 players need to get struck by lightning, only for the game to be delayed by like 20 minutes. Once a football game gets scheduled in Brazil there is no weather that can stop it. Zeus himself needs to come down to smite the players one by one

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What's this? It's Polymita picta, aka painted snail, from Cuba. (Photo credit: Aliesky del Rio Leal)

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iDigBio chatbot zoom webinar

A few weeks ago iNaturalist, a major online biodiversity social network/forum and database, announced it had received money from Google to create a generative AI tool for the purpose of adding "natural language" explanations to user-submitted content. No one asked for this, almost no one wanted this, people were already happily doing this sort of thing for free, and backlash was immediate: https://www.reddit.com/r/iNaturalist/comments/1l85g47/inaturalist_is_partnering_with_google_generative/

iDigBio is (was?) an NSF-funded online database, which brings together museum collection material from around the world for easy viewing in one place.

iDigBio is introducing a new "agentic" LLM chatbot called "iChatBio" to their website (which already has a search bar) in order to allow for "integrated searches across several databases simultaneously" with "a single, customized plain-language query". This is something entirely possible with the current state of the website right now, and something I do for my research almost every day. Again, the website has a search bar, and by definition it is already linking multiple sources of information together, because that's what a database is. AT BEST, assuming it works with 100% accuracy, they have re-invented the search bar but made it cost more energy. It is truly that lame.

Hopefully I can go on without explaining why generative AI should not be ANYWHERE near biology. Even if these tools did not plagiarize from real people and occasionally just make things up, they are more environmentally costly than existing alternatives, which undermines the supposed goal of these sites in the first place: to document and protect biodiversity. It's hard enough already.

I suspect iDigBio higher-ups already know how people feel about iNaturalist's recent announcement, as many people use both websites, and so they are keeping quiet about this to avoid extra scrutiny. I have received two separate iDigBio zoom webinar invitations in separate listservs within the past few days - one with just the chatbot webinar, and one with a totally different set (with some more generic stuff like "looking forward to the future!"). If the new iChatBio agentic LLM is so wonderful, then I think as many people as possible should know about it, so I am distributing the link to the chatbot webinar.

The webinar is on Monday, August 18th, from 1pm to 2pm. Here is the link to register:

It asks for your name, email, and organization. If you don't have an official affiliation and you would still like to participate, I see nothing wrong with listing yourself as "independent organization" and "citizen scientist". The website says ET in one place and CT in another place, and I'm not sure which is true, so I will be there at 1pm ET (maybe they had the chatbot write the announcement, too).

I encourage anyone interested in biodiversity, museum collections, databases, living things, information flow, or the planet Earth in general to take a look at this if you are able, and to perhaps prepare some questions. Feel free to share this link with other biology or data listservs, or with anyone you know who may be interested.

I can't imagine what people at iDigBio are thinking. If I had to guess, I truly think they want this announcement over and buried quickly, so they can pretend everyone is fine with it and collect the money. I am not fine with it.

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Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.

Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:

If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.

Doing that turns off the AI chatbot features in Firefox, but also the stupid new LLM tab-naming feature that's rolling out.

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Got inspired by this incredible little manuscript guy

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In case you think the writers on strike aren't making good use of their time, think no more!

Only click the read more if you're fully prepared. I'm taking no responsibility past this point.

Help a guy out. He's stuck. Who's got 18 brothers who all wanna cook. (source)

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Sam Handwich.

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🐊 Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri accurata descriptio, et iconibus artificiosissimis expressio, per universam physices historiam: . Amstelaedami: Apud J. Wetstenium, & Gul. Smith, & Janssonio-Waesbergios, 1734-1765.. Original source Image description: Historical illustration from 1734-1765 showing a large, brown, scaly crocodile with a curled, detailed tail and sharp teeth, posed with four clawed legs and wide eyes. Below it, a smaller, blue and green lizard-like reptile with a long, curled tail and open mouth stands on a rocky surface. Both creatures are rendered with textured scales and a naturalistic style against a plain, cream-colored background. The image captures anatomical features and textures in a scientific yet artistic manner typical of 18th-century natural history illustrations.

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I played the guitar for some years, getting good enough to do some little shows, and at 12 I stopped. At 30 I decided to play the guitar again. I remembered very little and I wanted to learn completely different material, so I expected I'd have to start again from practically zero.

It took me a few days to get back to how I felt at my peak back then, and then in a few more days I was doing things I'd never done before.

I think that's because at 30 I was much more practiced at learning than I was at 10, not to mention much more practiced at being myself and understanding my goals. Don't underestimate that.

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As for what concerns drawing in particular, I think that this idea of skill degradation is the logical following in the negative of the idea that an artist must draw every day to improve - and that too is an idea that I think may have started with having some merit, but has since been completely warped into some Christianity of penance ideology.

I think "draw every day" was more so the type of advice that was given on the spot to people approaching an artist they admire and asking how to reach their level. But "draw every day" doesn't mean that if you don't draw every day you'll be a bad artist and you will lose your progress, and also doesn't mean that if you do draw every day you'll magically improve. I think what it meant was: if you make room in your life for a creative activity (in this case drawing), and think about what you make and what you would like to make, you will be able to gain more from the experience more or less naturally as you gravitate towards the things that you enjoy creating.

Years ago I kept a blog where I drew every day for more than 1000 days. On some days, I was doing it to maintain the streak more than to make anything that I enjoyed. Nowadays I am slower and more purposeful about what I make. Everything that has happened with AI has also made me consider that I don't want to be a printer that spits out pictures, I want to sit with what I make and enjoy making something that belongs to me, with the final picture really more of a keepsake of the whole process than the point of the experience. Sometimes I let a picture sit unfinished for months or even years, and then return to it and finish it when I think I would enjoy sitting with it the most.

I also think that the days when I don't draw are just as important to drawing, because those are the days where I'm bringing input to myself. Art is a personal thing, so I must live as a person. That's on the topic of not wanting to be just a printer. How can I have something to say if I don't listen?

I wish upon everybody the same serenity I have about my own art.

I genuinely think the idea that if you should draw a little every day or you'll suffer skill degradation is a total fabrication. Some of the best art I've ever drawn has been coming back from long breaks. I'm talking like weeks. Sometimes you just gotta reset and flush the systems. There's no shame in it. Take breaks. The art will be there for you when you're ready.

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THE CATHEDRAL DUFFLE by SEAGGS