A Snowshoe Hare bounces away from the edge of a trail in the #Colorado Front Range. June, 2026. #FootpathFriday #Wildlife #Photography #TrailRunning
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Lucas C. Wheeler
@lcwheeler@ecoevo.social
mastodon 4.7.3Green Labs Shared Equipment Coordinator – CU Boulder. Interested in #ecology, #conservation, #restoration, and #sustainability. Background in #biochemistry and the #evolutionary genetics of #plants. I dabble in #ScientificProgramming and #ComputationalModeling. I love #nature. #Photography, #hiking, #running, #cycling, #reading, #writing, #sewing, #botanizing, #herping, and #learning. I believe social justice should be woven into the practice of science. Opinions my own.
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Joined November 10, 2022
A view of several of the #Oregon and #Washington #Cascades from the air. August, 2026. #MountainMonday #MobilePhotography
Replying to
@overholt@glammr.us The idea that the contents of a book being ingested by a probabilistic language model (i.e. more or less an autocorrect with a shit ton of parameters) somehow represents the knowledge entering the "intellectual space" is so infuriatingly ludicrous. Knowledge from books enters an intellectual space when a human with genuine intelligence reads it and thinks about it. The people who run these "AI" companies are just the dumbest, most obtuse jags on the planet.
Penstemon virens (Front Ranger Penstemon) are starting to flower in the foothills near #BoulderCO, despite the warm, dry Winter. The population doesn't look nearly as exuberant as a typical year though. #Bloomscrolling
A view of a rocky volcanic peak in the #Oregon Cascades. Circa 2014. #MountainMonday #PNW #Landscape #Photography #Hiking #HikingAndPhotography
Looking up toward the forest canopy in the Western Cascades, #Oregon. December, 2025. #ThickTrunkTuesday #Photography #hiking #trees
Winiger Ridge trail. Boulder county, #Colorado. April, 2026. #FootpathFriday #TrailRunning #Photography #Landscape
For #FootpathFriday, the trail toward Heart Lake in the James Peak Wilderness, #Colorado. From a trail run last weekend. #Trailrunning #photography #Landscape
The trail through Bear Canyon. Boulder county, #Colorado. April, 2026. #FootpathFriday #TrailRunning
Looking down out of a canyon in the Organ Mountains, New Mexico. November, 2024. #MountainMonday #Hiking #Photography #Landscape
A small series of falls along a creek winding through the White Mountains, New Hampshire. August, 2024. #WaterfallWednesday #Photography #Hiking #Landscape
For #MountainMonday, a large ridge that just up above the South Boulder Creek drainage near East Portal, #Colorado. April, 2026. #Photography #Landscape #TrailRunning
Replying to
@ZLabe Yeah, went for a trail run near Grand Lake, CO this afternoon and it was 69F at 8,800ft elevation. Down on the prairie in Boulder it's supposed to hit 89F tomorrow. 😬
Replying to
@benfry I see scientists in various fields doing this too and it terrifies me. I think the best explanation is mental laziness, coupled with hype and a lack of understanding, and a refusal or inability, on the part of many people, to engage critically with these (or any) technologies. It's amazing how many people I have talked to who just accept LLM outputs without a second thought, listen to an explanation of why that's a bad idea, and then turn right around and do it again.
One of the things that I find particularly infuriating about this whole "AI" hype machine is just how much it exemplifies the fundamental misallocation of resources in our capitalist global economy. Set against the backdrop of widespread poverty, hunger, untreated preventable disease, habitat loss, climate change, etc. we're dumping billions of dollars and almost unfathomable amounts of energy into creating just about the dumbest, most harmful technologies one could think of. I hate it so much.
Replying to
@kajord I assume they're referencing the Star of Eärendil? I am pretty sure that Tolkien would hate all these companies so much and deeply resent them co-opting names from his work.
Replying to
@Unixbigot That is ridiculously slow, to the point that it seems intentionally designed to make it difficult for people to cycle. I would have a tough time going that slow on a purely mechanical bicycle. I can understand having some kind of speed limit on multi-use paths, because where I live people on throttle e-bikes are regularly blasting past walkers going about 40km/h, no exaggeration. *That* is legitimately dangerous to pedestrians. But, 10kph?!!
I alternate between feeling like I'm living through the events of a Philip K. Dick story and the events of a Kurt Vonnegut story. It leads me to ask the question: has anyone coined the usage of terms equivalent to "Kafkaesque" for PKD or Vonnegut? For PKD I have to assume the correct term would be "Dickish", but what about Vonnegut? Vonnegutian? Vonnegutesque? #literature #language #humor
Replying to
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social I am getting really tired of the hubris of Silicon Valley.
Replying to
@tenzochris@mastodon.social That's a relief, because I thought that was the scary wolf thing that was working for "The Nothing" to destroy all of Fantasia.
Police opened fire with pepper balls on the crowd of peaceful protesters.
I post photos of beautiful places I've visited to various photography-related hashtags. I post those photos for my fellow *humans* to enjoy, NOT for #AISlop generators to use as source material. Anyone who follows me that has "AIArt" in their profile is getting immediately blocked. As Hayao Myazaki said a few years back, contorting human art and expression into fodder for lifeless content creation machines is an "insult to life itself". I have a zero tolerance policy for "AI" usage.
Replying to
@petergleick@fediscience.org What percentage of the LLM training data surrounding nuclear war is made up by the Terminator franchise and War Games? 😆 So depressing. SciFi authors always envision these grandiose stories about hyper-intelligent AIs turning on humanity, but the reality is SO MUCH DUMBER. Feels more like the kind of tech apocalypse from Cat's Cradle than the one from Terminator.