neville park

night walk mammal tally

• 4-5 raccoons
• 2 skunks
• 1 cat enjoying the catmint in a garden
• 1 rabbit

#parkdale #toronto #UrbanWildlife

really wonderful quotes in this article about beaver coexistence professionals (https://baynature.org/2026/07/22/explore/it-gets-me-out/what-it-takes-to-become-a-beaver-coexistence-professional/)

"California used to be a joke at the beaver conferences because it represented one of the more backward approaches to beaver management in the world"

"'Nobody grows up being like, 'I really want to work with beavers'"

Beaver conflicts, and deaths, concentrate along what Dolman calls "the beaver Mordor corridor"—the string of counties stretching from the Bay to the Sierra foothills

#beavers #California #ecology

Today's whirligig mites are eating:

• small fly (midge?)
• plant bug nymphs
• another whirligig mite

#DailyMitePic #Mitestodon #bugstodon #arachnids #mites #Acari #Acariformes #Anystidae

From @davidgerard@circumstances.run: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/05/06/openai-chatgpt-goes-goblin-mode-let-none-say-model-collapse/

> OpenAI even put specific instructions into the system prompt for Codex, their AI coding model, to try to get it not to talk about creatures: [GitHub (https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/codex-rs/models-manager/models.json#L55)]
>
> > Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query.
>
> In fact, OpenAI put in “never talk about goblins” twice.

You have no idea how badly I want to make a rule/the description for this instance "ALWAYS talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures…"

@kimlockhartga@beige.party @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org

some places

I'm in Toronto and TONS of our shops, apartment buildings, and houses don't have central air. A lot of buildings are Victorian or early 20th century and too expensive to retrofit. The big public housing projects are from the 70s and don't have it. NYC and other big cities will be the same way.

Many places have window-mounted air conditioners but it's far from universal.

The linked story about digital forensics & AI is great (@FabMusacchio@mastodon.social), but one of the best ways to tell if an image/video is doctored, CGI, or AI-generated isn't mentioned: FIND THE ORIGINAL SOURCE.

Quite often tracing the source shows that it was originally from an AI slop account, computer graphics artist's channel, ad agency portfolio, or parody site. Or it is genuine but taken out of context.

I use tools like TinEye, Google Images reverse search, simply searching for e. g. "whale jumping in front of the moon" or the information in the caption, and looking up the account based on TikTok/Instagram watermark or page/user name in the screen capture. It can also turn up other sites that have looked into the same thing, e. g. if Snopes has already done an article on it or if there was a news story.

I know I go on about this a lot and I'll keep going on about this until people learn basic media literacy

current earworm: the indoor centipede song https://youtu.be/3W3R3EElMho

(note, video contains footage of house centipedes, so just listen to the audio if you're skittish)