xrys.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

A few folks sent me messages about some unusual pigeons that appeared on the show Andor. Thank you! They are real pigeons and not CGI. They belong to the group of breeds called Pouters or Croppers. Here’s an illustration of an English Pouter from my book A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching.

submitted 3 hours ago • 41 comments

Sunday model kit - X-plus Mummy

submitted 5 hours ago • 24 comments

i wish my industry talked more about the peculiarities of the chinese games market right now one big example: this Battlefield-like that came out months ago is one of the top 10 most played games on Steam currently, and a higher concurrency rate than any Battlefield that has ever launched on Steam

submitted 4 hours ago • 2 comments

So apparently my art blog is now being cited by google's AI as an authoritative source, making people think that my silly art project about brains escaping bodies is a real thing... The state of the internet sucks, man

submitted 4 hours ago • 30 comments

New free Arakawa event skin - 循迹浪间 This skin will be obtainable from part 2 of the multi-part event series leading up to 520. #Onmyoji #陰陽師本格幻想RPG

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

I'm tired of translation colleagues (who are often in the older generation) saying "AI won't take your job, it's not good enough to replace us"--BUT THAT DOESN'T MATTER. It doesn't matter that gen AI is terrible at translation, that it constantly makes mistakes, managers are gonna push it anyway.

submitted 23 hours ago • 15 comments

🚀🔊 Turn up the volume! Watch our favourite view of last week's Biomass liftoff. Biomass satellite was launched on a Vega-C rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The rocket lifted off on 29 April 2025 at 10/15 BST/11:15 CEST (06:15 local time).

submitted 7 hours ago • 2 comments

What I like about role-playing games is that they allow you to act out power fantasies that you could never achieve in real life.

submitted 5 days ago • 13 comments

Searching for an old driver and the first two results go to either Broadcom or Internet Archive. I mutter "not today, Satan" and click the IA link.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

Did I wake up this morning thinking “man I hope I read all about the niche of horse games, and how there’s a hidden market for them and how players have modded other games just so they can have the experience they enjoy, and also the expert is on Bluesky?” No. But this is what the internet is for.

submitted 1 day ago • 3 comments

Say it after me: Chat GPT is not a search engine. It does not scan the web for information, it just generates statistically likely sentences. You cannot use it a search engine, or as a substitute for searching. Now. Please never use an LLM for information searches ever again.

submitted 3 days ago • 47 comments

What To Know About ‘Sinners’ theonion.com/what-to...

submitted 1 day ago • 86 comments

As a creative someone looking for a job, I can confirm this much, at least. Numerous job listings expect/demand AI use, and thus expect one worker to do the job of 3 or 4. Which shows a) how little they know about AI output, and b) how little they care about their final product.

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

📢 The Internet Archive needs your help. At a time when information is being rewritten or erased online, a $700 million lawsuit from major record labels threatens to destroy the Wayback Machine. Tell the labels to drop the 78s lawsuit. 👉 Sign our open letter: www.change.org/p/defend-the... 🧵⬇️

submitted 17 days ago • 125 comments

New, temporary open-access (through May 12) to "Monarchies and the Organization of Power, Ancient Egypt and Babylonia Compared (2100–1750 BC)" as part of the Cambridge Elements series, by Juan Carlos Moreno García and Seth Richardson: www.cambridge.org/core/element...

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

threw a few blind values in and got this nice night-city color theme for the megacity maps. for now the "discovered" map icons use the base palette colors but i'd like to recolor them according to a system so i can include their colors as part of the proc gen

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

Charlotte is the best and you should get he guide to drawing all the animals.

submitted 5 days ago • 2 comments

The Physical Donations (and Rescues) of the Internet Archive www.reddit.com/r/theinterne...

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

Happy Monday!

submitted 6 days ago • 2 comments

"A test of 22 general-purpose AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, x.AI, Meta, Google and other leading players in artificial intelligence found that all scored less than 50 percent accuracy, on average, for simple tasks required of entry-level financial analysts" www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

submitted 12 days ago • 6 comments

Silicon Valley is run by people who genuinely think the world as we know it is going to end in the next few decades. Many also WANT this to happen: they WANT the biological world to be replaced by a new digital world. They WANT "posthumans" to take the place of humans. A 🧵:

submitted 9 days ago • 113 comments

Painting makes me happy…

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Someone cold called a random cell phone number of a random employee of the archive to bring this to our attention. Please don't do that!

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

When I use Google now I just automatically scroll past the AI summaries like they’re banner ads

submitted 8 days ago • 70 comments

I built a tool for myself tonight that I would never have gotten done in the amount of free time that I’ve got available, and it’ll help me do more writing. It’s built with code & data I trained and gathered consensually, myself, on my own machine. This is why I’m saying we need better AI critique.

submitted 8 days ago • 50 comments

This is what I try to get through to students and organizations considering enterprise deals. The big tech companies want to get you hooked on their LLMs via penetrative pricing so they can jack up the prices later and MAYBE have a shot at sustainability.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

A little Sumerian riddle to brighten your day. “When I am small, I am the child of the garden. “When I grow, I am (on) the body of the gods. “When I became an old person, I am the physician of the land.” What am I?

submitted 9 days ago • 7 comments

Beautiful photos. The tablet on the left is the “Flood Tablet” of the Epic of Gilgamesh. The tablet on the right looks like it might be a word list.

submitted 9 days ago • 5 comments

Archaeology reveals that productivity doesn't necessarily raise inequality in the deep past! Here we test a new approach to measuring productivity using archaeological data. The results striking, expanding archaeology's methods for assessing past economies. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

just so you all know bc books are a very opaque business... any way you buy/borrow a book is fantastic, but getting hard copies is significantly better for the author because that number shows up in an antiquated database called BookScan that publishers prize. ebooks & audio don't.

submitted 9 days ago • 35 comments

Do. Not. Trust. Mushroom. Books. Unless they have a copyright from before AI. And are for the right area; most edible mushrooms have toxic lookalikes in other areas.

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

A rare carnivorous caterpillar—previously unknown to biologists—stalks spiderwebs for food whilst dressed in the remains of its prey, a new Science study reports. This new species, dubbed the “bone collector,” is found only on a single mountainside on the Hawai’ian island of Oa’hu. scim.ag/3GBDcV7

submitted 10 days ago • 8 comments

When does trade exacerbate inequality? Governance plays a role. Archaeology suggests that when a tiny group seizes the tools for maintaining fairness, inequality outstrips productivity. While not inevitable, this pattern does emerge several times in the deep past. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

At my library, our digital collections budget is astronomical precisely because of this- we pay multiple times more per ebook than what the average reader pays by design. What should be a godsend to making books easier to read and more accessible instead threatens to swallow our budget whole 🧵

submitted 11 days ago • 3 comments