Strange

However, I do think this case is great example of what happens when smart people decide they can use these systems “responsibly.”

Let’s put aside the plagiarism and the energy use for a second (not that these don’t matter, but they’re not relevant to my point at the moment) and pretend these systems were made with entirely properly obtained info and ran on only solar, but otherwise were entirely the same. If you’re a person, you might think “okay, I’m going to only use this to come up with ideas for my next paper: I’m going to do all the research myself and the writing, I’m just gonna brainstorm topics.”

The thing is, even if you’re trying to limit use to just “brainstorming” the chatbot isn’t going to limit itself to just brainstorming. You might ask it “what should I write about involving Greek history” and it may suggest “the plague of Athens” but it’s also going to suggest some “basic info” on the plague of Athens that you might end up picking up and deciding your topic is. It’s going to provide you with “research.” And even if you decide to check that research yourself, that’s still setting you down a specific path you might not have picked organically.

And speaking of double checking its “research”, fact checking is a time heavy process. Not only now do you have to read the original text the bot provided, but you also have to compare it line by line with the summary the bot provided. That’s more time than it would have taken to just read the article by itself. And with any time heavy task, people are going to get lazy. And in original research being lazy might mean skimming a paper or an abstract, chatbots allow you to be lazy without looking at the article at all.

And soon enough, despite telling yourself you were only going to use it for brainstorming, you have offloaded topic generation, research and eventually even drafting because that’s what these bots are intended to do. They are not meant to serve as research tools or help brainstorm or serve as a bouncing off board: they are built to encourage maximum engagement. And that means if you go at them with the best of ethical intentions, they are built to tempt you to use them as much as possible, regardless of whatever line you drew in the sand for yourself.

Obvs, Hank’s situation is not the same as the scenario I laid out but I think the snippet above gets back to my main point which is these tools are built to encourage interaction and that’s a hard thing to avoid, regardless of intentions.

Some other notes:

1. As stated, I don’t bring this up to add to a pile on, just to use this as an example of something I’ve seen happen with folks trying to engage in this tech with an ethical framework. This is because-

2. Frankly, I think shame is a shit motivator. I bring all this up to try to draw attention to something I find under discussed which is what these LLMS are meant to do, and what they are advertised for which are often very separate lists. (I didn’t even get into how they’re meant to train off user data but that’s another can of worms). If you want to discourage AI use, it’s a far better strategy to listen to why the person is engaging with AI and then address that reason.

3. I don’t want to come off as someone trying to scare folks that they’ll get addicted just by touching the stuff: my point is merely that is it critical to know what something is made for before engaging with it. This actually goes for a lot of tech besides AI like Google or social media (which are also designed to 1. Capture your attention and 2. Show you advertisements). AI isn’t a special kind of evil in this way, merely a continuation of a tech trend where a product is sold to a consumer with the goal of the time of the consumer becoming the source of revenue.

The Tumbeasts must be fed.

Couple of Project Hail Mary doodles!!

The first one was my idea of what he would go for as a jingly celebrations outfit ahah the eridians collect and make him all sorts of beads; even if they're sad that their most resonant materials are toxic to Grace. They settle on some of the lightest metals they have plus porous rocks (trying to avoid extra weight as much as possible because of, well, extra gravity).

Grace has a fun week sorting them by colour which is incomprehensible to them (to the point someone alerts rocky that the human has been pushing the same beads around arbitrarily and is he ok??)

It is not the best sounding outfit anyone has heard but they're happy Grace is well enough to celebrate with them!

sadie was like: it felt like university!

I went: yeah !! except it was mor3 fun and everyone was in cosplay

Thinks for 3 sevonds

Us both: tumblr university.

So, a few days ago, I was commenting on a post by @biteinsane, here, that was primarily about Ford and possible reasons he ended up at Backupsmore.  While I managed at the time not to hare off on a digression (as I am wont to do), it reminded me that in an earlier post responding to @sovonight, here, about Ford’s identity as a scientist, I’d wanted to get a bit more into his idolization of two academic figures, Carl Sagan, and Nikola Tesla, as seen in the posters in his dorm room (above).

On the surface, I think these references are meant to evoke a few obvious things.  (Beyond Ford’s fashion sense, I mean.)  Carl Sagan is immediately recognizable as the host of Cosmos, a hugely influential PBS miniseries that tried (and succeeded) in making science comprehensible and “cool” to the masses.  (And as most folks will remember, Neil deGrasse Tyson brought an updated version of Cosmos to television in 2014.)  If I had to boil it down, I would define Carl Sagan as a huge nerd with a passion for making nerdiness interesting and cool; and importantly, as a communicator of the passion of scientific research and exploration.  Meanwhile, Tesla has become, in popular culture, sort of an “unsung hero scientist” figure, regarded (a bit inaccurately, but I’ll get to that) as brilliant but underappreciated, especially in comparison with his rival, inventor Thomas Edison.  Edison is often contrasted with Tesla as “inventor/scientist” vs. “businessman” (which really does a disservice to Edison; but it can’t be denied that he could be ruthless in pursuit of business).  When you read up on him, Tesla is also a bit more of a “mad inventor” type (death rays, anyone?), in comparison with Edison’s practical bent.

What’s interesting to me, though, is what these choices of academic idol say about Stanford Pines in the time period we’re talking about.

What time period ARE we talking about?  Well – we know that Ford can’t have graduated from high school any earlier than 1969 (because of the portrait of Richard Nixon as president on the wall of the principal’s office in ATOTS).  We also now know from Journal 3 that Ford arrives in Gravity Falls in 1975.  In ATOTS, Ford says that he “went from undergrad to ph.D. three years ahead of schedule”.  If an undergraduate degree is normally 4 years, and a ph.D. takes at the most conservative estimate a further 4 years (go ahead, all you graduate students out there, you can laugh bitterly at this), that means that Ford should have gotten to his first ph.D. in no fewer than 5 years.  This would match up with his starting college in ‘69 or '70, and emerging with his ph.D. in '75.  So the posters on his dorm wall in ATOTS are there between the years '69 and '75.

As I pointed out briefly in the previous post, it’s interesting to see Ford choose Tesla as an idol, over Edison.  Edison’s headquarters were in West Orange, New Jersey, and while he wasn’t a NJ native, he’s regarded as a “famous son” in that state. (If you have ever travelled the NJ Turnpike, you can’t avoid the rest-stop named for him.)  Back in the 1960s, Edison had the better reputation in popular culture, too.  He was commonly lauded as the Great Inventor, of the light bulb among other things.  It’s not until the 80s and 90s that pop culture starts to reevaluate both Edison and his rivalry with the comparatively “unsung” Tesla, and Edison comes to be seen more widely as a big jerk whose success came at the expense of other scientist/inventors of the day.  (To be clear: Edison probably WAS a big jerk all along!  He wasn’t uniquely jerky amongst his peers, though.  Not really.)

The reevaluation of Tesla, and the rehabilitation of his reputation is probably best summarized by this comic at The Oatmeal; there isn’t a date on the comic itself, but it was posted in or prior to 2012 (which is when an update was posted at the bottom).  But the pro-Tesla, anti-Edison thing had become so extreme by that point that some articles also started to appear to try to balance the scales and present things a bit more factually and less mythically: “Nikola Tesla Wasn’t God, and Thomas Edison Wasn’t The Devil”, in Forbes of all places; “Tesla vs. Edison: A Mythical Rivalry”; and “Why I’m Tired of Seeing Nikola Tesla in Science Fiction”.

All of this said… I do think that Tesla makes for a good idol for Ford.  While I think that, growing up in New Jersey in the 1960s, young Ford would have been exposed to a lot of Thomas Edison hero-worship, for me, it fits in with Ford’s identity as a nerd for him to know about the then relatively more-obscure figure of Nikola Tesla, and to choose him (the “underdog”) as his idol over the (at the time) more widely lauded Edison.  

Furthermore, once Ford gets to college, I find something kind of fitting about him looking to Tesla as an influence, over looking to Edison.  As mentioned above, Edison is famous as, and sometimes criticized as, a “businessman” – someone as or more concerned with making money as he was with the pure pursuit of the sciences.  I would go so far as to say… Edison is the person Ford’s father would have wanted Ford to emulate.  Filbrick Pines, with his emphasis on his desire that his sons “make a fortune”, would plausibly have seen Edison as the example for Ford to follow.  It makes me wonder if rejection of that idea, even subconsciously, played any part in Ford hanging a Tesla poster up in his dorm room.  Ford has often come across as someone who desired recognition and fame (things that Tesla did, and did not, receive; it’s complicated); Ford has never really come across as someone who desired riches.  The large grant he receives is valuable to him because it allows him to go do research in Gravity Falls.  

(Just to refer back, for a moment, to the post about Backupsmore I mentioned above – all of this only serves to make me more puzzled that nobody thought to steer young Ford towards college in pursuit of science and invention, until what seems to be really late in his senior year, when the principal finally encourages him to try for West Coast Tech due to the success of his science fair project.  As I commented before, it’s clear in ATOTS that Ford’s academic potential wasn’t completely ignored, judging by the shelf and wall of his trophies.  It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me that young Ford could have started idolizing Carl Sagan, without at least thinking about following in Sagan’s footsteps; and that would have started with going to college.  I did theorize that Ford was discouraged from thinking about college by his father, who may have refused to help pay for it; but that doesn’t entirely explain why Ford wasn’t encouraged by others to try to secure a scholarship somewhere, until so late in the game.  But it’s also kind of weird that Filbrick doesn’t see Ford’s abilities as an inventor as a template for success – either in the footsteps of Edison, or becoming involved in the Space Race, which was such a big deal at the time.  But yeah, don’t get me started on Filbrick’s inability to help steer his sons onto any useful paths and then blaming them for it.)

Finally, I also want to point out that Tesla was famously asocial, and a lifelong bachelor; he felt that chastity was crucial to his ability to focus on his scientific work.  I wouldn’t feel comfortable labelling him as either aromantic or asexual without doing a lot more biographical research on him; but this is pretty interesting in light of the indications in Journal 3 of Ford’s aromantic outlook.

So that’s Tesla.  What about Carl Sagan?

Well, I think there are a few things about Ford’s choice of Carl Sagan as an idol that are super interesting, and they are things that aren’t immediately apparent to people who only know the surface markers of Sagan’s fame (i.e. he’s “that Cosmos guy”, a popularizer of science).

Let’s get this out of the way first: Cosmos did not premiere on public television in the U.S. until 1980; long after Ford had put that Sagan poster up on his wall in college in the early 70s.  Ford’s admiration of Sagan must pre-date Sagan’s nationwide fame, in other words.  So how did Ford get on the Sagan bandwagon that early?

Carl Sagan was a Jewish guy, born in Brooklyn NY and raised there and in Rahway, NJ.  Rahway is in northern NJ (a stone’s throw from the West Orange stomping grounds of Thomas Edison).  If you headcanon Ford and Stan’s hometown of Glass Shard Beach as being on the northern NJ coast (as I do; although I think it’s pretty much equally possible that it’s in southern NJ), then that really makes Sagan a “local hero” for Ford, in addition to the fact that he shared Ford’s cultural/religious Jewish upbringing (according to Journal 3 and Alex Hirsch’s recent tweets).  

For a young nerd, the 1960s would have been dominated by news of the space race (already underway since the launch of Sputnik in the 50s, but formally begun with President Kennedy’s “We choose to go to the Moon” speech in 1962, and culminating in the U.S. landing on the Moon in July of 1969).  During this time, when Carl Sagan is working at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, MA (and an asst. professor at Harvard), he is also working for NASA as an advisor.  (One of his most memorable contributions to the space program was the design of a gold plaque affixed to the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 space probes in 1972, intended as a way to visually communicate information about Earth and the human race to any extraterrestials our space probes might encounter; below.)  In 1968, Sagan would leave Harvard for Cornell University in NY (where he taught until his death in 1996).

It seems most likely to me that Ford would have developed his admiration of Sagan as a tiny nerd following the Space Race.  For kid Ford, doodling UFO saucers in his notebook, I think Sagan’s matter of fact acceptance that there must be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and that we might indeed come across it, would have had a huge appeal.  The idea of the sober, scientific search for intelligent extraterrestial life was controversial at the time, but arguably, Sagan helped gain respectability for it. In addition to the Pioneer plaque, Sagan helped Frank Drake develop the Arecibo Message (a radio message aimed towards extraterrestial life, beamed into space from the Arecibo radio telescope in 1974), and worked towards the establishment of the SETI Institute (“search for extraterrestial intelligence”), a goal realized in 1984.  (I’ll just say here that most of my background on Sagan comes from his Wikipedia article, which does a nice job summarizing his life and accomplishments.)

Tesla provides sort of a good template for Ford as the mad scientist, as well, I think, as perhaps underscoring Ford’s drive for recognition and success.  (As some of the articles linked above note, Tesla really was not unappreciated in his lifetime; but he did die impoverished, which is something that has driven the view that history did not reward him as he deserved.)  I think that Sagan’s appeal to Ford might be more for Sagan’s interest in and pursuit of extraterrestial intelligence, than for his role as a communicator and translator between the sciences and the layman.  Sagan’s drive to find extraterrestial life, and to communicate with it, mirrors, I think, Ford’s desire to apply a “scientific” respectability to the study of anomalies, and to become the man who proves their existence to the world at large (and perhaps acts as the bridge between the two worlds, as an “anomaly” himself).

Well given that this just keeps happening I may as well put this here on the post that inspired me to make the original 🥰

this post reminded me I should go eep

Posted july 30, 2026

Gonna highlight the recommendations, there is more details at the link above:

Recommendations:

Do not eat, sell, or serve recalled GreenWise Organic Frozen Whole Blueberries and Whole Mixed Berries.

Check your freezers for recalled berries and throw them away or return the product to the place of purchase. If you froze a product without the original packaging and can’t tell if it’s part of the recall, throw it away.

Consumers, restaurants, retailers, and foodservice customers who purchased or received recalled berries, including wholesale products, should carefully clean and sanitize any surfaces or containers that it touched. Follow FDA’s safe handling and cleaning advice to reduce the risk of cross-contamination.

Retailers that received recalled berries and repackaged them for individual sale should not sell them and should remove the products from the market.