Climate Scientists: we really need to focus on using less electricity from fossil fuels. Tech Industry: Sure, but hear me out… what if instead we used much, much more electricity?

this is the greatest feeling, when the cord box proves its utility to a family member

It is utterly catastrophic that RFK Jr. plans to end CDC recommendations for most childhood vaccines. It’s a betrayal of science, ethics, compassion, and the people of the United States. And it was also a specific goal of Project 2025 (page 254).

everybody stop trying to shove a.i.down my throat challenge level: impossible

"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future." - @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit. Incredible words. Listen to all of it!

President Trump has every right to change the name of the Kennedy Center. But if a future Democratic president tries to change the name back, that would be completely unconstitutional. by John Roberts

i was thinking today it feels like there's been a shift in how ai is rhetorically deployed, related to how it's pitched as a universal shortcut the shift from mostly a preceding justification (we're going to do layoffs bc ai) to a kind of post-hoc rationale / excuse

one of the great, pernicious myths perpetrated about higher ed—which media, higher ed administrators, politicians, and a number of faculty are complicit in spreading—is that humanities departments close due to some combination of cratering student demand and unjustifiable cost. It’s not true

Just to be clear: if 'no one was ready' a lot of people fucked up, bc those of us who work on this laid out what was going to happen 8yrs ago. The twofold issue that 1)it's not just a tech problem, and 2) Big Tech allowed itself to be ref-worked into spinelessness. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/08/t...

It hasn't even been twelve hours, but all three of us have been overwhelmed with requests from media for comment and I'm mostly writing this now so they'll leave me alone.

Donald Trump's rant about Rob Reiner raises new questions about Joe Biden's mental state.

Just so I'm clear on this, computer memory has tripled in price because a bunch of it that hasn't been produced yet has been ordered to populate GPUs that aren't installed in data centers that aren't built yet in order to service a demand that doesn't exist to make profits that don't happen.

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

What every kid wants this Christmas.

you say "i asked chatgpt" i hear "i asked [an improv comedy group]" an improv group wrote this report instead of a therapist i use an improv comedy group

Fact-check: true

Zoe Weissman survived the Parkland shooting. Now she’s at Brown, and it happened again. “Honestly, I'm really angry that this is happening to me all over again, and I'm just in shock.” We’re failing our kids. A gun-sick nation. 🇺🇸 www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...

It's easy to conjure the following path: Real person submits real question to LLM ➙ LLM hallucinates a reference ➙ Real person searches for the reference ➙ LLM captures the request, measuring it as demand³ ➙ LLM synthesizes a book-length text¹ ➙ Synthesized text makes its way into circulation²

In terms of US politics, Bush v. Gore is the defining event of the century. It set the template: a ruthless right that instinctively seeks power & doesn't give a shit about rule of law...and a bunch of hapless, feckless octogenarian Dems worried about the good opinion of centrist opinion columnists.

I don't know the details here, but Google ads and organic results are gamed by scammers who want to grab people looking for customer service numbers. Truly you cannot trust a phone number that pops up from a Google search. Just don't. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/b...

The internet is fast becoming so choked with this, it'll be unusable. We'll all be boats chugging blindly through the gloom and the muck, finding nothing, barely each other, uncertain what's true or even real anymore.

You can ask ChatGPT all day what it thinks you should research, but y'all, sometimes you have to stand on your own two feet and say you're a certain type of scholar because you believe in it. There is a power and knowledge in that shared identity.

Rewatched some Star Trek tonight. Still wild how a show about warp drives and weird nebulae ends up teaching the cleanest lessons about being human. Every episode says the same thing in its own way: ‘Be curious. Be brave. …Try not to fire phasers unless you really have to.”

[Converting all documents to Calibri]

If some guy stole my shit and made millions off it while wiping out my job prospects, and you, as my friend, bought that guy's cheap mass market replica of my shit, you and i would for obvious reasons have a problem. It being a massive company, not a guy, actually makes it even more of a problem.

What I always hear: “We can’t afford to pay our workers more than $15 an hour.” What I never hear: “We can’t afford to pay our CEO millions of dollars a year.” Funny how that works.

Folks could have read Morgan Ames's book and came to the same conclusion. But good to have the econometricians confirm. mitpress.mit.edu/978026253744...

the idea that a handful of conservative legal scholars have an understanding that should supersede a settlement affirmed my generations of american is astoundingly arrogant, and the idea that trump — or any president — can unilaterally overturn that settlement is just despotism

Most discussions about “misinformation” treat the problem as if people simply don’t have good enough critical-thinking skills. It sounds intuitive, but it’s not entirely accurate. The problem isn’t just individual ignorance, it’s the structure of the information environment people are placed into.

💯% this! Media literacy and critical thinking are two tools in the "misinformation" toolkit, but they are not cure-alls for a problem that's more systemic.

Wrote about Deepak Chopra’s new AI model, AI guru slop, and how none of this is really shocking because we already turned spirituality into a commodity. houseofmirrors.substack.com/p/this-was-i...

The Constitution is very straightforward on birthright citizenship. There's no ambiguity in the language, no other plausible interpretation. The fact that this is a public discussion at all, and that the Supreme Court is taking it up, is on its own anti-constitutional bullshit. Read the text👇

Let me tell you a story. Perhaps you can guess where this is going... though it does have a bit of a twist. I was poking around Google Scholar for publications about the relationship between chatbots and wellness. Oh how useful: a systematic literature review! Let's dig into the findings. 🧵

WONKETTE: “Department of Homeland Security is retooling a federal immigration database in ways that states can use to strike people from voter rolls by claiming they’re not eligible to vote.” www.wonkette.com/p/dhs-takes-...

If only there had been signs that a group of below average men who espouse misogynist views and are led by an adjudicated rapist would treat their female colleagues poorly.

Yesterday the President fell asleep, yet again, during a televised fake Cabinet meeting staged so that each of his courtiers could heap praise on him, praise for which he couldn't stay conscious. He woke up just long enough to spew racism. Why is this not being treated as an emergency? >

"Do you find yourself getting increasingly irate while scrolling through your social media feed? If so, you may be falling victim to rage bait, which Oxford University Press has named its word or phrase of the year." www.bbc.com/news/article...

Does anyone want a survivorship bias shortbread

Here it is with the byline and alt text

Frog tied some string around the box. “There,” he said. “Now we will not eat any more cookies.” “But we can cut the string and open the box,” said Toad. “That is true,” said Frog.

This is the first Thanksgiving for Sophie & Colin Hortman without their parents, Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and Mark Hortman who were assassinated along with the family dog in an act of political murder. National guards troops were not deployed to the state in response.

James Bond supervillains threaten to blow up the world with their big laser unless you pay them a trillion dollars. Real American supervillains embed themselves in the economy and threaten to cause a depression unless you subsidize their sex robots and the weird chatbots they use to avoid humans.

I really don’t think we can overstate the harm that the tech ethos of move fast and break things (followed by the unsaid “and then just move on”) has done beyond tech. Government, ngos, universities, public schools that have invited the folks who think like this in keep ending up gutted

As every socio-technical scholar has been shouting for years.... "Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it." www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Grateful to The Verge for publishing my essay on why large-language models are not going to achieve general intelligence nor push the scientific frontier. www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Over 600 people were sanctioned for comments made after Charlie Kirk's killing. (One man spent 37 days in jail for sharing a meme about Republicans' indifference to gun violence.) But Trump can implicitly threaten to hang Democratic members of Congress and it's old news before the weekend's over.