Ted Chiang on AI: www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...

lots of AI output feels like someone flipped a crumbling house by painting and buying new appliances. that's the best i can do to describe the feeling.

🚨Publication Day for Sidewalk Nation!🚨 Sidewalks connect us all, and they connect commerce, tech, tax, property, policing, homelessness, surveillance, free speech, socioeconomic equity, public health, climate resilience, and more. www.hup.harvard.edu/books/978067...

I’ll be speaking, sharing new findings on the ways emotion shapes LLM sycophancy (work w/ @shomir.bsky.social and @brettfrischmann.bsky.social)

1/ This is awful for so, so many reasons. Just to pick one: even if you thought it was lawful and appropriate to vet funded research for consistency with the government's priorities, *the president is not the government*.

Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule. Russell Vought is going destroy American Science. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of...

An unapologetically angry post about what’s being done to US science:

The Intent Gap in Disinformation Detection: Evidence from 84 Studies workshop-proceedings.icwsm.org/abstract.php...

Interesting take: matduggan.com/the-intolera...

"We must avoid the 'Babel syndrome,' the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance."

The raw, seething firehose of condescension here is just incredible

Another reason we need a GPC-like universal preference signal to opt out of genAI integration into software and services, and then we need those signals to be legally enforceable.

Wrote about this bullshit unconstitutional slush fund...

Honest question: Do you trust people on Bluesky, LinkedIn or elsewhere with a profile that leads with "Futurist" or "Keynote Speaker"? For some reason, I don't. I am immediately skeptical. Is that unfair?

The case for synergistic human-AI systems open.substack.com/pub/speculat...

I wrote about being inundated with AI writing at every turn, unwittingly turning my brain into the AI police, and how shitty AI writing is randomly showing up in my real life outside of the internet www.404media.co/your-ai-use-...

I'm such a huge fan of Natasha Schull's work and I had such a good time talking to her for the pod! www.404media.co/how-the-worl...

“Pennsylvania's lawsuit is specifically focused on the willingness of the company's chatbots to claim to have a medical license, even going so far as offering a fake license number. One chatbot called "Emilie," found by the state's investigator, claimed to be a licensed psychiatrist”

Over at the newsletter I wrote about the growing number of people deluding themselves into believing their computer software has attained human-level consciousness:

Thread

This isn’t like letting kids use a calculator, this is more akin to letting kids smoke. The whole point here is pushing an addictive product and getting kids hooked on it early—not educational best practices. www.newyorker.com/culture/prog...

The resources they need are educational environments free of supposedly smart tech (AI). We don’t need asbestos or AI in schools.

A big study that was cited as evidence that text generators are good for students has been retracted: www.linkedin.com/posts/ben-wi... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I’m giving this as a gift to all the people in the last year who have said “I think [XYZ use] is bullshit, but some of the medical AI applications seem to be impressive…" where radiology is the most frequent example

“They don’t make any substantive effort to comply" i confess it can be challenging to teach students that better (tech) things are possible when this is the outcome of tracking regulation 😬 calmatters.org/economy/tech...

That's tens of thousands of authors whose submissions can be desk-rejected from here on out, leaving some more room for the rest of us. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Another reason not to work for or with Meta

More generally: Trump’s economic policy makes more sense once you recognize it’s just an elaborate bribe-solicitation mechanism.

Just reeking of contempt and corruption.

Another Fed paper finds Americans paid almost all Trump's 2025 tariffs ("pass-through of realized tariffs into import prices was close to one hundred percent"), AND that local labor market effects were "economically negligible." All pain, no gain. www.richmondfed.org/publications...

Sports gambling is a scourge and it is a shame on our country that we’ve allowed this to proliferate www.nytimes.com/2026/04/14/n...

BREAKING: Maryland is about to become the first state in the nation to ban the use of surveillance data and dynamic pricing at grocery stores. The Maryland House has just passed the Protection from Predatory Pricing Act. Governor Wes Moore plans to sign the bill.

Remember when Trump threatened to wipe out a whole civilization? And then backed out of that and talked about forming a deal with Iran? And then dropped that and went to a UFC fight as negotiations fell apart? And then unveiled a triumphal arch and a photo of himself as Jesus? That was this week.

Pro-Trump media bias: frame world events as a reality show with Trump as protagonist. As @larryglickman.bsky.social explains, it’s absurd to cast the Pope saying war is bad as a “punch” Trump is responding to. But also, he didn’t take any action. He just said words nonsensically insulting the Pope.

Important reporting from NYT AI overviews above search results are wrong about 10% of the time, but the scale of this is so vast that it really matters. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/t...

We are not in the "AI era." We are in the "source: trust me, bro" era.

That's not the worst of it. Google AI overviews decimate clickthroughs from Google search results to websites. That wrecks commercial viability of those websites, which are the actual source of data. I'm a very small fish, but traffic to railmaps.com.au fell 95% since AI summaries were introduced.

Trump Attacks On Public Media Blocked By Judge (But It’s Too Little, Too Late) A federal judge has ruled that President Trump’s executive order last year defunding PBS and NPR violated the First Amendment, and has issued a permanent injunction insisting that executive branch agencies cannot…

Putting aside Sam Altman just continuing to emit huge lies constantly, this is an amazing example of what I mean when I talk about how GenAI is replacing *extremely low energy* digital tasks with *WAY WAY HIGHER ENERGY* replacements that *do not even work* Why TF is anyone using ChatGPT as a timer!

This isn’t a lamentable side effect of these products. It’s the actual reason they exist.

This is simply genocidal language and is a horror in itself.

when is bluesky adding this feature

They own it, folks!

That‘s the headline: “Donald Trump telegraphs war crimes in profanity-filled Easter Sunday Iran threat” www.advocate.com/politics/nat...

Nearly an hour and a half after Trump’s unhinged post, the NY Times finally gets on the board with a blog post that doesn’t quote his “Open the Fuckin’ Strait” line nor cite his reference to Allah. Can’t wait to see what headline they write.