Appreciate this letter from MN State Sen Jim Abler (R-Anoka) to POTUS

They’re calling him the world’s most sober man:

We delivered the Regester lecture at Puget Sound last week and The News Tribune discussed it and our work on AI romantic companions and philosophical accounts of consciousness (w/ @jttiehen.bsky.social )

I will support any New York mayoral candidate who admits bodegas are just convenience stores and everywhere in the world has them

Mariners!!

This is also bad in that it's not a one off op-ed writer. These articles are coming from the editorial board. People really need to cut their subscriptions to WaPo and move on to supporting other outlets

As Gov. Pritzker says in his opening statement, ICE and CPB are attempting to provoke a reaction by their actions in Chicago. And as he says -- more or less -- at the time stamp below, he won't order state police to physically confront them, b/c he can't.

If you could win a prize by guessing the number on a die 🎲 hidden under a cup, would you want to guess before the die was rolled, or after? The odds of winning are the same in both, but they can feel different. 🧵

I think the “somewhat useful” category is u helpful. If they asked me personally, I would say it’s “somewhat helpful,” because there are some benefits, but also that on balance it’s more harmful then helpful, because the costs of the inaccuracies and hallucinations outweigh the benefits.

genuinely its really funny that the "online american catholic" position is that the pope is wrong about the bible and the "online american secular" position is that the pope is always right about the bible

Once again, it is *faculty*—not administrators—who brought this case and won. Including UC Faculty Association chapters of the AAUP.

According to Oregon, Trump got the idea that Portland is on fire because Fox News illustrated a September 5 story on protests of ICE with video from the George Floyd riots in 2020. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

My most controversial post-ejection take is that treating voters as adults with agency and telling them the truth isn’t looking down on them, while telling voters things you know to be false to validate their feelings in an attempt to manipulate them is considerably more condescending.

i keep rereading this

My Bluesky profile image is taken from a student artwork of me painted grue (the student was doing an art project on philosophical thought experiments and I had mentioned that grue was my favorite).

Latest projection suggests that more than 505,000 adults and kids have died due to USAID's illegal dismantling by Musk, Rubio, and Lewin Source: www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?vi...

actually that checks out

In the American League, there are 6 playoff spots but 7 different teams that have more than a 50% chance of making the playoffs. Mathematically possible but counterintuitive.

Trump just likes dropping bombs and committing war crimes so I don't think we'll be invading Afghanistan

Bluesky policy discussion: “You’ve got this detail wrong but it’s cool that you’re even here.” Twitter policy discussion: “I just told your boss you wanna fuck kids.”

One of the natural consequences of blurring the line between state censorship and “cancel culture” was making it easier to engage in state censorship. I leave it to your imagination whether the people who did that intended that result or were merely recklessly indifferent to it.

No notes

The free speech activist who built a list of professors he worked to get fired for their speech must be celebrated for his support of free speech, and anyone who quotes his speech accurately in context will be fired and/or face state punishment by the champions of free speech, do I have that right?

For decades everyone on the list argued they only knew Epstein in a professional capacity while all the notes to him are "I sure love being pedophiles together with you, my friend Jeffrey Epstein"

i'm kind of with will here. one of the *strangest* features of this age is that nominally liberal elites seem totally enervated in the face of fascism--meanwhile the liberal base is screaming our heads off. this doesn't comport at all with the standard story--

This addresses some but not *all* of my concerns about the world of watches.

Following up on the "Harvard is about to cave" narrative: how it happened, and why it matters, what we know and don't. By me, whole timeline is before the pay wall. fallows.substack.com/p/harvard-vs...

Bari Weiss is literally going to run CBS news while complaining about being silenced

The “correct” answer here describes Plato as a pupil of Aristotle.

The bank app is telling me to "tap & pay like a boss😏" and "rally my crew". I am 37 years old and you are the bank. Don't talk to me this way.

love it

70 years ago yesterday, they applied for summer money.

Everyone over 30 was traumatized in childhood by getting 45 minutes into Disney’s Fantasia and realizing there would never be any dialogue

Maybe they'll eventually regain their nerve, but for the moment, JB Pritzker appears to have single-handedly spooked the Trump administration into backing down with one 12-minute speech.

DCD out at the CDC.

The transformation of the Washington Post editorial page appears to be complete.

we are fucked

I was thinking about this after my exchange with Aidan yesterday. “Spoils to the victor” is a plausible epistemic principle for handling philosophical theories that disagree on what to say about possible cases. But I was wondering if there are any empirical analogues of it.

Superb survey of different approaches to the key theoretical question of the moment: What does it mean to call language models “cultural technologies”? At any rate I’m going to three (3) conferences and symposia this year connected to it! +

With the proliferation of camera phones, we should be living in a golden age of “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” And yet the the show is no funnier today than it was 20, 30 years ago. Stagnation.

The brownshirts are wilding:

We took a close look at Split Ticket's WAR metric, which has become influential in Democratic circles for suggesting moderates significantly outperform progressives. Our finding: The metric contains systematic biases that overstate the advantage of moderation. A corrected model shows no advantage.🧵

Study finds that interacting with an AI companion reduces loneliness as much as interacting with a human does, and also that people underestimate how much it reduces loneliness.

That GPT-5 is underwhelming should probably lower your probability a bit that the world will end soon, but also lower your probability a bit that you will live to see human immortality. So, a mixed bag.

*George Carlin voice* Have you ever noticed how anyone less impressed by AI progress than you is an idiot, and anyone more impressed by AI progress than you is a shill?