I am a medieval historian!! The world always is in a state, it has never not been in a state, joy and delight and beauty is what humanity exists for

One thing I will never understand: How did the 90s give us Rage Against the Machine, System of a Down, Anti-Flag, Rise Against, Dead Prez, Pennywise, etc., but suddenly when we have actual neo-fascists in charge of things...

WAR DON'T SEX CRIMES HIDE CRIMES

Gen Z just got their own grade-A example of why Oxford commas matter.

It's very bad when all 2000-odd Democratic candidates every cycle can freely text everyone in the country who donated even a single dollar sometime in the past, without consent or consequence. The commons are being destroyed to extract an additional marginal dollar.

If I ever run into that damned Needle in a bar, there will be a donnybrook. A genuine donnybrook!

Some personal news...

This one was way easier to write than last year's. (Fingers crossed I don't have to do this again for quite a while.)

Nothing like finally wrapping up another 10+ hour shift in the data mines, then calling an Uber to go out for the evening, only to wind up with a driver who's listening to an hour-long NPR for on agentic AI.

Air traffic control issues in Boston are getting wild. Per @flightradar24.com lots are getting diverted, including at least two that had to abort landings at the last minute.

Feels very Boston to have arrived at the protest an hour behind schedule because of @mbta.com shenanigans, but we made it in the end. Kind of shocked they couldn't get @dropkickmurphys.com to show up though - maybe next time boys?

GPT-5 really makes me miss Clippy.

The powers of the imperial presidency have to be placed into a tin box and lowered into the ground, and that ground needs to be covered with concrete and sealed inside the Chernobyl sarcophagus. Enough.

This will be fun. Wonder which side he'll choose.

My new Turing test: can your AI model successfully figure out how to find the right variable for the right geography and get it from the American Community Survey API? (Also tempted to use this as a modern captcha for job applicants - all these ML engineers need to chill with the resume spamming.)

Jesus Christ 🤦‍♂️

Goodnight, baby girl. Sweet dreams, little one. Sleep well, I'll see you in the morning. Love you, honey. Goodnight, baby girl. 💔

Leaving #AAPOR and my flight got changed, so now I'm connecting in Detroit. Was lucky enough to score an upgrade, so I'm curious which esteemed paragon of methodological wisdom I'll be seated next to.

Hey @newsweek.com are you using ChatGPT without proofreading now? Because referring to "Former President Trump" is exactly the kind of thing an AI model with a knowledge cutoff date of 2023 would do. 🤔

Just curious - what is an acceptable success rate before you ship an AI product?

In my fantasy timeline, this is the new "fell off the back of a truck" and they somehow wind up in Kiev. Sigh...

Schumer’s simply not up to what this moment demands of our leaders. A letter might be how “opposition” looked or functioned before but that doesn’t cut it today.

Can't wait until GOP electeds start considering what it's going to be like to be unemployed in a broken economy after the midterms.

To put things in context: Three weeks ago, it felt like every institution was folding. Like nobody was standing up except the American people, like we were calling our representatives and nothing was happening.

If you're unsatisfied with the Dem / progressive leaders we have now and want better ones, there are people working on doing exactly that who could use your support.

Do any European countries let you apply for asylum because your president belongs in one? This is absolutely insane.

Aside from the moral question here, Yglesias's claim is based on a theory of campaign strategy about 2 decades out of date. Refocusing attention on favorable issues can work in elections, but persuasion is how you make issues favorable in the first place. It's not just one or the other.

This is also why we need every prominent Democrat to say "This is illegal, and when we take power, we will prosecute it" to remind every bureaucrat or political appointee that if they help Trump, they will end up in jail

I'm not saying that New Yorkers are weak-kneed cowards, but I am saying that Massachusetts has set the national example for how to treat tyrants since 1775.

I don’t think New York City can lay claim to being the greatest city in the world simply based on its run of mayors they have elected. We’re gonna give that title to Paris or something until they get their shit together

Data folks: how do I explain to a bunch of product-focused engineers why we need separate data infra for AI/ML/analytics? Seems obvious to me but apparently it's not. Any favorite citations / quick reads? (Have already shared the dbt explainer on analytics engineering vs data engineering to start.)

In my friends group chat, someone asked if there's a place for GW Bush in the opposition. My response: "If that's what it takes - it's last call and we're desperate." I protested his wars and moved to Ohio to campaign in '04, so there's no love lost there. But this is no time for grudges.

never surrender

I'm old enough to remember when MSNBC, Air America, and Current TV were supposed to be the counterweights to Fox. The problem isn't that nobody's tried, it's that encouraging good government, fact checking, and being nice to people isn't as good for ratings as conspiracy theories and demonization.

Nobody: Absolutely nobody: Tchaikovsky: Imma put cannon fire in a song.

For those of us who work on AI safety, it's frustrating to see how the danger isn't that *we* aren't careful enough, it's that the people we need to worry about don't actually give a shit about the harms it can cause.

Complaints about a lack of Democratic leadership presume that the generation of leaders that got us into 2025 can get us out of it. That's just not going to happen. Instead, we need to find and elevate the next generation of leaders who are ready to meet this moment. Here's our contribution:

So the Washington Post has been hijacked. The NYT is making the pitch bot cringe. LA Times thinks you need AI to save you from biased reporters. Serious question, where can we turn these days for credible, fact-based reporting?

I hate how well this post has aged.

A British person sees the sun for the first time in months:

One thing about elder millennials growing up playing Wolfenstein 3D and watching Indiana Jones repeatedly is you don't need to teach us that Nazis are the bad guys

My god, does this app need a "turn off retweets" button. Yes, everything is on fire. No, you can't save it by retweeting 100 times a day about how on fire everything is. I hate having to unfollow people I like & agree with, but this app is just one giant anxiety dumping ground now and it sucks.

When we in the U.S. wriggle out of this (if we do), we might seriously need to take the postwar plan to deindustrialize and pastoralize Germany, and apply it to Silicon Valley.

TFW you realize how many hundreds of billions have been made by first convincing people that structured data stores are too hard to set up and maintain, then 5-10 years later convincing the same people that unstructured data stores are not conducive to fast and reliable analysis. Rinse, Repeat.

Me watching all of the grotesque body horror CGI in Superbowl ads: