Really enjoyed this roundup of fun animal stories from 2025 🧪 And the bone-collector caterpillar is still my favorite!

In the late 1830s, Karl Weierstrass dropped out of university. He is said to have spent his school years drinking and fencing. Decades later, he published a function that threatened everything mathematicians thought they understood about calculus. www.quantamagazine.org/the-jagged-m...

The full spiked 60 Minutes CECOT package, clean & subtitled. 1/5

Very accurate observations. ML and petter recognition were not regarded as mainstream AI from the late 1960s through early 1980. The ML community had trouble getting thei papers accepted in AI journals.

Wildly different things, tasks, techniques, subspecialties being lumped into "AI" and then being conflated with each other, doesn't help. Different types of models vs the techniques to train them vs the tasks they are supposed to accomplish, all under "AI".

Those who speculated wildly about the Brown shooter without knowing any facts got things wrong—and it is important that they lose their credibility because of it, Graeme Wood argues.

New post by @michelleding.bsky.social on resources for the Brown community in the aftermath of the shooting. open.substack.com/pub/michelle...

There will be many lessons to take from the tragedy at Brown. One is this: spreading baseless theories and false accusations online causes real harm. Innocent young people have had their lives upended by reckless online speculation. It is damaging, and it must stop.

My new startup idea: AI agents to help increase your h-index. Let's DISRUPT academic citations together.

In our last blog for 2025, @gaiamarcus.bsky.social reflects on whether the 'AI train' is on the right track: www.adalovelaceinstitute.org/blog/mind-th...

What this will mean, in practice, that if you are deemed an enemy of the administration, they will pore through your citizenship application paperwork looking for some reason to retroactively disqualify you. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/u...

This requirement -- for the job listed -- was a real headscratcher for me. www.govexec.com/technology/2...

Supporting public and open infrastructure is fantastic. Well done @icmlconf.bsky.social for supporting OpenReview

A Brown University student from Alabama was shot and killed on campus Saturday afternoon, according to a church in Birmingham. https://www.wpri.com/news/local-news/providence/student-killed-in-brown-shooting-parishoner-at-alabama-church/ 

Appreciate all the people reaching out both here and on so many other platforms. It's a bit scary and we still don't have a full picture of who was attacked.

I am heartbroken for our Brown community. If you know anything about Brown, you know what a tight-knit community we are. We share each other’s joys and pains. Today has been gut-wrenching. And our emergency is not yet over. Please keep our Brown family in your thoughts. 💔💔💔

Praying for the victims and their families. My heart breaks for the students who were looking forward to a holiday break and instead are dealing with another horrifying mass shooting, this time in our own Providence community.

Active shooting at @brown.edu right now. This feed has access to police scanners and the main news coverage. www.youtube.com/live/0w2MTbq...

"States should ignore this ridiculous EO" as well as any similar attempts to preempt legislatively. The president's billionaire cronies have made him understand that controlling data means controlling resources means controlling people. This EO is a declaration that we must all submit.

Probably not even Congress can preempt all state AI laws without itself regulating. That’s an obvious abuse of enumerated powers. But the President? With an executive order? Give me a break.

I dislike that Time Magazine has chosen to conflate CEOs with the people who actually got their hands dirty making the technology work. I’m incensed that Fei Fei Li is half off the page. I’m sure she is too gracious to say it.

I was so taken with @cyberlyra.bsky.social 's talk that I had to write an entire blog post (about it, but also about what the talk tells us about imagination and the AI moment). In a totally old-school unfashionable way, I'm not going to soundbite it here. RTWT: cntr.brown.edu/news/2025-12...

Just participated in a panel via zoom at IIT Madras, and while I couldn't collect the memento given to in-person panelists, the organizers have planted trees all around the campus in our name. Cool idea! Now I just hope the monkeys leave the saplings alone :)

It’s been two weeks since ICE took Yuanxin Zheng from his father. He is six years old. He’s still not home. This has to end.

Next up: www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/

Please provide nominations for the wokest font. I'll start here with dyslexiefont.com/en/

I am so incredibly proud of the work my students did on this @acluofiowa.bsky.social report about automated license plate readers in Iowa. www.aclu-ia.org/publications...

a friendly amendment I'd propose is that good critics exist, but 1) good criticism takes time since it draws on evidence, which itself takes time to collect and understand and 2) good criticism does not get awarded in our current attention structure, in part b/c its an inconvenient foe for boosters

"there's a new serif in town"

Now imagine sharing your private fantasies with what you believe is a bot that cannot judge or remember. Just that, on the other side, is a man in a one-room home in Nairobi, pretending to be an AI companion. That man is Michael, and this is his story: data-workers.org/michael/

The announcement was so forceful and sweeping it appears to have forced the website out of existence. "upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. reset reason: connection termination"

That's a very important observation. To turn it into something actionable, I think folks are better served spending less time on "what is it?", and more time working on "what does it do, how do _I_ tell apart the shitty output from the good output, and how do _I_ get better at controlling that?"

The ACM has now issued an official statement arguing against a federal moratorium on state AI regulation. www.acm.org/binaries/con...

Here's @mikecaulfield on AI and fact-checking: We're not taking the fact-checking powers of AI seriously enough. It's past time to start. https://mikecaulfield.substack.com/p/its-time-to-take-the-fact-checking

Accurate headline would be "Trump attempts to violate constitution to appease AI investor cronies in the White House" as @nytceciliakang.bsky.social well knows, but NYT editors refuse to accurately headline these stories. The lede should mention regulations are meant to stop kids killing themselves.

Here are my Ten Provocations for Studying and Crafting Reponsible Human-AI Teams (or, what 20 years of working with #NASA taught me about how we could be doing #AI completely differently, and much, much better): youtu.be/28pkHL4IHE4?...

I joined the Tech Policy Podcast to talk about the latest DSA enforcement developments with @justinhendrix.bsky.social.

Do you have a credit card number of yours memorized? I'm trying to see something...

Florida #AIBillofRights meets the Blueprint for an #AIBillofRights 🤝 Safe and Effective Systems 🤝 Algorithmic Discrimination Protections 🤝 Data Privacy 🤝 Notice and Explanation bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/ostp/ai-bill...

Philosophy is the category theory of the humanities.

I agree that raw salary is definitely one of the reasons that public sector/advocacy technology struggles to be appealing to young technologists. An important part of the 'value alignment' piece, too, is creating contexts where grads feel like they have have the opportunity to grow technically.

Very glad to be a part of a new paper detailing how developers and developer platforms can prevent AIG-NCII, a form of image based sexual abuse that disproportionately harms women and girls. Thanks to all the collaborators and Max Kamachee & @scasper.bsky.social for leading this important project!

Democratic politicians need to stop accepting Trump’s white nationalist premise that immigration is bad and proudly and loudly make a positive case for why America’s identity and history as a nation of immigrants is so important.

Historian of eugenics here. I don't normally like to retweet bad arguments, but this is such a fundamental misunderstanding of eugenics, I think it's important to point out. I don't have time to debunk all of the ways this is inaccurate, but I'll highlight a few things and then recommend some books🧵

Spotify thinks I'm 71. Damn you classical guitar music.

it is really very well written.

that reasoning by the judge is just fantastic

This is a fantastic and informative article (read the paper as well)

I'm spending my PhD researching just this question of what careers in tech "for good" or "in the public interest" look like. Just published an op-ed this weekend about one option: go do tech and/or data work for a non-profit! localnewsmatters.org/2025/11/30/b...

His “it’s not a eugenics company” tee is raising questions already answered by his shirt. www.cbsnews.com/news/nucleus...