It's such a low-key resistance move but talking about not using AI, especially in a professional context, is so important in working against "inevitability" narratives and so powerful in identifying who your people are — and in ensuring there are more of us all the time.

Sadly, not a surprise at all 😢 Neither the urge to keep working and make the numbers, nor this: “Truthfully, I now have even less respect for our leadership team than I did before, which I didn’t know was possible"

Enjoyed reading "The Unaccountability Machine" by Dan Davies: at turns thoughtful and hilarious. Goes deep into cybernetics, history, neoliberalism, and accounting (!). A friend sent me this quote which is pretty funny and on target unless you're an academic; then the joke is on you (and me).

“Why aren’t college students protesting” stories are almost always wrong (they are protesting), omit crucial context (they were brutally punished for protesting before), and somehow suggest that 19 yr olds have more moral responsibility than elected officials three times their age

Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building an AI clone to replace him in meetings www.theverge.com/tech/910990/...

One of the ways news media often fail us is by giving us the microscopic rather than the telescopic view. Everything I mention in this essay is well-documented, but the dots are mostly not connected to make visible this death by a thousand cuts our country is undergoing.

Keep an eye on this: Trump is trying to seize the beautiful Presidio in San Francisco, a longtime goal of techbros who want it for a dreamed-of libertarian "Freedom City". The plot is nutty but real. Seems Silicon Valley tech-fascists are extracting their money's worth from Trump before he fades. 1/

This is one of the most hopeful and remarkable geopolitical developments in years. Huzzah! And hooray!

No shade to the OP for admitting this, but it shocks me that people my age don’t know this. You fundamentally cannot understand how the world functions, how power works, if you don’t know history.

Facility and route optimization on road network graphs can solve countless problems across many industries. However, these solvers often require expensive software to set up and run them, or expensive, rate-limited travel-time matrix APIs. The spopt-r R package offers a solution.

This is not a story about Gen Z refusal; this is a story about how middle managers and executives have been so pilled by an industry that they are willing to fire workers who refuse to use its products.

Just to crib Jan's great chart here a little bit - here are just a few of the headlines that came out when growth somewhat slowed in 2024 Many, many media outlets do not really know how to handle technological change like this

Zohran Mamdani and the NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection have announced a "Click to Cancel" rule. The rule would make NYC the first city in the nation to ban subscription traps and force companies to make it just as easy to cancel subscriptions as it is to enroll.

The kids are all right.

I guess what I’m saying is great consumer products don’t make young people feel anger and despair the more they use them www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/s...

So… big news. (Keep reading.)

imagine you’re on a spaceship and then some random guy says that all the water and power on board should be used to generate fake sentences and ugly pics

what can I do / if I can't change it?

3. Some of these trends certainly could be driven at least in part by AI. But for reference, here are the charts of some of the industries that have gotten talked about the most in the AI conversation.

I get AI cold pitches for ghost writing or startup funding almost every day. Such as, "have you ever thought about writing a book?" Why yes, I have. Three of them so far. I've never followed up to see how slop-ish the agentic systems really are. This 🧵 does!

Keychron dropped all the step files for all their products, chumming the waters like “have at it you 3D printing freaks” Incredible flex. github.com/Keychron/Key...

this is very interesting. reinforces my belief that most of the the time whether a private market exists is less important than how it is regulated worksinprogress.co/issue/why-ja...

No war crimes today, yay

I have a father and mother in law in Iran. I have a sister in law. A niece. She's 14. She likes silly pink headbands and purses and dresses, just like kids her age all over the world. There are 93 million people like her in Iran. People who do all the normal mundane life things as the rest of us.

More details about the Bayesian Workflow book and case studies now available on the book web site avehtari.github.io/Bayesian-Wor... (but you still need to wait a bit for the book)

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

Don't let this moment erode your humanity. Don't allow this uncertainty to make you feel siloed and helpless. Defend your own decency and our collective decency, because if those are lost, we won't hold much else.

As you walk through the museum in Hiroshima, you walk through exhibits that chronicle life in the city up until the bomb detonates. Then you turn a corner and this photo is blown up on the wall so it’s perspective correct, probably 5 meters high. It’s profoundly shocking.

Revlimid has its origin in a pill that cost patients $7.50 each. Decades later, the cancer drug costs more than $18,000 for a month’s supply — even though it still only costs about 25 cents to manufacture. (Published May 2025)

'An MIT Media Lab study titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT” found that LLM users “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” The tech oligarchs have somehow managed to enshittify thinking.'

Tonight we're going to party like it's 1989 (nominal dollars)

Done.

Researchers at Stanford University modeled how many people could die or be disabled in 25 years if vaccines for polio, measles, rubella or diphtheria were no longer available. We decided to illustrate it.

So, AFICT the “reasonable” argument for LLM coding is if we persist through economic chaos and environmental crises while sacrificing the creative industries and education then models built using stolen data and license violations might safely revolutionise software dev productivity?

Every time I relearn this it boggles my mind youtube.com/shorts/ZUe9c...

This whole thread is funny in a cringe way 😳 The code is like a parody or anti pattern. Except it isn't a parody.

what the actual fuck????

In a world full of problems, I hate that this technology boils our engines of hope down to empty non-interaction. My school recently polled to see how the faculty feels about using AI for GRADING. At what point is it just robots talking to each other? Where is the humanity in these humanities?

"decision-makers use System 3 [LLMs] .. even when outputs are systematically incorrect. This .. reflects an uncritical reliance and persists under conditions that suppress as well as enhance analytical reasoning .. [They had] elevated confidence when System 3 was engaged, despite consistent error"

I had this discussion with a coauthor just today. The topic was how to write a chapter about expert-level intuitions in a way that works for less expert readers. My coauthor said, "this is why writing is so hard." I would add: also why it can't be captured by an LLM's dumb text averaging.

My county 911 operator helped talk a neighbor through labor as they waited for local EMTs to arrive. I mention this because it’s easy to forget real folk are out here just helping folks out and taking care of babies.

This is amazing history I didn’t know. Wow.

LISTEN. Thank you, Cecellia Wang.

Here is what the dismal snowpack means for California's water (present and future). Op-ed from me. (Gift link) #climate #climatechange www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/open...

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

FWIW, I've written four books so far, working on another. Plus a blog and dozens of papers. I have never used AI/LLMs to write any of them. Not even research or grammar suggestions. (OTOH, records show that LLMs have copied and reused my writing without acknowledgement 🤷)

www.microsoft.com/en-us/micros... is it good to build an entire economy and software infrastructure on this

I defended my PhD 10 years ago today. That was the least remarkable thing that happened that day. Sharing something I wrote about it last year. Since then "the horrors persist but so do we." And with dignity.

Trans friends, thank you for being you, and for, when you can, sharing yourselves with a world that is so frequently undeserving of the light you bring to it. I love and support you, always. 🏳️‍⚧️🫂🫶

Periodic reminder that Anglosphere isn't a real thing. It gets really awkward when you point out that most English speakers aren't white (Hello India and Nigeria!) Then they say, no it's more about English systems of government and education, then you point out that Nigeria and India have those too