"DNA is a code," "The brain is a computer,"... Machine metaphors are one of the most successful conceptual tools in biology. But have you ever wondered where these analogies come from? What fundamental assumptions do they rest on?/1 🤨 #complexitycat 🐈‍⬛ www.complexitycat.org/posts/machin...

National Park Service has open comment page, for Albert Speer Memorial Arch that is next on MAGA wish list You can make comments here: parkplanning.nps.gov/documentsOpe... That page has lots of "before and after" illustrations. Below, before/after view from near JFK/RFK grave site in Arlington

New research sheds light on how mediocre employees help would-be authoritarians maintain power. (Gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/w...

This is a devastating interview. Scott Pelley tells the NYT that Bari Weiss directly put a “thumb on the scale” for Trump over the killing of Renee Good. Here’s his explanation of exactly what happened.

Once again thinking about this essay I wrote a few years back about trans futurity, apocalypticism, and AI as salvational technology for a technocratic occult www.heliotropejournal.net/helio/artifi...

Kegseth brings his kids with him for a taxpayer-paid vacation in France, and he decks them out in combat fatigues.

Donald Trump Jr. invested in a startup. Three months later, the Pentagon handed that startup $620 million after the White House called and ordered them to fast-track it. The company's value went from $200 million to $2 billion overnight.

IF YOU ARE IN AN ACTIVIST SIGNAL CHAT please check if there’s someone named “AJ” with a trans flag in bio OR someone named “Teddy” with a pink Signal name attempting to access, joining, or already in your chats. That’s a fascist infiltrator. Reset your group link after you boot em!

if faculty don’t control curriculum, it’s not actually a university. it’s just expensive high school for adults

Reminds me of a diagram from one of my favourite academic papers of all time

Reminds me of this banger

“Stochastic parrot” is great I also like “text extrusion machine”

This image from Anthropic goes out to the two guys on here who called me dumb for talking about stochastic flocks

Anyway, interesting to regard the above and the below all at once. What are Amodei and Altman both anxious about? Money? Energy? Data? Efficacy? All of the above? 🧐 bsky.app/profile/rach...

Despite how wrong AI mysterians are, they are engaging with these systems in a mechanistic way that is generative of research programs and policy. AI critics should engage w/transformer interpretability much more. Doing so is the only effective way to regulate them. Great paper here:

This paper doesn't use the term "intentional stance," but it does really expose that imputation of consciousness is an act by the observer that's usually not based on dispassionate analysis of the observed's internal structures. It's just vibes, and those aren't sufficient. arxiv.org/pdf/2605.31514

Blue states could pass laws mandating faculty governance and academic freedom.

“The Auburn University Board of Trustees on Friday gave itself complete control over course offerings, curriculum, degree requirements and academic credentials while eliminating shared governance at the Alabama land-grant university… The policy leaves many questions unanswered”

ICE flights. Friday, June 5, 2026. At least 72 flights on 27 planes, at least eight deportation and removal flights, one of which (to Panama) was likely a third-country removal.

New, by me at this.weekinsecurity.com: Meta has filed a data breach notice confirming *thousands* of people had their Instagram accounts hacked as part of a months-long campaign abusing its Meta AI chatbot. Meta's breach notice shows the account hijacks were far more widespread than first thought.

Anthropic survey of social scientists tending to support my anecdotal impression: friends who see potential value in AI mostly use it for coding (or use it dialogically), and are wary-to-disapproving about asking it to draft documents or significant sections of them. +

Amazon engineers in Seattle slam employer for building AI data centers while laying off 30,000 staffers

Facebook just opened up their meshflow repository, which seems to take a point cloud and a reference image and return a mesh with clean geometry in ~1 second! mesh-flow.github.io github.com/facebookrese...

Get up to speed on why ICE flights are so bad and what you can do to stop them with my FAQ here: gillianbrockell.com/what-is-ice-...

The best part of Habeas Flight Watch imo? Click the “record” button and you get a downloadable flight record that immigration attorneys can attach to their filings.

These ICE Air flights, where your neighbors are shipped away from their families, to distant government camps, in chains, without probable cause or due process, for indefinite detention, are not unique to Minnesota - they happen at least weekly at every airport on the map below.

This is a longer range model showing the range of possibilities. Analogous to Hurricane track prediction "spaghetti" plots. FWIW, the US models are predicting on the lower end of the European (ECMWF) ensembles shown here. El Niños disrupt rainfall needed for crops around the world. 🌍

When big companies call for regulation, they are calling for the kind of regs that will protect their business--not jobs, the environment, or consumers. We most definitely need to regulate AI. But we shouldn't be taking cues from the companies that stand to profit trillions from the industry.

An Anthropic project is using feedback from about ‼️ 1,000 ‼️ human software engineers to improve Claude Code.

british democracy is rapidly failing—but our enemy's strategy is very predicable, we can still beat them my latest for @liberalcurrents.com www.liberalcurrents.com/fascism-is-a...

A really great read about the current moment, and how astronomy got here, building on thousands of years of data science. I feel like I should have known that Muriel Mussells Seyfert cataloged the Coma cluster galaxies used to infer the existence of dark matter..! 🔭 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muriel_...

NEW: A stunning new project from @lawfaremedia.org's @katherinepomps.bsky.social finds that 97 Jan. 6ers who received clemency for their role in the Capitol riot then got arrested, charged, and/or convicted with subsequent crimes—a number much higher than previously reported.

Games can be joyful and relaxing. And they can tell graceful stories about uncomfortable futures. In "a permanent echo", we invite you to work through the question of who is to blame for what's to come. ✨Wishlist: s.team/a/3727200 #indiegames #PitchYaGame

Periodic reminder that Teapot Dome, the worst scandal in American history prior to Watergate, involved $9 million changing hands. That’s adjusted for inflation. This story by itself is 55500% bigger than Teapot Dome. That’s not a typo.

BREAKING: the Massachusetts House just passed one of the best data privacy bills in the country. It includes a total ban on the sale of precise location data and includes a private right of action allowing people to sue Big Tech over data abuses. HUGE WIN! But there’s more work to do 🧵

Susan Collins is largely responsible for Brett Kavanaugh—a man credibly accused of rape—being confirmed as a justice on the Supreme Court. As a result, Roe v Wade was overturned, and we now have “Kavanaugh stops” and a dismantled Voting Rights Act. She deserves to be unseated, NOT applauded.

Tomorrow: closing roundtable of Alexey Yurenev's AI Photography / Film installation Seeing Against Seeing ft. a conversation between the artist and fragrance artist / MIT lecturer / realnose.ai chief science officer Andreas Mershin. 19 bishop allen dr #Cambridge #MA Instagram: @temporaryinstitute

Aphantasia is associated with spatial memory and navigation difficulties in complex virtual environments in this new journal, using Sea Hero Quest: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... First author Adrienne Li ⭐

In a statement to @benmullin.bsky.social, Scott Pelley disputes what Bari Weiss said in this morning's editorial meeting, claiming he was never offered "a way back" as she claimed. "These executives cannot gain the trust of the staff with lies. This is antithetical to everything we stand for..."

If you missed it, you can watch a replay of the Luddite Lab Resource Hub launch at the @dairinstitute.bsky.social PeerTube channel. We discuss the Hub and have an incredible conversation with organizers Anna Iovine, @benjaminharnett.com, and Pomai Neil. peertube.dair-institute.org/w/4evWrVsa7i...

As Nate Jones reports, court records show that Donald J. Trump sent DMs on Twitter as the 45th President but The Trump White House Archived failed to preserve them as required by law. www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...

And we are live! Massive thanks to everyone who contributed to this. Reading your posts made me so much madder than I ever knew was possible

Frankel to Rubio: "It is crazy that you want to let people in from South Africa because they can assimilate, while you're throwing out hundreds of thousands of people who have already assimilated and that are important parts of our economy and family life."

He says this is because they've never filed a claim! Can he really be this stupid? Does he have no idea how insurance works? I went for years without filing an insurance claim BECAUSE I WAS HEALTHY! But if I had gotten in an accident I would have needed it. WTF are we dealing with here???

Yes, that's what Google is known for these days, helping society at large

A thoughtful piece on the Patagonia / Pattie Gonia trademark case — which addresses the ethic of taking a place name as a brand name. (Especially, in this case, a very fraught name.) heated.world/p/can-patago...

The US is now spending more on data center construction than on public transportation infrastructure

The US is now spending more on construction for data centers than public transportation infrastructure. Data centers contribute to higher electricity costs and air pollution —all while enriching a handful of Big Tech CEOs. Is it any wonder communities are organizing to stop them?

James Tiptree’s The Girl Who Was Plugged In is well regarded as proto-Cyberpunk and while it’s an All-Timer 1/3rd of the narrator’s prose sounds like doing Beat Poetry about computers which explains a lot about Cyberpunk prose generally.