The smartphone theory of everything

Superb from David Oks. How an equally poor China in 1950s stole a march over India in 3 decades by obliterating its repressive old social order, liberating women & investing more in mass health & mass education. davidoks.blog/p/why-china-...

new William Gibson book opening line dropped

It's amazing that there is so much pedagogy and research into the act of reading, yet all of it basically comes down to: "So it turns out you have to actually understand what you read. Like. You have to think about it. You have to actually think about what the words mean. That you're reading."

I’m a little late but happy pride 🌈🌈🌈🌈

Marjane Satrapi 1969-2026

Nicobar Pigeon The Nicobar Pigeon is one of the world's most beautiful pigeons, admired for its shimmering metallic green and blue plumage, long neck hackles, and distinctive appearance. Found on islands from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to the western Pacific, related to the DoDo. 📷 R.Sharma

Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen.

Hatred of data centers is the only bipartisan political issue in America. Incredible work by tech CEOs in uniting the country.

Truly, one of the most generous scholars who loved sharing good work wherever he found it.

the only reason i'm on bluesky is to find evidence-based analysis on whether my feelings of economic (and general) precarity are rooted in data and methods or not (maybe i'm vibecession but i haved earned those vibes)

koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2026-05... Is this a study : fertility implications of boom in Korean microchip and high-bandwidth memory stocks?

Great WaPo article on the **10,000** huge diesel generators at Virginia's data centers permitted to emit 13,000 tons of NOx. The article is based on data crunched here at Sierra Club (1/9) @washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

MIT (endowment: $27B) shuttering three of its four main libraries is one of those news items that just knocks you off balance, auguring, as it does, profound and permanent changes to the entire institutional apparatus of higher education in this country.

The leadership and clarity of @MIT President Sally Kornbluth www.bostonglobe.com/2026/05/26/o...

The Squamish people of what is now Vancouver were illegally dispossessed of their land 100 years ago. They sued, got the land back, and used their sovereignty to ignore local zoning and build 6,000 new homes over the loud objections of nearby wealthy NIMBYs. Now other tribes are getting in the game.

The last thing you see before opening ChatGPT

The RCP8.5 debate has gotten silly, but my own hot take is this whole thing is a failure in communicating probabilities and the scenarios community should just bite the bullet and do this quantitatively, rather than relying on squidgy terms like "implausible" or "worst-case" to do the heavy lifting

UC Berkeley Law creates new AI policy that bans AI for "conceptualizing, outlining, drafting, revising, translating, or editing any work submitted for credit" or exams because "thinking remains the sine qua non of good lawyering (and of a quality legal education)." That's what I'm talking about.

I guess green card is off for me.

California continues losing tech jobs—in data released yesterday, the Golden State lost more than 14k jobs over the last year and more than 23k since 2020

Collecting readings on how to think and live through times of deep uncertainty. There‘s AI of course, but also climate, epistemics, and precarity.

OpenAI's claim that this is a central conjecture in discrete geometry is not an exaggeration. This will I think be looked back on as the first time that AI solved a major mathematics problem (defined as a problem that all experts in some subfield had thought about). openai.com/index/model-...

Found this a thoughtful and unexpectedly moving read. “… some of the most valuable human work lies not in making things new, but in the patient, humble, disciplined practice of helping what matters to endure.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vk7x... tracey denim is my favourite album since 2020

▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 38.56%

Omg

“We found that only about 54% of all miles traveled by Waymos in California are driven with a passenger onboard.” AVs without congestion pricing will be a net loss both for the consumer and society.

Millions of Trips, "Waymo" Empty Miles: California's First Thousand Days of Commercial Robotaxi Service https://findingspress.org/article/161870-millions-of-trips-waymo-empty-miles-california-s-first-thousand-days-of-commercial-robotaxi-service?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

Irrespective of how you feel about it generally I think the commonwealth prize thing should be a moment of reckoning for people who think an indefinite cordon sanitaire around AI artistic products is viable.

We’re going to think of pre-2022 internet and writing as low-background steel. Good news is that, at least for writing, there’s plenty available.

Olga Tokarczuk is asking A.I. “Honey, how could we develop this beautifully?”

In a Turing Test of sorts, it looks like a 100% AI generated story just won the Commonwealth Prize for the Caribbean region "for its lyrical precision and haunting atmosphere, the story stood out for the confidence and restraint of its voice." Published in Granta: granta.com/the-serpent-...

there is an æsthetics in all things

"The Environmental Protection Agency has come up with a new way to speed up construction of data centers, power plants, and other industrial facilities: Let them start building before they obtain required federal air permits" Alex C Kaufman in @heatmap.news

My best piece of advice, and this is something I learned the hard way, is: if you live in an elevator building, get a keychain that is larger in every dimension than the gap between the elevator car and the elevator door

It's publication day for Moral Economics. You can buy it now at American bookstores, and you can still pre-order it in England at a discount, from independent bookstores #econsky #academicsky marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2026/05/mora...

RCP 8.5 is a boundary object that’s failed, in that it’s an object that different disciplines understand differently and yet that has provoked more heat than mutual understanding. (Flag a potential paper for someone in science studies! Or send me citation if it exists!)

I think this response gets at the fundamental conflict between non-scientists who think that climate modelers are primarily trying to make predictions about the future, and the scientists who run climate models, who mostly are trying to understand how the the climate system works.

@madisoncondon.bsky.social and I wrote briefly about this last month: progressivereform.org/publications....

It was also sad to see many academics in public sphere very quickly fold on this. Worst-case scenarios are valuable, both analytically and epistemically. Tail-end probabilities influence if not drive our long-term infrastructure, social and political planning.

"Plausibility" is the least interesting and useful motivation for climate scenarios. We should not use the worst case scenarios as a design standard! But we should be aware of what those ranges look like, and may need stronger forcings to see what extremes could look like under more mild scenarios.

Why are there squares everywhere in statistics (e.g., normal density, variance, least squares, etc.)? statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/05/16/w...

First the transmission line paper and now this one. @catiehausman.bsky.social's research is by far the most likely to make me go "hell yeah" to the research question and what it is showing followed quickly by "damn it!"

Hi. Not really sure how to promote this story...but it is about AI and the overwhelming feeling of it bleeding into everything with no concrete articulation for what a good version of that future looks like. It's about feeling like every 8th person is living on another planet. Hope you'll read it

Louder for the “left” NIMBYs in the back “This shift is driven by a surge in supply. More inventory is still on the way, with peak units expected to deliver by the end of (the second quarter).”

Nothing makes me more anxious than the charging desert between finger lakes and western PA. It’s just me, my dread, and dwindling battery.

New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.

Our paper is out in Nature Human Behaviour! @rsenninger.bsky.social and I asked a simple, underexplored, question: when governments write policy documents, whose knowledge do they actually cite? 👉 rdcu.be/fhngy 🔓 seramirezruiz.github.io/papers/ramir... DOI: www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵👇