Two weeks until Trump claims the Iran war would never have happened if he’d been president.

if we're on classic British comedies with extended jokes about not mentioning the war www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tms0...

An official declaration that I am doing oral exams with students (one of the downsides of GenAI!) and then getting on a plane to Europe, and so won't be able to respond to any more of the comments/queries/questions that are proliferating (and are now too many for any human to respond to anyways).

Apple + Microsoft + Eli Lilly paid 46% of all corporate tax to Ireland in 2024 See note from the Ireland's Fiscal Advisory Council. - www.fiscalcouncil.ie/new-council-... - www.irishtimes.com/business/eco...

After Software Eats the World, What Comes Out the Other End?

this is the category error all the AI maximalists make if I had to break down what I think the impact of AI would be by field, I'd have to first talk about which *subtasks* it's helping people with the amount of variability by field and task is MASSIVE, ranges from 90% takeover to 0%

I think that’s fair, though I think part of people’s frustration is when it feels like the combativeness isn’t intellectually honest. The level of anger at the Altmans of the world is justified; it doesn’t _need_ inaccuracy to prop it up.

Yes, and although it is it genuinely useful application, it feels like the jump from "adding up columns of figures on a calculator" to "Microsoft Excel" rather than the first step on the journey to Mars. The big sceptic case has to be "AI is not an exception to the laws of cost and economics"

it is really good.

1. A short thread on a Bluesky phenomenon that might be described as "They are a dead-eyed cultist who must be cast out lest the heresy take root!" OP has blocked me for mocking them - I'd usually obscure their name but since they themselves were quote-dunking to demand someone else be blocked ...

Block them all! Amazing strategy which is absolutely bound to work!

"We should worry less about autonomous robots, and more about pseudo-autonomous systems embedded in bureaucracies that enable them to do things that they used not be able to do, but with a lot of slop."

Tired: Now, At Last We Have a God. Wired: Now, At Last We Have a Conscience Collective.

"the enthusiasm of the Trump administration to threaten Anthropic with quasi-expropriation for not embracing its program 100%, suggests that [billionaires] are not nearly as safe as they might like to be, and that this is especially true of billionaires like Musk and Karp"

Economists: we award Nobel Prizes for work on efficient institutions and minimizing transaction costs. Also Economists: the review process at the American Economic Review.

There's something magical about how very-online quantitative social scientists are letting AI Sokal Hoax their discipline.

This the grandchild of Glenn Reynolds' etc "objectively pro-Saddam" shtick during the second Iraq war.

Conceptualizing and Measuring Geopolitical Alignments - www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

On Iran, see the larger context. Five of the seven countries that the Trump admin has militarily attacked since Jan. 2025 are significant oil producers, even though petrostates are rare. It's not a coincidence. I explain why @goodauth.bsky.social goodauthority.org/news/is-oil-...

www.programmablemutter.com/p/ai-is-a-bu... AI is a bureaucratic technology. So is war.

Current events confirm the achieved wisdom of time-honored classics in the social sciences.

This shitty culture destroyed a generation of centrist intellectuals and weakened our defenses against fascism.

It has become one of the classics of the discipline.

Soviet zombie economics is today's tech billionaire choice. Do I become a knuckle under kleptocrat? Or do I allow this grabby President to push me around and lock in a pattern of corporate capitulation? #Anthropic HT @himself.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/programm...

this

Canada. There is policymaker adjacent debate happening about the otherwise insuperable problem of defending a _very_ long land border against a possibly hostile neighbor. e.g. globalnews.ca/news/1162522...

I spent my last summer of my undergraduate degree manning the visitor's desk at Archbishop Bolton's library in Cashel. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolton_...

"... the specifics of the relationship between Anthropic and the Department of Defense... highlight more general contradictions in the Trump coalition between executive-authority enthusiasts and Silicon Valley oligarch-wannabes" -- @himself.bsky.social www.programmablemutter.com/p/who-loses-...

I suspect there is gender stuff happening too? Honest salt of the earth plumbers with proper views are 100% male, by stipulation.

ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

also advocated literal kill-a-tenth-of-Muslim countries'-population-at-random-to-show-them-we-are-not-messing-around decimation policy after September 11.

thanks to people in replies.

or she'll just Sideshow Bob it and say that there's supposed to be a comma after the first word,

again, anthropic is almost all people who explicitly left OpenAI for ethical reasons which i find esoteric and wrong, but nonetheless meaningful "ethics"

Via a friend who is still on the hellsite: these are all good questions.

lots of good stuff in this, ranging from wide ranging arguments to discussion of the startlingly extensive history of male sex-pests in the genre.

this

My thoughts open.substack.com/pub/musgrave...

BREAKING — 51 Iranian children are dead after a strike hits Minab girls elementary school in Iran.

This is actually genuinely very much not good for stability and not-killing

This has been my experience in the two places I've taught too.

Some interesting things to contemplate here. One point, most interesting to me: how the techbros' embrace of the increasingly authoritarian state might really blow up on them.

I spent yesterday afternoon teaching my students about the Trump AI strategy that Dean largely wrote, with additional material from his substack. This is a remarkable statement for him to make.

Here's one we baked already www.programmablemutter.com/p/who-loses-...

And the global reverberations: the US is asking allies to choose the American AI stack. But this episode sends a clear message-if you build on American AI, DC can reshape its terms at any moment. This will accelerate the digital sovereignty concerns voiced last week at the AI Impact Summit in India.

I spoke with @bloomberg.com about the designation of Anthropic as a "supply chain risk" by the Trump Administration www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCQ0...

What's missing? The public. Decisions about whether AI can surveil American citizens or autonomously deploy lethal force are being settled in a contract dispute. No Congress. No democratic deliberation. No accountability. We've outsourced questions about the use of force to a corporate negotiation.

x.com/SecWar/statu... Anthropic has just been designated as a "Supply Chain Risk to National Security." This is so fucking insane it is hard to describe how insane it is.

time traveler from 12 months from now just sent me this

this is the quintessential example of what Bruce Schneier and I call a "common knowledge attack" on democracy. It isn't just that the fake comments can masquerade as real ones. It's that flooding the zone makes public commenting _as a whole_ unreliable and readily dismissed, even from real people.