We got my teenager an iPod clone with FM radio and now she's complaining about the un-targeted ads she's hearing. 😂

I know it makes me a super-villain, but I’m a France fan. Allez les Bleus!

Date yourself with a snap of your first ever computer.

Academic philosophy, like math, cares a lot about conceptual innovation. I love the treatment of Hardy's curse here & it points up dangers to philosophy from AI. The value of phil is going through others' thinking, puzzling out the problem *with* them. Not new conceptual results.

This year’s birthday was kind of miserable, as we’re all getting over summer colds. But the art my daughter made lifted my spirits. Plus, the main benefit of doing a part-time PhD is that your teenager will (briefly) think you’re smart. #PhdSky

For a parent in a part-time PhD program, this is enormously validating. I wonder at the fact that I end up with coherent, sometimes useful prose at the end. Now I’m even more impressed with the rest of you.

Martin Puchner on writing and speech as (unnatural) technologies, plus some bullish thoughts on artistic creation with AI. Lots to disagree with, but this was thought-provoking in a way that booster narratives usually aren’t.

Queued, Prof. Nyholm’s work on AI has been illuminating for me.

What’s one book you think a conscious AI agent or alien visitor to Earth should read, and why? Could be something profound, funny, weird. Any reason is the right reason.

Circular thinking is only a failure if you conceive of "true" thinking as linear & propositional. Even if scientific thinking only claims to *approach* truth asymptotically, this is how we moderns think about thinking. Great post from @raeandruth.bsky.social, with some great AI infographics.

My daughter with “Snails Space with Vari-Lites” at the American Art Museum almost ten years ago. Sad to hear about David Hockney’s passing, he was one of my very favorites (and hers).

Sounds legit

“Inflation is a real thing.”

I sent my agent feedback on its work product, and it marked my feedback as spam. These things aren't conscious, sentient, or human-like...but they are annoying.

Me: Claude Code, I have some Nate Jones posts I haven't read yet, I want to check them against this repo to see if they have useful ideas. Claude Code: I have reviewed every Nate article in project memory, databases, emails, Costco shelves, and outer space. Me: ... Chill, they're in my tabs.

Seeing @steveearle.bsky.social live for the first time last night was incredible. Some feel good, some blues, some Townes, and everything in between. I’ll never forget Steve talking about his sons and playing “Little Rock n Roller,” missing my own son.

I’ve been working on this dissertation and the Pope just…he just tweeted it out.

I just had the worst customer support experience of my life with UberEats. Worse than the cable company. Come to find out, they are selling this awful AI customer abuse bot to other businesses:

Why does my Obsidian vault look like Charlie's conspiracy board in It's Always Sunny? 100% because I am thorough and honest, and not at all because I have issues and am Too Much.

I assume that in the new post-AI academic order, we will be required to exhibit our extensive, poorly written notes on everything that we've cited in a paper. For scientific integrity. And let me tell you, I am so ready for that day. #phdsky

i can’t help but think we’re far from nailing memory systems this one here is extremely interesting. two LLMs at once, one just managing and surfacing memory for the other

This was a great read. We are facing collective problems that are potentially changing what it means to be human for nearly everyone.

Existentialists Wanted: Philosophy of AI Beyond Ethics link.springer.com/article/10.1...

This short post on BoingBoing cuts right to the heart of AI "selfhood". AI models are just bags of bits, running on distributed hardware. The popular convo is about whether "Claude" or "GPT" is sentient, has beliefs, etc. But there is no such unitary entity to ascribe those things to.

My 6yo is rooting for the Alabama women in the SEC softball semifinal, because “Florida is a CROCODILE.” Only close on the mascot, but I can’t fault her logic.

I feel like this crazy fixture aside, if Spurs are relegated, I should just bandwagon Man City. They're based in a place I've visited and really liked. The incoherence of being an American fan of the Premier League is getting to me. (I may also be trolling @drpatoc.bsky.social here.)

Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels from Infocom. I’m not sure I’ve ever loved a game more than that one, though New Vegas comes close.

We just saw Chris Higgins at the Comedy Loft in DC. Highly recommended, super funny dude.

My response is, we routinely use human beings as tools. And it’s getting worse. I think that’s part of why it’s so tempting to take AI models as conscious: they’re language-using entities we can objectify just like humans. (Not excluding disordered intimate “relationships.”)

The gaps for AI adoption are mostly hiding in processes, workflows, and execution. Lily has a great piece here. I've been living this this week, building the tools we really need and seeing where the gaps are. They're mostly human. But building the tools (using Codex and Claude Code) helps ID them.

I used Codex to review a project I built with Claude Code. It figured out all the things lingering in my head, but not the docs, about what needs to be done to shore up the thing. I’m almost amazed as the first time I used Claude Code effectively, in the ancient days of January 2026.

I agree that the right policy response to AI will be complicated. But it drives me nuts that we’re not talking about cultural responses, at least not much. We don’t have to sit around waiting for government (or a voting majority) to tell us what the future will be.

It’s worth noting that my favourite uses of LLMs for writing are “did I write this entire document for UK spelling?” and “did I screw up my citations?” I hate doing those things 100% manually.

This is an excellent conversation. Now that the LLMs have gotten really good, it’s interesting to see (at least) two types of outcomes. If you can’t think, you’ll get much better and more stylish boilerplate. If you can, LLMs can facilitate interesting writing. I see a lot of the former around.

Poli-fi fiction is a great idea — I’d certainly read these. Especially a lottocracy novel/series.

There are 500 useful niche skills like mail merge that everyone *should* know because they occasionally save time or trouble. Few people are likely to know more than a handful. The fact that you can ask Claude or GPT to do it in natural language is actually a meaningful innovation. /TED-talk

I guess I was really meant to study Heidegger. He draws attention to the thingly character of works of art by comparing Beethoven quartets to potatoes, and I just go, “Yup, checks out.”

Did you know Heidegger was kind of obsessed with nuclear weapons? New article out in Gatherings has both historical and philosophical research on this weird rabbit hole I’ve been living in the last two years: academia.edu/resource/wor...

This from Ted is really insightful. I haven’t (yet) seen it with academic work or corp strategy, and maybe I’m just not skilled enough. But if you treat LMs as thinking partners instead of answer machines, the results can be stellar. I’ve seen it in comms, finance, & more.

This is incredible. I am a recovering em-dash abuser, but I will never clean up my act with commas.

Brilliant marketing, but I imagine this is also roughly true in substance. AI coding agents will have gone from “bad even with human supervision” to “it isn’t safe for humans to write code themselves” in the space of ~6-12 months.

“Take away the agent, and Bob is still a first-year student who hasn't started yet. The year happened around him but not inside him.” Great description of any use of an LLM that takes away formative struggles in education (reading papers, fixing early mistakes, outlining arguments).

Really insightful, and I love the idea of trusting our (future) selves to preserve games as living things. Especially on the precipice of code no longer being a precious, expensive commodity for many.

This was pretty entertaining.

Our 13 yo’s view from the Ponte Sant’Angelo in Rome. She’s getting some good reps in with her camera.

A sign that human creativity is a bottleneck is that this year everyone can generate almost any image or video they can think of for nearly free and the April Fools posts are basically just as bad as any other year.

The AI friendship lit is an attractive nuisance for me. I keep wanting to contribute something, and a lot of existing approaches don’t think quite deeply enough about ontology. Jake’s paper looks great, focusing on the constitutive carelessness of AI models. Emotion is a red herring.

This is fascinating. Technology is part of the story of why we’ve become so polarized for sure. (Including democracy as a tech, as @alexgphilosophy.bsky.social describes in Lottocracy.) Anti-polarization tech could be part of the solution.

This genre of "I used AI incorrectly, deploying zero human judgment, and it didn't go great" story really gets to me. The world needs more profiles of people who fixed a smudge on their glasses with a hammer while wearing them, clearly.

Name a film you've seen 7 or more times