But actually as far as I know we don't have a well understood causal story for aerodynamic lift. AI, that is LLMs and related machines, are not special in their mysteriousness. Language sure is special though.

Binge watching The Chair Company

Here are the 2025 property tax bills for the famous Painted Ladies houses in San Francisco. If the numbers look kind of weird to you, welcome to wonderful world of Prop 13 (1978)!

Maybe it will happen tomorrow

they’re shooting crowd control munitions at crowds that include multiple members of congress, the governor, and a sitting united states senator. they fired pepper balls at the senator. they cannot and will not be reigned in by democracy, whatever’s left of it.

I know people don’t say this anymore but: protect this girl at all costs

You make fun of horoscope girlies ⭐️ but then you let a pile of linear algebra tell you what to do….

For a while there was so much crowing about people losing their jobs over posts about Charlie Kirk. I’m not seeing many posts showing people are winning law suits - but they are.

o no i got invited to a manel (13 men ffs) feeling extremely tokenized

Culmination of my weekend experimenting with local models: Haven't hooked it up to an image model to see if it works yet, but here's the PoC of what Qwen 3.5 9B put together in ~2 hours today. Will probably rename the repo since I moved toward a computer vision approach. github.com/ajnafa/TabFe...

I don’t think it’s a great use of time or energy to pretend you can reform the president‘s personal militia

it am the whole brain

So glad to finally share work years in the making! What started with fMRI effect size benchmarks ended up showing that conventional study planning detects ~half of expected brain effects, suggesting more distributed processes than the lit shows (+ new methods for mass univ effect/power estimation)

“despite not having to go to trial, we're still picking up the pieces of our lives both emotionally and financially. Every single one of us as co-defendants, we have very real fears of bankruptcy and being in debt for the rest of our lives because of this.” Innocent, but the legal costs are high.

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill was denied access to Delaney Hall this morning whyy.org/articles/de... @whyynews.bsky.social #NewJersey

A lot of people who should know better are treating the demise of RCP8.5 as some kind of "gotcha!" moment that somehow overturns the rather dire climate predictions of the past decade. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth!

Ultimately, the Earth could still experience RCP8.5-like warming this century even though RCP8.5-like emissions are virtually impossible. It's not likely, but it's within realm of possibility. That's alarming, and it means we absolutely need to understand potential consequences.

We currently appear to be taking an upper mid-range greenhouse gas emission trajectory through the late 2020s relative to IPCC scenarios from 10-20 years ago (i.e., not an extremely high RCP8.5-like one, certainly, but also not an especially low one--closer to RCP4.5 or RCP6).

There is, in real world climate system, more than one path to get to a "high warming scenario." Thankfully, it doesn't look like we're going to take anything close to an RCP8.5 *emissions* trajectory. But that does not mean we're safe from an RCP8.5-like level of warming. Why?

My fav line: What’s critical is that Black-led groups act as _representatives of Black people to the Democratic Party_, not representatives of the Democratic Party to Black people

"I spent way too long at a Nordstrom Rack picking out shoes that I thought looked fashionable but also modest and wouldn't make jurors think I was a bitch." Never had to prepare go on trial, but still relate to this so hard.

The United States is at war with Cuba. A blockade is an act of war, imposed by military force. The goal is to cause widespread suffering to get the target to capitulate. If the Chinese navy blockaded Taiwan in an attempt to overthrow the Taiwanese government, that'd be an act of war. So is US-Cuba.

"What is key here is that conservatism was ascendant. Heritage was built mid-Nixon. The Federalist Society was built in the Reagan years. But in the conservative worldview, these victories were insufficient, because their perceived popular mandate was not reflected in their power over institutions."

I've been reading older books on AI written by PhDs for non-academic audiences, and some recent ones. And oof the post-Gladwell popular nonfiction template. In the up until the 2000s. "I'm going to tell you you some stuff I want you to know." Now "Little story/fun facts/take-aways/repeat"

PhD? No problem. Start a non-profit? Fun! Have a baby in grad school? LFG! Consistently manage my own laundry and keep a closet organized? ETERNAL HELLFIRE AND DAMNATION LEVELS OF CHAOS.

this is why I find climate dooming so frustrating there is no point - none - at which throwing up your hands and going “well we’re fucked” is the correct response every tenth of a degree matters and can make a big difference and is worth fighting for

i am a revanchist for the early internet and you can too amybrown.xyz/manifesto

this is where i finally tell bluesky that i used to work for tom and the worst thing i can say about him is i think it’s a failure of imagination that he still has so much money

I believe the phenomenon described here with AI is one version of the same thing that leads patients to various modes of ‘alternative care’ that doctors like to denigrate. MDs want to be the ultimate authorities, but they aren’t willing to put in the work to build trust.

Amen! It always surprises me to hear colleagues value and aim for impact above anything else. Some even use it as a moral justification.

Good science does not have immediate high impact, only "popular" does.

ja fragt euch mal

It's fascinating to me how the people who push back on development that would enable fewer people to use cars (density, bike networks, transit) *also* hate all other cars but their own. You saw this in the LWB tantrum this weekend, too.

bow before your god. the true ultimate goal of evolution.

It’s such a reveal that many people implicitly think about structuring information for machines as primarily a selfish benefit as they will use those machines later, but do not see partners in the same way.

And for the same reason. "this structure will help the machine think better." yeah, that data dictionary, code documentation, structured materials and results metadata, all that shit was going to help your heart-beating colleagues think better too. Also I am super guilty of not doing this, so

Tangentially, it continues to bug me that people are willing to structure information for machines that they weren't willing to structure for other people, e.g. coworkers.

Powerful piece! www.ms.now/opinion/canc...

updating your committee on your dissertation progress

Jason is a great follow for so many reasons but one of them is for spirit lifting posts like this. I'm being completely sickeningly sincere right now. From my vantage, lucky kiddos.

It am San Diego

Ok so the thing that absolutely bothers me so much about this meme is that the last two panels are always redundant, like if you know the format you only need two of four panels to get the joke. I hate that so much and I don't know why.

In nuanced news about people using LLMs, people probably like asking them about medical issues because they evince the behavior we wish we saw from our medical providers. Reminder to consider that people's reports about what they like might be valid.

For anyone interested, I'm actually more competent than your already biased assessment tells you I am.

Over a decade of insisting that verifiably restricting Iran's nuclear program was terrible, because unilateral US force would achieve so much more. It hasn't. The JCPOA advocates were always right. Cruz, Graham, FDD, etc. bear responsibility for this disaster (but will likely never acknowledge it).

I remember adults coaching my siblings and me to laugh at Chocolate Rain. I didn't know what I was seeing or hearing but it unsettled me. They knew what it was about so they taught us what to do when we saw something challenging like that. We laughed at him.

On panelView, and why we should always look at our data first.. yiqingxu.substack.com/p/plot-your-...