Oh no! RIP, Brian.

Huge loss. news.miami.edu/as/stories/2...

Correct, Andy. Paperwork LEGALLY makes you American.

My simple heuristic for "is it conscious?" questions is: 1) Take the set of beings that you're confident are conscious. 2) Identify what all those beings have in common. 3) Ask whether the thing you're asking about share those commonalities. 4) If not, then answer "not conscious."

Highly recommend this pod on AI where @chrislhayes.bsky.social interviews Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of a big recent New Yorker piece on the subject. Tons of interestng discussion, especially for us ex-philosophy geeks. Forthwith, a short 🧵

Ok, since I’ve gotten a few “you don’t know for sure it’s not true!” let’s briefly say why. In a hyper-strict Cartesian sense of “know,” you can’t really “know” whether anything or anyone is conscious except yourself. But in the everyday sense, outside the dorm room…

We’re dying because of overpriced dinosaur juice while China wins the future.

1/5 Atif Mian's article in F&D Magazine summarizes his related academic pieces in which he refutes the claim that because the rich save a higher share of their income than the non-rich, rising income inequality leads to rising saving. www.imf.org/en/publicati...

it’s not his fault he is under the control of a small rat that hates poor people

For years on my old blog I published the names of servicemembers who died in Iraq & Afghanistan. No other outlets were. These are the first 4 Americans to die in the Iran War. Capt. Cody A. Khork, 35 Sgt. 1st Class Noah L. Tietjens, 42 Sgt. 1st Class Nicole M. Amor, 39 Sgt. Declan J. Coady, 20

Larry Bartels made this point awhile back, about the Great Depression www.washingtonpost.com/business/eco...

Another big reason obsessive poll-sniffing is silly: “Public opinion” on most issues quite literally does not exist. It is an ephemeral artifact of the process of polling itself. Ask again a day later with slightly different wording & the numbers change radically.

Been watching recent Star Trek shows and it’s neat how every other episode they come up with some astonishing technological innovation in the heat of the moment to save the universe or whatnot and then, instead of it becoming ubiquitous and transformative, you sorta never hear about it again. Cool.

My opinion: Jamelle Bouie is the best national political columnist in America. This doesn’t mean he is always right or you always need to agree with him. But he consistently elevates the form. Conservatives and liberals who make deranged personal attacks on him just make themselves look bad.

if she wins, its total victory for left yimbys happy to say

Personally, I don’t think we should bring about Armageddon.

This is a good piece not only on Block but on AI, including the term AI washing. If you read anything on the topic read this

I guess I’m relieved that my application a year ago for a government affairs job at Anthropic went nowhere.

New, in which I go hard tankie on the viral Citrinis essay. (That is I approach it with a Two-Agent New Keynesian model.) There were two predictions from it that sounded true. But only one survived putting it under a model during this learning exercise. /1 newsletter.mikekonczal.com/p/sending-in...

I think it’s a property developer mental model: America is a mall. If you wanna sell things in the mall, you gotta pay rent. Otherwise, you’re ripping off the mall.

Her father fled China because he organized student protests during Tiananmen. He was a political refugee. The story of this family, and Alysa Liu, would have played out very differently today. This is what we're losing. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/19/w...

Distressed that it didn’t even occur to me to name my dog Gargamel.

The thing about weaponised interdependence is that other people, including your allies, might try and escape it, even if you don’t actually weaponise it.

This is a great piece (got via @simonwillison.net ) steve-yegge.medium.com/the-ai-vampi... As an economist would say: the productivity enhancement can be real, but the gains should not exclusively accrue to the firm!

Functionalist approaches measure intelligence by how closely its outputs resemble the human mind. If you constantly recalibrate its outputs to resemble a human mind, you're not creating a thinking machine. You are creating a machine to trick other functionalists.

I think the correct take is that (1) LLMs are normal automation technology. They eliminate some jobs that can be automated, create other jobs managing the automation processes, and increase the productivity of workers who gain mastery of the tools; and… 1/2

Put it in the Louvre? Nah, sis — put it in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations after the grid goes down, because this one needs PRESERVING:

A tale told in two screenshots :)

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

In Minneapolis, people are literally singing resistance before marching to the hotels where ICE agents are staying—inviting them to defect and join us in solidarity. It’s an action rooted in compassion, courage, and collective humanity. Transforming fear into shared power.

Now out in Synthese! 😊 "Reframing the free will debate: the universe is not deterministic", with Henry Potter and George Ellis rdcu.be/e2hIh

Still awash in cortisol from kids summer camp sign-ups.

Well, Kristen Radtke of The Verge just made me cry with this remembrance of her childhood best friend Alex Pretti. "Alex was an easy playmate: generous, curious, sweet. His mother always ensured he had a tidy haircut and a clean room." www.theverge.com/policy/86856...

I wrote about my childhood friend Alexi Pretti. Please read it and share it and remember him as a human being. @theverge.com

Hello I’m the ubermensch, my one weakness is whistles

Superb reportage on Minneapolis from one of the all time greats.

If the admin's strategic goal was to break public resistance to immigration enforcement activities, it was a tactical mistake to go to the Twin Cities.

Always read Kerry Howley

nine years old

Kerry Howley reports from Minneapolis as the city fights back against Trump’s ICE invasion. “The chaos is both real and routine, a stasis that will hold until it doesn’t.” Read the full Cover Story: tinyurl.com/55xjswrn

I wrote about Minneapolis. nymag.com/intelligence...

What we call generative AI is actually the logic of poetry infused into the humanity of an insurance table

Just finishing watching Task. Great show. But it struck me that depicting federal law enforcement as apolitical and professional in a contemporary setting now feels like a dispatch from an alternate reality. The feds as the competent grown-up cops is a broken trope.

Just a normal dog

America has a housing shortage. Every single housing proposal you see that is not "build more housing" will have the primary effect of pushing up the prices of existing housing, and is therefore, in reality, a plan to enrich current homeowners. In conclusion, build more housing.

Fuck it I don’t care anymore

Just published, my “The Philosophers Have Only Interpreted the World.”Philosophy and Society 36 (4): 985–1000. Open access. journal.ifdt.bg.ac.rs/index.php/fi...

Go Hawks!

Here's a particularly juicy nugget I found in my reporting . . .