There are so many different reasons to believe that LLMs cannot have beliefs, cannot know anything, cannot reason and cannot be a form of intelligence.

I’ve been running around asking tech execs and academics if language was the same as intelligence for over a year now - and, well, it isn’t. @benjaminjriley.bsky.social explains how the bubble is built on ignoring cutting-edge research into the science of thought www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

i’d not endorse all of the cost computation choices. but the key point—changes in the price of participation in contemporary life are not taken into account by conventional purchasing power measures, and that price has grown much more than is reflected in inflation and poverty measures—is correct.

Learning that Annemarie Gray (no relation) of Open New York, NYC's YIMBY group, has been appointed to Mayor-elect Mamdani's housing transition team. This is FANTASTIC news!

A friend who teaches theology shared with me a post about CS Lewis's Mere Christianity, which discusses foundational Christian logic across denominations. It reminded me of Dale's tweet below, and I wanted to share some thoughts here regarding modesty and respectability, which are often hot topics.

WATCH: If you really STILL don’t understand how car-dependent suburbia is HEAVILY SUBSIDIZED by downtown & all the urban parts of your city, please watch this EXCELLENT video by #NotJustBikes helped by #UrbanThree & @StrongTowns.org. And then please SHARE it as much as possible. youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI

Warren proposed a bill that would make the PE firms liable for the debts of the companies they control. It really is just common sense

WATCH: If you STILL don’t understand how car-dependent suburbia is HEAVILY SUBSIDIZED by downtown & all the urban parts of your city, watch this EXCELLENT video by @notjustbikes with @UrbanThree & @StrongTowns. And then please SHARE it as much as possible. youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI

The potential benefits of migration are not identical everywhere. This remarkable new resource from @niskanencenter.bsky.social maps the US counties where the economic benefits of immigration might be highest —> www.niskanencenter.org/mapping-amer...

An Oregon pilot program giving cash to homeless youths sees a staggering reduction in homelessness. The program gave participants $1,000 cash payments each month for two years, and at the end of the project's first phase, 91% of participants reported being in stable housing.

Keep this in mind when people claim cars mean business — closing Central #Madrid to cars over holidays resulted in a 9.5% boost in retail spending on its main shopping street: STUDY. There was also a 71% drop in air pollution. Via @carltonreid.com in @forbes.com. #citymakingmath #citiesforpeople

Good morning. I've got a banger new post out today that develops a new method for placing voters on the left-right ideological spectrum, and adds a new, "non-ideological"/affordability axis to usual way we chart & think about US voters (esp swing voters). www.gelliottmorris.com/p/not-just-l...

If you use GMail, AI (Gemini) was turned on yesterday by default and now scans all of your content for machine learning. To turn off, go to Settings>General and scroll down. Uncheck the box for "Smart features." There's other "Smart" add-ons as well, but that's the one that reads your content.

The USDA has designated 444 counties as farming-dependent; their average vote share for Trump was 77.7%. investigatemidwest.org/2024/11/13/t...

Today is the day to repost this meme about International Men's Day, one of the most unironically wholesome memes that has ever been made. Shoutout to all my fellow champs, chiefs, and kings. ✊

"Democracy is dying in the West because it has been overtaken by a caste of professionals, politicians and technocrats, for whom democracy is a slogan, a contest, a source of legitimacy in an instrumental sense, but not an idea or ideal they respect or aspire to."

It is must-reading.

Since Christmas is around the corner, a reminder that Wikipedia has a store. And the profits go to a project billionaires hate, so you're buying an object and getting free spite.

Excellent Chris Lehmann piece in @thebaffler.com on how current American fiction's blind spots when it comes to the MAGA mind: thebaffler.com/salvos/ameri...

The point about LLMs lacking "voice" is correct, but imo the limits to good AI writing are more fundamental. I would sum it up like this: the very best writing "defamiliarizes" the familiar -- makes it fresh, conjures it anew, etc. But LLM outputs are an averaged rehash of the familiar, by design.

In this post, I explain why the major questions doctrine provides additional reason to reject Trump's claims of sweeping detention/deportation power under the Alien Enemies Act, which he claims is triggered by illegal migration and drug smuggling: reason.com/volokh/2025/...

Enjoying Pluribus but mostly want to know how the economy works.

Keep on travelin', Carol! #Pluribus

A really important point. You can't "solve"misinformation without understanding the ways beliefs function as identity markers more than attempts to represent reality accurately gone awry.

Centrist Democratic strategists have probably done more to prime voters to think of the Party as a vehicle for wokeism than anyone other than Trump or Fox News. And on very thin data that's not causal or predictive out of sample. The extent of the self-own is remarkable substack.com/@gelliottmor...

every company in 2025

Great piece by Zadie Smith. When the right talks about classics or "Western" culture, these works are only important to the extent that it demonstrates their superiority, they have no interest in art in and of itself beyond that www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

What do liberals stand for? This

Amazing scenes

Rhetorical pleas against infighting are always begging the question about who's actually on the same side as you.

While a 50 year mortgage might lower monthly payments, it drastically increases total interest and slows equity growth. Stimulating demand without fixing supply would likely raise prices. The core issue in the housing market isn't financing; it's the lack of supply.

No matter how hard people try to convince us having empathy is wrong, it is right. No matter how hard people try to convince us that diversity is a weakness, it is a strength. No matter how hard people try to convince us that love is limited, it is unlimited.

parents 8 years from now: yoshinobu yamamoto you go to your room this instant!

I feel like I say this every year but I really need people to hear it. Halloween is the best American holiday. Just kids outside welcomed into their world, marching around together, showing off their costumes to the elderly, parents meeting parents, neighbors catching up with neighbors.

Go Blue! Christ.

Husband sent me the Baffler essay on postliteracy and it’s so good. Goddamn, starting with Ong (who remembers him and Luria? Yes!), Eco, a whirlwind class analysis of literacy in history. Haven’t even reached the main part of the essay yet. A must read. thebaffler.com/salvos/we-us...

"Does moderation matter? In our current two-party system? Not really. Presidential vote explains 98% of House outcomes. Candidate quality has collapsed to statistical noise." open.substack.com/pub/leedrutm...

It's also wild considering even college sophomores have figured this out. yale-herald.com/2025/08/31/h...

Not a hard question, except for the culture that pretends it's not the answer 1) right-wing media lies incessantly, so anyone truth-based doesn't trust it, and anyone who trusts it doesn't trust anything else 2) other media treats those lies as legitimate, for "fairness," getting trust from no one

This talking point has never made sense to me. Social benefits are more likely to increase wages by making it easier for workers to say no to low wage offers. Structural risk of mass starvation — THAT’S the subsidy to low-wage employers!

makes me weep to think of the gifts robbed from us because unaffordable housing has made it difficult for people to pursue their passions and hobbies

If they razed the thing and built 500 units of public housing, I’d be all for it.

Hawkeyes looking real!

Updating my LEGO White House

the difference between a wonderful audiobook performance by a gifted voice actor and this "digital voice" horseshit masquerading as legit audiobooks makes me steaming mad. good narration is important and deserves to be paid for!!!!!!

My position is that you can use it to effectively automate some things, which is cool, useful, and even kinda fun, but you can also waste tons of time trying to make it do things it basically always botches because it’s badly oversold and sorta sucks.