The recent days have been horrific. We can't become numb to repeated instances of illegal and unconstitutional action by government agencies. It's even worse when public officials are blatantly lying in ways that contradict dozens of pieces of video evidence.

A Washington Post article suggests that, beyond a certain threshold, larger homes don't make people happier. Instead, well-being is correlated with affordable housing in walkable neighborhoods where they feel socially connected. www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

Day 3 of me, a known tech bro, defending the honor and good name of career government officials. Part of the reason we're in the mess we're in, is that too many of y'all believe the lies that government officials are less smart or less motivated, than the private sector. That's complete nonsense.

I was walking down a street in New York and I thought how lovely it was, with the trees and the light. Tried to take a photo and this came out. It’s incredible how blind we become to the ugliness of cars. They really do mess things up. Yet somehow we manage to filter them out.

Only surprised it's just 1100

AI may bring many benefits to humanity, but none of them justify the slander of one of our greatest punctuation marks. www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the...

My last living musical hero is still my hero but unfortunately no longer living. RIP to the great, great Mr. Tom Lehrer.

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

Nature reports on how live-animal markets are a natural laboratory for viruses to evolve and spark deadly outbreaks, and how scientists lack support to study the risks these markets pose. #medsky 🧪

People really will get freaked out by the ingredients list on a jug of oat milk and then think they're only eating one chemical when they grill a steak. Enjoy your heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons!! Worse than anything in oat milk, but still not that bad.

Yep. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I think a lot about what Carl Sagan said in one of his final interviews.

Some stats from 100 days in on congestion pricing: - Complaints about car-honking are down 70% - The Holland Tunnel has 65% fewer delays at rush hour; time to get thru it is down 48% - 6 million fewer cars - Half as many traffic-related injuries - 1.5 million more visitors to BIDs year over year

conventional wisdom is that travel times haven't fallen in the congestion relief zone, according to readings from congestion-pricing-tracker.com. but it's not true anymore, and it was only ever true because google maps interpolates historical data.

After 9 great years in Google Cloud, I'm very excited to start a new role as Head of Engineering for the Responsibility organization at Google DeepMind. Although new beginnings are always difficult, I'm comforted knowing it will be a very chill and normal time to begin this challenge.

God I needed this

Making LLMs run efficiently can feel scary, but scaling isn’t magic, it’s math! We wanted to demystify the “systems view” of LLMs and wrote a little textbook called “How To Scale Your Model” which we’re releasing today. 1/n

Research in Cell Genomics led by @danafarber.bsky.social's Bradley Bernstein, MD, PhD, presents an AI transformer model developed in collaboration with Google Advanced Sciences which can predict gene expression. https://bit.ly/42zNVsj

Excited to present the results of my 20% project in collaboration with @broadinstitute.org and @danafarber.bsky.social . In our new paper we demonstrate a long-range model capable of detecting regulatory elements at distances beyond a million base pairs.

This is actually super-helpful and a huge relief. www.thecity.nyc/2025/01/28/h...

New Bleecker St Breakfast at chloe is phenomenal

Cat tax

"At the time of writing, nearly thirty people work in Checking at The New Yorker, almost all of them full time. It is labor, at scale, that produces accuracy." www.newyorker.com/news/the-wee...

Most succinct fact-check I've read of how LA Fire Dept's budget wasn't recently cut -- in fact, the opposite -- from @politico.com. But that misinformation spread anyway. www.politico.com/news/2025/01...

Is NYC's congestion fee a regressive tax? No. Driving into Manhattan is expensive even w/o the fee, so very few low-wage workers do it. Plus the money will be used to improve the transit systems they *do* use paulkrugman.substack.com/p/lessons-fr...

Ugh this is so sad. Maybe not her most powerful, but to me, her most moving poem is this one

Have crowds actually changed—or is it simply that the words we use to describe them have altered over time? @adamgopnik.bsky.social writes about how crowds persist as historical agents and have become a field of study.

The usual suspects are out there yelling "There are 23 million government workers! Fire most of them!" No awareness that most work for local governments, and most of *them* are schoolteachers. Federal employment hasn't grown since the 1950s