once again

“Turn around, go back to the place where you belong, and we’ll all forget this ever happened.”

It is $5 Friday, and Morris & Max are wondering if you might consider contributing to their baby bottle fund? We now have 5 bottle babies at the farm, and boy can they eat! donorbox.org/mmfs-donate

If you haven’t read “The Privatization of Everything” there’s a chapter on Chicago’s parking meter situation including enraging details like “the company that owned the meters sued the city to stop them from increasing buses bc it might decrease the use of the meters”

The magical effect of the Green Wave, visualized as if it were an NFL first down marker

New post! "Making Sense of Replications (and Some Nonsense about the Replication Crisis)," in which I suggest a journal club reading list of new papers on replication, and push back on claims that the replication crisis is fake. getsyeducated.substack.com/p/making-sen...

send me names of apps with cloud icons, and I'll install a bunch of them and screenshot my Dock

These are three different apps with completely different functionality. *ban clouds in app icons now*

so excited to finally get our solar panels up and running *monkey paw curls*

"If I am to flower into something other than myself, I would rather rot into nothingness as I am." - The Reflecting Pool

Invented problems are only useful to parties that will never govern, because there is no way to solve them in the real world.

Finally out in Psychological Review (psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/...), our update to Signal Detection Theory. We show that contrary to the prevailing Gaussian assumption, evidence distributions in recognition memory are likely minimum extreme Gumbel!

YouTube is just full of AI slop now. So much garbage that sounds *just* plausible enough if you aren’t paying too much attention.

Which is the crux of it. Previous governments dismantled third spaces, family and child resources etc. Current councils of all stripes are closing youth clubs and libraries. There’s nowhere to go and nothing to do.

I think we all know which platform teenagers will return to once Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit Twitch, Threads, and X are banned

"We're shipping so much more code with AI!" "Good, stable code?" "Oh heavens no. No no no. not at all. We couldn't possibly"

The Berlin Zoo named their baby Hippo Brötchen. :) (Bread roll 🥖)

found a little buddy and brought her to a nice flower shrub, but why are her wings so mangled? :( #invertebrate

It's hard to be excited about the Artemis III mission announcements when the CEO of the company making one of the mission's rockets has spent his week inciting racial violence via his personal social media platform.

There should be a Bulwer-Lytton-type award every year for the most brain-dead political take in a national publication. This would be a strong contender

Hardly a new point, I know, but these race riots are another example that, while Starmer is up in a froth about banning children from social media, the biggest danger is adults having their brains cooked by rage-baiting misinformation on Facebook and Twitter and being radicalised into violence.

And those “likes of Reform” include the sitting Labour government

Court holds Google liable for false claims in AI Overviews. Seems significant. "A regular search engine just points to outside websites. But AI overviews generate 'independent, new, and substantive statements' by evaluating and combining content from various third-party sites" the-decoder

have I mentioned that I teach first year writing here and that I am being laid off

Hey @erinbiba.bsky.social want to come over for dinner later?

couple of thieves #art #illustration #birdart #myart #magpie

Ted Chiang is brilliant. He takes the question of AI consciousness to its logical conclusion—really a must-read, right down to the last word: www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...

When he was very little (like six maybe?) my son got the idea from an in flight safety card on a plane that if you don’t maintain this EXACT position in flight your plane would crash:

this flight safety card is all of us

You used to be able to google the time of the sunset, and Google would give you the exact time right on top every single time. Thankfully, with artificial intelligence, you can now ask Google what time the sun will set and it will conveniently tell you "I don't know."

oh god I've completely lost it at this

In November 2023, police discovered the decayed corpse of Tracey Turnell in Walthamstow Market. She had no phone, job, passport, friends or lovers. There wasn’t a single photo of her. It was as if, in her far too public death, she entered the public record for the first time. Who was she?

[Now that's public] I've cancelled my donations to Wikipedia after some of us found out this happened. Again, "benevolent" executives are the fucking problem.

the USA should not be allowed to host a major sporting tournament again in our lifetimes, man

One of the arguments put to me re: scientific reform is essentially that it will sort itself (poor science is ignored) but of course things only get sorted if scientists are *constantly* doing the difficult work of evaluating competing claims, so "grey" science doesn't spread.

New blog post! Let's say an effect you are interested in varies between countries and you want to explain some of that cross-cultural variation. What could possibly go wrong? www.the100.ci/2026/05/20/f...

read this and tell me again that long term memory is organized semantically

Or: “Burnham pledges to pre-emptively lay down his best weapon against Reform”

I am once again begging, praying, weeping for lists of written instructions rather than videos. I do not want to watch your two minute video in the hope of catching the two seconds where you whizz past what goddamn menu the thing is under. Write. It. Down.

Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google's on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it. www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/chrome-...

Once again, the Onion sustains me.

Few people have more palpable contempt for learning than the people in charge of education; seems bad

If you're interested in #reproducibility, and/or a fan of Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, check out this Veritasium video. A process is reproducible (good), then not (bad), then reproducible with a different result (very bad)

The City of Ottawa posted the raw speed data from before and after Doug Ford banned speed cameras and the effect is so obvious it's not even necessary put a line marking when that happened. This chart shows the percentage of drivers going 15km/h or more over the posted limit.

Historian of abolition here, history tells us how we got here, to put it succinctly “John Brown was hanged for treason and Robert E. Lee was not.”

We listened. We reflected. We evolved. Meet RLadies+. A more inclusive identity for our global community. Because belonging matters. 🔗 Read more about the rebrand: rladies.org/news/2026/re...