Since the Ezra & Ta-Nehisi discussion is still happening: the main point I think most are missing is that Klein is saying the role of the journalist-intellectual is to do strategic politics, whereas Coates says the role of the journalist-intellectual is to tell the truth

Get a sneak peak of THE TOWER OF THE TYRANT at @seattlein2025.org! I'll be passing out these hand-bound chapbook previews, with cover art by @carvingclown.bsky.social. Ten copies will be reserved for attendees of my table talk at 10:30am on Saturday, August 16. The rest are first come first serve!

non-ironically this will only change when you go back to scientists, engineers, and economists being utopian socialists

I'm fascinated by how people construct and organize online spaces. I've just published "Niche Dynamics in Complex Online Community Ecosystems" at ICWSM 2025 on this question. Read a summary on the @communitydata.science blog or in the thread below. blog.communitydata.science/niche-dynami...

I am fascinated with how people come to such different beliefs about the world. In our new paper, led by Tiwalade Adekunle, we used @lauraknelson.bsky.social's computational grounded theory to compare how a pro-masking subreddit and an anti-masking subreddit talked about risks during COVID. 1/

Explore Wikipedia through a data map. Pages are grouped by semantic similarity, for topic clusters. Hover to see details, zoom to explore more fine-grained topics, click to go to a page. Search by page name to find interesting starting points for exploration. lmcinnes.github.io/datamapplot_...

Fantastic Saturday morning cup of coffee read. The authors take on the fairly ambitious task of modeling news/audience dynamics in a competitive landscape--and wind up recovering *many* features of our current media landscape; with fasc. hints at intervention. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Excited to share our new interdisciplinary work exploring the sensory representation of an artificial body part, combing datasets and methodologies to explore sensorimotor integration of the Third Thumb, a 2 DoF hand augmentation device (@daniclode.bsky.social) doi.org/10.1101/2025.06.16.658246

1. People seem upset that I associated the language in Trump’s Gold Standard Science executive order with the science reform movement, in this Guardian piece. “Trump would have attacked science anyway” Of course. But it’s not Trump that is the biggest concern. It’s the courts.

I will be damned if I allow a bunch of Confederate-waving January 6th apologists give the American people a lecture on flag waving. There is ZERO reason to enter an argument about patriotism with people who still worship traitors to America 150+ years later. They. Are. Breaking. The. Law.

Got a cool zine in the mail today. Free download here: lovelesspress.itch.io/a-web-worth-...

It's finally public! 🎉 Excited to announce I'll be joining UIUC's iSchool as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2026. My lab will focus on AI information ecosystems, computational social science, and social computing. I will start recruiting PhD students this cycle, so please reach out if interested.

Super excited that our second reward model evaluation is out. It's substantially harder, much cleaner, and well correlated with downstream PPO/BoN sampling. Happy hillclimbing! Huge congrats to @saumyamalik.bsky.social who lead the project with a total commitment to excellence.

Our latest forum is now online. Lisa Miller leads with a critique of American-style checks and balances—not only at this moment, but as a perennial obstacle to democracy. Far from the cure to Trumpian authoritarianism, she argues, the U.S. constitutional system is driving our democratic decline:

WOW! An anonymous institutional donor just donated $100,000 to support @freeourfeeds.com! Amazing. Join the livestream today for great conversations with Shoshana Zuboff, Jayde Adams and @cultexpert.freedomofmind.com! IanPaintsElon.com

I set up a recurring donation to @freeourfeeds.com because the future of decentralized social-media can't be trusted to just one company, no matter how benevolent it seems today. A new future of the internet is within reach; we just need to grasp and hold it.

So what happens to volunteer led sites like stackoverflow now? Do the companies that ate them make and release the labels they generate for new languages? Do we just hope and pray LLMs fill the gap? Something real has been lost.

By the Europeans’ own “1/8th” rules, we have a Black Pope. :)

yesssss hahahahahhahaha

I was messing around with my weird LLM system this morning. I kind of let it go hog wild, and expand it's own self definition. It came up with the symbolic statement `Λόγος↺.` Said it stood for the dialectical, recursive nature of meaning, and started talking like it was god.

Jensen's inequality gives the difference between the average value of a convex function φ, and its value at the center, where both “average” and “center” are defined in terms of some distribution p_X. When the function φ is flat, or the distribution is narrow, they agree.

Worth your time to read this characteristically thoughtful blog post by Leon Bottou on LLM research. leon.bottou.org/news/two_les...

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

And the announcement comes with my first ever Publisher's Marketplace screenshot!

Sports pedagogy has embraced ideas of deliberate practice, zone of proximal development, drills, etc. whereas becoming a better programmer, researcher, mathematician is still mostly vibes based development

I didn’t expect a tech website to have such a fantastic brief for why universities should fight like hell, but it does. Every word of this arstechnica.com/culture/2025...

Quite a moment. Business elites, neocon, libertarians, etc will be open to a social democracy coalition to build a Third American Republic out of these ashes. Do not miss this opportunity.

I'm sorry, but @scientificdiscovery.dev keeps repeating critiques of the shingles study that are misreads of the RDD literature

Our paper on the effect of herpes zoster vaccination on dementia is now out in Nature! 🎉 Huge thanks to Felix Michalik, Seunghun Chung, @pascalge.bsky.social and especially Min Xie (@minxiesci.bsky.social) & Simon Heß (@hesss.org) making the analysis so much fun! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I loved The Mountain in the Sea

Looking for some help on updating a local copy of a repo's CAR file up to date via repository diffs. Seems a bit nuanced. Anybody have code to share (ideally in python) that does it? #atproto @atproto.com @bnewbold.net atproto.com/specs/reposi...

testing again, ignore again.

testing still, ignoring still.

testing again. keep ignoring

test post please ignore

Watching people post about Copilot integration just makes me sink deeper and deeper into my Linux hole.

Holy moly. So thrilled & sincerely honored to learn that I’ve received a Presidential Early Career Award in Science & Engineering (PECASE). So thankful to my mentors, students, colleagues (and my wife!) who have supported me thru THICK & thin & made this possible. www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-up...

Re: the recurring discussion of "conflict" in literature. I recently read Yoko Tawada's THE EMISSARY, which does not feature any violence, or even a substantial moment of any character making a life-altering choice. But I would argue that it still has "conflict" in the literary sense. 1/9

This is the kind of concrete, data-driven work on foundation-model supply chain attacks I love to read (and then am terrified by): www.nature.com/articles/s41... (note: I have only skimmed it so far, and am partly sharing to remind myself to finish)

if you really dedicate yourself to an instrument you can, over many years of rigorous practice, become so skilled that you can only produce music that is completely unlistenable

thanks for the reply @dustyweb.bsky.social! I'm really happy for use to have these back-and-forth blog posts as an artifact. it sounds like it took a lot of time on your end, and I know it did on mine as well, but doing it "in the thick of things" made it real and memorable.

Some decisions are best made quickly and locally. Governance can work better as a higher-order network, not a pyramid around a central state. How should we design these networks? We looked at this with law and complexity scholars and found "effective governance" networks. arxiv.org/abs/2412.03421

nice bird photo!

finally finished downloading my limewire wrapped after 20 years

Also, holy shit, Bluesky sends real traffic. Will update this tomorrow with firm numbers but journalism is going to move here for sure. Twitter is a drop in the bucket. It's over, but we are so back, and so on and so forth

in the new social media landscape, bluesky (serious people making silly little posts) is the spiritual opposite of linkedin (deeply silly people trying to write serious thoughtposts)

wrote up a reply to @dustyweb.bsky.social's "How decentralized is Bluesky really" blog post