Ian McKellen performs “The Strangers’ Case” speech from “Sir Thomas More” on Colbert.

Perfect example of sousvelliance power. ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/su...

This WSJ story about the unconstitutional secret ICE administrative warrants memo shows everything that's wrong with legal journalism under a lawless presidency. The TLDR is that it falsely presents unconstitutional conduct as law-creating. Very important thread 🧵🧵🧵 www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

wikipedia turns 25 today! the last unenshittified major website! backbone of online info! triumph of humanity! powered by urge of unpaid randos to correct each other! somehow mostly reliable! "good thing wikipedia works in practice, because it sure doesn't work in theory" - old wiki adage

How I'm dealing with my stress: I bought a 3d printer and am producing 100 whistles at a time. 1000 heading to Minneapolis tomorrow.

haha linus vibecoding

ICYMI: Finally blogged about an "old" paper led by @groceryheist.cc that uses data from a @wikipedia.org system to show how the introduction of a biased AI flagging system can still lead to more fairness because the humans without the system are even more biased. mako.cc/copyrighteou...

Want to discover great posts beyond who you already follow? The For You feed, built by @spacecowboy17.bsky.social, is a personalized algorithmic feed based on your likes. It's one of our favorites for finding cool conversations across the network. Try it here: bsky.app/profile/spac...

Claude code. So impressive and useful. I've heard it said that SOTA AI is much better at coding than other things. Can anyone point me to a source on qualitative and quantitative comparisons with other tasks?

Not going to stop yelling about this. Hugely gratified by this review.

Great review of The Tower of the Tyrant in SFX Magazine! 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 'J.T. Greathouse flexes the muscles of his imagination with The Tower of the Tyrant . . . this is a work of expansive scope and scale, with thrilling battles, compelling characters and high stakes' @sfxmagazine.bsky.social

Really pretty aurora display visible now in Minneapolis!

This flow chart is also canonical (sincere apologies but I do not think I can alt-text this)

I really think at its heart philosophy is one giant battle, taking place over many eras and nations, between people who are basically pleasant bureaucrats and people who are sexy murder poets, and it’s both super important and super boring that the pleasant bureaucrats must win.

What I'm asking is, who let the goat out in the first place?

In two weeks! @sffaddictspod is hosting a virtual launch party livestream for The Tower of the Tyrant! Activities: A (short) live reading! Banter with special guests! Q&A! Assigning people bird companions! It'll be great fun. 10AM PST / 1PM EST / 6PM BST!

New NeurIPS paper! Why do LMs represent concepts linearly? We focus on LMs's tendency to linearly separate true and false assertions, and provide an analysis of the truth circuit in a toy model. A joint work with Gilad Yehudai, @tallinzen.bsky.social, Joan Bruna and @albertobietti.bsky.social.

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.

Conventional wisdom says interdisciplinary research is valuable but harder to get through peer review (need to please diverse reviewers, etc). @sdxiang.bsky.social Daniel and I partnered with @ioppublishing.bsky.social to test this wisdom and add nuance

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