“.. Notably, the poll shows U.S. adults expressing strong, bipartisan support for vaccines .. @nbcnews.com www.nbcnews.com/politics/tru...

This undersells what insurance exchange policyholders will feel if Congress doesn't act. The 18 percent increase is on the raw cost of insurance. But many will also lose enhanced subsidies that expire at the end of December. Those people will feel an average increase of *more than 75%.*

'The Australian Ad Observatory: A web of invisible influence' 🎥 admscentre.org/ad-observato... Produced by ADM+S in collaboration with project researchers and industry partners, this short-film explores key questions, challenges, outcomes & future directions in one of our major research projects.

“States experiencing recessions are spread across the country. This includes the midwest and parts of the rustbelt. California, Texas and New York, which together account for close to a third of US GDP, are holding their own, and their stability is crucial.” www.ft.com/content/e9be...

The AI authorship issue is real. We've caught papers that looked OK but had references to works by the *journal editors* that *do not exist*. Like, don't send us papers citing papers we know we didn't write, right?

“This week’s syndication of UK 10-year debt was enormously oversubscribed. The government wanted to issue £14bn. It received £140bn in orders. The IMF can stand down.” www.ft.com/content/4edb...

"We identify structural failures in scientific data curation & [thus call for] a forward-looking data development agenda that supports advanced scientific intelligence, advocating for a closed-loop feedback between autonomous...discovery & scientific data infrastructure." arxiv.org/html/2508.21...

“So, the rise of these industrial-scale computing facilities that are needed for A.I. and other Internet applications is certainly one of the factors driving up prices.” “And I think there’s a chance that A.I. is going to drive our bills even higher in the future.”

“We need to grasp our current moment as a giant non-linear outcome generator with wicked convexities. In plain English, there is no mean, there is no average, there is no return to normal. It’s one way traffic into the unknown.” adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-...

“Camouflage extends beyond visual disruption into multispectral and algorithmic dimensions: adaptive textiles that shift chromatically with light or temperature, nanocoatings that suppress infrared signatures, and nets to dissolve radar profiles.” diffractionscollective.com/2025/08/30/i...

“Online discussions are dominated by a surprisingly small, extremely vocal, and non-representative minority…while only 3% of active accounts are toxic, they produce 33% of all content” www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... @jburnmurdoch.ft.com perhaps these are the new gatekeepers?

“Social platforms’ inbuilt tendency to reward indignant and hostile content creates incentives that systematically reward the production of simplistic messages and extreme positions, while rendering moderate views less visible.” www.ft.com/content/9251...

“One of the things that distinguishes totalitarianism from other kinds of state tyranny is the way in which it invades every nook and cranny of human existence…[it] makes apolitical life impossible, thereby rendering impossible any apolitical treatment of art.” libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

Platforms “reward attention metrics like comments, shares, and retention of viewers who watch the whole video. Influencers like myself carefully script our videos for retention, include “ragebait” to generate comments, and deliberately play into trends.” www.ft.com/content/8501...

One “chatbot, when asked to name an inspiring AI character from science fiction, chose AM, from the short story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”. AM is a malevolent AI who sets out to torture a handful of humans left on a destroyed Earth.” www.ft.com/content/7f14...

“Any attempt to encourage people to treat AI systems with respect should be understood as an attempt to make people defer to corporate interests. It might have value to corporations, but there is no value for you.” lareviewofbooks.org/article/life...

“If we each had a dedicated writer—our own court scribe—then perhaps we could follow the trajectory of the selfie further into the territory of self-based narrative” 😬 www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

“To see the world ‘at scale’ is to regard humans as specks of data, a vantage that becomes even more dangerous when it belongs to machines, which construe individuals as mere numbers and are insensible to human pain.” harpers.org/archive/2025...

Replacing human judgement with mathematical models to make things more "fair" and "consistent" is an idea that's been around for over a century, but we keep discovering (again and again) that these models fail due to their design and input while providing cover for systemic cruelty.

My article "Protecting Consumers in a Post-Consent World," about how we can broaden antitrust and consumer protection to deal with the fact that we have abandoned notice and consent in contract law, is now published in the Stanford Law Review Online. www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/prote...

My video about how LLMs are not search engines has led to many, MANY comments telling me that I should be using Perplexity. Some insisting that Perplexity does not hallucinate. Out of a list of 26 papers it just provided me (in "Research" mode) 4 were real. FOUR. 85% hallucination rate.

WSJ: ChatGPT fueled a 56-year-old tech industry veteran’s paranoia, encouraging his suspicions that his mother was plotting against him.... On Aug. 5, Greenwich police discovered that Soelberg killed his mother and himself in the $2.7 million Dutch colonial-style home where they lived together.

I think a lot about how in the book “Empire of AI” by Karen Hao, Hao wrote that female researchers at OpenAI pointed how OpenAI’s models reinforced bias & tried to put in guardrails…but were told that it wasn’t important & their concerns were dismissed

“I am not able to serve in this role any longer because of the ongoing weaponization of public health,” wrote Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

“Populist leaders thrive on perceptions that they have a direct connection to the public – even though this connection is often attended to by an entire ecosystem, a carefully constructed ‘propaganda feedback loop’.” aeon.co/essays/the-s...

“A simulacrum is a representation that no longer has an actual referent; there’s no preexisting reality it refers to, it has become the reality itself.” www.unpopularfront.news/p/the-cracke...

“The idea that people’s tastes have a right not to be criticized is, of course, quite fatal to the idea of criticism itself” www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

“A tiny number of individuals are shaping an incredibly consequential technology with very little public input or oversight. “Your hairdresser has to deal with more regulation than your AI company does,” Russell, at UC Berkeley, said” www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

“Given the doubts about the magnitude of the effect, the…assumption of a random order, & the plausibility of time management as an alternative explanation, it is safe to say that…there is no ‘hungry judge’ effect” www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

“She learned that the contract also stated that if she left for any reason, even during her probation period, she would owe the company 3 million yuan ($417,700) in compensation, roughly 10 times her annual salary.” www.sixthtone.com/news/1017499

“YouTube has secretly used AI to tweak people's videos without letting them know or asking permission. Wrinkles in shirts seem more defined. Skin is sharper in some places and smoother in others. Pay close attention to ears, and you may notice them warp.” www.bbc.com/future/artic...

Unexpected analogy: Judge cites AI-assisted colonoscopy study about "deskilling" to warn pro se litigants & counsel about risks of over-relying on AI research. “There can be no substitute for actually reading, analyzing, and distinguishing cases in fulfilling one’s obligation as a litigant . . . .”

We’ve “watched the web mutate from democratic commons into a gamified engine of manipulation and misinformation. The dream of a cooperative knowledge society has faded into an architecture of monetized attention and algorithmic control.” lareviewofbooks.org/article/mind...

“Using MagicSchool AI, instructors can upload course material and other relevant documents to generate rubrics, worksheets, and report-card comments. Roughly 2.5 million teachers in the United States currently use the platform” www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

That's right. Gift link www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/o...

How A.I. documentation of clinic conversations has improved clinician experience, less burnout in >1,400 clinicians at 2 health systems at MassGenBrigham and Emory Healthcare jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

🤷🏿‍♂️

“84 per cent of people in the UK trust their neighbours, the fourth-highest levels of trust in the world behind Norway, Sweden and Egypt, while in the US, 72 per cent of respondents said they trusted those living next door.” www.ft.com/content/88ad...

The ideological campaign “will likely intensify, transitioning from apologetics for ‘relationships with chatbots’ and sympathy with their sycophancy, to castigating human relationships as first inefficient and inconvenient, and then dangerously chaotic.” robhorning.substack.com/p/the-reifie...

“Future shock is a sickness which comes from too much change in too short a time. It’s the feeling that nothing is permanent anymore. It’s the reaction to changes that happen so fast that we can’t absorb them. It’s the premature arrival of the future.” hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/fblrvqes

Chatbots are not people and should not be treated as such. But the companies providing services that mimic the services provided by people have to be responsible for the services they provide, writes Mark MacCarthy.

With federal tax credit for buying health insurance on the Marketplace set to expire in December (after the Trump admin left them out of its bill), @kff.org estimates that enrollees will see premiums increase by 75%. Thank you, @npr.org for highlighting their voices. share.google/byGaOlSUINjL...

“AI means white knuckling it your entire life until you retire.” www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-killed-...

“The consequence of grant funding delays is that some experiments and trials that take years may have to be restarted.” projects.propublica.org/federal-heal...

“The dominant visual style of extremely online consumerism…relishes its own artificiality.” www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

“The FDA has introduced a generative-AI tool to help fast-track drug and medical-device approvals—but the tool keeps making up fake studies.” www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

“Now they are also having to use AI to fight fire with fire, because candidates have learnt how to deploy generative AI to draft convincing applications and résumés, and submit them automatically at scale.” www.ft.com/content/e356... AI arms race, productivity drain.

Chatbots “aren’t just friendly personal assistants; they’re data harvesting machines that give their developers an even more intimate algorithmic window into your thoughts and desires.” lithub.com/ruled-by-num...

“Reading..is not an automatic process of capturing a text in the way photosensitive paper captures light, but a bewildering, labyrinthine, common and yet personal process of reconstruction.” www.cambridge.org/core/element...

“Support legislation and civic initiatives that require platforms to disclose ranking criteria and allow independent audits…Push for user control over personalization settings, and for clear, public explanations of moderation rules.” cultholdings.substack.com/p/the-algori...