in this house we don't respect charles dickens due to his racist smear campaign against dr rae's inuit witness reports

It's like glitter...it's been hundreds of years and we're STILL finding Vikings everywhere 😆

For my European friends: Today is the day many Americans believe Rapture begins. Evangelicals will float to heaven & Catholics are left behind to suffer torments of Hell. Jews will gather on the banks of a River Jordan to convert, the Whore of Babylon will ride the Beast, etc. It’s a whole thing.

Also - before I stop doing HORRIBLE ADMIN TASKS and do some proper work - can we take a moment to query that word "contentious" in the Guardian's coverage of the Tylenol thing?

It has big geopolitical implications as well, since China and the US are vying for dominance of the AI tech stack. In my opinion this makes it very different from the early 2000s

It’s not a leverage bubble (at least not yet) so not too concerned about a disorderly capitulation. But the concentration of real activity, valuations, productivity expectations, trade dynamics etc around this single theme makes the prospect of any unwinding very different to even the early 2000s.

tbh I see this as less of a tell of an impending bubble than the fact that Oracle will need to use its balance sheet to finance the buildout of the cloud infrastructure needed to meet its supply commitments to OpenAI

Seen this way, concentration effects are a form of crowding out. You create a circular flow of capital among the richest companies with limited spillovers to real activity elsewhere, promising investors enormous payoffs. Theory consistent with earnings profiles of top 6 stocks versus the rest.

Another way of looking at the above problem is that AI is a very expensive thing that large cap tech can throw its cash pile at in order not to appear to be ex-growth rather than conceding to the combined effects of time and size and returning cash to shareholders.

One way you can keep cycle going is pushing expected cash flows further and further out in time. So the money doesn’t need to start turning up till, say, 2027/28 but you book the contract value today. It means cash burning AI platforms can pledge future income in the hope of finding a profit model

Again, I would be careful to distinguish between the practical value of the technology and the current valuation of the firms involved in its production. They are not necessarily the same thing.

I still wonder about whether we are just seeing a version of end cycle behaviour bsky.app/profile/toma...

Endorse. bsky.app/profile/ivan...

So, if I get this right, OpenAI is paying Oracle $300BB for computing power, which is built on its partnership with NVIDIA, which is funding OpenAI to the tune of $100BB

For one day only, the Blackadder Prayerbook – made for Glasgow’s first archbishop, Robert Blackadder, c. late 1400s – will be on display as part of Glasgow’s 850th birthday celebrations & @natlibscot.bsky.social’s centenary 29 Sept, Glasgow Cathedral. Free #medievalsky www.nls.uk/whats-on/bla...

Gupta: It is safe. That’s what the best-quality research shows. And how irresponsible, using the podium of the WH to put this out there when you’re not even offering an alternative. That is dangerous. An untreated fever is dangerous. Untreated pain in pregnancy is dangerous.

Essentially, it Autism is perceived as preventable and treatable, then families (mothers) who fail to take their recommended prevention or treatment steps can be blamed for their kids' Autism and denied social support (eg, healthcare, school-based accommodations, etc.).

Whether they're blaming vaccines and Tylenol, or selling dubious "remedies," what they're really doing is promoting the perception that families (and especially mothers) can prevent and treat Autism. And thus also the perception that people with Autism and their families don't need social support.

Interesting in light of all these questions about the Coast Guard’s usual drug interdiction practices in contrast to the boat strikes, a topic that would presumably come up at a Senate confirmation hearing?

Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has donated $70 million to the UNCF, the largest private provider of scholarships to minority students.

ICYMI: we tackled healthcare grifters like RFK Jr and Florida's Dr. Ladapo with Dr. Peter Hotez, the Epstein cover-up with Rep. @robertgarcia.bsky.social and #magacancelculture with @karenattiah.bsky.social @lizzwinstead.bsky.social & @timjacobwise.bsky.social www.youtube.com/live/ULh1UDg...

My interview with CNN

In an ideal world, all the people writing, "Prosecutors are under pressure to charge Trump's enemies" would mention John Durham and Hunter Biden. Treating those as normal prosecutions was part of what got us here.

For me, Turning Point is always going to be about Shirley MacLaine and Anne Bancroft.

For years, influencer Nick Fuentes was too extreme even for MAGA. Now he's working his way into the mainstream—and has a plan for his secret followers to seize the levers of power. www.wired.com/story/nick-f...

In December 2023, Special Counsel Jack Smith asked SCOTUS to grant cert before judgement to hear Trump’s immunity appeal. The court rejected that request and didn’t issue its immunity decision until July 2024. Trump’s federal cases never made it to trial before the November 2024 election.

Mine didn’t but I if I’m gonna take advice from some heroin addict… I prefer this guy.

Can’t explain it but of course they want to take away one of the only painkillers that’s safe for pregnancy, a condition that causes weird and unusual pains. these people WANT pregnancy to be a punishment and handicap. they want to control.

Science pushes back. Thanks to Helen Tager-Flusberg for her work on this front! Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/23/o...

Reflections Rocks and Water https://www.wikiart.org/en/john-singer-sargent/reflections-rocks-and-water

Russia's disinformation campaign continues, and having expanded onto Truth Social with Charlie Kirk's death, they're now making content for Truth Social that's all Charlie Kirk related, and pushes buttons related to the LGBTQ+ community, and Ukrainian refugees.

Crypto hoarders turn to share buybacks in push to boost falling stock prices - on.ft.com/4mtEYXS

This is horrific and feels like it should be a bigger deal. Business Insider reports that people who have worked at xAI have seen Grok create images and written material with child sex abuse material. www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-gr...

Manuscript Leaf with Initial A, from an Antiphonary https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/466780

The SEC is going to be down to zero Democratic commissioners in a few months and I don’t see Trump doing anything to fix that

If these folk think HR is an overwhelming presence, interfering in every decision they make, I can't help wondering exactly what decisions they wanted to make that HR prevented. And how many times they did do by saying "that's illegal".

This is Australia but holy shit

New York Night https://www.wikiart.org/en/georgia-o-keeffe/new-york-night

Not only don't I think this is a crank theory, I think it's obviously true almost at the sun-rises-in-the-east level.

Don't renew your subscription unless Kimmel comes back without apology and without extortion.

I often think how among all the other things it is against, fascism (and its attendant authoritarianisms and make-believes) is fundamentally a war against complexity—against the inherent complexity and multiplicity of the universe and social reality—and against any efforts to understand them as such

So, research done or funded by vendors (MS, OpenAI, Google, etc) is always going to be biased and should generally be dismissed out of hand as marketing The only exception to that is if the study shows something bad or embarrassing because you know it must be truly bad if they can’t gloss over it

Made me think of this Vaclav Havel quote. At 66 yrs old I don't know if I will even be alive when we fully restore democracy to America and hold all these treasonous fuckwits accountable for their crimes. But even so, I know fighting fascism is the right thing to do. That whole planting trees etc.

Those are on the list. I think SAHARA is the best propaganda film ever made, particularly about strength and victory through diversity. Also: EDGE OF DARKNESS AIR FORCE THEY WERE EXPENDABLE WAKE ISLAND MRS MINIVER ACTION IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY THE MORTAL STORM

CASABLANCA is a great one. So is the Jack Benny / Carole Lombard TO BE OR NOT TO BE.

Since the election I’ve been obsessively watching movies that were made when the outcome of WW2 was in question. Movies about resilience in the face of disaster and monstrous evil. It’s very helpful.

There’s a certain type of poster that seems to think it’s helpful to stamp out anything hopeful in the name of being realistic about how bad things are. Don’t be that poster. We know how bad things are. But for most of us, hope helps a lot more than your cynicism. Rebellions are built on hope…

LLM responses which do not reflect consensus reality & facts are produced via the Same Process which generate responses which *Do* broadly conform to consensus reality & facts. The Same Processes. The Same Ones. "Hallucination" is just a word to distance yourself from the outputs you don't like.

How many times, in how many contexts, from how many internal and external researchers, or from how many CEO's are people going to have to receive this message before they believe it: "Hallucinations" are an inherent part of the large language model architecture. www.nature.com/articles/d41...