great

The full issue of this is on the internet archive and it does not disappoint

There's a free iOS app called BitCam which only takes pictures like this, and I absolutely love it. Takes me back to my earliest days with the first Mac I ever owned, a Mac Plus.

we talk too much about the male loneliness crisis and not enough about the male suckerfication crisis maxread.substack.com/p/prediction...

Oh so now this is interesting -- what if Musk's trillion-dollar pay package is just a way for him to get a $50bn one?

Is this real? Are people using LLMs as stand-ins for humans in social science studies? How on earth do they get these papers published? Could someone possibly be that ignorant?

easy to miss in the punditry about Musk's pay package: he only becomes a trillionaire if he meets *a bunch* of milestones payouts begin at $2 trillion market cap + other conditions here's a handy graphic www.wsj.com/business/aut...

the thing is China is doing *both*

My favorite comment on the FT story

The blue wave witnessed yesterday was almost entirely due to highly motivated voters showing up at the polls, and as a result pollsters badly miscalculated, leading them to almost entirely miss it in some states www.wsj.com/politics/ele...

Page One in Chattanooga. #SNAP

“authors & publishers who filed a lawsuit against the Sam Altman-led firm have secured access to internal Slack messages… discussing the mass deletion of a pirated books dataset… A NY district court ordered OpenAI to hand over the communications regarding data deletion” futurism.com/artificial-i...

The Trump regime is East Winging the Goddard Space Flight Center, home to the 10,000 scientists and engineers in NASA science and engineering directorates.

A Customs and Border Protection agent appeared to brag to fellow agents about his marksmanship after he repeatedly shot a Chicago woman following a collision between their cars, text messages shown in court revealed. https://cnn.it/4oNgXfK

Amazing that a) the tariffs weren't nearly as bad as people thought they'd be and yet b) the mere threat of them, plus cuts to IRA grants, really dented spending on manufacturing in the U.S. under Trump -- precisely the opposite of what he promised when he came to office.

truly amazing things happening at the Supreme Court right now

Roberts now going at the solicitor general like a cat with a wounded mouse. Keeps telling him that tariffs are taxes on the American people. "Who pays the tariffs??" Says Trump's argument would neutralize separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches. Incredible stuff.

This is a good headline. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

I find Bluesky‘s fixation with the NYTimes confusing. The Times is neither the way most people in the U.S. get their news nor the most powerful platform. The whole media ecosystem is, I think, worth dissecting in particular and in aggregate. Is it just that everyone here is a subscriber?

“The headline story from this year’s elections is simple: Democrats increased their support across the country and swept all the marquee contests in key states.“

I’ve been on a ~journey~ with social media lately, in part linked to burnout and my own serious concerns about how it‘s harming our information ecosystem and therefore the human race. But I have to say that at times like this, Bluesky’s ability to surface important news is now unmatched.

I've very deliberately been almost entirely avoiding social media for the past 3 weeks. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to even begin to understand what it's like to be a normie news consumer in 2025. It is SO DIFFERENT than being online a bunch.

Manufacturing factory construction investment DOUBLED from 2021-2024. The IRA made clean energy cheaper to make, cheaper to use, and cheaper to build in America. Much of it now rolled back, energy will be more expensive for everyone for the next 10 years. It’s a crisis.

MIMS: The “unsung heroes of AI, the ones actually transforming business processes and workforces, also happen to be the smallest, fastest and cheapest.” @mims.bsky.social 👀 www.wsj.com/tech/ai/larg...

For a long time paleontologists have floated the idea that the asteroid is merely what finished off the dinosaurs. But no! It seems they were thriving and maybe would still be the dominant life form on Earth comma it's not for that pesky asteroid. www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Baltimore high school student Taki Allen was swarmed by police after an artificial intelligence system apparently mistook his bag of Doritos for a gun www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

I don't think many of us appreciate just how much things like the president canceling trade talks with Canada because he's mad that some Canadians reminded the world that Reagan didn't like tariffs is alienating the "fiscal conservative" wing of the base

Whenever I start to wonder why humans are having such a tough time with modernity I find it helpful to remember that: 1. We’re animals. And we've only been human for 0.15% of the time that mammals have existed. 2. We’ve only had written language for 1.8% of the time that we’ve been human. 1/3

hard same

Carl Pei created Nothing because he got "bored" with Apple products. Now he's making phones and wearables that compete directly with Apple's -- and, against all odds, succeeding. Fascinating interviewee this week on our Bold Names podcast: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpeV...

Really encouraging story on progress with enhanced geothermal from @mims.bsky.social. As Fervo's @timlatimer.bsky.social says, sometimes it feels good to say "drill baby drill"! www.wsj.com/business/ene...

Improbably, there is one type of renewable energy which got a huge boost under Biden, saw its tax incentives preserved under Trump, and is backed by the likes of Bill Gates. It even uses made-in-USA tech from the oil and gas industry! my latest: www.wsj.com/business/ene...

ChatGPT’s new Atlas browser doesn’t just see what you read — it remembers it. @eff.org’s Lena Cohen showed me it even logged “memories” of her looking for *abortion care* and her doctor’s name. Out-surveils even Chrome. My @washingtonpost.com column: wapo.st/49bOcVC

Wikipedia is seeing a significant decline in human traffic because more people are getting the information that’s on Wikipedia via generative AI chatbots that were trained on its articles and search engines that summarize them without actually clicking to the site www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

THREAD The AI bubble will continue to inflate, and will reach a scale few can comprehend. This increases the downside risk that will follow in the wake of it popping. It's being fueled by two things. 1/🧵

me every time I calculate what OpenAI's projected power usage will be by the year 2030

BREAKING: MIT Rejects Trump’s Sweeping ‘Compact’ Offering Colleges Funding Advantages * The school became the first university to reject the terms, saying they would undermine independence * UT Austin, on the other hand, has indicated enthusiasm for the proposal www.wsj.com/us-news/educ...

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

There is so much in this WSJ piece on what Trump has done / plans to do with the Justice Dept it's impossible to sum it up, but: * Indictments planned for a half dozen current / former officials Trump dislikes * So many have resigned from that whole sections are gutted www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

"Trump ignored the advice of aides, Justice Department officials, and even Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican" in ousting a prosecutor who refused to indict former FBI director James Comey

The historically volatile Texas grid was entirely stable this summer, despite extreme temperatures. Grid operators never once had to ask Texans to conserve energy or shut off their air conditioners. Why? Solar & batteries. Want a stable grid? Try solar & batteries.

I gotta say: the papacy of a Chicagoan with the cultural competency to comment firmly, yet carefully, on U.S. events has been a hell of a plot twist.

"Some have said about Assassin's Creed games that "DEI kills art" but this might be a case where "anti-DEI" helped kill art."

shades of Selma

Gonna be thinking about this lede for a minute.

not comforting that every time someone says Well It Sure Feels Like We're Living in Unprecedented Times, the history knowers have to reach further and further back in history to smugly rebut them

good reminder of how much things can change in just 5 years: in October 2020, wearing stuff like this all the time in public was completely plausible

This is a REALLY good video that gets into the *specifics* of how AI is degrading our information environment and putting truth further out of reach for the average person / the population as a whole