Pandering to the far right is literally how a middle-of-the-road party kills itself. Fascists will never stop believing that you’re spineless lefties by definition, but the core of your supporters will feel betrayed & leave

Last week, I discovered that my old doctoral supervisor Barry Allen unexpectedly left us. I wrote about his work, his style as a mentor, & my own conflicted feelings about drifting from our relationship through the tougher times of my life & career. for-all-our-futures.beehiiv.com/p/what-is-ou...

Olivia Nuzzi: a writer who couldn't even be bothered to read to the end of her two-paragraph ChatGPT summary of Jacques Lacan's Écrits

This thread. I think it's incredibly important to remember that the TERF fragility/rabidity started to take off right around the height of me too, and the main message they had was "men are inherently violent." They targeted trans WOMEN, while at the same time excusing actual violence from cis men.

This is a very insightful (and short!) thread about feminist solidarity breaking down. It also makes me think of Rose McGowan as an example of this division: she became an enthusiastic Trump supporter because of Democratic Party leaders' close relationships with Weinstein

What I don't get about elected leadership's discourse around Mamdani & what they think is political extremism, is that Jamie Raskin was positioning himself as the leading edge of Democratic Party progressivism not even a year ago.

It would make sense to call Elon Musk an extremist white supremacist & racist with more reach & influence than anyone with these beliefs since Victorian Britain & Nazi Germany. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

New from me this morning, a deep dive on Elon Musk's Grokipedia-- the forthrightness of the white nationalist and eugenic advocacy in many entries surprised me and the experts I spoke to www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

What perfect album came out the year you turned 16?

If you're a philosophy or science geek, this one's for you. And the arguments are relevant to democracy.

That’s a pretty messed up headline, yeah

Just how morally, ethically, intellectually bankrupt do you have to be to argue that 15-year-olds can sell sex but can’t affirm gender

It doesn’t take long for books called “Contemporary Philosophy” to gather dust

Jeffrey Epstein seems like he was a totally empty person. No inner life, no complexity in his thinking. He oriented his entire life around sexually exploiting & assaulting teenage girls. There was nothing else in his head

Six months from now, all those speed cameras turned into red light cameras will be torn up because Doug Ford & his cabinet will have racked up $5K in those fines too

A while ago, I wrote in some more detail about a particular kind of toxicity that can set into academic lifestyles & approaches to the research profession for-all-our-futures.beehiiv.com/p/philosophi...

They don't read books. They use meditative literary content product

The same investors also put startup funds into Titanic Shipbuilders and Challenger Orbital Services. #TooSoon?

After an economic crash you always see headlines like What Was Everyone Thinking? What do you mean everyone, most of us are waving our arms and screaming every day, it's a handful of insanely rich assholes who aren't listening

The people who built the tech destroying society are antisocial weirdos, which is why their products are socially corrosive. But as tools have advanced, incidental pro-social functions (Facebook as Rolodex, Twitter as news hub) have decayed and it’s just “you consume slop, you talk to computer” etc.

Trans women are biologically female and our medical needs make a lot more sense if we are conceptualized as having essentially an extreme form of hyperandrogenism

Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/11/o...

The Republican president is a pedophile who has doubled my healthcare costs and let scores of violent criminals out of jail. But a Democratic mayor-elect wants to make busses free in a city I don't live in. I have never felt more politically homeless.

My most important advice to any professional in any field is always the most basic. Correspond in writing as much as possible and think as clearly as possible about what you say in those messages.

I had to take the car out for its annual winter tire change today to a farther-away garage than usual because of the city’s post-snowstorm rush. It reminds me of how lucky we are in our technological environment because the whole task of travel & waiting took all morning

We need an entirely new circle of elite opinion makers because seemingly everyone is deeply implicated in the rolodexes of pedophiles

Johnny LaRue was the greatest character John Candy ever played. I will never be convinced otherwise

My wife & I watched that John Candy documentary last weekend & it made me realize that my parenting style is a lot like Uncle Buck’s sarcasm & way of talking to the kids like they’re ordinary people. Even though I never really got into Uncle Buck because I find the kids annoying

Take LoTR. The reason evil exists in the books is because the creator is singing new creations into existence and Melkor wants to co-opt the song. It’s the reason Sauron’s armies are twisted forms of elves. The evil in LoTR CANNOT CREATE, they can go “this thing looks like this other thing”

I just finished reading Moon of the Turning Leaves, which takes place after a solar storm shorts out all electronics on Earth, leading to an apocalypse where billions die & human life goes pre-technological. The sign of the solar storm was massive auroras so I’ve been a little freaked, actually

📢 New research: how Autism charities talk about Autistic people. TLDR: they say we're a problem. Summary in The Conversation: theconversation.com/autism-chari... Full text: https://doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0335132 @helenabnett.bsky.social @kat-williams.bsky.social @willowholloway.bsky.social

I’m really curious as to how much Sydney Sweeney actually does to cultivate these conservative connections. Is it part of her branding efforts? How effective does her management this it can be?

What I find hypocritical about modern conservatism is how their disgust blinds them to truth. Like how they’ll call LGBTQ people pedophiles but have no problem sending their pre-teen daughter to Rev. Carmichael’s closed-door Bible study class even though he writes Epstein Island fanfic

Commercial AI has a serious problem in that they try to design it for being a "a safe, pleasant, and endlessly available conversational partner" and thats one of the flaws that makes it hallucinate more. Its hedging and unwillingness to upset anyone is causing it to lie.

I got some good professional news recently that I'll be able to share with my admittedly small audience later this week. Can't be specific right now, but it's nice to feel forward momentum in my career for the first time in a couple of years.

My latest newsletter lays out my perspectives on the hype & controversies surrounding LLM technology. I'm also giving some of the intellectual background in my career as a researcher that qualifies my opinion beyond being just some guy. for-all-our-futures.beehiiv.com/p/hype-hope-...

The quotes through the whole thread are the key to understanding how public health care systems that are free for patients are central to maintaining democracy, not only morally, but institutionally.

“The problem is that when it is installed in a health sector that prizes efficiency, surveillance and profit extraction, AI becomes not a tool for care and community but simply another instrument for commodifying human life.”

My latest newsletter lays out my perspectives on the hype & controversies surrounding LLM technology. I'm also giving some of the intellectual background in my career as a researcher that qualifies my opinion beyond being just some guy. for-all-our-futures.beehiiv.com/p/hype-hope-...

Do any of them wonder how they let their lives become this way?

If I were a worker in this position, I would take this order so literally that customers would think I was a pod person & I would speak entirely in my salesman voice

an arc where the former governor of NY loses increasingly inconsequential elections until the series finale is him trying to run for senior class president at a local high school and getting his ass kicked by some 17 year olds.

I LEARNED THE ANSWER TO THIS Chris's Steakhouse was a New Orleans landmark Chris Matulich periodically got bored, sold it, waited for the new owner to fail, and bought it back cheap The sale conditions: Can't move it, can't change the name He did this six times Then he sold it to Ruth Fertel

File this under, things that make me want to eat a lot more vegetables

I've heard some of these arguments many times from conservative libertarians who themselves don't have a lot of wealth, especially that those who would ask the very rich to pay more of their fortune to support state institutions are simply bitter & envious of the wealthy. Hayek said the same thing.

Are you one of Solana’s “low vibration humans”? If so, you’re not going to like him very much.

Very thoughtful thread about how misogyny insidiously makes men’s lives terrible too

Most interesting discovery in this research for me: that optimizing LLMs to sound more human tends to come at the expense of outputting content that a human would actually say.

My latest newsletter is out, where I try to summarize my last three years (also last twenty years!) of research, learning, & applications of AI & LLM technologies. I hope you'll subscribe if you find this interesting and worthwhile. for-all-our-futures.beehiiv.com/p/hype-hope-...