Our government’s priorities are entirely backward. And purposefully so.

Andrej Karpathy is worried about keeping up with software engineering practices

I'm sharing this because sharing an NYT story about this outweighs my dislike of the publication. We have known for months because of data outside of Japan that this year's flu season was going to be bad but we have an HHS secretary that hates vaccination and so voila.

Interesting mixed medium approach to this Asahi feature on opium and Japanese occupied Manchuria: www.asahi.com/special/manc...

Most understated, proportional, & well-earned take down: A man & a woman lawyer were on the same side in the Ohio Supreme Court. When the Chief Justice called the woman to the podium, the man stood up & said that they’d divide time but she’d go first. The Chief deadpanned, “That’s why I called her.”

Also note that when a judge switches from referring to a party’s argument to referring to “counsel’s argument,” counsel should be concerned. www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/rod/docs/pdf...

This thread about relying on citations of others reminds me that lawyers can mess up by relying on the work of even seasoned lawyers. Here, attys who routinely respond to public records requests routinely made an objectively wrong argument. Ohio SC Justice DeWine called them on it. Link in next post

Here's Casper @ 4442m depth. Max depth for ROV SuBastian before things go poorly is 4500m. I think this was the last time @schmidtocean.bsky.social came across this undescribed octopus. Dive 690 #nazcahighseas #MarineLife

It seems we're celebrating Xmas by bombing northern Nigeria. What are we supposed to be hitting? Tents in a semi-desert?

【大阪大学出版会：2025年総まとめ】 『ごく短い小説の研究：近現代日本掌編文学論』斎藤理生 著◆「コント」「けし粒小説」「ショートショート」など、すがたかたちを変え、人々に親しまれてきた掌編文学の百年を検証。 www.osaka-up.or.jp/book.php?isb...

I did not understand this: one of the five Europeans the US has barred from traveling to the United States...is a permanent resident who lives with his family in the US. Now he is worried about being arrested and deported for the crime of monitoring online hate. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/u...

Researchers recently asked Americans what income level other people need in order to live a good life. A whopping 86% of Americans reported income levels well below what others say they themselves need. Fascinating!

New weirdo plant just dropped. Merry Christmas! www.nytimes.com/2025/12/25/s...

And… TRO granted! A sweet Christmas present for @imranahmed.bsky.social, @counterhate.com--& for their mission of fighting antisemitism & protecting kids online. Also nice for our all-star legal team. A lump of coal in the stockings of authoritarians & the merchants of disinformation

Burning crosses

Kawade Shobo has put up a useful list of Japanese publishing houses now on Bluesky. Many of them are not very active yet, but I expect activity to increase as more Japanese posters migrate from X/Twitter to this platform.

Sometimes all the wisdom and truth in the world can be found on the side of an 18th century Wedgwood teapot; Health to the sick Honour to the brave Success to the lover And freedom to the slave Sharing this one again because it's awesome, someone should start reproducing these.

Oh, this is great news.

six months ago Reader’s Digest asked if they could purchase the publishing rights for this elaborate shitpost I wrote a year ago now wherein I pretended to be the elf equivalent of David Brooks at the North Pole. Thought it was maybe a phishing scam but it’s real LMAOO

Dialect variation in Japanese sign language.

SATŌ Haruo wrote an episode of the local rumor that his father might have fought against a tanuki (raccoon dog); today, we have added an e-text of this funny story into our public collection: www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/001763... 今日の新着は、佐藤春夫の随筆「私の父が狸と格闘をした話」。ふしぎでゆかいな思い出話。

After Jan 6, the U.S. far right had to find a frame that could distract and shift blame from their election fraud lies. They settled on “censorship” — which made their lying villains into “free speech” heroes, and allowed them to target all of the people and orgs that tried to hold them to account.

We don’t spend enough time discussing how the entire MAGA movement is kept afloat by the constant threats of stochastic terrorism orchestrated by the president of the United States. Congress, the courts, much of the media … all kept in line by the mob boss and his army of anonymous goons.

A thread on the impact of a lahar flow in New Zealand. This was the national disaster that dominated my childhood years, and a topic of discussion every Christmas.

I have worked with a good many excellent young colleagues from other countries who have been studying issues of AI safety and bias. Their work overlaps with and feeds into content moderation and dis/misinformation detection. Their lives and careers may be greatly disrupted by this abysmal policy.

Watch. DOJ will eventually release the old FBI handwriting analysis of the Epstein/Nassar letter saying it's a fake, then point fingers at "dems" who "perpetrated a hoax" to "hurt president trump."

"古代天皇制の形成から、鎌倉新仏教による変革までの中に日本の思想的伝統を探るという丸山眞男の研究を引き継ぎ、さらに掘り下げた政治思想史家による名講義" 飯田泰三 『日本政治思想史講義　『丸山眞男講義録　第四冊』を精読する』 comingbook.honzuki.jp?detail=97844...

ah i see where the confusion's coming rom here. none of this has ever been about saving money. it's about racism. hope that helps

Btw this is one of the biggest reasons why it’s not as easy as people think to start up independent newsrooms or just be an indie journalist on substack. If you are actually holding powerful and rich people to account, you WILL need legal representation. Not a matter of whether but when

I deleted my post about alleged letter from Epstein to Nassar because I’m concerned about its authenticity and I’m worried that sharing it may help the DoJ damage the credibility of other documents if it turns out to be a forgery.

This is the first good news I have seen today. Back to plumbing repairs. It appears that our faucet technology is 20th century.

one of the critical things here is that 90 percent of journalism has been destroyed, and the remaining 10 percent is what was once the top 10 percent, highly status-driven, highly opinion-driven, and intensely New York/DC centered. there's no ladder to come up as a journeyman left.

When I was working as a translator in Tokyo some decades ago, the best proofreaders in our company were people who had had experience programming computers. Programming had taught them to find anomalies in text.

Tokyo's public parks suffered a unique form of theft this week. Thieves made off with the flush valves from toilets in Suginami City's Wadabori Park, rendering them inoperable. Similar thefts were later reported at another 10 locations around Tokyo.

As a Philosopher of Art, I have to say that the objective is not to have the "same" experience as seeing an image, but to have "an experience" that unfolds similarly when one sees an image. That is, engaging with the alt-text they come to understand the experience conveyed by the image.

The portage railroad is the coolest thing I've seen on the internet all day.

All of these bootlegged copies of the 60 Minutes segment flooding my feed (saying, ‘Watch it quick! Before it disappears!’) makes me feel like I’m in the Soviet Union and just got some black market foreign newspaper I need to hide under a floorboard in my house. This is where America is now

bari weiss saw this and decided that she had to hide it from the american public

Wrote a short piece arguing that higher ed must help steer AI. TLDR: If we outsource this to tech, we outsource our whole business. But rejectionism is basically stalling. If we want to survive, schools themselves must proactively shape AI for education & research. [1/6, unpaywalled at 5/6] +

Interest in Greenland is apriori evidence that global warming is anything but a hoax.

Sounds very Genghis Khan-y to me.

In case ppl wonder how model-written summaries are actually used: this morning I handed a model a 13-pg document I had written myself, and asked for a 3-par summary. What it gave me was not only accurate but expressed some things more clearly and crisply than I had done in the original. +

Folks, you can’t have Christian Nationalism without the antisemitism. It’s a central tenet of the ideology. The fact some of these Jewish Heritage folks are just realizing this is wild to me.

NEW: Organ tuners have been leaving temperature and humidity records in little-known books for decades. 🎹 They reveal how temperatures inside churches have changed over time due to climate change and increased heating. A new scoop for The Reengineer! www.thereengineer.pro/p/church-org...

"'If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a "kill switch" for any reporting they find inconvenient,' Ms. Alfonsi wrote." {gift link} www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/b...

This was my approach when trying to get oral interviews with segregationists for my first book. “I’m writing about you and I’d love to get your input, but I’m writing about you either way.”

Come to think of it, I don't think I ever did a captcha where the traffic lights to be identified were out.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing: a 🧵 1/n Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/... Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...