Yesterday an interview was posted with Mike Lauer about the state of science. I strongly disagree with it. I will write more later. But for now: I agree w/ Lauer’s central points about budgets and paperwork and institutional incentives. But he seems to not realize the political minefield he is in.

Tren de Portlandía

These are two of my absolute favorite things I've seen on the internet thank you so much for creating them 🥰🥰🥰 Moreover, ICE must be destroyed

finally. a use for men

On Wednesday, Renee Macklin Good was fatally shot by a federal ICE agent. Becca Good, her wife, shared the following statement with MPR News.

Christ. AltNPS is blasting out misinformation to their millions of followers. We don't know the agent's name, and the real photos of him are being mixed in with obvious AI fakes. This is wildly, WILDLY irresponsible.

Renee Nicole Good was an avid writer, a proud mother and a hobby guitarist who won a poetry prize in 2020, according to online records and an interview with her father. Here’s more of what we know about her life: https://wapo.st/4bjKzxW

Happy New Year! 🎉 We're excited to welcome our newly elected Steering Committee members. See the 2026 US-RSE Steering Committee members at us-rse.org/about/steeri.... Thank you to our outgoing members for their service, and here's to another great year for the #RSE community! #RSEng #research

Re: the AI slop paper shared by @thomaspellard.bsky.social and @lameensouag.bsky.social, I wrote to the editors — will update when I get a reply, and will be following closely what they do. Key point is that we should hold the *journal* accountable for this mess I have a few predictions... 1/n

At least four videos show what really happened when ICE shot a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday. DHS has established itself as an agency that cannot be trusted to live in or present reality. @evystadium.bsky.social has more. Full story by @josephcox.bsky.social: www.404media.co/dhs-is-lying...

Tim Walz: "Our administration is going to stop at nothing to seek accountability and justice. The state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is working on the investigation."

AOC: This has now become what we feared most about ICE for a long time—that it would be used as an anti-civilian force with no accountability. At the end of the day, what we saw today was a murder, and murders in cold blood need to be prosecuted.

important message to all bluesky users

Really important for the left - and our donors - to understand the machinery they are building.

The more I read about the purges of senior leadership at #NIH & elsewhere, the more I am reminded of the “Scouring of the Shire” chapter in JRR Tolkien’s book _Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.” That’s the task that we will have to pursue in 2027 and beyond: washing away the stench of Saruman.

Sloro Animation

[Elizier Yudkowsky voice] The architectures and APIs of lightning and MLFlow, and the compatibility thereof, are best explained by game theory. More specifically, continuous zero-sum games. In this blog post,

New paper led by wonder postdocs Francesca Greenstreet and @jessegeerts.bsky.social and @clopathlab.bsky.social trying to understand why –in the "what for" sense– there are multiple motor learning systems –supervised and RL-based– in the brain. Check out Jesse's 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Following the tradition I started in 2023, I have done a little summary of the projects and hours (628.2) I spent collaborating this past year. My goal is to motivate you to measure all the work we put in community work! maureira.dev/blog/oss_con...

Yann LeCun has long proclaimed LLMs to be a dead-end research strategy, at least if we are after a technology that can successfully mimic intelligent behavior. Looks like he is finally putting his money where his mouth is and fleeing the sinking ship.

Love this from Guillermo del Toro

The Trump admin knew what they were doing when they nominated Steve Pearce, a proud advocate for selling off our public lands. Our public lands are NEVER for sale. I’m a NO on Steve Pearce.

Always use the mic at a conference even if you’re loud. People who can’t hear you *can’t hear you * when you ask if you can hear them in the back. Some of us went to one too many hardcore shows in our youth without ear plugs and our hearing ain’t what it used to be 🥺 #SICB2026

(Semafor) - The New York Times and Washington Post learned of a secret US raid on Venezuela soon before it was scheduled to begin Friday night — but held off publishing what they knew to avoid endangering US troops .. @semafor.com www.semafor.com/article/01/0...

Chavez in 2009, while being labelled as paranoid, outlines exactly what is happening today.

💀

Strong rec for @aseprite.org, a really well done piece of software, great docs, very intuitive, works on all platforms. Very nice to have is just wanna tweak other folks art like for use in @godotengine.org

good thread on just how profoundly unprepared most of our press is to meet this moment we're in

This brainrot is more responsible for the rise of authoritarianism in the US than any of the wokeness it will not shut up about

We gotta imprison each of these shithead AI ceo's in a different data center like the minotaur

I've been tracking the spread of nonconsensual deepfakes on X for more than two years. Here's a timeline of how Musk's leadership allowed the practice to flourish from a once-underground market to a viral trend, with little recourse for victims or legal enforcement. spitfirenews.com/p/grok-csam-...

Since I love procgen / high systemic story generator games, I decided to finally pick up Rim World. But I did not like it, which did not make any sense. So I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out why and made a little graph.

From "Democrats should abandon trans rights" to "I want to have sex with a computer." Wake up, honey, it's the worst takes of the year.

This is the kind of great work that @boltsmag.org does. Follow them. Support them. You can’t fight for power if you don’t understand where it sits. Include Bolts in your citizenship toolkit.

Today is the *first* day you can repost this...

Outlook for the new year ...

For new year's eve we stayed in and watched the Baltimorons youtu.be/F6t-h68UuhI?... Very cute, we really liked it 1/2

RETVRN

manuscript central is a cia front

TL;DR: OpenAI being sued by the estate of a mentally ill man whose interactions with ChatGPT saw the chatbot explicitly validating and encouraging his paranoid delusions, directly leading to him killing his mother and then himself.

It's hard to think of another policy that is so fundamentally a free lunch as congestion pricing is

So you hate wifeless?

I'm a sigma 100x dev. I always have Claude open in 3 VS Code instances). I've engineered prompts that keep me LOCmaxxing. But I space out PRs to not intimidate my co-workers and Andrej Karpathy. Social science has not yet developed methods to reliably measure my impact on software cycle time, sorry

We saw no evidence for these super devs looking across cycle times in 216 orgs and over 55k cycle times over a year of software development work. I think consistent individual velocity effects are present and possible but honestly, environment, task variance and compounding other factors mute them.

In honour of the late Skeeter Davis's birthday Ron sings "End Of The World" RS youtu.be/HBjk5myLC98?...

The National Science Foundation starts 2026 with a new management structure that affects every scientist with--or applying for--NSF funding. Here's what you need to know. www.science.org/content/arti...