I'm really truly all for a world in which the legitimacy of research doesn't depend having a Ph.D and a Uni job. <I publish with non-academics without degrees!> and I'm really truly into critiques of academia and the value of a degree <I start every class inviting students to drop out!> BUT

Great quote from a student writing a paper on the effects of AI on loneliness: """My position is that AI companions do not fully eliminate loneliness, they just privatize it."""

It's the feel-good hit of the season: Follow "Leopards Ate My Face" documenting disillusionment with Trump within MAGA on Twitter and TruthSocial. They're realizing they've been lied to. Mostly those who are directly affected: the leopard does have to eat your face specifically for you to wake up.

Just got this flashback to the early days of Slack. Slackbot was very eager.

We need OPINION labels on news.

The average exam grade in my programming class has fallen by one grade point post-GPT3.5. The exam is has been unchanged for 7 years.

"It will never work in theory" — Oooh great title This is on the difficulty gaining traction on research informed by practice in the software engineering context ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/104...

There's nothing strong about practicing civility. But there's something very strong about practicing civility with strength.

I've noticed that economic critiques of progressive ideas are never head-on, but always talk about downstream systemic consequences: knock-on effects causing unintended consequences that ultimately push the economy in the wrong direction.

What being a parent and being an academic have in common: the feeling of being utterly mad about something that everyone else thinks is fundamentally unremarkable.

Help me read this. Heritage is erasing memorials to black soldiers. Is it mustache twirling strategy to create a backlash that makes an opening for restoring confederate memorials? Or am I overthinking it and they're simply erasing non-white history because it's crime season and the getting is good?

A book that made you a radical (politically or about anything).

A discipline I used to have that I’ve let slip over the years is not having opinions about things I haven’t actually read. Now I opine left and right. Some of it is that there’s only so many ideas to be had, and I’ve tussled with them already in some form. But some of that is just me being sloppy.

Used to be my intro coder grad students would ask “Is this possible” and the answer would be “unfortunately, no”. Now with LLMs the answer is “unfortunately, yes” Everything is now accessible to beginners, but each is a spirally rabbit hole and beginners need a good nose for what problem to want.

What motives are there to complain for the removal of Black soldiers' memorials, at the same time that you defend those to Confederate generals? Heritage Foundation, is much more than a "conservative American think tank." It's a radically extremist and deeply un-American institution.

Is it just me or does Newsom need Visine?

As someone with deep lifelong loves of atheism and rationality, it's so uncomfortable that the prominent figures to emerge representing them in my lifetime have been so unimpressive. In particular, they seem so blind to how their emotion is interfering with their reason.

Newest most offline place I've seen evidence of AI replacing people: those sentimental schlock prints that you replace with your art when you're buying a picture frame. Walk through a frame section of a place like Hobby Lobby: about 15% is clearly AI right now.

Not entirely sure what's going on but while "6 7" is just another thing in the online world, I'm getting wink-winked by the most incredibly offline and disconnected people in my life: barely literate children, near retirement faculty, and every rando in between

Never sure when a bundle of random characters in a message are a new social media acronym or someone sneezing with autocomplete on

Few things are more radicalizing than knowing history. Nothing opens your mind faster than experiencing other ways of being and seeing that they work too.

Your cat when you're choking to death in your apartment

Few things are more radicalizing than a plane ticket. Nothing opens your mind faster than experiencing other societies and seeing that they work too.

Post-election, I'm v. curious whether split-ticket voting was lower or same than typical. If lower, that's an especially strong rebuke. Swing voters are typically strong splitters: they want Dems to have one exactly house of Congress, no more. If Trump is changing that for them, I want to know.

People can be very influenced by the status quo and not notice things right in front of them like hair dryers obviously have nothing to do with hair they're just incredibly dangerous bed warmers.

Academics complaining about their service loads is as old as time. Really makes a guy feels like he's a part of history.

Teen The Onion please

Big claim from a big name. Getting this kind of concession out of crypto is typically like squeezing blood from a rock.

#booksky Your mission: radicalize a teenager (or hell, citizen) in one book. What book?

All my costumes are bald jokes now

Today I learned that biweekly and semimonthly are different because during two months of the year "biweekly" will happen thrice.

My kid is dressing as Indiana Jones this Halloween and I'm all like "Boyboy wants to be a professor just like daddddddy 😭😭😭😭"

Matcha Horchata ice cream: only in California

Want Ursula K. Leguin's take on AI Alignment? Here are the key pages from her 1985 "Always Coming Home". In a few words: "the two species had diverged to the extent that competition between them was nonexistent, cooperation limited, and the question of superiority and inferiority bootless."

"The antinomy of expertise": where public reliance on expertise is greatest, public confidence in it is lowest.

If you've ever wondered how much a human skull costs, a human skull costs about $1000. www.skullstore.ca/collections/...

I think it's already one newscycle past, but the thing about Mamdani's aunt *not being a genetic aunt* is that around the world families are so big & interconnected that you can def just call every older lady who hangs around the family "aunty." In Arabic it's like that in the language.

I just copyedited a student submission by reversing all the paragraphs. It was written *exactly* backwards. It went from inscrutable to just fine in no time. Kinda fun to have such a big impact without, like, really doing anything.

A lesson from nearly 20 years in social science: if your effect is big and strong and not super obvious, check your code.

Today's rationalists (the less wrong/Harry Potter fanfic kind) don't like being called neorationalists because it makes them feel less new.

All birds are dinosaurs. All dinosaurs had teeth. Therefore Ichthyornis dispar. I imagine him and his buddies finding an old lady with breadcrumbs in the park and leaving only bones and breadcrumbs. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthyo...

I mean, do I have a second to talk for a minute?

Live your life such that no one ever thinks to name an ICE detention center after you.

My spam texts are getting wierd.

He’s referring to the peaceful transition of power. What will you be doing on Jan 6 2029?

I stumbled on a true "This one weird trick" for credit scores. Get a second credit card from the same bank and then cancel it. Banks (at least Chase) will add the limit on the cancelled card over to your existing card's limit. Raising credit limit lowers credit utilization which raises credit score.

One for my collection of mundane commons. Until we restore a critical mass of people with values around seeing these little daily holes in shared responsibility, and stepping up to fill our share of them, what chance do we have tackling the problems haunting our global commons?

"This friendship could have been an email."

I showed up to the library for a bunch of holds, beautiful books, that I definitely don’t recognize and have never heard of. I guess my late night online black-out-drunk inter library borrowing request binges are starting to catch up with me

If crypto is decentralized in theory and despite that becomes centralized ( organising naturally around normie infrastructure hubs) in practice, then * is it good faith to present it as “about” autonomy and * is centralization so bad?