More context on this #Artemis II image: * This is the night side, lit by moonlight. You can see city lights in Spain & Portugal, & a sliver of day at lower right * The Sun is entirely behind Earth, which makes it a kind of solar eclipse, but w/ Earth doing the eclipsing instead of the Moon: ☀️🌍🚀🌕

“They’re destroying more than fifty research facilities across thirty-one states, labs that house decades of irreplaceable long-term science…And they’re replacing all of it — the offices, the scientists, the institutional knowledge, the professional independence — with fifteen political appointees”

Pfizer has ended its large Phase III Trial of an updated COVID19 vaccine. They were not able to enroll enough people to meet their goal. A major problem is the FDA’s wholly unreasonable demand that people with chronic conditions, who benefit most from the vaccine, not be allowed to participate.

One of my tiniest pet peeves as a therapist is how often people say "you need therapy" when what they mean is "you need a better way to manage your mental health." There are MANY effective ways to manage your mental health, and therapy is only one of them!

People who are looking for ways to criticize Israel without coming off (or, indeed, being) antisemitic: there are a lot of examples in this tumblr thread of what not to do: abigailnussbaum.tumblr.com/post/8127791...

So... I have kind of a different take here than most of this website, which is that my position on AI's social value or my personal use is mostly beside the point. Regulators and legislators have authority over pollution and they should use that authority bc pollution is bad.

This is about 10% of California's power sectors emissions. Think about how hard it is to make a grid this size 10% cleaner. That is the amount of work a new fossil plant of this size cancels out. We cannot have new fossil infrastructure if we hope to have a safe climate. There just isn't time.

if you're defending hasan piker then what I hear that antisemitism is so important to you that you will defend a rape apologist who abuses animals

I guess I'm a filthy centrist because I don't think Ds should be indulging conservatives *or* shitty edgelord twitch streamers who say orthodox jews are inbred & hamas is the lesser of two evils & the 10/7 rapes didn't matter

just want to be clear that the supreme court will not be deciding if the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship; the justices are deciding whether or not they want to strip the 14th Amendment of its guarantee of birthright citizenship

This flu season I've learned... 1. Home tests are readily available, including combined flu/covid tests. 2. Antivirals need to be taken within 48 h. 3. Xofluza is better than Tamiflu (one dose; more effective against flu B) but few know about it. 4. Antivirals can be taken as prophylaxis. 1/4

basic research into random crap pays off. as a society we are currently pouring our vast surplus wealth into gambling addiction profiteering, fraudulent psuedo-healthcare, and unusable B2B software. this is a choice. We could instead choose to spend it on telescopes and bathyspheres.

As a reminder — the world got Semaglutide (Ozempic, Rybelsus, Wegovy) and Tirzepatide (Mounjaro, Zepbound, Tirzetta) in large part out of research "isn't it funny how you feel when lizard bites you"

1.) details matter 2.) we need not be wedded to our own catastrophe 3.) despair is the work of fascism

Honestly cannot think of a time I knew less what was going to happen at court than I feel ahead of oral arguments on birthright citizenship tomorrow. The fact that this is getting a full hearing instead of a 9-0, per curiam, benchslap is already beyond disturbing.

I think the Gadsden Flag should be reclaimed. Especially today.

this TDoV, if you are a trans woman who I am friendly with, and you would like me to buy you a pizza or other treat, please lmk via any private contact method. (transfemme enbies, sort yourself in or out re comfort level. "friendly with" is deliberately broad.)

Catholic converts are overwhelmingly not people who find themselves in doctrinal agreement with Catholicism, but who have an aesthetic preference for guys in robes and censers full of incense over youth pastors with guitars singing contemporary faith tunes.

saying publicly something I have been saying privately for a while now: Current AI capabilities for secretarial work are 95% reasonably competent and 5% catastrophically bad. If (& only if) the 5% catastrophically bad can be dealt with via structural guardrails, this will be transformative.

confiscating Elon Musk's fortune won't do a lot for sustained government funding but it could cover the initial buildout cost of quite a few solar farms

Increasingly it’s seems like the only core tenet of “progressive” today is being sufficiently “antiestablishment” and many of these orgs are showing that they don’t stand for anything really.

boy am I feeling this one today. Even if you are STRICTLY butlerian-jihad-now the approaches you should take to advocating against "dumbass integrations that don't work and nobody likes" and "thing that is totally upending software dev at tremendous computational cost" are reeeeeeaaaaaal different

"Israel" doesn't start with a J.

Natural climate solutions can deliver a host of benefits for people + nature. So what’s holding them back? A new @science.nature.org-led global study analyzed >500 projects across 137 countries to identify 46 implementation barriers. Turns out, most aren’t scientific or ecological—they’re human!

win condition for the modal american civil unrest is “cause this picture to be taken”, not fire bomb a walmart or whatever

We already do this and it is not working. You can’t fund a newsroom in $20 increments until you have massive scale and you need money to get there. Commentary is easy to stand up at low cost. Reporting is not.

oh no, "what if we could make Democrats be UK Labour" people whom I think should shut the fuck up (Third Way) are trying to crush a transphobic antisemitic campist genocide apologist who should the fuck up (Hasan) and people who should shut the fuck up (alt-lefties) are mad about it. how terrible.

did grok design this

(if we want to see any kind of economic rebound at fucking all from the Strait of Hormuz crisis, AFAICT the only path forward is mass impeachment, confiscation of assets for Trump admin aligned profiteers, and investing 100% of that money into defossilization infra and research)

Progressive wealth taxes that kick in early enough to annoy the current upper middle class and that make it virtually impossible to accumulate more than, say, 25M in today's dollars. I would settle for similarly aggressive income & inheritance taxes if a true wealth tax is too difficult to admin.

People who claim not to believe in horseshoe theory should take a long look at this image.

really fuckin grinds my gears how the terfs all broke down in pretend sobs about how trans women are such a threat to our precious lesbians. in reality, if terfs get their way, lesbians will be the second category of people shoved back in the closet

Part of the issue is undoubtedly that we have better documentation of what the US/Israel/IRI are doing to people than what the RSF is doing but whenever a story like this comes out I'm reminded that "this is the worst atrocity I have heard of" is not the same as "this is the worst atrocity ever"

Sudanese people deserve to be more than just a talking point about how it's not just Israel and the US who are slaughtering people en masse

And it really sucks that it's basically never brought up outside of whataboutisms

I think a lot about how El Fasher is quite likely one of the largest massacres in modern history and it's just generally... not discussed outside of Sudanese ex-pat circles www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

most of the news stories about the nazi tat describe it as "being similar to a nazi symbol" instead of "being a literal nazi symbol" so when they say people know about the tattoo and don't care, I think they're carefully lying

it's a hell of an environment to be making PhD program decisions in -- and I'm one of the lucky ones who got any offers at all this year. (4.00 in community college, 3.99 at Berkeley, and a year of research in a good lab with a paper in revisions.... and I still count one acceptance as lucky.)

I don't think people fully appreciate how apocalyptic things are for US science. I haven't had any new funding since 2024, but I'm still ok since typical grants are for three years. This means next year I will be completely out of funding and will have to fire everyone in the lab. It's not great.

Now out! We show that TEs can be horizontally transferred between fungal species via Starships. Once transferred, these TEs can become active, changing the genome organization and affecting the lifestyle of the recipient fungus. www.nature.com/articles/s41... @oggenfussursula.bsky.social #TEsky

LLMs-gone-rogue dominated coverage, but had nothing to do with the targeting. Instead, it was choices made by human beings, over many years, that gave us this atrocity. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blame-for-the-iran-school-bombing-the-truth-is-far-more-worrying

No really, I am not kidding when I say that the data broker industry must be destroyed: www.npr.org/2026/03/25/n...

what's funny about the epstein class discourse is that if we use the term properly as an analysis of the impunity that rich men (esp white ones) have, it immediately and obviously applies to hasan piker

What's wild is that this current war is indistinguishable from a deliberate plan to frighten countries away from petrostates & into the arms of the world's dominant electrostate.

And the main reasons people seemed willing to indulge the denialism were: 1) a refusal to believe that a Palestinian could ever do anything violent, which is both bizarrely infantilizing and weirdly justifying the idea that you need to be on good behavior to “earn” human rights 2) antisemitism

October 7 denial was super grim to watch because there was literally no need for it. You could fully own *everything* that Israel had done to Palestine *and* even have sympathy for Palestinians who saw violence as their only recourse *and* admit all the horrible shit about October 7 was true.

I guess we're all doing Harry Potter takes today so mine is that "is this media spiritually corrupting?" is a vague psychological question that you can discourse about for hours and there is no right answer but "where is my money going when I buy this?" is a lot more straightforward

That said I don’t know that AI for video gen is dead per se, just that the “one shot very expensively” model is dead — I think there’s a lot of potential in e.g. human in the loop Blender workflows

Fundamentally I am taking this as a confirmatory datapoint for the “either they will self-correct resource usage issues or they will fail and that will correct resource usage issues” theory of AI and the environment

So, if [what we're calling] AI suddenly just became a text and image thing, not a video thing, then every single projection for data centre capacity, energy requirements for data centres, investment needed in data centres just became *laughably* wrong. Orders of magnitude wrong.