AI letters are flooding the medical literature. (gift link) Thanks, Altman.

The remains of Nottingham Looms at the abandoned Scranton Lace Company in Scranton, Pennsylvania www.abandonedamerica.us/scranton-lac...

G. K. Chesterton raises his hand…

When I joined the UW Biology department in 2001, everyone else had a nice nameplate on their office door — but I got a piece of paper with my name on it taped to the wall. It was a newly implemented cost-saving measure, I was told. You cheap-ass bastards, I thought. Anyway, now I feel better.

Mood: just manually renewed SSL certification on my AWS-hosted website.

"Criminals posing as US immigration officers have carried out robberies, kidnappings, and sexual assaults in several states" according to an FBI bulletin. Which, of course, gives ICE cover to commit the same crimes. "It wasn't us, it was different thugs, dressing up as us."

The highlight of Briarfinch's set last night. Anyway, this one goes out to Sean Dunn tonight.

It’s a good night for it.

Shutting the fuck up for the next two decades would a superb start, Bill.

Imagine splitting open a rock and seeing this.

Excited to read the book based on Berkeley's Sense and Sensibility and Science course (sensibility.berkeley.edu/index.php?ti...). If you enjoyed Calling Bullshit, you'll find this a real treat. Thanks, Saul!

OK, inspired by @banditelli.org I wanted to post at least something crow. 🪶 Here they are engaging in mass vandalism just for the fun of it. OK actually they're digging out beetle larvae that harm the lawn—you can see one in the iphone photo below—but it's pretty funny to see the mess they make.

OK, inspired by @banditelli.org I wanted to post at least something crow. 🪶 Here they are engaging in mass vandalism just for the fun of it. OK actually they're digging out beetle larvae that harm the lawn—you can see one in the iphone photo below—but it's pretty funny to see the mess they make.

You laugh but hoagies are specifically designed to be "skip-fired" off the ground so they bounce into a target's lower body. Direct targeting allows the projectile to retain maximal kinetic injury and may cause serious mustard stains that remain visible on camouflage fabric even after dry cleaning.

When the suspects appear to be white guys, it’s not a bombing — it’s an intentional explosion.

Yeah, well, she hopes you'll stop fucking the living room furniture, but you know...

I'm listening to one of the better late-night albums that you've probably never heard, the stretched-out and low-simmering blues of Suzanne Langille and Loren Conners. One track below from youtube; Tidal link here: tidal.com/album/271323...

I'm listening to one of the better late-night albums that you've probably never heard, the stretched-out and low-simmering blues of Suzanne Langille and Loren Conners. One track below from youtube; Tidal link here: tidal.com/album/271323...

Yeah, definitely! Thanks, Grok!

Another casualty of the LLM revolution. In "arXiv’s CS category, review articles and position papers must now be accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review."

That's one kind of payback.

The Chicago Tribune called it that. This is its Instagram

Convince me this is not state-sponsored terrorism.

Garbage in, garbage out.

I have a number of colleagues who think that LLMs will be very useful as individualized tutors. One of their arguments is that unlike previous generations of AI tutors, LLMs have the full context window of the conversation and that’s better understand what a student knows and doesn’t know.

Tylenol in here running “fuck you Bobby” ads during the World Series.

Don't know if any of you have ever been tempted to use Evernote, but any company that eliminates their free tier AND makes current users subscribe to extract their own data is little better than a protection racket in my book.

Breaking: It wasn't in fact Robert Plant's mama that he was going to make sweat and groove because of the way she move

Breaking: Joe Rogan called Mike Tyson "bro" on podcast; careful genealogical investigation reveals not his real brother.

Regarding "far more common than reported here": Left: the Nature News story above, Sept 18th 2025 Right: Wired directly quoting OpenAI, Oct 28, 2025 www.wired.com/story/chatgp...

Don't open your own mail for a while, Bobby.

👆 This.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere Short thread:

After Will Klein's fourth shutout inning I actually started to feel like it would be OK if the Dodgers won, because he deserves the win on this one. And then I thought uh-oh, I don't know anything about Klein. What if he gets milkshake ducked? Well, turns out quite the opposite. Legend.

Making a biopic is tricky. I suspect Bruce Springsteen would be the first to agree that in real the real world, stories don't have tidy beginnings or endings, life doesn't follow the traditional narrative arcs, and every choice and every happening draws context from a vast arc of private experience.

Well, I can see how that ended up on clearance.

Confidence goals 🪶

It's long past time for state and federal authorities alike to put an end to Stephen Miller's jerkoff fantasy of masked thugs kidnapping people of color off the street with impunity. Yes, there are Americans who want this. But they are a woefully small minority. Why are we still letting it happen?

Seriously, @nytpitchbot.bsky.social you need to just hang up the gloves. You can’t compete.

To be fair, dribbling a soccer ball through fire in the desert while wearing Oakley’s is exactly the sort of thing I would’ve thought it was super badass in 1985. But I was 14 and it was 1985.

Here in Seattle, furloughed NOAA employees were out in the pouring rain cleaning up beaches yesterday, part of a national week of service organized by federal workers who can't do their jobs due to the shutdown. Story by @heyjohnryan.bsky.social at KUOW, our federally defunded public radio station.

Goddamn if the Bruins didn’t roll over like they worked in the chancellor’s office.

Ubadah Sabbagh is referring to closed-access for-profit publishing here, but I keep thinking about how perfectly it describes the general push to incorporate large language models into the scientific workflow in the interest of higher "productivity". ubadah.substack.com/p/beware-giv...

This was a fantastic read. Nice surprise that it had guest-star @carlbergstrom.com who I guess still has not see the lyrebird :-) lareviewofbooks.org/article/what...

I’ve been casual student of physics for four decades. Why did no one ever explain to me so clearly what a conservation law is? From Susskind and Hrabovsky (2014) The Theoretical Minimum. — This is why reading basic material from brilliant thinkers is so often worth the investment.

When we’re not doing sports gambling ads, LLMs that tell you how not to seem like you like your date too much, google cloud data-dredging baseball superstitions, this is the participatory surveillance world series. Can we go back to beer ads, oversized trucks, and blood pressure pills please?

Everything that’s going down in the NBA and we’re still advertising for sports betting on screen during the actual World Series coverage with the announcers talking about what’s a good bet? Fuck this.

The good kind of provocative perspective worth reading by HCI/games tech folks too but want to add one thing, which is hinted there but could be even more explicit: the role of publishers in this actor network

I would gladly read a followup on this focused entirely on IRBs. I've been surprised by how often researchers say they could never got approval to run tests mimicking the sort of interventions that major platforms undertake on far larger populations as a matter of course on a daily basis.

3. While big oil, big tobacco, etc. serve as well-known cautionary tales, social media research poses novel challenges for independent researchers—perhaps most notably, access to the study system itself. It's like trying to study climate change if Exxon-Mobile owned all the world's thermometers.