So what does Rosalind Franklin have to do with a Brita water filter? Her models of non-graphitizing carbon structures explain how it works & laid a foundation for decades of research in this field: from carbon nanotubes to graphene. 🧪😀 Here's her 1951 paper on the topic:

Good reminder to mask.

Why is Trump so obsessed with the California primary? The urgency of Trump’s most recent lies about election fraud in the state reflects a grim reality for the aging president: California will likely spell the end of Republican control over the U.S. House of Representatives. https://bit.ly/4ec9ymv

OB-GYNs release their own vaccine schedule, rejecting RFK Jr.'s meddling arstechnica.com/health/2026/...

At the American Medical Association’s annual meeting, members of the group’s House of Delegates sent a clear message to their leaders: Call out RFK Jr. — even if it costs us in the pocketbook.

OpenAI is considering drastic price cuts to compete with Anthropic. OpenAI cannot under any circumstances afford this pay cut. This is fundamentally insane. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/open...

No one wants this except billionaires. theconversation.com/canadas-ai-f...

FFS www.cbc.ca/news/science...

Finishing a quick & dirty run through the new social media bill. Interesting that its list of chatbot harms to be mitigated (deceptively mimicking humans, posing as an expert, using manipulative techniques to create emotional bonds) could double as a description of chatbots' basic functionality.

NEW: malware developers added nuclear & biological weapons text to to their spyware. Goal? To trigger LLM safety refusals... so that their spyware wouldn't be analyzed by an AI security scanner. Cleanest practical example I can think of for why over-indexing on first order "safety" is risky. 1/

Gonna be honest this price cut story has me giddy. They’re out of ideas. They’re admitting that their business model doesn’t work. If they actually discount their services the bubble is bursting. And I looked, and behold a pale horse! and its riders name was The Smiling Man

If your identity depends on making someone else's life harder, you're not as tough as you think you are. Bigotry sounds less like strength and more like fear with a red hat and a loud mouth. Real strength lifts people up. Cowardice is just amplified prejudice. Happy Pride 🌈😎

Thread… (long)

Everything I've read for days is through lens of this 🧵 "prepare for a potentially strong El Niño event — which will exacerbate drought and heavy rainfall and increase the risk of heat waves both on land and in the ocean..." www.usatoday.com/story/news/w...

right? literally "more cowbell" as a business. using iteration to massively improve results is very clever, but also financially wowzers. local models are NOT there yet. some people say a couple of them are "good" at coding but i am skeptical

coda: Using AI to write is very funny. Would you use a $400 million ASML EUV microchip-etching machine to sign a birthday card to a friend? Directionally, this is the same as using AI to write.

the following are all probably true and not in the least contradictory: 1. There's a huge bubble in AI investment, the crash is going to be bad 2. A majority of the tasks we've been promised AI will "take over," it will not 3. AI will completely transform coding

I hate it when there is "a moral to the story". Thanks but if i want to learn a life lesson, i'll make a terrible mistake

English actor Patrick Godfrey has died at the age of 93 he died at home, surrounded by his family, on Thursday, June 4 Godfrey was known for his roles in TV and film, including Ever After: A Cinderella Story, A Room with a View, Les Misérables and The Importance of Being Earnest

Decided to pull out an important part of the interview. Generative AI is often justified with comparisons to the cost of Amazon Web Services ($57bn) or Uber's ($32bn) in losses, when its costs and losses are hundreds of billions of dollars worse. And there's no post-bubble redemption story.

Angus Reid data shows 68% of Canadians want heavy regulation of AI, even if it slows development, and would oppose a large data centre planned near their home. The government is way offside with Canadians on this. Telling them to become “literate” isn’t going to work. angusreid.org/ai-regulatio...

And why is Carney determined to integrate AI all through the public service while laying off tens of thousands of workers? www.cbc.ca/news/world/a...

RIP

Holden Thorp is an institutionalist. He's been a university chancellor, provost, now EiC of Science. When institutionalists pull the fire alarm, we listen, because the call to action he issued this week exposes the dire nature of the threat we are facing. 1/ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Carney is laying off thousands bc he sees human beings as a cost centre. "AI agents & models are capable, & they can perform certain tasks. But the complex thinking & complex reasoning that would require to complete a task end-to-end reliably, that still is very much on the human side." #CdnPoli

This defines fascism. Holy hell, we are off a cliff. “The whole idea here is to basically have one control tower,” said Daniel Kowalski, a budget expert at the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation. “There’s one executive, all the agencies should be working to implement the executive’s agenda.”

My grandma would drive me around Yakima in her 1969 VW Beetle and tell me how much better the New Deal - Social Security in particular - made her life. Politics can help real people and that’s the lesson these assholes want us all to forget

Remember that the existence of Long Covid and the fact that millions of people worldwide are suffering from it creates an extraordinary dissonance in the minds of a section of the population who wish to believe the falsity that Covid is no longer dangerous, and perhaps never was.

Air conditioning is unapologetically a good thing because it helps people not die. And one good thing about air conditioning is that it largely needs to run during the day when solar power is at its maximum: it can and should align with clean energy goals.

Always a blessing to read Rabbi Danya’s words.

50 000 Poles showed up at the main square in Kraków’s Old Town last week to celebrate the promotion of their team Wisla Krakow to the first league. They cleaned up the square before going home, leaving no garbage behind. 0 arrests, 0 violence, 0 looting

(For those of us who don't know the US GDP off the top of their head, this isn't a joke)

"Starbucks pushed Automated Counting to 11,000 stores in roughly a month. It did not prove it slowly. The fastest way to turn a marketing number into a brand liability is to scale it before the room you tested it in looks anything like the room it has to live in."

The toll on press covering Delaney Hall:

Engaging the public in humanities & social sciences feels more important than ever. So we are offering £8k grants for researchers to work with galleries, libraries, archives, museums or performing arts organisations to do this. Please help spread the word! www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/sche...

Finding out Vince Lombardi said this to his players and assistant coaches about a gay player genuinely made me feel something. If some ancient hardass could say this in 1969, imagine thinking that we still need to tolerate homophobic and transphobic bigots in 2026.

And @rwarnica.bsky.social’s piece on Albertan separatism is of a piece. You can’t blame this stuff on Eastern elites, no matter how stuffy and self-interested they might be, without reckoning with what separatists actually believe. www.thestar.com/opinion/star...

I would like to point, once again, to @marcellodicintio.bsky.social’s piece in Albertan separatism. Required reading. bsky.app/profile/marc...

So I had one of those days that was technically useless in that I didn’t write anything BUT omg I read so many cool archival things. Willing myself not to let the utterly anti intellectual culture of productivity in academia ruin that feeling.

I wonder what these numbers mean for credit card debt and bankruptcy rates in future...

IMPORTANT: For any artists/writers/etc etc, using Linktree to point people to their work, from 5 July, they'll be feeding all imagery you use on your landing page into DALL-E by OpenAI. I deleted my account this morning.

Fantastic read! the “automagical” approach only worked until it didn’t. we found that the designers had sawed off any controls that would let us steer it back onto the right path. The people who knew what to do when things broke were the very ones laid off in pursuit of the new “agentic” vision.

My disability justice says we are not commodities. Not products. And until we do real work on dismantling ableism, this is just a particularly dangerous dongle.

We’re here to be the selves only we can, and AI does not empower that. It is a thief, meant to enrich some of the worst people in the world. It’s only free for now. As soon as they have leverage, they’ll start charging people who have fully convinced themselves they need it.

It’s stealing their ability to critically evaluate words, story, plot structure, every piece of craft. It’s leading their own skills to deteriorate. That to me is not an aid. And it flies in the face of disability justice principles. We are not here to be judged by output and productivity.

At this point, I don’t think there’s a particularly responsible way to engage with it, even (somehow) overlooking the environmental toll, the unethical source of the model’s training, the way data centers are poisoning communities.

So family members will be like “hey, it’s not as good as a real therapist, but any help is better than nothing, right?” Except LLMs are programmed to be obsequious. They train brains toward their worst impulses, because they’re meant to agree with you. Even when you’re saying questionable stuff.

The other thing about disability dongles is they don’t usually have much forethought in place, because the assumption is that tech will just continually advance to the point these things aren’t problems. Tell that to the people with ophthalmic implants with obsolete drivers.

Because you’re appealing to the quick fix, the idea that tech will be an equalizer, without doing anything to change the way people act towards disabled people. Some well-off disabled people will (maybe) get exoskeletons. Poor disabled people will be further excluded.