It's crazy to see the exact same madness that characterized the worst excesses of Woke 1.0 reincarnated by AI-antis, but instead of being about fundamentally good things (civil rights, stopping police violence) it's about policing whether someone used a coding assistant to make a CRUD app.

This really feels like Anthropic decided they needed a way to check for Chinese distillation attacks and they let Claude vibecode the solution.

Trans rights are human rights always and forever.

So this is most cursed thing I've seen in a hot second. Not only does it include a hexavalent carbon (?!?) it also is structured into the antichain lattice of Boolean functions. Organic chemists really must be stopped. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeMoco

I am genuinely starting to believe that we're in a simulation - or possibly some mediocre attempt at literary satire by a kind of cosmic MFA student.

There's something interesting to be written about how European refusal to adopt AC hinges on a commitment to the idea that climate change is still a future issue that can be avoided by sacrifice, rather than a present crisis that must be adapted to.

The way AI-antis talk about "The Bubble Popping" is starting to sound like the way that QAnon people talk about "The Storm": an overwhelming event of such magnitude that it becomes impossible for anyone to deny that "they were right." It's a myth of emotional catharsis and unambiguous validation.

New information theory results: Tl;dr - here are two generalizations. The first is that TC/DTC/S-info/O-info are special cases of a common form. The second allows us to move beyond Shannon info. theory for more general theory of synergy. 1/N arxiv.org/abs/2601.08030

absolute brain tickler music: paperclipminimiser.bandcamp.com/album/ii

Everyone knows that the end-result of this is witch hunts where people are accused of using AI, have no ability to rebut the claims, and get mobbed/harassed/excommunicated. These kinds of self-righteous purity spirals *always* lead to the exact same pattern but we keep doing it over and over and ov

There's an interesting analogy to be made between LLMs and psychedelics. In both cases, what you get out is largely a function of what you put in. They can be a force multiplier for someone with good epistemic hygiene and strong critical thinking skills...or they can drive you literally insane.

I've seen variations of this story so many times: the faith that people feel like they can put in MDs almost universally implodes the first time they are forced to seek help for a chronic or non-standard illness. I went through the same thing - and some people have been managing it for decades.

I'm not sure we'll like the consequences of deciding that being able to talk and think is no longer sufficient evidence of personhood or confers moral standing

If quantum immortality is true, everyone who gets rabies is, in their personal timeline, the only human who inexplicably survived an otherwise fatal disease.

One of the things the neo-Luddite Left really needs to hear a lot more is the Global South *loves* AI. So many people there see it as a an equalizer that makes them more able to compete in the global economy against those of us from wealthy countries.

TFW you are cast into the Lake of Fire, but somehow still have to pay exorbitant rent.

And people say that people can't make real art with AI.

The real take-away from this analysis is that increasing material wealth doesn't make us happier. This is kind of a problem because the entire orientation of American policy for the last century has been: more material wealth -> greater quality of life.

New paper with @doctorjosh.bsky.social, @drmichaellevin.bsky.social, and co-first author Vaibhav Pai. This one is a doozy - in it we show that we can modulate the degree of emergent, multicellular organization in a Xenobot with an exogenous compound (ATP). 1/N www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I wonder how much of the global change in fertility rates boils down to the fact in the past, having kids was the default (no birth control, social expectations) versus now having kids is an active choice people must make of their own volition?

Sea surface temperatures are already surging to record high levels for this time of year in key El Niño monitoring areas. ➡️ Sign up for our next monthly state of the climate webinar to learn more: climatecentral-org.zoom.us/webinar/regi.... We'll also be talking about the hurricane season outlook.

Not to be Dooming On Main, but I've got to ask: what's the off-ramp for the US here? Are we just going to hope that eventually everyone just kind of calms down? That future generations develop some kind of immunity to Internet Psychosis? Some sort of Revolution (that doesn't devolve into Civil War)?

#NetSci2026 Day 4 starts with YY Ahn's keynote on random walks and their implications for various network problems, e.g., spreading, link prediction, embedding, community detection @netscisociety.bsky.social @netsciconf.bsky.social

One of the only genuinely good MCU movies was specifically about how this exact thing was evil and something Nazi's would do.

Absolutely insane that WIRED would frame brain retraining as some suppressed, subversive idea no one can talk about when every LC/PAIS suffer will tell you that it's usually the first thing doctors will give you (rather than a real treatment). "Do some yoga and box breathing. That'll fix you up."

Any science moots have any thoughts on this new preprint out of George Mason and NOAA? "Projections based on the accelerated trend estimates suggest the potential for an additional 0.5–1.0°C of warming within the next decade." Seems like bad news. www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-9...

The Nidclaude gnaws at the roots of your brainstem.

I think you could make an argument that it's better for us (for our "souls" or w/e) to treat Claude as a moral agent (even if it's absolutely not) than it is to get used to the idea that we can abuse things that talk and think like us.

Psychologists doing clustering be like: #statsmeme

I want to write a Substack about how HP Lovecraft and JRR Tolkien were basically writing in the same conservative vein, but from very very different perspectives.

*Alfred Tarski has entered the chat*

Lets say you were a computational postdoc interested in fleeing the sinking ship of American science amidst a wave of historic layoffs in tech and staring down a real risk of stagflation...where would you be looking?

Apparently @fortune.com is posting articles on /r/collapse (This isn't some random Redditor posting a Fortune article - it's the official Fortune Mag account). Feels like a really surreal development... www.reddit.com/r/collapse/c...

I love the genre of "people blame capitalism for a basic problem of being a human." In Genesis, Adam's punishment for eating the apple is that he'll have to do labor to eat and that it'll suck. You don't hate Mondays you h̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶p̶i̶t̶a̶l̶i̶s̶m̶ miss the Garden of Eden.

There's something interesting to be written about how almost all social justice theory descended from academic criticism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis. The result was a fixation on signs, symbols, and abstraction at the expense of any real engagement with the real world.

It's worth remembering that things are typically antifragile within a limited range of intensities, beyond which, they are just straight-up fragile. Bones are antifragile...but will still break in a car wreck. Will climate change push us outside of our range? Idk.

I see this as a massive win for formalism as a philosophy of mathematics. Maybe it will turn out that learning rules for manipulating strings of symbols is all you really need to do genuine mathematics - intuitions and "meaning" be damned.

CIS PEOPLE TIME TO STEP UP it’s once again time to yell at our bad government via online comment form the FCC is trying to make trans and nonbinary content require special ratings on shows GLAAD has a good writeup on it below TELL ‘EM NO direct link to comment form: www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings...

I am horrified by how similar my musical tastes are to Claude's. Am I ... actually an NPC?

Would there be interest in a kind of local compute co-op? Something between running local models yourself or sending all your data to a mega AI company? I'm imagining something that specifically serves a single town/city and van be more responsive to local concerns.

I'm going to start *spins wheel* injecting peptides into *rolls dice* my toenails so that they *draws random card* glow in the dark. This will definitely fill the gnawing void at the core of my being and make me happy...right?

It's really grim that these customer service interactions are apparently all that remains of "human connection" for a lot of people. Losing the 2 mins of awkward banter with the grocery store cashier shouldn't be a crisis - we should have a rich enough web of genuine irl relationships to sustain us.

Claude can sometimes really cook.

This result explains a lot about the vibecession and 2024 election

Any sociologists have theories about why Reddit in particular is such a swamp of misanthropy? It doesn't seem obvious that it had to be that way, but I've been on chronic illness/pain forums that had more joie de vivre than a typical subreddit.

This is proof(imo) that a lot of anti-trans "I'm-so-rational-I-just-follow-the-science" critics like Dawkins really just dislike trans people and are using "facts and logic" as a post-hoc justification. Take the actual trans people out of the equation and suddenly all those "principles" vanish

I'm genuinely heartbroken to say goodbye to Knowledge Fight. It was one of the few things that reliably brought a smile to my face during the darkest periods of the COVID pandemic and the aftermath.

Watching Internet Leftists target Stancil has given me a much better understanding of why so many 20th century experiments in Leftism turned into crimes-against-humanity factories.