I get the sense that conservatives are losing their grip on the Culture War trophy they seized in 2024...but mostly because of their own incompetence and aggressively overplaying their hand; NOT because the Left has done anything in particular to make themselves more appealing or desirable.

"Everyone who makes different choices than me is a Bad Person, because my feelings make me the arbiter of morality and righteousness." ~ A grim portrait of progressive psychology. (This isn't a defense of Twitter ftr, more a condemnation of these dweebs).

Classical billiards can compute. With Isaac Ramos, we show that 2D billiard systems are Turing complete, implying the existence of undecidable trajectories in physically natural models from hard-sphere gases to celestial mechanics. Determinism ≠ predictability. 🎱🧠 @upc.edu @ricardsole.bsky.social

Abstract submission deadline for NetSci 2026 has been extended! The new deadline to submit work to is January 9, 2026 (anywhere on earth)

Definitely should not have binge-read an entire book of Laird Barron short stories. Absolutely not in a festive, holiday mood after that.

Nobody with a brain thought that remote learning would have no negative consequences. We all knew it would. The question was: would the negative consequences of remote learning be worse than the consequences of keeping schools open. It baffles me that people apparently don't understand this.

I'm surprised at how few face masks I'm seeing at the Complex Networks and their Applications Conference. Epidemic spreading has been *the* hot topic for the last five years. I thought more people would feel antsy about spending hours in an auditorium during flu season, yet...

TIL about a memorial ceremony in Iceland in 2019 to mark the end of a glacier, changing the place name from Okjökull to Ok (jökull = glacier). Uncompromising wording on the bronze plaque: "This is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it".

We just got published! 🥳 "Brainstem dysfunction as a potential etiology of #MECFS and #LongCovid: A mechanical basis” by Jeff Wood, @thosvarley.bsky.social @hiimjakekthx.bsky.social @artasemita.bsky.social @tessfalor.bsky.social @kaufmanmd.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 1/6 🧵

Ngl this is kind of an interesting idea - get an LLM to hallucinate plausible papers/studies you might have done as a source of inspiration?

I ntroduce yourself with five concerts you've seen — Radical Face (2x) Thievery Corporation (2x) Bonobo Emancipator Shpongle

🚨New paper! 🚨 "The topology of synergy: Linking topological and information-theoretic approaches to higher-order interactions in complex systems" 1/N journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Null models for comparing information decomposition across complex systems journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

God help me, I think I'm becoming microtubule-pilled.

The Government isn't coming back, is it? Even if this or that gets re-funded, I feel like we've moved into a qualitatively new chapter of American history.

I'm not even particularly religious, but the whole idea of "automating pastoral work" seems genuinely evil. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Are there any fictional mantras that go anywhere near as hard as "Fire walk with me"?

This is hugely significant since it seems like a killing blow to the fundamental premise of liberalism: that the population is rational and deliberative enough to be trusted to work out a just structure for society.

I actually love this - I would 100% play a surrealist survival game where the world around you follows some kind of unstable dream logic. There's some awesome potential for psychological horror here.

I feel like we have a lot of difficulty threading the needle between "normalcy bias" and "catastrophizing". It seems every take is either: "we're all doomed" or an optimistic "don't worry, nothing fundamental will change." Where is the take saying: "doom is not inevitable, but certainly possible."

One thing I didn't anticipate about the Musk-ification of The Other Site is the sheer number of confident crackpots that have come out of the woodwork. It seems like every third bluecheck wants you to know that they "solved consciousness" or whatever.

Is it insane to keep trying to make a career in science? I'm on year 2 of the academic job market, and every piece of news makes me think that I'm putting my eggs in a basket that may not even exist in a decade.

Proclamation of the Imperium - III 2022

The undeniable truth is that the American Left has *utterly failed* to provide even a bulwark of resistance against the Right, let alone inspire a popular mass movement with its own vision. Would-be revolutionaries should probably sit with that a bit before condescending to all the liberals.

people playing music/videos on their phone speakers in public is more than just mildly annoying and is instead a leading indicator of the decline of community and empath

Cocktail idea: a Leland Palmer - iced tea, lemonade, and two unexpected shots of bottom-shelf vodka.

Evaluating oscillatory mechanisms underlying flexible neural communication in the human brain https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.16.682957v1

We are watching a civilizational crash-out of world-historic proportions here.

Every time we find a way to use technology to satisfy some rewarding urge, it has been a problem. From opioid drug dependency to obesity and metabolic disease, we just can't handle it. I have no idea what the psycho-sexual equivalent of diabetes will be...but we'll find out, I guess.

It is finally out! Have you ever wanted to get into information theory, complexity, and networks? If so, this is the paper for you: a comprehensive tutorial review on information theory for complexity scientists specifically. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

For the past year, we've analyzed hundreds of primary sources spanning nearly a decade—emails, transcripts, texts, recordings, slides & other materials—revealing how a group of Silicon Valley elites sought to capture the psychedelic industry. Out now: "The Psychedelic Syndicate”

New paper dropped! Led by @thosvarley.bsky.social and Pai Vaibhav, we show that flows of information within a #xenobot resemble flows of information observed in adult human brains. Thomas provides caveats and context below. w/ @drmichaellevin.bsky.social, Caitlin Grasso, & Jeantine Lunshof.

New paper! This one is going to raise some eyebrows, so I want to explain the details before people get all worked-up about the title. 1/N www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

New release of Nvim-Lab, with better LSP configuration, and some new QoL plugins. github.com/thosvarley/n...

This is probably a good look at the future of AI - small, lightweight systems optimized for a given task getting wired together to produce high-level behavior.

A political scandal involving shoddy construction of a dam: Watergategate

The rate of change is too damn high. AI, politics, climate change...there is too much stuff all coming to a head at once! I feel like it is genuinely starting the wear on my mental health and/or soul.

I wonder how much of the current AI market is literally being driven by 5-10 men who genuinely think that, if they can pull this off, they will actually rule the world. I don't just mean "will have tons of money", but actually taking over the world.

I already worry that a lot of independent scientific software is buggy (leading to unknowingly publishing wrong results) -- the introduction of "vibe-coding" is going to make this infinitely worse. Scientists *need* to get training on software engineering/development.

📌 Save the Date! The flagship conference of the Network Science Society - 𝗡𝗲𝘁𝗦𝗰𝗶 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲 - is coming to Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute, 𝗝𝘂𝗻𝗲 𝟭-𝟱, 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲. Prepare to share ideas, discoveries & challenges in network science. Registration opens soon! 🔗 www.netsci2026.com

This is objectively the correct response, but it also feels like a pretty big step down a road that ends in open and hostile conflict between the federal government and the biggest state.

This shit is actually evil.

Dropped by the Other Site for a moment and hoo boy. I don't know if it's gotten worse in the 3 months since I was last on, or if my tolerance has just waned, but man - I kind of feel like spending too much time there will give you actual brain damage or something.

Probably the biggest personal change in my views has been the transition from being essentially libertarian on issues like drug legalization, gambling, etc. to being a lot more skeptical that society should be permissive when it comes to products designed to exploit known bugs in human cognition.

This is something I have been very worried about for a while - the era of COVID-as-an-acutely-deadly-virus seems well and truly behind us (thank God)...but what happens in a decade when everything has gotten COVID 10-20x? Or to kids who get it throughout development? www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/h...

I really thought that "The Chthulucene" referred to something a lot cooler than what it actually is.

A weird failure mode of LLMs I've run into: since they are trained on old data, if a package you're trying to configure substantively changes its syntax, the AI will insist on using the old version and never recognize that its has changed. This post brought to you by Neovim LSP configuration.

This is really interesting - the common narrative seems to be "lonely men become angry, Andrew Tate-watching reactionaries", but liberal men blow conservative men out of the water when it comes to feeling lonely.