DOGE is a genuine echo of the Cultural Revolution. a bunch of fucking morons, most of them kids hopped up on hyper ideological extremism, went around gleefully yanking the wiring out of stuff they didn't understand bsky.app/profile/anna...

Some hard decisions were made this morning... #laptop #stickers

the risk has never been of Bad AI becoming Superhuman AI, it's Bad AI becoming Good Enough To Replace Something That Would Cost More Up Front If A Human Made It AI. people shipping little gremlins that can destroy your phone when presented with sufficient riddles as the internal machinery of the app

www.percepta.ai/blog/can-llm... As a research lark at Percepta, Christos embedded a computer into an LLM, showed that it could solve the hardest Sudokus, and then as a side bonus built an exponentially faster attention

This is not a shitpost, I'm serious. Adding things is so easy that any computer can do it. Determining whether it improves the whole (and leaving the whole intact when removing the excess) is purely human, because it requires a point of view.

This is just a shitpost, but there's something to the idea that Almost every design choice and optimization for large language model-based "AI" comes from the designers' terror of ever hearing the words "you're wrong" or even just "no."

So… I've been writing for about 18 years on the idea that if you somehow manage to make meaningfully conscious machine minds & then you treat them as tools, then you're enslaving those minds, and that's pretty messed up. And this ties into something else I've re-upped recently: LLMs can't say "No."

GOOD NEWS! Researchers at Stanford University have developed a UNIVERSAL vaccine known as GLA-3M-052-LS+OVA, that protects against a wide range of respiratory viruses, bacteria AND even allergens. The vaccine is delivered intranasally AND provides broad protection in the lungs for several MONTHS.

We're at a point where there are no cheap options to retreat to and no price points that guarantee quality. Every run-down studio is $1400, every fast food meal is $17, every luxury condo has peel-n-stick tiles, every $300 pair of boots falls apart. Endless expensive mediocrity.

I think about this one a lot.

1. A short thread on a Bluesky phenomenon that might be described as "They are a dead-eyed cultist who must be cast out lest the heresy take root!" OP has blocked me for mocking them - I'd usually obscure their name but since they themselves were quote-dunking to demand someone else be blocked ...

Three very good threads this morning. Here is the first!

hello I am now a member of @flaminghydra.com and am kicking things off with a multi part series on fascist aesthetics and what their whole deal is flaminghydra.com/toward-an-un...

OFFS. When Iran tried to interefere in 2020, researchers caught them and called them out. Then the Benz-Weiss-Taibbi-Musk-Jordan-Trump axis labeled those researchers "censors" ... and set about defunding them and dismantling their organizations.

Restrictions on international researchers at NIST stand to be the latest blow to the US research community. #physics #quantum

I'm a cognitive scientist with an interest in epistemic vigilance, and this essay that's been going around gave me pause. I don't think it's straightforward to apply the concept of epistemic vigilance to interactions with LLMs, as this essay does. 🧵/ sbgeoaiphd.github.io/rotating_the...

I have spent the past several months studying the cutting-edge research on modern democracies that have defeated authoritarian leaders. I've learned that the conventional wisdom on the topic is wrong — in ways that have clear implications for the US going forward THREAD www.vox.com/politics/479...

Nobody understands reliability as the primary motivator in certain situations any more "Move fast and break things" does NOT apply to the vast majority of things in the world and the fact that so many people think it should is half the reason we're in this mess in the first place

FUN FACT ABOUT ME: I’m a Francophile…but specifically, about 15 years ago, I took great interest in Louis XIV and went way further down the rabbit hole than anyone had any business being. Louis, for all his architectural and design brilliance, readied France for a revolution. Let’s take a walk…

Vibe coding gives me "using a regex when you need a parser" vibes.

Today is the anniversary of when the Canadian flag flew for the first time at Parliament Hill in 1965. From September to October 1964, the Special Flag Committee reviewed 3,541 flag entries from Canadians. Here are just a few of the rejected designs. 🧵 1/12

Much of my youth revolved around the website ZineLibrary. It went down around Occupy in a massive loss for a movement whose ideas and knowledge mostly doesn't circulate online but in person. Anyway I've put it back online with a *thousand* anarchist zines: zinelibrary.org

Should you get snatched out of your home on April 21st because you didn’t file your taxes on time? The government is focused on immigrants now but if you set the precedent that people should get kidnapped over paperwork there’s a whole lot of people who can get taken next

Dan Reed published an essay on what HPC needs to do to remain competitive in the age of AI yesterday (https://hpcdan.org/2026/02/06/hpc-in-an-ai-world/). It was so engaging that I jotted notes as I read and figured I might as well publish them […]

Heads are going to explode 💥 Cato Institute just nuked the lie. Immigrants have cut U.S. deficits by $14.5 TRILLION since 1994, slashing the national debt by a third. All that “immigrants are bleeding us dry” noise? Absolute bullshit. 1/3

I suppose it's tedious for me to argue about whether or not something is weird, but it's worth noting that Poincaré would've found it weird. Here's him talking about Hilbert's program, from 1913. Wonder what he would've thought of today's "logic piano" !

Epstein’s economic power among academics was made possible by a capitalist system that makes higher education dependent on the charity economy rather than a public good supported by taxing the rich

Replacing Great Man of History Theory and Structural Theory of History with Worst Web Forums Theory of History

It's crazy that if you have the first principle "human ethnic groups, physical differences aside, are not different in terms of mental capacity or 'inherent' personality traits" you are woker than 90% of the people who work for supposedly liberal media organizations.

american conservatism is not the preservation of fire but the worship of ashes

an easy way to remember the difference between ssh -L and ssh -R is to try both until it works

Philip Glass boycotting the Kennedy Center Philip Glass boycotting the Kennedy Center Philip Glass boycotting the Kennedy Center Philip Glass Philip Glass Philip Glass Philip Glass Philip Glass boycotting the Kennedy Center

"106,636 years of federal work experience were lost across the 10,109 employees with Ph.D.s who departed STEM or health roles 1 January–30 November." It isn't just the scientific knowledge but the *institutional* knowledge that's been lost. Rebuilding federal science will be a generational effort.

If we're going to fix institutions, we have to burn out, root and branch, the idea that managers are interchangeable. So many places recruit the most brilliant scientists, artists, lawyers, doctors, etc, and they have to work for a guy who owns six McDonald's restaurants because some PE guy said so

I think Democrats should claim that they're going to make immigration tougher, and then simply describe a better version of system when asked about it. Polling consistently shows that the public wants to get tougher, and also that their version of tougher is *weaker than the actual system now.*

Maybe the most important thing I’ve learned over the past few years is that the solution to what looks like a collective action problem is to just start solving it. People will show up.

I think about this, by @adamjk.bsky.social, all the time adamjk.com/collections/...

When countries get hooked on US tech, their governments are constrained in reining in tech’s harms while most of the economic benefits accrue to the United States. It’s time to break out of that trap — but that means challenging the Silicon Valley model, not creating our own digital colonizers.

If I was the commander in chief of the Imperial hegemon I would simply not dismantle the network of military and diplomatic alliances, favourable trade deals, and broad cultural paramountcy that had made my nation the most wealthy and powerful the world has ever seen.

While AI is frequently criticized for its resource intensity, the biological shower thought is, thermodynamically speaking, one of the most expensive computations on Earth. To match the resource footprint of a single 10-minute shower, an LLM would need to generate millions of tokens of "slop.”

This is an amazing article, with tons of explanatory power about our current moment. Highly recommended!

This, like the flat and possibly declining price of oil, shows how we're in a phantom economy. Businesses saw a way to lie about layoffs without worrying investors, so they lied. All those big big numbers making line go up are a fantasy.

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@beenwrekt.bsky.social has a lot of nice writing on the latter issue, that there is no particular reason to believe that competitive testing like ML uses should work and yet it... definitely does?

friction is a master concept that i think is the most important thing in clausewitz, and barry watts makes a good case that it is (as clausewitz expresses it) not just operative in military but a universal force in the world

"Man who opposed bike lanes over ‘pedestrian safety’ now angry about No Right on Red law, faces serious identity crisis."