Wealthy centrists: Why don’t young people get more active in politics, if you don’t get active you’re not allowed to complain Young people: Actually we spent years designing & lobbying for this bike line Wealthy centrists: 3 businesses owners who don’t live in the city said no, so STFU & go away

Conservatives made an obscure legal school of thought one of their main gripes for years, only to immediately prove it out when in power *I get Critical legal theory isn’t obscure in academia, but your neighbors has no clue what it is

yes

have you seen the new python package? it's on pypi. you can literally install it with pip. set up a venv. grab it with poetry. you just use rye. run it with pipx. you can install it with uv. install uv right now. go to uv. dive into uv. you can uv it. it's on uv. uv has it for you. uv has it for you

Morning walk

Appreciate these insights from @emollick.bsky.social. But the "wizard problem" isn't that AI is too opaque. It's that we're designing systems that hide their processes. We could build AI that shows its work, explains, and lets us intervene. Instead we're choosing black boxes and calling it magic.

You can’t fix autism because autistic people are not broken.

At this exact time and date — 14:19 Eastern US time on September 22, 2025 — the center of the Sun is directly over Earth's equator (in technical terms, it has a declination of 0°), marking the moment of the September equinox. Happy equinox!

i feel "iron law of institutions" is like wilhoit's law. it gets you some mileage, but it fails in a bigger way

rewatching NETWORK for a project 👀 and it is absolutely shocking how prescient this film is. it’s like paddy chayefsky was granted a vision of america in 2025 and he furiously tried to turn what he saw into something intelligible to viewers in the 1970s

The thing about the Pentagon press story is this: the media is central to civilian control over the armed forces in any society. They are the ones usually pulling the alarm that forces politicians to respond. Abu Ghraib pics were on Rumsfeld's desk and he didn't do anything until media covered it

Elite was released (circa) 41 years ago today! This space trading open world game is considered to be the forerunner of many modern games, as well as being an important milestone in the history of space sci-fi.

Fearful Americans Stockpiling Facts Before Federal Government Comes To Take Them Away https://theonion.com/fearful-americans-stockpiling-facts-before-federal-gove-1819579589/

Simon Fraser University Installs Fir, Canada’s Most Powerful Academic Supercomputer ow.ly/Wngl50WZnVP #HPC #HPCwire

I'm not saying this to bag on the people who weren't worried yesterday & are worried now. The point of the "and then they came for me" poem is *not* that the guy they came for last deserved it. The point is to encourage you to speak up early. Now it's no longer early and you need to find a new poem.

From sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2025/08/woke...

As a society, the one thing we were totally unprepared for was annoying leftists being right.

LLMs becoming superhuman at all games & competitions but not even normal-expert good at anything that's not a game or competition continues to raise deep questions about whether games & competitions are a secret natural kind

i love public-facing scholarship. can’t believe i haven’t checked this out yet.

If you visit the Canadian Museum of History, you can see the portable writing desk that belonged to my favourite historical figure, David Thompson! It was manufactured in 1770 and used by Thompson on his travels throughout Western Canada.

Ursula K. LeGuin on technology

I wrote about Nate Silver's definition of Blueskyism and how I don't think it explains all that much. open.substack.com/pub/danieldr...

Standing up for due process isn’t standing up for criminals. It’s standing up for the fact that the truth isn’t just whatever the loudest or the most powerful person says it is.

This is "The Starlost" erasure and I will not stand for it!

I tried revisiting it recently, with the same result. It’s like they made a whole series out of the boring parts of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now Quark, on the other hand…

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

the real glory of world war two was that it involved a warrior cult being ground down and beaten to a pulp by people who would rather have been doing something else.

Stares in "No Silver Bullet" by Fred Brooks 99% of the time, the hard problems aren't technical but architectural, conceptual or procedural

Hot take 🔥 Reproducibility isn’t just about data and methods. It’s about scientific software. If your code can’t be run, your science can’t be trusted. Let’s fix that together. 💜 #OpenScience

It's getting harder and harder to deny that AGI is a near certainty. This kind of rapid expansion, this level of investment and infrastructural shift, this amount of *risk* - it doesn't happen without astronomical reward. The other day I saw a big barn, which can only mean one thing: giant horses

Taking this opportunity to plug something from my reading list, Steven Johnson's "The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective", It's about how anarchist terror, the FBI, and dynamite all grew up together.

I really think at its heart philosophy is one giant battle, taking place over many eras and nations, between people who are basically pleasant bureaucrats and people who are sexy murder poets, and it’s both super important and super boring that the pleasant bureaucrats must win.

For 12 months, America had a limited proof of concept for universal healthcare, and it was so uniformly successful we had no choice but to obliterate our society

I keep thinking about how the COVID vaccine was rolled out for free for all Americans in 2021 by the federal & state governments with support from local health departments & universities. Since, we have seen the privatization of delivery thru commercial pharmacies & the need for insurance coverage.

Very fun dynamic where anytime someone takes a stand against the criminal president who commits four hundred crimes a day they get subjected to intense scrutiny by the media over a parking ticket they got in 1987

I wrote a new essay about AI. This time I'm writing about "The Hallucination Problem"—what it is, why it is, and what there is to be done about it. As usual for my writing on this topic, it's long, but here are the CliffsNotes.

Illustrating the first point: the talk is by Korean man who works at a British university, he's presenting ideas based on previous work by American thinkers, speaking at a Dutch university, to an audience from around the world. The casual cosmopolitanism of academia is striking to me in these times.

Hooking on here to randomly mention that Hasok Chang's book, "Inventing Temperature", is awesome, and highly recommended to anyone interested in metrology or the philosophy of science. For me, it was one of those high-impact books, it changed how I see the world in many ways.

How am I constantly doing things yet never actually getting anything done. A mystery for the ages.

This WaPo piece about the Airbnb/DOGE guy who is now the head of design in government ignores that: *DOGE fired the actual talented design people in government, including Social Security! *IRS had a beautifully designed tax filing system that DOGE killed *USDS already did online passport renewals

Everything the rich have ever wanted is being delivered, a further weakened labor movement, a gutted regulatory regime, a public sector being strangled in a puddle. The rest was hokum invented by academic scribblers searching for a logical rationale for the rich to be more dominant.

the question shouldnt be "what radicalized you" but "what desensitized you" i just realized this. and the answer is, so many many injustices

Cars, like guns and the internet, tell us that other people aren’t real. The subway, bikes, books tell us that other people are real, the basis of community and a new imaginative horizon

Dragging your work laboriously from site to site, platform to platform, as they pivot to fascism or go plain mad or start plundering your work, or scalping more of your money, is now the everyday experience of “making stuff.” It’s all so miserable. This wasn’t the promise. It’s like rot.

I feel like being a barista would suck, you're inherently dealing with a lot of people who haven't had their coffee yet

“Someday, I hope, we’re going to have a reckoning over the horrors of this moment, but I don’t think we can do it without a clearer understanding of how this fits into U.S. history. There’s a tendency to say, “This isn’t who we are,” and I get the impulse, but history is never that simple.”

I love how that Alexandra Petri vibe comes through the summary. She's a treasure