Steve B. Holt

Apple became one of the most profitable firms on this planet of Earth on the innovative idea that users don't need to or want to understand anything about how or why products work.

The number of systems that break when housing becomes unaffordable - even in just the best, most productive cities of a country - are massive because it becomes a large distortion in career and living decisions that prevents people from optimizing their own lives.

Me, heading into the semester of LLMs everywhere with an asynchronous section of a capstone class on deck.

A better case for merit systems in administering highly technical areas of government could not be conceived than what this administration as done to HHS and its proposal to take grant-making decisions out of the hands of scientists and place them into political appointee hands to make it worse.

Farthest I've been:
N: Denali, AK
S: Antigua Guatemala
E: Barcelona
W: Kailua-Kona, HI

Sometimes it all just kind of hits you and you realize how many layers of stupidity we are all being buried by.

A coalition of adults voted for a man who was like, "I'm going to put the guy that swims in shit rivers in charge of health services and research" and now we all get to die of preventable diseases because shit rivers guy de-funded the most promising vaccine research line in a generation.

So many examples about AI boil down to "what if you never had to think about things ever again...even things like *what to say to loved ones* and *communicating emotions to friends*?" and I just have to say that it surprises me 0% that a severely anti-intellectual era of the US is smitten.

Same. Never will, tbh.

Kind of wild to me that Peter Thiel wrote some code in the 90s and has a) reaped ungodly sums of money from it and b) used said money to fund an entire neo-fascist movement that culminated in, functionally, a coup of the United States government.

Who could have known? No one can predict how these things will go!

Save the PMF Program or Risk Losing a Generation of Public Servants The Trump administration's elimination of the PMF program will have negative long-term consequences for an entire generation of policymakers.

Eliminating the PMF program as President Trump ordered could mean losing a new generation of bright public servants. PMF alums @andrewpmiller.bsky.social and Kelly Razzouk explain in @justsecurity.org:

Apples? Never heard of 'em.

Everytime I hear someone say something like "because of TikTok, I can't watch a clip longer than 30 seconds, lol," I want to pour one out for Quibi, an idea that arrived four years too early and got mocked out of existence for thinking so low of people's attention spans.

Jesus Fucking Christ.

My Orioles jersey buying strategy is to wait for a long-time player I've grown to love watching play to get traded away and salving the heartbreak by getting a jersey at 40% of the price.

(Yes, this is about Cedric Mullins.)

(And Andrew is one of the most thoughtful, inventive instructors out there who really cares about student learning. If *he's* having these issues in online classes, the dam has broken.)

Now, most public and non-profit universities are behaving exactly the same way and I'm generally finding myself in the minority for seeing why that's bad.

I'm old enough to remember when the Obama administration went after for-profit colleges for putting out shoddy online degrees that imparted no skills or knowledge to students and left them in debt for nothing and everyone thought that was a good thing.

Since there's obvious perverse incentives here that also push against the socially optimal outcome, some set of actors who still care about college as developing skills and knowledge will need to develop a means to realign the incentives here. And LLMs might just force the issue for us all.

And look, I get that some faculty probably prefer the "set it and forget it" approach to teaching of online learning because they don't actually care much about the learning function of classes. But it's a large set who seem to feel that way and find all manner of rationalizing delusions.

I have said for years that employers need to be pressuring universities to label transcripts and diplomas by modality of completion if they want to have a clear understanding of the skills someone they're hiring actually might have. That's more important now than ever before.

I've been fighting a very lonely war on this front for years now, but basically all of the best evidence suggests asynchronous online learning was absolutely awful for student learning and skill building *before* LLMs were integrated into every software imaginable. Now? They mean nothing.

Frankly, reporters should generally be so much more skeptical of anyone at the Manhattan Institute than they seem to be, especially someone the Institute is trying to get profiles from reporters about.

I am not usually someone who really puts much stock in the "normalizing" function of outlets like the New York Times, but the way they have covered Rufo and the Right's war on universities is what I would point to if I wanted to illustrate how it functions when it does.

Watching a close Orioles game when the starter comes off the mound

I mean, the Urias trade alone felt like the Astros getting a man on the inside.

The Personalist Penalty: Varieties of Autocracy and Economic Growth Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

Interesting paper by @sgehlbach.bsky.social, @chrisblattman.bsky.social and Yu. Even though Trump is definitely trying to build the personalist type, I suspect that even if autocracy manages to consolidate in the US, it will be a more institutionalized variety… www.nber.org/papers/w3409...

Out of curiosity, is that the case everywhere or does that authority vary across states?