Justin Singer

This is more than 2x what the USPS "lost" over the same period, while actually delivering a real service.

So much for the "efficiency" of private companies...

www.uspsoig.gov/sites/defaul...

But why deny yourself?

This is how you do local news.

She Despised Charlie Kirk. He Resolved to Make People Like Her Pay.

Tired: algorithmic media's impact on teens
Wired: algorithmic media's impact on boomers

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/12/u...

This specific legislative fix has been my hobby horse for like a decade.

Whole development cycles have been lost to the AI fever dreams of investors, with nary a true customer request driving the roadmap.

As a CEO, I push my team *away* from AI at every opportunity. Some of that is because as a customer, I feel abused by AI platforms. I've spent four years building on Retool, for instance, and I'm ready to leave because a year ago they traded bug squashing for agent building and it's all gone to shit

Oof.

I don't know how to convince well-meaning parents that elementary school education is not destiny (even college isn't!), but I do know that catering to their insecurities is a bad way to go about improving their kids' education.

I'm a product of "gifted" education and I sat down with my (now 2nd grade) "gifted" kids' teachers in Kindergarten and explicitly asked them to focus on social and emotional learning, because curiosity would take care of the rest. Kids (especially gifted kids) need to learn to be humans first.

The amazing thing about this particular cycle is that the tech CEOs who had the courage to look at AI five years ago and say, "this shit is nonsense and doesn't belong on our roadmap" are going to end being both completely vindicated and universally unemployed. (And that's bad).

Between The Most Dangerous Game, The Lottery, and The Necklace, middle school English turned out to be quite a life prep course.

Reminds me of a favorite piece of academic writing from right after the GFC:

Bubbles, Gullibility, and Other Challenges for Economics, Psychology, Sociology, and Information Sciences
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Ahmadinejad at Columbia: A Campus View September 24, 2007 was a busy day for free speech on campus

For no reason, was thinking about the time I attended a wildly controversial Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speech at Columbia that was entirely uneventful. Looked it up to confirm my memories only to discover that tomorrow is the 18th anniversary.

magazine.columbia.edu/article/ahma...

revealed preference is that many US elites prefer crony capitalism and promises of a mechanical god to science and innovation

Well that's one way to go.

"Everyone's eager to write stories about how companies that don't use AI will be at a competitive disadvantage. In this paper, I ask, what if the opposite is true?"

i really don’t want a superpower or a cheat code. i just want to do a good job.

As ever, unenforced regulations are a tax on good faith.

Foodborne illness surveillance is being weakened amid chaos at CDC People who work in public health hit a new level of despair this week amid high-level CDC firings and resignations. And we learned a key food safety surveillance system is being scaled back.

People who work in public health hit a new level of despair this week amid high-level CDC firings and resignations. And we learned a key food safety surveillance system is being scaled back.

foodfix.co/foodborne-il...

Mate-seeking spiders looking to smash are getting smushed by cars in Southern Colorado. So the state is building tarantula crossings.

Debate Club has broken containment.

One more thought on this. As a food manufacturer, I'm liable if my product causes harm when used as intended. *As I should be *. There's simply nothing about AI that demands we inoculate product makers from liability for things that only they can control.

Fair. And awesome.

Is that 89X from Detroit?!

Do you think we achieve the singularity first or lie about it for tax purposes first?

It's a strange mix for him. He wrote/edited a great series of essays on competent bureaucrats that was basically a love letter to the administrative state pretty much in parallel with the SBF disaster.

Fair thought, but wrong.

Kevin de Patoul, chief executive of crypto market maker Keyrock, says investors should be realistic about what this is. “You’re injecting a huge amount of risk into a system that, in the end, has almost nothing backing it except the continued appreciation of the asset.”

Screenshot of I Think You Should Leave episode, where the focus group man states “Oh my God, he admit it!”

Even older folks remember when Mitch's Wednesday special was $2 pitchers (+ live music!)