Dan Guadagnolo

And if you reckon banks have moderated their behaviour post-financial crisis, get this: US loans to private equity and credit funds have jumped by 60 per cent between the fourth quarter of 2024 and the second quarter of this year. To almost half a trillion dollars.

Experimental evidence of the effects of large language models versus web search on depth of learning Abstract. The effects of using large language models (LLMs) versus traditional web search on depth of learning are explored. A theory is proposed that when

When people learn with ChatGPT instead of following their own searches, they end up knowing less, caring less, and producing worse advice, even when the facts are the same.

Friction is an essential ingredient for learning! Convenience makes us shallow.

academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Ghoulish, evil, intentional malice

I don’t care if a lot of recruits can’t run a mile but I do care that we don’t seem to have much for young people to dream of and work towards but enactor of state violence or grifter, and even the idea of putting in effort to achieve an outcome feels sour

Protein Powders and Shakes Contain High Levels of Lead - Consumer Reports CR tests of 23 popular protein powders and shakes found that most contain high levels of lead.

my latest investigation for @consumerreports.org is based on months of reporting and 60+ lab tests of leading protein supplements

we found that most protein powders and shakes have more lead in one serving than our experts say is safe to have in a day (🧵)

www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein...

Chart showing beef prices relative to the Bloomberg Commodity Index since 1965

Beef is just crazy expensive rn, especially compared to other commodities

Whenever anarchism — or any idea more radical than the status quo — gets dismissed as unserious, it's worth remembering the current system runs on things like "we put all the money on a scam machine that tells rich dipshits they're god."

It's simply ending the partnership between government and academia that drove the most successful era of science anywhere ever. There's no eternal rule that required this system, it was a just a specific, creative innovation that worked. It seems wr will learn its value the hard way now.

I had some thoughts about people saying that "debate me bro" trolling is somehow the height of democratic discourse.

American media has been manufacturing parasocial reactionaries for decades. Limbaugh, Beck, Shapiro, Jones, Carlson, Hannity, etc. The importance of these figures is not ideological purity, consistency, inventiveness, etc. It’s that they keep you company in your cab, your cubicle, on your commute.

sometimes they have televisions attached and that allows me to rage watch house hunters on HGTV! Kind of a perfect vibe for a very fast run

How thousands of ‘overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI to seem smart Contracted AI raters describe grueling deadlines, poor pay and opacity around work to make chatbots intelligent

“AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor,” said Adio Dinika, a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute…These raters are the middle rung: invisible, essential and expendable.”

U.S. Attacked Boat Near Venezuela Multiple Times to Kill Survivors American officials said the repeat drone strikes were carried out by Special Forces, and more attacks could come soon.

EXCLUSIVE: U.S. Attacked Boat Near Venezuela Multiple Times to Kill Survivors

American officials said the repeat drone strikes were carried out by Special Operations Command, and more attacks could come soon.

theintercept.com/2025/09/10/u...

New pub: @culturalstudies.bsky.social has just posted the interview that @imreszeman.bsky.social and I did with Andreas Malm re: Fossil Capital, the development of his thought, and plenty more. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.....

Meta suppressed research on child safety, employees say The company’s lawyers intervened to shape research that might have shed light on risks in virtual reality, four current and former staffers have told Congress. Meta denies the allegations.

A German teen told Meta's child safety researchers his under-10 little brother had been sexually propositioned multiple times on its VR platform.

Meta deleted the evidence.

New internal whistleblower docs indicate that was part of a broader cover-up: www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...

over time I believe this will end up being one of the most unpopular things the administration ever does

a death sentence for many hobbies and all the average consumer sees is that you’re taking away all their bargains

one of the few policies that has a direct negative effect on almost everyone

Congrats Dylan! Preordered!!

Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change: Evidence from U.S. Résumé and Job Posting Data 35 Pages Posted: Guy Lichtinger Harvard University Department of Economics Seyed Mahdi Hosseini Maasoum Harvard University Date Written: August 31, 2025 Abstract We study whether generative artificial intelligence (AI) constitutes a form of seniority-biased technological change, disproportionately affecting junior relative to senior workers. Using U.S. résumé and job posting data covering nearly 62 million workers in 285,000 firms (2015-2025), we track within-firm employment dynamics by seniority. We identify AI adoption through a text-analysis approach that flags postings for dedicated "AI integrator" roles, signaling active implementation of generative AI. Difference-in-differences and triple-difference estimates show that, beginning in 2023Q1, junior employment in adopting firms declined sharply relative to non-adopters, while senior employment continued to rise. The junior decline is driven primarily by slower hiring rather than increased separations, with the largest effects in wholesale and retail trade. Heterogeneity by education reveals a U-shaped pattern: mid-tier graduates see the largest declines, while elite and low-tier graduates are less affected. Overall, the results provide early evidence of a seniority-biased impact of AI adoption and its mechanisms.

Whoopsie. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

How to run a university in Canada? Outsource it to this management consulting firm Nous Group's template for getting out of the red has been adopted by major schools. Critics call it the corporatization of higher education.

One of Australia’s worst exports: consultants Nous are wrecking Canadian universities nationalpost.com/feature/how-...

Absolutely. I wouldn’t have been able to finish in time!

70 years ago, on this date, Emmett Till was kidnapped and brutally murdered by white men.

His family, including his cousin who was with him at the time, is repeating the train ride he took from Chicago to Mississippi in 1955 to mark the anniversary

Being a hater is delightfully human too. The chatbot will only ever flatter the user!

Hard to overstate how badly this’ll screw over international doctoral students across the US.

DOUBLE #hpbio job alert! The @ihpst-uoft.bsky.social has 2 postings for full-time tenure stream positions in the #Philosophy of Science and/or Tech at the Assistant and Associate prof levels (general #philsci or phil. of race/indigenous knowledge/non-western sci).
🐋🌱

Can I recommend a book by @drewmckevitt.bsky.social because “gun capitalism” is key to understanding all of this

uncpress.org/978146967724...

Can’t say enough about how people just want to live, and everything about our society is aimed at making that impossible

oh rad I'm doing this too! Im just trying to figure out the copying situation for the texts since we've got a bit of a Big Brother situation going on wrt copyright here.

Remember: LLM-based chatbots are tuned deliberately to produce outputs like this, in the service of keeping users' attention and encouraging them to pay real money

Awful. It is maximum engagement. The outcome of a product working as intended.