Zach A.

New:

I sat down with @aljazeera.com to talk about my firing from the Washington Post, being the last Black staff columnist left at the Post.

And how I believe the right is not just engaging in “cancel culture”, but “annihilation culture”.

Full video here: youtu.be/89qMGkK3LBc?...

"I DON'T NEED YOU TO FUCKING REWRITE WHAT I'VE JUST WRITTEN!"

Dam been writing a book about this and she just TikToked it in 90 seconds.

Evidence that even when LLMs produce similar results to humans, they “rely on lexical associations and statistical priors rather than contextual reasoning or normative criteria. We term this divergence epistemia: the illusion of knowledge emerging when surface plausibility replaces verification”

A friend who teaches at a South Side high school reports attendance is down as much as 50% some days due to fears of ICE raids. This is state terrorism.

Christopher Columbus was dragged back to Spain in chains by a crusading knight, convicted of tyranny and immeasurable cruelty, pardoned by Isabella but banned from returning to Hispaniola.

Fuck Columbus.

Donald Trump Truth Social Post: Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers! Governor Pritzker also.

I will not back down.

Trump is now calling for the arrest of elected representatives checking his power.

What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?

Starving children screaming for food as US aid cuts unleash devastation and death across Myanmar U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly said “no one has died" because of his government’s decision to gut its foreign aid program.

Horrific reporting from the AP on the Myanmar families watching their kids starve to death from Trump and Musk’s aid cuts apnews.com/article/myan...

#367 - Tylenol, pregnancy, and autism: What recent studies show and how to interpret the data “Science is not about being right or wrong in an absolute sense. It's really about constantly updating our priors, understanding the probability of something as new evidence becomes emergent.” —Peter ...

Evidence-based review of the Tylenol/ paracetamol - autism controversy stirred up by MAGA and their friends - FREE podcast + detailed notes

from evidence-based health/ longevity/ exercise podcaster Peter Attia (not on BSky): share with US friends!! peterattiamd.com/tylenolandau...

On a blue gradient background with imagery of the Supreme Court and the HRC logo, white and yellow text reads, “Today’s oral arguments made clear that, as Colorado’s Solicitor General stated, history, precedent, and commonsense must allow states to hold licensed providers accountable to the recommendations of every mainstream medical and mental health association.” Attributed to Kelley Robinson, President, HRC, in response to Chiles v. Salazar oral arguments.

“Conversion therapy” is pseudoscience. Period.

The Supreme Court must uphold the constitutionality of these legal restrictions and stand strongly between our children and these abusive practices.

This is a big #WhiteChristianNationalism red flag.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement A GESTAPO BY ANY OTHER NAME IS STILL THE GESTAPO

More Gestapo THUGGERY.

Not a drag queen

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences: Vol 380, No 1936

Great issue of Phil Trans B @royalsocietypublishing.org on the BIG QUESTION of the origin of life: royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202...

Solar Hegemony: M-Dwarfs Are Unlikely to Host Observers Such as Ourselves With no firm evidence for life beyond our solar system, inferences about the population observers such as ourselves rests upon the Earth as a single input, at least for now. Whilst the narrative of ou...

Here’s my new paper which our last #CoolWorlds video discussed. Paper tackles two existential puzzles: why don’t we live around the most common star type, an M-dwarf, and, why do we live so early in cosmic chronology?

arxiv.org/abs/2510.01215

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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

Opinion | Civility Is a Fantasy

I wrote about the dangerous fantasy of the civility framework in political discourse. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/24/o...

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA

10 YEAR OLD ME IS LOSING HER MIND (a thread 🧵)

major traffic incident

Spain approves ‘total’ arms embargo in Israel * * *

"The Spanish government approves a “total” arms embargo on Israel, part of a package of measures aimed at halting what Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called “the genocide in Gaza.”"

www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_ent...

This is the solution to the Paradox of Tolerance: It's a contract, not a rule. If you break the terms of the contract, it no longer applies to you. If you won't be tolerant, you don't get to be tolerated.

I wanted to get a video of this ghost crab but every time I got close to their hole they scuttled back in, so I tried getting clever with it. I made a little sandcastle and shoved my phone into it, hit record, and walked away. Crab was VERY suspicious of this addition to their environment.

the H1-B thing seems unlikely to withstand a court challenge, but it's still deeply funny that it's basically a nuclear warhead aimed at businesses and executives who've been grandiosely and publicly kissing his fucking ass for nine months

Defense Secretary Hegseth requires new 'pledge' for reporters at the Pentagon The Pentagon is implementing new guidelines that will require journalists to sign a pledge and agree to report only approved and officially released information.

The Pentagon is implementing new guidelines that will require journalists to sign a pledge and agree to report only approved and officially released information.

I’m not gay but

Hakeem Jeffries gotta go, not just as House leader but also from Congress

Justice Eddins went even further in a concurrence joined by two other justices. He flamed the U.S. Supreme Court for choosing to "steamroll" the First Amendment's separation of church and state by mandating government support of religion. He wrote: The federal wall cracks. The Supreme Court's recent religious clause cases wreck the relationship between free exercise and non-establishment.... The Roberts Court casually dismisses the lessons of American and world history, the warnings of prominent early Americans, and the judiciary's storied legal minds. Bad things happen unless government and religion are completely separated. Justice Eddins also wrote about something you and I have been talking about for a long time, which is the conservative supermajority making up facts. He called out Kennedy v. Bremerton, the notorious "praying coach" case, writing: "As it often does, the Court repackaged and whitewashed facts to achieve a desired outcome." This is the same point that Sherrilyn Ifill has made on the show about how the record in that case, and so many others, is ignored.

I am pleased to report that Hawaii Supreme Court Justice Todd Eddins has dropped another total evisceration of the Supreme Court.

He says originalism is a fraud—and the Republican justices are shamelessly making up facts and history to impose radical Christian nationalism: slate.com/news-and-pol...

There are no greater, more loathesome, more hideously repulsive hypocrites on earth than MAHATs.

Ah yes, this is important background info. Sinclair is Bond-level supervillainry and more people need to be aware of it.

No for-profit private corporation exists to protect free speech, even as an American value. They exist to make money.

But it's as ridiculous for these execs to think that caving to an authoritarian to lessen the pressure, when it gives Trump more power and will do the opposite.