James Uther🦋

Shouldn't have had that coffee.

Today was one of my favourite lectures, on how evidence influences debates.

Case A: 79 people died as a consequence of smart motorways (2010-2024). That's sufficient to pause the policy.

Case B: In the first year of the Welsh 20mph scheme 900 fewer people were injured. There's still contestation.

How Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs - Anil Dash A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

"The son of an immigrant, a child of the counterculture, a man offering an unmistakable fuck-you to Big Brother, and a person who, above all, would never kiss the ass of someone who had absolutely awful taste. This was Steve Jobs." www.anildash.com//2025/09/09/...

For oncologists who incorporated AI into their practice, their ability to spot tumors fell by around 20% within just a few months of adopting it--Bloomberg

Good people, don't outsource anything you're not willing to lose....

Letter of the day (in the Times)

fossick

One really consistent pattern whenever I look at the energy and financial data for large big tech companies is that energy + revenue are being decoupled. They keep having to buy more and more energy each year to make the same $1 of revenue.

This is a pretty new thing

ketanjoshi.co/2025/05/31/t...

Cover of the book

A quote from ‘Serving the Reich’ that is as pertinent today as it was in 1930s Germany:

“The sense of helpless fatalism among the academic scientists seems not so much misjudged as calculatedly self-serving. The Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, working at the University of Berlin in 1933 said…”
1/n

Emma Harner writes beautiful music.

How climate action provided one of the few bright spots for Labour's first year in office The consensus is the Labour government has had a disappointing year, but when it comes to the green economy real progress has been made

Here’s the full assessment of Labour’s green performance over its first 12 months in office.
www.businessgreen.com/news-analysi...

I suggest a compromise: these guys can be doomed, and the rest of us can keep fighting

Black is, in fact, white. But big black doesn’t want you to know that, and the elites are all bought and paid for. Wake up!

The Death of the Student Essay—and the Future of Cognition One professor's reflections on the end of an era, as AI tools such as ChatGPT have murdered the student essay (RIP). Here's why that threatens the future of human cognition—and how to save ourselves.

"The writing is getting better. The ideas are getting worse" www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-death-... @brianklaas.bsky.social

In the past year we've had a series of papers with results that've shocked #climate scientists - the globe is heating #FasterThanExpected & we don't fully know why

The public discourse is not keeping up.

Here's a series of 5 new studies that climate hawks & journos need to have on their radar 🧵

Are you a journalist writing about a current heatwave?

The images you choose are critical to the story.

The @climateoutreach.bsky.social team have shown some ideas here which help stress the risks rather than the typical ice creams: www.climatevisuals.org/how-do-you-p...

Indicators of Global Climate Change 2024: annual update of key indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence Abstract. In a rapidly changing climate, evidence-based decision-making benefits from up-to-date and timely information. Here we compile monitoring datasets (published at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15639576; Smith et al., 2025a) to produce updated estimates for key indicators of the state of the climate system: net emissions of greenhouse gases and short-lived climate forcers, greenhouse gas concentrations, radiative forcing, the Earth's energy imbalance, surface temperature changes, warming attributed to human activities, the remaining carbon budget, and estimates of global temperature extremes. This year, we additionally include indicators for sea-level rise and land precipitation change. We follow methods as closely as possible to those used in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Working Group One report. The indicators show that human activities are increasing the Earth's energy imbalance and driving faster sea-level rise compared to the AR6 assessment. For the 2015–2024 decade average, observed warming relative to 1850–1900 was 1.24 [1.11 to 1.35] °C, of which 1.22 [1.0 to 1.5] °C was human-induced. The 2024-observed best estimate of global surface temperature (1.52 °C) is well above the best estimate of human-caused warming (1.36 °C). However, the 2024 observed warming can still be regarded as a typical year, considering the human-induced warming level and the state of internal variability associated with the phase of El Niño and Atlantic variability. Human-induced warming has been increasing at a rate that is unprecedented in the instrumental record, reaching 0.27 [0.2–0.4] °C per decade over 2015–2024. This high rate of warming is caused by a combination of greenhouse gas emissions being at an all-time high of 53.6±5.2 Gt CO2e yr−1 over the last decade (2014–2023), as well as reductions in the strength of aerosol cooling. Despite this, there is evidence that the rate of increase in CO2 emissions over the last decade has slowed compared to the 2000s, and depending on societal choices, a continued series of these annual updates over the critical 2020s decade could track decreases or increases in the rate of the climatic changes presented here.

Our new paper updating key metrics in the IPCC is now out, and the news is grim:

⬆️ Human induced warming now at 1.36C
⬆️ Rate of warming now 0.27C / decade
⬆️ Sharp increase in Earth's energy imbalance
⬇️ Remaining 1.5C carbon budget only 130 GtCO2

essd.copernicus.org/...

Heard @indyjohar.bsky.social talk about 'verbocentric' languages. Reminded me of the functional vs OO wars! steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/exec...

Just finished rewatching Rogue One and then immediately watched the beginning of A New Hope. It's such a contrast!

The official report on the blackout in Spain and Portugal was just released. I'll give a quick summary of findings and provide some additional info.

TL;DR
conventional power plants didn't control the voltage as planned
over-voltage caused renewables to turn off as required

headlines post blackout blaming renewables

headlines post report not blaming anything except management

A comparison to show something important:

- Post blackout, headlines blamed renewables (directly, suggested or framed as debate)

- Post Spanish gov't report showing 9 coal/gas/nuclear plants failed to provide voltage control: framing is about management, planning rather than the generation type

In Minnesota, America’s Luck Ran Out The United States is a fraying society, torn apart by polarization, intense disagreement, and ratcheting extremism.

I wrote about the political violence in Minnesota for The Atlantic -- and how we now live in a climate where this is likely to keep happening, as Trump's violent rhetoric has normalized, encouraged, and absolved political violence.

That army parade was straight outta Spinal Tap.

When people say "I did my own research", I am reminded that a PhD is literally (more or less) "other researchers have agreed that you are able to do your own research".

leftists: that thing you teach us in school to be terrified of is happening

historians: that thing is definitely happening

star wars: here is a beat-for-beat breakdown of how the thing happens, but with pew pew lasers. we know you watched it

news outlets: these protesters are out of control

on bsky! @smartereveryday.bsky.social‬

YouTube video by SmarterEveryDay I Tried To Make Something In America (The Smarter Scrubber Experiment) - Smarter Every Day 308

This is really interesting. And Destin seems really nice. www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTG...

“I've seen and lived what an AI Fueled future looks like:
Mediocre men harassing their talented and likely autistic peers until their peers just up and fuckin leave to a different organization out of frustration and exhaustion.”

Also, Claude code is scary good

Sister in Aus:
“you may have heard it’s really wet here”.
“No, I thought it was really hot?”.
“Oh yeah, there are droughts, but there’s massive floods right next to the droughts”