Reed the Frog

Haven't seen this sourced on anything but this guy's substack, but yeah this is terrifying. Maybe we shouldn't allow religious death cults to take office, huh?

Also... doesn't this mean Trump is the Antichrist per Evangelicals?

Academics Need to Wake Up on AI Ten theses for folks who haven't noticed the ground shifting under their feet

I'm not gonna touch most of this but two things:
1. The apprenticeship model of science was never supposed to be about the PI's workflow. The point isn't to have research assistants to help to publish stuff faster. Training the next generation researcher *is* the point. Because we care. Allegedly.

a thing historians will marvel about when they study this era is the extent to which the "war is a thing that happens to poorer, browner people" class went about systematically dismantling every aspect of the global political order that confined the costs of war to poorer and browner people

There are reasons Persia as a millennia old civilization

Eisenhower

Why developers using AI are working longer hours Studies find AI helps developers release more software—while logging longer hours and fixing problems after the code goes live

This feels like a helpful primer for understanding AI in general. It makes programmers more efficient on the front end because they can generate more code. But it makes them less efficient afterwards because it vastly increases the amount of time they spend tweaking and fixing bugs.

“Many of their commanders are especially delighted with how graphic this battle will be zeroing in on how bloody all of this must become in order to fulfill and be in 100% accordance with fundamentalist Christian end of the world eschatology.”

I grew up with all this Gog and Magog Revelation end-times war fetishism, and I can tell you (though you probably knew already), these people are both dangerous and unstable.

Scenes from a personalist regime

You Can Just Do Things | Patrick Blanchfield As ever, the horrors Trump embodies implicate more than just his singular odious person. His “habit of abusing power to force his will upon an uncooperative world”—in David Frum’s formulation over the...

Is it really such a shock that a man who’s bragged about sexual assault doesn’t give a shit about the tedious rituals of manufacturing consent from a populace he despises before getting violent? If you’re President Trump, you can just do things. www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

Repost YOU in a singlet 🤼

Spotted in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood

The Peril of Talking About Electricity Affordability Rob sits down with Jane Flegal, an expert on all things emissions policy, to dissect the new electricity price agenda.

Very funny that abundance pundits (abundits?) who talked about energy affordability because they thought it'd build support for their preconceived policy preference of building lots of new stuff soured on affordability after learning that it mostly means making better use of existing infrastructure.

Stanley Plotkin is a living legend in the vaccine world. He often attended ACIP meetings & I was lucky to meet him years ago.

Kudos to @helenbranswell.bsky.social for profiling his life and accomplishments at a time when vaccines are under attack. We need his wisdom & insights more than ever. 👇

Here's your friendly reminder that 81% of Black Americans were against the Iraq invasion in 2003, and we're overrepresented in the military, which is why the % wasn't higher.

For a group the whole world believes is uneducated, we seem to be VERY politically savvy.

progressive.org/op-eds/afric...

Semafor Keeps Hosting Ridiculous “Restoring Trust In Media” Events That Only Further Undermine Trust In Media You might recall that when political news website Semafor entered the media industry on the back of $25 million in private money, they made all kinds of promises about how they were somehow going t…

I wrote about how @semafor.com keeps hosting "restoring trust in news" events that unironically elevate all the shittiest people in media most responsible for declining trust in news.

I have said many times "I wish I had Google Earth with time coordinates" but this is not it. The whole point is to see streets as they were, which we *could* get close to with what we know (and labour). If I want costume dept brown, unlikely carriages and vibes, that is why bad television exists.

The NYT style guide

I was told trump would make things cheaper

Apropos of last repost: The rabbis throughout our tradition constantly remind us the Amalekites no longer exist.

This is relevant because the propaganda is meant to associate Amalek and Iran, which is Segal using the Torah to call for a God-sanctioned total war on Iran.

MAGA will forget all about his antiwar promises; this war will be embraced by phony patriots as righteous, as God’s command; and the domestic attacks on “enemies of freedom” will start.

The millions of us who aren't fooled need to get out on the streets and say no, not in our name. trib.al/Ogb0aY1

This is why it's not enough for Congress to just appropriate funds to scientific agencies. How the funds are or are not spent and when they are spent needs to be enforced.

The administration is playing games with our taxpayer dollars, when they should be going towards scientific innovation.

it's also so insulting to working class people to assume that they're not just bigots, but utterly unpersuadable, and can only be politically appealed to on that basis

(you'll notice this 'listening to the voice of the forgotten man' shtick is dropped the minute we ask for redistribution)

roadhouseendgame i was talking to my mom about cardassians and said something along the lines of what must it be like to be a cardassian civilian. like abstractly knowing the rest of the galaxy thinks of your species as 'the evil ones' and kinda sorta knowing your government runs labor camps and torture prisons and is a military empire, and it's a huge deal for everyone else in the galaxy, but you just like run a restaurant so it's not a big part of your daily life, so you just like, go about your day and make soup and don't think about it' and then halfway through my sentence i actually heard myself and then had to go sit down for like ten minutes. like sat down in a chair and stared at the floor for ten minutes

whoops

For ppl who aren't aware:
Old temperate forests are insanely rare nowadays and extremely important ecosystems lost forever once cut.
They're not just "old trees" but intricate networks of trees, fungi and all kinds of living creatures.
You CANNOT replant this!! Once it's gone it's lost FOREVER!!!

It appears that a Polymarket account called "Magamyman" made $515,000 in a single day betting on last night's U.S. strike on Iran, with the first trade placed 71 minutes before the news broke publicly.

Seems like a thing more people should be mad about

Ladies and Gentlemen, the New York Times.

Vanity war.

That about sums it up.