Atanas Stankov

What is up with big name NYU psychology professors selling books about how social media and/or AI should be run, often authoritatively? I haven’t seen this to that level with any other big name institution like Stanford or Columbia. Super specific crowd gets attracted there.

Biological Laboratory | LEGO® Ideas This is a two-floor realistic Biological Laboratory building. In this design, I try to tell stories about biologists, introduce biology concepts to general publ…

I just made an account and voted for this biology laboratory made of LEGO to "promote biological research and inspire more people into the world of biology". They need 10K votes. Reposting and/or voting below would be helpful. 🤗
beta.ideas.lego.com/product-idea...

PS: This can be plausibly solved with laser-based systems but those are still in research as far as I understand. It’s all pro and con. Anyhow for the mean time any state with a small budget cause havoc. Blowback has always been the indicator of hubris and scruple-less decision making.

From the Damnthatsinteresting community on Reddit: El-udeid base in Qatar got hit by an Iranian missile after the patroit system failed to intercept it multiple times. Explore this post and more from the Damnthatsinteresting community

The economics of war have changed. Zelenskyy had a speech last year stating that pricy state-of-the-art defense systems (Iron Dome, Aegis, Patriot) can be overwhelmed using cheap munitions (drones of various types) by mere volume. POTUS is showing this with idiocy.

www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsi...

From the funny community on Reddit: The local beaver has retaliated after his dam was removed Explore this post and more from the funny community

My favorite instance of plausible high animal intelligence is beavers using trees for destructive revenge. 🧪

www.reddit.com/r/funny/comm...

The glue to all productivity is the social process.

It’s not capital. It’s not algos/AI. It’s not maths. It’s not gold or bitcoin. It’s not the old institutions/beliefs. While important, they are tools.

Pivot towards the social, in whatever abstract capacity one can imagine if it’s not clear how.

Rage post sorry. But still it’s a bad precedent.

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL NEVER ALLOW A RADICAL LEFT, WOKE COMPANY TO DICTATE HOW OUR GREAT MILITARY FIGHTS AND WINS WARS! That decision belongs to YOUR COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF, and the tremendous leaders I appoint to run our Military. The Leftwing nut jobs at Anthropic have made a DISASTROUS MISTAKE trying to STRONG-ARM the Department of War, and force them to obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution. Their selfishness is putting AMERICAN LIVES at risk, our Troops in danger, and our National Security in JEOPARDY. Therefore, I am directing EVERY Federal Agency in the United States Government to IMMEDIATELY CEASE all use of Anthropic’s technology. We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again! There will be a Six Month phase out period for Agencies like the Department of War who are using Anthropic’s products, at various levels. Anthropic better get their act together, and be helpful during this phase out period, or I will use the Full Power of the Presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal consequences to follow. WE will decide the fate of our Country — NOT some out-of-control, Radical Left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real World is all about. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP 29 ReTruths 61 Likes Feb 27, 2026, 3:47 PM

This afternoon's crashout brought to you by a bunch of nerds with very weird ideas about whether code is something you should be nice to.

An upcoming California law requires operating system providers to enforce basic mandatory age verification It's basic, and by the looks of it, near unenforceable.

Age verification needed to run a Linux OS?… Gavin Newsom is such a clown.

One reason friends and I left California is dumb governance, esp. bc of NIMBYs blocking Section 8 housing and high rise building permits in the South Bay of Silicon Valley to keep rent up.

www.pcgamer.com/software/ope...

What does it mean for a system to compute? What does it mean for a system to compute?, Wolpert, David H, Korbel, Jan

iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1...

I’m not a fan of AI hyper-scalars but kudos to Anthropic to sticking to their morals. It makes OpenAI and Google look weak too.

Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid Coal makes a bit of a comeback, if only by accident.

Solarpunk future for everyone.

arstechnica.com/science/2026...

PS: I am sticking with the post above bc, while it is polemic and rage-y, I’ve understood there are no proper mechanisms of collective bottom-up stick. For one, the college unions are fangless and slow. And this lack of bottom-up stick bleeds onto how public policy is shaped. Shame. No more carrot.

This is why Bluesky lacks the ignition old Twitter. It is just more bubbled behavior. The best thing would be to make the algorithms transparent.

Stop infantilizing the user base. Academia doesn’t need to release its faulty top-down control mechanism released onto the public.

Can anyone fix science? Science has always been in crisis. This is fine.

Part one of a new blog series: using the discovery of vitamins as a parable for why replication crises in science are actually good.

💯 Konrad v. Earl is my favorite science Twitter moment. I remember looking at the graphical tree and all the side conversations around that fertilized.

I’m confused how mainstream intellectuals are going to capture the working class vote post-Trump? Like the DNC is getting good polling right now because being anti-Trump is a free lunch but we are in populist times and people across the board want anti-establishment candidates post-Trump.

Is there something special about the “information physics” of globalization that has forced all the world’s nasty and hidden mechanisms of controls in the open in a short timespan (2016-now)? There was one viral tweet a that said the world is not getting worse but more exposed.

What sucks about memory is that the laws of physics allow you to access a fixed amount at time. Is that a feature or a bug?

Tired of dystopian sci-fi? You might like Solarpunk. A recent literary genre imagines what happens when our climate changes—and so do we.

hey yo

i wrote a reported culture essay for @motherjones.com about solarpunk

it was incredibly fun talking to a bunch of solarpunk thinkers and artists!

the magazine commissioned some lovely art for it too

le voila: www.motherjones.com/environment/...

Under Mamdani, City to Probe Businesses Where Most Workers Take Zero Sick Days Employers will be subject to an investigation by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection if more than half their employees took zero paid time off in a given year.

Hopefully Mamdani takes a jab at 4-day work weeks and having the month of August off as policy. European countries have a lead on that.

www.thecity.nyc/2026/02/20/z...

Not listening to career advice is one the best lessons I learned. So much bad advise that I thinking of writing some folk short stories with silly characters. Or the very least it is a nice fantasy.

… because a lot of these tech jobs are an ecological disaster in the professional realm. Yes that needs be said even in some rant-y post. The longer the bubble lasts while the US toys with authoritarianism the more a tech job looks like a hole in the professional resume. 2/2 \rant

YouTube video by The Tech Report AI Bubble: ‘This is dumber than WeWork’ | Ed Zitron

There are a reasons why I have resentment towards tech work and it is the professional infantilization. What’s weird is that having complaints about this leads to stronger gaslighting to counter the complaint narrative. I’m also tired of the “I got bills” excuse... 1/2

m.youtube.com/watch?v=N_3X...

Bluesky doesn’t match the thrill of old algorithmic Twitter. I know folks like to say the curated feed is where its strong but even then it just have the same snappiness and ignition. Maybe its just a specific user phenotype that likes it. 🤷‍♂️

Old Twitter started the Arab Spring.

Are the chips manufacturing shortages going to get so bad that silicon and neuropixels probes are going to be sold out for a while?

Meta to retire messenger desktop app and messenger.com in april 2026; users shift to web and mobile platforms *]:pointer-events-auto scroll-mt-[calc(var(--header-height)+min(200px,max(70px,20svh)))]" dir="auto" tabindex="-1" data-turn-id="request-699152fb-6e90-8320-803c-56f9d1483383-28" data-testid="conversat...

Discord decline vibes. I think messaging app platforms fit Cory Doctorow and Peter Zeihan’s description of the fast collapse of US prestige. Yet folks still have a hard time criticizing the career built around these institutions: from data analysts to project managers.

dzrh.com.ph/post/meta-to...

Often after the student sees the grade they stop listening to feedback. What the point of feedback when the path is already blocked or determined?

An ecological metaphor of the neural code.

For the reading list.

It’s a contagious herd response sped up by technology because they’ve seen a better possible future in media. 2/2