Kevin J. Kircher

Imo three things you can do in undergrad that will probably meaningfully improve your career chances (that aren’t highly contextual where the wind may shift and what’s happening to CS majors rn might happen):

-become statistically numerate

-learn another language

-learn to write well

And there is nothing worse than what Pinterest has done to teacher morale. The peer pressure and the parent pressure to furnish a space is unrealistic and expensive. Especially when teachers are making less than $40,000 a year. You’re asking them to use their money to fund your classroom.

I just saw a kindergarten mom in tears on TikTok because her child’s classroom wasn’t filled with rugs and lamps and bins full of fun things...

It’s important to understand what a state-funded classroom looks like versus a teacher-funded classroom. Your beef is with the state, not the teacher.

As electric bills rise, evidence mounts that data centers share blame. States feel pressure to act Amid rising electric bills, states are under pressure to insulate regular household and business ratepayers from the costs of feeding Big Tech’s energy-hungry data centers.

“But growing evidence suggests that the electricity bills of some Americans are rising to subsidize the massive energy needs of Big Tech…”

I think this is part of why big tech companies are so into LLMs: Their executives see the potential to get more decent code per worker per week, meaning they can accelerate the company's output, lay off highly-paid coders, or do a bit of both.

It's underappreciated, I think, that generating decent (if not great) code is one task that LLMs are genuinely good at, especially tailored LLMs trained on high-quality codebases. This is not only killing job opportunities for computer science grads, it's putting existing coding jobs at risk.

Lord please bless me like you blessed this man.

"Read it out loud" is my favorite piece of writing advice. If you can say it to your cat without stumbling over words or cringing at the sound of your own voice, it's probably decent. If not, revise more.

NIH scientists say that mRNA vaccines have saved untold thousands of lives. A heroin addled nepo baby whose brain was partially eaten by a worm says mRNA vaccines are worthless and even dangerous. For busy medical patients, it can be hard to know who to trust.

email to me: Our disabled son has CP and bladder spasms so urologist is recommending Botox treatments and we read your article and are concerned about the presence of mRNA in the Botox. Is mRNA in all brands? How can we know if it is in there? Is there a safe brand you recommend? He has to have this so what do we do? Thanks

my reply: personally, i'd recommend you follow the advice of your doctor. but what do i know, i'm just a random person you emailed. I have no more formal education around botox than the author Naomi Wolf, whose advice I assume you were actually seeking. but since you emailed me, my suggestion is that you listen to your kid's urologist, who is a trained medical professional, rather than seeking out medical advice from someone with an english degree and a history of making significant errors in her research. best of luck!

a specific skill I've developed over the past ~20 years is crafting responses to emails sent to me, but intended for that other Naomi Wolf

BRICS in 2025 | The Polycrisis Nations meet in Brasilia for the 2025 BRICS Summit. China's rise and US chaos shape the opportunities and challenges for the group.

“China’s dramatic surge of investment into the ’new three‘—EVs, batteries, and solar—is expected to crush oil demand by 5M barrels/day by 2030. That cheaper green tech is now enabling 100+ countries to break free from … imported hydrocarbons towards the sunlit uplands of electric self-sufficiency.”

BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.

In a statement confirming the deliberate killing of al-Sharif, Israel’s military accused the journalist of heading a Hamas cell and “advancing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and [Israeli] troops”. It also alleged that it had documents providing “unequivocal proof” of his involvement with the Palestinian group. Muhammed Shehada, an analyst at the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, said there was “zero evidence” that al-Sharif took part in any hostilities. “His entire daily routine was standing in front of a camera from morning to evening,” he told Al Jazeera.

For any wavering supporters of Israel, there have been off-ramps to take to avoid being (staying) on the side of a genocide basically every day. Here’s another, killing an entire team of journalists and claiming they were terrorists.

One of the things I'm very glad about is that if everything I'm doing winds up accomplishing nothing I will have done it struggling for something with people my life is better for knowing. Life is too short for much else imo.

This is probably a good time to mention that I’m on a research leave from my college from now to August 2026 (and possibly longer) to do more work in this space, starting with rebooting my newsletter It also means I have more capacity for projects, collaborations, and speaking at events.. debcha.org

The actual physical reality of the planet is that incident solar is abundant. The new technological reality is that we can now harness renewables at scale, opening up ways to limit extraction + pollution. We are not just making shit up to feel good.

This is the world we want to build and live in.

wait no-

a tasty new future
is shockingly near

An important thing to understand is that this happened because ONE PERSON chose to stand up, and courage is contagious. We all have the power to change things, even *huge* things, and when brave people stand up and tell the truth, sometimes it reveals to others that they know the truth, too.

The reason speed limiters are a bad idea is not that their intended policy outcome is bad, there is no good reason to speed in residential/urban areas, it's that they pose as a band-aid reform but aren't actually cheaper/easier/faster/more popular to implement than full-on "ban cars"-type urbanism.

Watch the moment a group of Israeli activists stormed a live television broadcast to protest Israel’s war on Gaza.

Members of Standing Together, wearing 'Leave Gaza' T-shirts, jumped onto the stage during the airing of the Big Brother show on Channel 13.

Postcard from the future: Sacramento’s Rancho Seco clean energy park The Sacramento Municipal Utility District has remade the site of a shuttered nuclear reactor into a clean energy park. With power demand growing, the model could be replicated at retired or underutili...

Sunday reading: Sacramento's utility has remade the site of a shuttered nuclear reactor into a clean energy park. With power demand growing, the model could be replicated at retired or underutilized thermal power plants across the US www.quittingcarbonmedia.com/postcard-fro... via Quitting Carbon 🔌💡

The hypocrisy when they claim that “if this hugely carbon intensive thing wasn’t produced here, it would be produced worse somewhere else” - while a public body is also marketing said thing for export to new markets 🫠

My biggest concern about Trump is that he kills our ability to dream.

Trump, tech, news outlets like NYT they collude to limit our ideas of what's possible

She did! The FT graph shows change since 2019.

bsky.app/profile/hann...

Perhaps the Financial Times graph that @ketanjoshi.co shared was normalized to start from 0 in 2019. For history on Irish data center buildout, I'd defer to @hannahdaly.ie.

This whole thread on rent control is very good and this point, in particular, is important

Hiroshima source: thebulletin.org/2020/08/coun...

Gaza source: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists estimates that the US killed 70-140,000 people - mostly civilians- by dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The latest death toll estimate from bombing and shooting people in Gaza - mostly civilians killed by Israel - from 10/23 to 1/25 is at least 84,000.

Sounds awesome! Have fun 🤘