Kaushik

Donate to Washington Post 2026 layoff fund, organized by Rachel Siegel On Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2026, The Washington Post laid off hundreds of journalists. We ar… Rachel Siegel needs your support for Washington Post 2026 layoff fund

Whatever you think of the Washington Post at this moment, here's a chance to support the dedicated, hard-working journalists who were just laid off. If you have the means, your donation is most welcome. If you don't, a kind thought and maybe spreading the word to others is support enough 💙

The Fashionable Notion of 'Free Speech Culture' Is Justifying State Censorship, Ironically It'll convince people that free speech is a sham

This, from @kenwhite.bsky.social in @theunpopulist.net, is a genuine must-read. If the current state of free speech discourse interests you—and especially if it infuriates you—this is a critical reframe steering us away from the idea that bad-faith actors are actually our free speech heroes.

Who even likes this guy? Have always his popularity baffling.

far from the main takeaway, but the way Tim Urban has befriended and let his work be coopted by hacks has been especially disappointing to watch.

Watching @babbulicious.bsky.social perform after Mamdani's speech got me more pumped than the speech itself.

So, 0.08 cents for each account?

Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani It’s remarkable, the people you’ll hear from. Teach for even a little while at an expensive institution—the term they tend to prefer is “elite”—and odds are that eventually someone who was a studen…

Peter Coviello isn't on Bluesky, but this definitely should be: lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

@weisenthal.bsky.social dismayed to hear ads for Palantir on Odd Lots. Worried about how it could influence your coverage of them.

Wearing joker makeup under a v for vendetta/anonymous mask, and a printout of a 2015 tweet by dril that reads, "the jduge orders me to take off my anonymous v mask & I'm wearing the joker makeup underneath it. everyone in the courtroom groans at my shit"

For Halloween, I was a @dril.bsky.social tweet.

This was just posted by a CBS News producer on their Instagram stories.

YouTube video by Indivisible Tutorial: How to cancel your Spotify subscription

FYI if you have a Spotify membership, Indivisible is asking people to cancel until they stop running ICE recruitment ads. Instructions on how to do it here: www.youtube.com/shorts/TKp7c...

Why not? Seems on the surface like it would be for me, too.

If you remember this video of Chinese guys mimicking AI, then I've got a treat for you: I just talked to its creator, a 29-year-old actor in Hangzhou named Mu Tianran 穆天然, about how he captures AI slop's essensse so well, and why Sora 2 made him worry about his job.
www.wired.com/story/made-i...

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had in-vested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death. The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

After each six or eight months' work in the mines, which was the time required of each crew to dig enough gold for melting, up to a third of the men died. While the men were sent many miles away to the mines, the wives remained to work the soil, forced into the excruciating job of digging and making thousands of hills for cassava plants. Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides... they ceased to pro-create. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and fam-ished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desper-ation.... In this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk ... and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fer-tile... was depopulated... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write....

Please remember that the disgust people have over Christopher Columbus is not based on some modern, 21st century “woke” ideology, but rather on contemporaneous accounts of atrocities that make many modern genocides appear quaint in comparison.

Below, are the accounts of Bartlomé de las Casas.

The Hidden Costs of Coding With Generative AI AI coding tools boost productivity in the short term, but hidden technical debt can cripple systems over the long term.

Technical debt is a problem that compounds quickly. AI-generated code just upped the interest rate on that problem. Here's an article in @mitsmr.bsky.social to help you think about when it's safe to deploy AI-generated code, and when you probably shouldn't.
sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-...

Rejoice! ‘Bend It Like Beckham’ Is Finally Getting a Sequel Those still reeling from the Lionesses’ historic victory have even more news to celebrate.

Someone just alerted me to this news by being snarky about it and friends, I HAVE BEEN WAITING SINCE I WAS PREGNANT WITH THE DAUGHTER WHO JUST GRADUATED FROM COLLEGE FOR A SEQUEL TO BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM.

Snark however much you want, internet stranger, I am choosing joy!

It's a real shame that there's not a single Indian movie on that NYT list of 100 best movies of the 21st century. If nothing else, Om Shanti Om should be on that list.

How the West Deemed Eating With Your Hands “Uncivilized” | The Juggernaut And why the practice persisted in South Asia anyway.

Even though the fork gained popularity and prevalence in Europe during colonization, today, “forks are used by 1% of the Indian population.” Ray added that, just as Indians never took to forks, they “never took to British food.” (We can only wonder why.)
www.thejuggernaut.com/eating-with-...

Folks who never eat with their hands (and I don't mean just sandwiches) are seriously missing out.

The Business Cost of the Shrinking STEM Research Pipeline Companies can help U.S. universities struggling to import the international doctoral talent needed to fuel innovation.

While universities fight visa restrictions in court, American business is sleepwalking toward a talent catastrophe.
International students are 40% of U.S. STEM PhDs, who are essential to American R&D.
Business leaders: academia can't solve this alone.
sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-...

The ban is too strict. A unit should be available for short term rentals for up to a couple months in a year. Year-round tenants would benefit from renting out their apartments when they travel, too.

Specific Expression #53: Jazz Guy getting really into sick Jaco riff. The jazz guy's eyes are cocked in a pseudo-dreamworks expression. His pupils slightly far apart like Ryan Gosling. He has a small smile, top teeth exposed, bottom lip protruding.

YouTube video by MIT Sloan Management Review Nobel Laureate Busts the AI Hype

For @mitsmr.bsky.social, I interviewed @dacemoglumit.bsky.social about the impacts of AI on the workforce and the economy.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zF1...

When CEOs push for 120-hour workweeks, the notion of a 4-day schedule seems fanciful. But @julietschor.bsky.social's research on orgs that tried a 4-day workweek makes it seem surprisingly viable. My interview with professor Schor in @mitsmr.bsky.social.
sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-...

The Subtle Knife was incredible though. Agree that Amber Spyglass goes off the rails a little.

You should be ashamed of yourself for endorsing Cuomo. You recognized his corrupt and predatory behavior when you called on him to resign in 2021. What changed?

You want to discard purple seals. You should put blue seals on your gold cards.

Steely Dan

This is true in the US but I just returned from India where I had some truly excellent bananas. I go bananas for bananas in India.

Alas he's a staple of Indian airport bookstores like so much other sanghi-lit.