Jim Cowie

Harvard Law professor launches Case Viewer app for easier access to court decisions - Harvard Law School Harvard Law Professor Ben Eidelson tapped into a childhood passion to build a tool for lawyers and law students.

A nice write up about Case Viewer, my legal browser app: hls.harvard.edu/today/harvar...

If you have an iPhone, iPad, or Mac and haven't tried it, you should! Learn more at www.caseviewer.app, follow @caseviewerapp.bsky.social, or download for free from app store: apps.apple.com/app/apple-st...

Pioneers and Pathfinders: Jack Cushman Today, we’re joined by Jack Cushman, director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, where he and his team are reimagining how library principles can shape the future of legal technology. Jack is a…

Podcast: Jack Cushman joins “Pioneers & Pathfinders” to discuss libraries shaping legal tech, digital preservation, and realities of legal AI. Listen: www.seyfarth.com/news-insight...

Evitable

I’m thrilled to share that I’ve been helping out my brother David who is starting a new org, Evitable.com, focused on informing and organizing the public around societal-scale risks and harms of AI, and countering industry narratives of AI inevitability and acceleration! 1/n

The question isn’t "why does Signal use AWS?" It’s to look at the infrastructural requirements of any global, real-time, mass comms platform and ask how it is that we got to a place where there’s no realistic alternative to AWS and the other hyperscalers. 3/

Populism fast and slow It is natural that a person who is both concerned by the rise of right-wing populism and possessed of a bookish disposition might turn to the academic political science literature in search of a bette...

If populism is (as this argues) a rebellion against System 2 thinking—which requires symbols and remains frustratingly hard for most of us—it seems we’re stuck with it forever.

If only we could make some kind of, idk, cognitive prosthesis for symbolic reasoning? Yeah, never mind. Sounds hard. +

Come work with me! I'm hiring a data scientist to join me at @harvardkennedy.bsky.social @shorensteinctr.bsky.social

careers.harvard.edu/job/senior-d...

Amazon has blamed today's massive outage on the "DNS resolution of the DynamoDB API endpoint in US-EAST-1."

@kentik.bsky.social observed a complete drop-off in traffic to this particular AWS service beginning at 06:55 UTC. Thousands of services around the world were impacted.

Guest Post - Rethinking Disciplinary Data Regimes - The Scholarly Kitchen Between a political policy environment focused on defunding and deleting data collections – an environment in which little can be trusted – and an onslaught of new AI tools that feed indiscriminately ...

Our Public Data Project Lead @mollyhardy.bsky.social writes about public data preservation and how it’s complicated by the artificial contemporary distinction between science and the humanities @scholarlykitchen.bsky.social

Well, forget what I said, turns out you can process marsrover images on the train too :)

There is a super faint smudge where comet 3I/Atlas should be. The new orbit parameters in Stellarium are a pretty good match. 🔭 #3iatlas

Open science folks would get a *lot farther* if they spent did a yea long internship in science far outside of their own discipline.

Scoop some poop in the pine barrens and count prions for a bit.

Deliberately failing to minimize free energy, maintaining incoherence, is expensive. But apparently the influencer ecosystem provides ample compensation, rewarding effective amplification of incoherent things.

Internet down for a second day in Afghanistan as country's first-ever internet blackout continues.

Directive from Taliban govt is to revert to 2G-only service as a way to "prevent immorality."

The ongoing internet shutdown in Afghanistan is the outcome of what many feared when the Taliban took over in August 2021.

As of August 2024, we hadn't seen much change with respect to internet service in the country, as I detailed in this blog post:
www.kentik.com/blog/afghani...

AFRINIC has elected a board. Now the hard work begins : Regional internet registry faces numerous critics and isn’t out of the legal woods

At long last, AFRINIC can convene a board, hire a CEO, and continue its critically important work. 🙏

www.theregister.com/2025/09/15/a...

Beginning at 04:27 UTC today (Sep-15), Starlink suffered a brief but global service outage. This is most widespread service outage since Jul-24 when Starlink was down for more than two hours.

Nearly all AS14593's BGP routes were briefly withdrawn at the time of the incident.

Submarine cable cuts in the Red Sea disrupt connectivity between Europe and Asia.

Latency spikes as traffic is re-routed around the broken cables. @kentik.bsky.social's Cloud Latency Map captures the impacts here:
clm.kentik.com?q=4084ef2b1d...

Get fucked, textbooks.

Seriously breaking my PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology brain that this happened.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Recruiting Ph.D. Students for Fall 2026 We are an interdisciplinary research group at the University of Colorado Boulder that uses design to understand and reimagine socio-technical systems.

Interested in accessibility, visualization, or data ethics? I'm looking for Ph.D. students to join @data-and-design.org at CU Boulder Info Sci in Fall 2026.

data-and-design.org/recruiting/phd

On Aug 19, China's Great Firewall began blocking most traffic on TCP port 443. This disruption lasted from 16:35 to 17:48 UTC (00:35 to 01:48 Beijing Time).

According to the GFW Report, the outage was caused by the injection of forged TCP RST+ACK packets.
gfw.report/blog/gfw_unc...

This is btw the trajectory you would expect if you believe LLMs are—not an abstract protean principle called “intelligence”—but a cultural technology that animates the verbal machinery already folded up in libraries, allowing it to run by itself.

"On July 4, 1903, the Manila cable was spliced into the Pacific cable in Hawai‘i, and President Theodore Roosevelt, who was at his home in Oyster Bay, New York, sent the first message to William H. Taft in the Philippines."

doi.org/10.1016/j.ma...

I love this opposition, because it really clarifies the difference between assuming language models are abstract intelligences, and observing the roles they actually play in a network of social, language-using animals

The reverse of the bitter lesson is when you spend a month trying to solve a problem with deep learning and then solve it in a day with feature engineering and XGBoost. Let's call it the nauseatingly sweet lesson.

New entries in @Starlink's GeoIP file for #India appear the day after the country's space regulator granted a license to launch operations in India.

This was the final regulatory hurdle for the satellite provider to enter the massive South Asian market.

www.reuters.com/world/india/...

White Snakeroot Common Name: White Snakeroot, Indian or White Sanicle, Richweed – Snakeroot is used as a common name for several plants without clear attribution. It is generally asserted that this would mean that…

It took more than a century of suffering on the American frontier before they figured out the "milk sickness" that carried off untold numbers of settlers, including Abraham Lincoln's mother. What a story.

hikersnotebook.blog/flora/other-...

Tuvalu has became the latest site of a Starlink Community Gateway.

At 20:40 UTC on July 2, 202.2.120.0/21 appeared in the global routing table — the first route originated by Tuvalu Telecom (AS23917) and transited by Starlink (AS14593).

More here:
www.kentik.com/blog/starlin...

"is this the big finale? is this? .. is this?"

"no, this is the big finale"

"haha no wait there's even more, what a fakeout"

"omg omg omg this is the big finale"

"welp I guess that was it" (tepid applause, vague disappointment)

"next year they should have more"

🇺🇸

Product and Research Manager

Join our team! LIL is looking for a Product and Research Manager to help create, shape, and execute on our portfolio of open knowledge projects. PRMs work across every piece of the LIL ecosystem, from software experimentation to convening of events. Learn more at careers.harvard.edu/job/product-...

Black background with some white oblong dots and a dim round dot at center labeled A11pI3Z.

For only the 3rd time in history, astronomers might have just identified an #interstellar object hurtling through our solar system! 🔭

Named A11pl3Z, it could be as large as 12 miles across.

Read buff.ly/D2RTHXU

And join our livestream at 9 CT (14 UTC) today: buff.ly/5TSsDkj

📷 Filipp Romanov

3rd interstellar object discovered? Maybe. There's a lot of buzz right now in the Astro community. More observations should come in tonight to confirm if A11pI3Z is from beyond the solar system.