Paul Rohr

Closing the communication gap: The new priority in public health In an op-ed published August 2 in the New England Journal of Medicine, four members of Yale's health ecosystem lay out a case for how to make America trust

"The word “immunity” really tripped people up during the pandemic. From a medical and scientific perspective “immunity” represents a very complex system in our bodies that is not an on/off switch. But in colloquial use, “immunity” often means a perfect protection, like legal immunity"

One of my biggest (re-)discoveries as an adult is learning that "I don't wanna" is, in fact, all the justification I need.

Engineering is the intersection of Curiosity and Capability

When your curiosity outstrips your capability, you expand your capability and grow

When your capability expands, it allows you to see farther and grows your curiosity

Don't allow your tools take away both your Curiosity and Capability

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations estimates that DOGE "generated at least $21.7 billion in waste across the federal government, despite its ostensible goal of eliminating government waste," noting this amount could've covered the rescissions package twice—with $2.9 billion to spare

How Streamplace Works: Embedded PDS Never have I gotten so many "wait why would you do it like that" messages.

First Streamplace architecture blog post! I wrote about Streamplace's embedded atproto PDS, why we decided to do it this way, and some thoughts about the "Static PDS" use case more generally.

i think that’s pretty well thought out, especially the assurance that the internal repo main follows the public repo with force pushes.

And you refollowed me 14 minutes ago, too

Ah, the perils of "vibe coding" without "vibe testing"

Specifically, that confident tone from your coding "assistant" means that until somebody "vibe complains", you won't necessarily know how spammy you're being

I don't look at notifications every day, but when I do, there's usually a fresh follow from you. (Today I happened to look twice)

Same. Already got two today

Nice that the Bluesky firehose is now becoming a live dataset on which to demo streaming databases

American Crisis exclusive: The 'Media Capitulation Index' A sweeping report — with rankings — on the decline of independence in our corporatized media

Super cool to
see @freepress.bsky.social's Media Capitulation Index featured exclusively this morning by @sulliview.bsky.social (Congrats to my colleague @timkarr.bsky.social and all the FP team colleagues involved in making this happen)

👋

Urgent piece by @ambpressman.bsky.social about the dangers of capitulation to the administration - we know from Hungary what happens when “those best positioned to uphold democratic norms chose the comfort of an illusion over the courage of action”

It is very easy to break things. It is a very different thing to put them back together.

Seconding this. There are almost no terrible ideas put into an R01 grant. By the time you're writing grants to federal agencies, you have been vetted and vetted and vetted for 8 years of graduate school, post-doctorate, and being a trainee PhD

Any problems are almost always methodology nitpicking

GitHub - cheeaun/swablu: Experimental opinionated web client for Bluesky Experimental opinionated web client for Bluesky. Contribute to cheeaun/swablu development by creating an account on GitHub.

@cheeaun.com has been slowly building an atproto client too, but it's not as far along

if you feel like porting specific phanpy features over, I'm sure patches would be welcomed

"Here’s what the 'just let tech bros run everything' crowd fundamentally misunderstands about how innovation actually works: It requires exactly the kind of chaotic, unpredictable, open ecosystem that authoritarianism systematically destroys."

Which format is primary/canonical for your intended use cases?

Does the content start as markdown + get converted to your format? Or vice versa?

And that's why it's so important to look at the facts!

If you use ~vibes~ to find out who's suffering in the world, you've made it really easy for people with money to advertise to you about how bad they have it.

We Deserve Better: A New Social Media Bill of Rights Earlier this year, I was a part of a CNN documentary, Twitter: Breaking the Bird, which gave me much pause for reflection about the state of social media and how we got here. This year alone we&#82…

We deserve better & we can build it!

Using social media we should demand these basic rights!

Don't use systems that don't uphold these rights.

Don't build systems that go against our interests and users.

Why we need a social media bill of rights!

www.techdirt.com/2025/07/17/w...

Reminder that (1) this site’s muting feature is very good and (2) please alt text, besides the accessibility it helps people successfully mute

Two-thirds of the DOJ unit defending Trump policies in court have quit The U.S. Justice Department unit charged with defending against legal challenges to signature Trump administration policies - such as restricting birthright citizenship and slashing funding to Harvard University - has lost nearly two-thirds of its staff, according to a list seen by Reuters.

understandable that folks who signed up to work at fed programs would object to being reassigned as mob lawyers
www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...

Tl;dr yes it's possible to do farming in a way that Americans would want to pick crops.

And all it would take is farmers willing to run real businesses. Then let workers buy those businesses out from under their heirs where appropriate.

Which is a complete 180 from how US ag currently works.

Ex-farm worker here.

We need to talk about this whole "But a living wage for farm workers would spike the cost of food!" thing.

Not true AT ALL.

Y'all don't understand how fast experienced farm workers are.

The average tomato picker pulls 650lbs per hour.

At $20/hr, that's $0.03/lb for labor.

A key component of the decision was about how bad it would be to have illiterates living among us, people afraid to go to hospitals, and so on. The decision used a public good standard to find that any legislation that creates a degraded class of persons forced into hiding was not in the pub int…

Pristine political communication

The basic issue here is that nobody had actually ever built a republic with as large a voting base as even the Early United States before, so nobody actually knew what large-scale popular political parties were going to look like because they hadn't actually been invented yet!

Why should they live more with one of us when they are children to us both?: Parents' motives for practicing equal joint physical custody for children aged 0–4 Joint physical custody, i.e., children spending an equal amount of time in both parents' home after a separation or divorce, is increasing in many cou…

Cool paper! Note their citation of this 2016 qualitative study of root causes (at least within Swedish society) for the changes they're measuring

I especially liked how this paper links individual "motives" to uptake rates of parental rights guaranteed by earlier shifts in family policy