Tom Weingarten

Photo of Tom Lehrer

My last living musical hero is still my hero but unfortunately no longer living. RIP to the great, great Mr. Tom Lehrer.

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE.

This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined.

It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

Exclusive: Inside the thriving wild-animal markets that could start the next pandemic Live-animal markets are a natural laboratory for viruses to evolve and spark deadly outbreaks, yet scientists lack support to study the risks they pose.

Nature reports on how live-animal markets are a natural laboratory for viruses to evolve and spark deadly outbreaks, and how scientists lack support to study the risks these markets pose. #medsky 🧪

People really will get freaked out by the ingredients list on a jug of oat milk and then think they're only eating one chemical when they grill a steak.

Enjoy your heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons!! Worse than anything in oat milk, but still not that bad.

New reports tell us cattle and sheep farming can be sustainable – don’t believe them, it’s all bull | George Monbiot Feeding the world sustainably is an incredibly complex challenge, yet some people are trying to sell us a bucolic fairytale, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

Yep.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

"WE'VE ARRANGED A society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don't know anything about it?" "Science is more than a body of knowledge, it's a way of thinking. A way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along."

I think a lot about what Carl Sagan said in one of his final interviews.

How Well Is Congestion Pricing Doing? Very. One hundred days in, honking is down; bus speeds are up.

Some stats from 100 days in on congestion pricing:
- Complaints about car-honking are down 70%
- The Holland Tunnel has 65% fewer delays at rush hour; time to get thru it is down 48%
- 6 million fewer cars
- Half as many traffic-related injuries
- 1.5 million more visitors to BIDs year over year

Thank you I had to scroll down much too far to find this. Absolute treasure of a story

Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship -Casablanca

My (perhaps naive) understanding is that selling it to someone who doesn't care increases supply, reducing the price Tesla can sell new cars for (downwards pressure from surplus cars). The net effect should be similar to a boycott: one less new car they can sell.

conventional wisdom is that travel times haven't fallen in the congestion relief zone, according to readings from congestion-pricing-tracker.com. but it's not true anymore, and it was only ever true because google maps interpolates historical data.

After 9 great years in Google Cloud, I'm very excited to start a new role as Head of Engineering for the Responsibility organization at Google DeepMind. Although new beginnings are always difficult, I'm comforted knowing it will be a very chill and normal time to begin this challenge.

God I needed this

Making LLMs run efficiently can feel scary, but scaling isn’t magic, it’s math! We wanted to demystify the “systems view” of LLMs and wrote a little textbook called “How To Scale Your Model” which we’re releasing today. 1/n

Research in Cell Genomics led by @danafarber.bsky.social's Bradley Bernstein, MD, PhD, presents an AI transformer model developed in collaboration with Google Advanced Sciences which can predict gene expression. https://bit.ly/42zNVsj

By pre-training on a multi-modal input combining sequence and ATAC data, our model can generalize to unobserved cell states to predict gene expression, chromatin accessibility quantitative trait loci (caQTLs), regulatory motifs, and enhancer-gene links.

A multi-modal transformer for cell type-agnostic regulatory predictions Javed and Weingarten et al. created a multi-modal transformer that learns generalizable representations of genomic sequence and chromatin accessibility by utilizing a novel masked-accessibility pre-tr...

Excited to present the results of my 20% project in collaboration with @broadinstitute.org and @danafarber.bsky.social . In our new paper we demonstrate a long-range model capable of detecting regulatory elements at distances beyond a million base pairs.

Recycling in NYC Is Easier Than You Think: A Guide for the Confused Where do pizza boxes go? What exactly is rigid plastic? How clean do empty jars need to be? Relax, experts say.

This is actually super-helpful and a huge relief. www.thecity.nyc/2025/01/28/h...

New Bleecker St Breakfast at chloe is phenomenal

Cat tax

What’s a Fact, Anyway? Journalists put more stress on accuracy than ever before. The problem is, accuracy is a slippery idea.

"At the time of writing, nearly thirty people work in Checking at The New Yorker, almost all of them full time. It is labor, at scale, that produces accuracy."

www.newyorker.com/news/the-wee...

Most succinct fact-check I've read of how LA Fire Dept's budget wasn't recently cut -- in fact, the opposite -- from @politico.com. But that misinformation spread anyway. www.politico.com/news/2025/01...

Lessons From New York’s Congestion Fight “Car brain” is part of a broader syndrome, which we can’t ignore

Is NYC's congestion fee a regressive tax? No. Driving into Manhattan is expensive even w/o the fee, so very few low-wage workers do it. Plus the money will be used to improve the transit systems they *do* use paulkrugman.substack.com/p/lessons-fr...

Ugh this is so sad. Maybe not her most powerful, but to me, her most moving poem is this one

What’s the Difference Between a Rampaging Mob and a Righteous Protest? From the French Revolution to January 6th, crowds have been heroized and vilified. Now they’re a field of study.

Have crowds actually changed—or is it simply that the words we use to describe them have altered over time? @adamgopnik.bsky.social writes about how crowds persist as historical agents and have become a field of study.

The usual suspects are out there yelling "There are 23 million government workers! Fire most of them!" No awareness that most work for local governments, and most of *them* are schoolteachers. Federal employment hasn't grown since the 1950s