Phil Steitz

The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents | Fortune Neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath said older generations “screwed up” giving students access to so much technology: “I genuinely hope Gen Z quickly figures that out and gets mad.”

Now THAT's a headline.

"The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents"

fortune.com/2026/02/21/l...

Did ChatGPT write this talking point for you, Sam?

Or do you just *organically* suck this bad?

By the numbers Here’s where the cryptocurrency industry stands, early into the 2026 election cycle: $288 million: Total cryptocurrency industry spending toward the 2026 election cycle to date. This includes funds sent to pro-crypto PACs, direct contributions to candidates, and contributions to non-crypto PACs.a $221 million: Cash on hand with pro-crypto super PACs, ready to deploy in the midterms $100 million: Additional committed funds that pro-crypto PACs say they have secured but haven’t yet appeared in FEC filings $3 million: Already spent by pro-crypto super PACs in the 2026 cycle, primarily on special elections in Florida and Virginia $74 million: Contributions to Trump PACs in the 2026 cycle by crypto companies and executives

Here’s where the cryptocurrency industry stands, early into the 2026 election cycle:

• $288 million: Total cryptocurrency industry spending
• $221 million: Cash on hand with pro-crypto super PACs
• $100 million: Additional committed funds
• $3 million: Already spent by pro-crypto super PACs

Symmetry in language statistics shapes the geometry of model representations Although learned representations underlie neural networks' success, their fundamental properties remain poorly understood. A striking example is the emergence of simple geometric structures in LLM rep...

In our new preprint, we explain how some salient features of representational geometry in language modeling originate from a single principle - translation symmetry in the statistics of data.

arxiv.org/abs/2602.150...

With Dhruva Karkada, Daniel Korchinski, Andres Nava, & Matthieu Wyart.

The Promptware Kill Chain - Schneier on Security Attacks against modern generative artificial intelligence (AI) large language models (LLMs) pose a real threat. Yet discussions around these attacks and their potential defenses are dangerously myopic...

www.schneier.com/blog/archive...

Behold: the first-ever list of news outlets that have banned generative AI in their reporting. As of today, this is literally information that you cannot find on Google.

My goal is to fill the starter pack, so please send over suggestions with supporting evidence!

go.bsky.app/8cn1XfT

Yeah there is that with the hallucinations but the bigger issue is the dehumanization. Journalism is more than just reporting facts in an engaging way. Taylorising will kill it.

And doing it this way will also lead to more positive response from readers. So what’s not to like? Cheaper, more accurate (well, modulo a few uncaught hallucinations here and there), more engaging news coverage? The problem is that over time you and up killing both the medium and the profession.

Impressive example here showing Claude Opus penetrating benchmark algorithms.

Love was in the air at the sanctuary last week, as the herd enjoyed some special Valentine's Day-themed enrichment. 💞

This is going to be the big “find out.” The hard part of producing good software that does useful things is getting real clarity on what those useful things are. Coding forces dimension reduction because its language is so primitive. Without that back pressure, we get slop.

Super accessible write up on what we and others have been up to on representational convergence in AI models, and the platonic representation hypothesis, along with contrary views.

I'm a big fan of Quanta Magazine, so it was very cool to see them cover this!

Our grad-level "Deep Learning" course (MIT's 6.7960) is now freely available online through OpenCourseWare: ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-79...

Lecture videos, psets, and readings are all provided.

Had a lot of fun teaching this with @sarameghanbeery.bsky.social and @jeremybernste.in!

One Generation Runs the Country. The Next Cashed In on Crypto. Sons of top Trump administration officials made billions for their families, but their investors didn’t always fare so well.

www.wsj.com/finance/curr...

The combination of corruption and grift here really is stunning. Even for Trump.

We mourn our craft I didn’t ask for this and neither did you. I didn’t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some hack could make money off o…

nolanlawson.com/2026/02/07/w...

I see this as just another step along the journey that started with engineers plugging in patch cords. We got a similar big jolt from Fortran, the innovation that enabled "anyone" to write code. And just like then, we'll see that not just anyone can do it.

It’s actually worse than that. When you do it yourself, you can focus the prompts.

Exactly. Great journalism helps us see what’s important. That is the difference between journalism and social media.

The thing that saddens me the most about the violent repression of protests today in the US is that we learned, back in the 60’s, how to handle protests without hurting people.

Many open source maintainers have already advised people how to engage with their projects. There are contribution guides and communication channels in which to engage. The problem is, people have chosen to ignore all of that, and have started behaving like code slinging bots using AI tools.

This really is unbelievable. We used to say that this kind of thing was impossible in the US because if it ever happened it would be all over the nightly news. The problem is there is more nightly news.

Towards Better Statistical Understanding of Watermarking LLMs In this paper, we study the problem of watermarking large language models (LLMs). We consider the trade-off between model distortion and detection ability and formulate it as a constrained optimiza...

Towards Better Statistical Understanding of Watermarking LLMs

@amstatnews.bsky.social @tandfresearch.bsky.social #LLM www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

There is nothing more fundamentally American than neighborism.

“…decrying how no one had alerted him to the inherent instability of digital currencies except for dozens of coworkers, family members, podcast hosts, and respected economists. “

Agreed on the props for supporting the research. I also agree that understanding and skills loss is not inherent and in fact skills *gain* is possible. It all comes down to leaning in instead of sitting back and watching.

We're gonna win

PhD Scholarship

My Centre is a unique place to do a PhD in Philosophy, because you can be in constant contact with experts in veterinary medicine, psychology, zoology and policy and be part of a team united by a shared interest in animal minds. We now have our 1st ever PhD scholarship: www.lse.ac.uk/sentience/phd

AI-induced cultural stagnation is no longer speculation − it’s already happening AI-mediated culture is already being filtered in ways that favor the familiar, the describable and the conventional.

A phrase for why so much AI art looks the same: cultural stagnation.

Creativity gets flattened into polished sameness when machines optimize for what’s familiar.
buff.ly/JkvxYJF

Stylin’ like Macron

Europe Prepares for a Nightmare Scenario: The U.S. Blocking Access to Tech Trump’s threats have injected new urgency into European efforts to reduce its reliance on American technology.

www.wsj.com/tech/europe-...

There is a real innovation opportunity here. Over-priced bloatware, cloud services and slop engines are ripe for replacement. EU has talent and core infrastructure to do it.

I am looking for a graduate-level intern for next summer to work with my team on large-scale security systems.

If you do large-scale data, formal methods, distributed systems, computer security or anything related, ping me. Or just apply before mid-March.

hpe.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/Jobsathpe/jo...