From the desk of Benji Welner in Stanford, CA. I do not believe that software engineering is undergoing a tectonic shift due to large language models. I have, at this point, seen a large enough sample of code produced by the frontier of so-called artificial intelligence: it is often impressive but always incomplete. The nature of a computer program is that it does exactly what you tell it to do. Any programmer would tell you that bugs are almost never an error on the computer’s side of things,…

Women ‘more likely to be told autoimmune conditions are psychological’“Among men, the most frequently reported time to diagnosis was less than three months. Among women, it was one to two years.”Cool, cool.

Humanity depends on you being Nonconforming or: All this Condescending Conditioning can suck my Cumdescending Cock. Rabbit: "The best revenge is a life well lived." Bear: "That's nice. But I think I will just 'hug' them." Now, more than ever, we’ve got massive homogenizing weapons. The effects of radio and television pale in comparison to the mental conditioning pushed by social media, and the prospects for AI-based education are darker than any sci-fi cautionary tale could predict. Just the…

Right then.You dragged your asses all the way out to the middle of shitting nowhere, Montana. You broke into the billionaire’s bug-out complex. You managed to do all that without a scratch or detection.And you were eight fucking minutes late.The PlayersAble - Like a brick wall gifted the power of speech by a cruel genie. Don’t ask about the chemical burns.Baker - Running a true crime podcast is a better way of keeping tabs on the unnatural than anyone wants to admit. Ignore the blindfold with…

Health data is my biggest interest within data protection law. If my health would permit it, I would work in a hospital or pharmacy. I even originally set out to complete my traineeship in medical documentation at a hospital! It fell through because I would have had to move to another state. Alas, now I don't work in any medical settings, but I still work with health data in a boring building instead. Under Article 9 GDPR, health data is considered a special category of data (often called…

Recently John Gruber, whom I’ve followed for decades, published X Once Again Marks the Spot. It’s short and I’m not going to try to summarize it so go read it if you haven’t already. But here are two key quotes: “I see more interesting posts on X than I do on Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon combined. I wish that weren’t so but it is.” and “The culture on X today is remarkably friendly and inclusive. It is a cheerful place.” Reaction on Bluesky and the Fediverse has been pretty fierce. I think…

People have lost their goddamn minds. It seems that, as a society, we are neurotic as all hell and we need to chill the collective fuck out. I'm of course not talking about things that actually matter like a certain politician and his role in certain files. In fact I would say we aren't angry enough. The French busted out the guillotines for less. No, I'm talking about the general douchebaggery that seems omnipresent. You'll be driving on the freeway and you'll get some dickhead in his Dodge…

This essay presents a framing of stupidity as requiring the capacity for intelligence. Stupidity is not the opposite of intelligence but its evil twin, the dissimulating Cain to a cerebral Abel. And perhaps surprisingly, the degree of stupidity available to any system scales directly with the intelligence that system possesses—more intelligence begets greater feats of stupidity. It would be a stretch to call a bacterium stupid, and we know that cats and dogs achieve modest feats of it. But…

Link: Young People and the Future of Free Expression, by the Knight FoundationWorth paying attention to:“New Knight Foundation-Ipsos research among young adults and high school students points to a generation that strongly values free speech as a democratic principle, but is less confident about exercising it without consequences.”Workplaces and classrooms feel the least free, but it’s good to hear that home is generally a space where they feel more free.What’s surprising, and a bit worrying,…

Portrait of a Verb and not a Noun My wife and I were talking about what "art" is. I forget the context, but it comes up from time to time since we both have far too many hobbies. We have a friend who falls hard into the "what I say is art is art" camp, and who will triumphantly point at a trash can and yell "ART!" at us. It used to annoy me. It's very much a devil's advocate gambit, and the devil rarely needs the help. To be fair, though, I couldn't actually articulate what I thought was the…

As I announced on this blog a couple weeks ago, I’m teaching a new course this semester at UT Austin, entitled AI Alignment Theory. To call such a course “timely” seems like an understatement; this is the first course I’ve ever taught for which multiple gargantuan developments relevant to the course have happened while I was teaching it. Since AI alignment is still a field with no standard textbook (although that might be changing), no accepted body of mathematical theory, etc. etc., the way…

I remember back in the days of the early internet in the 1990's the concept of news, information and things that where beneficial to being a well informed person, being behind a paywall would have been a very foreign idea. How did we let that happen? Why should I have to pay for information, unless the goal is to keep us from being truly informed. This should not be a new concept — people like Plato, Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and of course, George Orwell, warned us that…

If you are lighter than me, you are colorist. You are my oppressor and you owe me reparations. If you are thinner than me, you are fatphobic. You are my oppressor and you owe me reparations. If you have more money or material resources than me, then you are classist and you owe me reparations. If you are American, then you are my imperialist. You are my oppressor and you owe me reparations. If you are from the West or of European descent, then you are racist. You are my oppressor and you owe me…

When do we determine when to speak up and when to let sleeping dogs lie? When is it itching for an argument? And when is dealing with conflict honestly and productively?

[This is a guest post by Lukas Liehr, João Pedro Ramos and Mitchell Taylor – T.] We are launching the Bourgain Project, a community-driven initiative to revisit, expand upon, and explore the body of work of Jean Bourgain, one of the most prolific mathematicians of his time. The goal of this initiative is to develop a deep, comprehensive understanding of each one of Bourgain’s over 500 individual papers, while discussing and connecting the common threads and unifying ideas that run throughout…

...an ordered list: like everyone else, i have been mistaken countless times it isn't relevant to enumerate them all, for whatever loony reason one might have accountability, self-deluding, clarity, self-abnegation, cognitive extinction and wrong about things between the poles of triviality and profundity with consequences dire and minuscule to the point of invisibility, and everything in between but, in the aggregate balance of one's 7 decades of walking under the same sun seen 24,333…

In the Open Media Network (#OMN), the commons represents both the foundation and the destination of the native #openweb. Rather than relying on #closedweb corporate #dotcons or top-down state power, re-framing the commons as a practical, lived alternative – what you might call a “quiet” form of collective ownership and mutual aid grown into daily social infrastructure. The OMN makes a distinction between native and non-native technology paths. A native path starts from the commons: open,…

How do you become more likable? It’s simpler than you think. Genuinely becoming someone people like is a subject unto itself. It takes real effort. Real self-improvement. Real personal growth. And a whole lot of spine to stand firm in your values. But there is a simpler approach you can adopt: never say anything that contradicts people. Easier said than done. People seem to take offence at the smallest things these days. So you have to learn which opinions are likely to rub them the wrong way.…

Opening up about my screen addiction on Manual in May drew a strong response. Among the many comments and emails I received, one message from a reader, R., stood out. A software developer, she related to my story. She said what saves her is “sort of hating technology.” I’ve been thinking about it ever since I read that email, months ago. I asked R. to elaborate on that contradictory relationship, working in technology while hating it. She replied: I see my job as… a job. […] But beyond that,…

Recently I had the happy task of contributing to a forthcoming issue of the American Behavioral Scientist honoring my PhD advisor, Paul DiMaggio. The papers engage with different aspects of Paul’s very varied work in organizations, culture, institutional analysis, and other topics. My paper, which you can read a draft of here, puts his most-cited paper, [DiMaggio and Powell, 1983], in the context of other highly-cited papers in sociology since the 1930s, and tries to see what that can tell us.…

Immersed as I've been in one capacity or another (student, teacher) in the academic division of the year, putting September 1st as the signpost of an annual rebirth, and rebaptizing myself into the holy waters of knowledge, so to speak, autumn is my favorite time of the year. Not only is the feeling of organizing new schedules, new modes of the everyday, new stimuli to engage my mental

Nick Cammarata of Goodfire makes a bold claim: Neural Networks are Already Clean. This was his follow up after various resulting online discussions. This is clearly good work that tells us new and important things. The question is, how big an update is this, how much progress does it represent and what is the outlook going forward? The reactions here range from the super optimistic takes of ‘this means mechanistic interpretability is solvable,’ or even ‘all but solved,’ with comparisons to the…

What doesn’t get cheaper↗ chrbutler.com “the work of gathering consensus, sequencing decisions, and unifying expectations costs exactly what it has always cost. That part hasn’t moved at all.”

I feel somethin' so right doin' the wrong thing And I feel somethin' so wrong doin' the right thing Everything that kills me makes me feel alive And I feel somethin' so wrong doin' the right thing conting stars | onerepublic

About a year ago my friend Bhawna Parmar published a piece in The Caravan called “Off the Books: Schoolgirls in Odisha tune into right-wing YouTube.” Bhawna spent months reporting in Khordha, a district in Odisha, my home state, and followed Roza, a fourteen-year-old who gets two hours a day on a phone. Roza’s school advertises […] Source

In this episode I talk to about his mathematical concept of sophistication and how that relates to meaning outside of math. We discuss his book Judaism Straight Up and the potential benefits that religion provides to communities. Next we cover his work on algorithmic authorship detection in a different texts, including the Bible. Finally we discuss modern AI and how people can find meaning when their work is no longer economically needed. Listen or Watch on YouTube or Spotify. TranscriptBelow…

The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and the University of Toronto have launched new initiatives to support and focus philosophical research on various aspects of artificial intelligence (AI). Eduardo Paolozzi, “Perception through Impressions” from The Conditional Probability Machine The Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at LSE has received a $5.3 million donation to launch a new research group—The Global Priorities Research Group (GPRG)—dedicated to…

Aadarsh Padiyath defended his dissertation in March, 2026. Aadarsh is well-known to readers of this blog. Aadarsh had a guest post in 2024 exploring the techno-determinism he sees in a lot of the work in computing education research related to Generative AI (see here). I wrote last year (see post) about his work on creating and validating an instrument to measure Critical Reflection and Agency in Computing. He’s a human-centered AI researcher who works on “reliance boundaries.” The last study…

The Govardhan Hillton is a long story. A generous donor sponsored the renovation of my ashram. My assistant, an engineering genius, supervised the work, and the donor gave him carte blanche to make it first class and highly functional. It is. I was so impressed when I returned that I jokingly called the place the Govardhan Hillton. Unfortunately, the name is sticking.[1] This week David, our devotee friend from the Samuel Platzer Co. diamond family in New York, is staying at the Govardhan…

Just a reminder that on the 25th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the war it caused was already 21 years in the past, Japan and Germany had largely been rebuilt and become allies, and the economic costs of the war were largely behind the US (though not Europe or Asia). — Maggie McNeill (@maggiemcneill.bsky.social) 2026-09-11T17:44:58.998Z I think scientists should lock RFK into a Skinner box to test this. Of course, several other Trump henchmen will need to be similarly-confined as a control group.…