We had the privilege of talking with public defenders from Washington state, D’Adre Cunningham and Sarah Hudson, twice in the past couple of weeks: Part 1: Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO): Apple Spotify YouTube Part 2: “Good Enough” AI Governance for Public Defenders: Apple Spotify YouTube

“Publication differences by gender are small or statistically undetectable during graduate study, but become more pronounced by graduation and especially by the time of first permanent hire…. Teaching portfolios appear broadly similar across gender groups in terms of overall volume, though there are some suggestive differences in how teaching labor is distributed and repeated over time.” Those are two of the conclusions drawn from a study of data gleaned from a 2025 survey conducted by Academic…

Via Brian Leiter, here is an analysis of how AI figures in philosophy job ads these days. Misc. notes: I disagree with Prof. Leiter's pessimism about the prospects of making good hires here ("This is going to result in a lot of weak appointments..."). It's perfectly true that philosophers don't have long experience with generative AI, and that almost no philosophers have expertise in the full range of issues required to work proficiently on this subject. But nobody has long experience with…

My daughters, Granbury TX. For Father's Day weekend, we rented a lakehouse, hiked a state park, and played poker. (I won, so I didn't have to do any chores.) I'm so glad we have this tradition. We've done it for probably 12 years now: rent someplace and hang out there for the weekend. Sometimes we go to the nearest Goodwill and buy a board game from the 70s and play it; the most recent selection was STOP THIEF, which we picked up somewhere in Arkansas. The game includes this membrane keyboard…

It was dark at 4:00am, but the moon was out and I could see just the hint of light on the horizon as I pulled on a sweatshirt and began folding up the tent. Camped at just under 7,400 feet, I'd gotten my first good night of sleep in three days, banking nearly ten hours of shut-eye as a cool Sierra breeze streamed down the canyon overnight. I'd need every minute of that recharge; the day was going to be a doozy. Not that I ever really stood any chance of keeping up with Matt @theesotericone. By…

tag(s): #fishing I was about to write either tea or anime reviews, but both would be longish. I am a bit tired and sleepy, today we went out for a hike (plus kiddo and I did a hike yesterday with his scout troop). And also, as the title spoiled, we went out fishing after getting back, so we spent like 2 hours in the sun at Oradell. Today, after like 9 months (or maybe more?) (I CHECKED: closer to a year, going by this post) of fishing, I caught not one, but three fish. And got a fourth one…

Polymarket set up a fake website for fake bets and then paid influencers to create videos of "huge" "wins" that weren't real. Scandalous behavior and yet more evidence these prediction markets are a growing blight on our society. From the Wall Street Journal:→ The Wall Street Journal

The legend of Yig, Father of Serpents, remained figurative no longer, and I started with loathing when told of the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth. — The Whisperer in Darkness Another month, another Lovecraftian portrait. Yig was the last of the Photoshop melanges from 1999 that I felt a need to replace for the new edition of The Haunter of the Dark, which means that the whole of the Great Old Ones section of…

Looking idly out the window of my favourite coffee shop, sipping on a cool iced latte that I needed after a long walk on a warm summer’s afternoon, a thought came to mind: Why am I so fascinated by the outside world when I just sat down inside?Even now, back at my desk, I find my eyes occasionally looking out the window. I see a black cat walking slowly on the pavement, someone leaning into a friend’s car window to chat, and the vistas of greens – the dark greens of trees and the lighter greens…

Intro In my hometown, Adana, summers are really hot. Which means most people do the bare minimum during the summer months and just wait for it to be over. That’s why my brain just doesn’t want to accept the fact that I’m having a really busy June — and possibly a busy summer in general — and it needs to rewire itself. Greetings from Sangarius. Hope you’re all doing well. Mission Control Inbox: 346RSS Reader: 4457 Upcoming Events/Travel in Next 30 Days: 1 (+1 TBD) Heading to İstanbul tomorrow…

Random thoughts too long for a Mastodon post, but not long enough for a full-blown post. 📽️ After applying the three-sip rule to Caira, I can now say with confidence that this product is not for me. It’s still a neat concept, but there’s a wide gap between concept and real-world usage that Caira fails to fulfill. On top of this gap, the questions posed a while ago by PetaPixel remain valid: Who is the target audience for Caira? What does Caira accomplish that a smartphone cannot? I’ll have to…

Happy Monday! I’m off from work this week with very little planned beyond getting new tires and having my hair done. I’m playing it by ear, although I’d love to take the train into the city one morning to check out a stationery store. It’s also WM’s last week of teaching, which means his summer begins in earnest Friday afternoon. For years we’ve called summer “Camp Pop” because for the dogs, it’s summertime with Pop! I recently scaled back the number of Substacks I pay for, but one of the paid…

I know pretty much nothing about artificial intelligence (AI) except what I’ve read about it. Take what follows with a grain of salt, therefore. As I try to understand the world that AI is going to create, there are a couple of metaphors I keep coming back to. One is of a highway system that no longer has any on-ramps. There were on-ramps, once upon a time, when the highway system was first built, but they fell into disuse and then decay. This image represents what I think AI will do to the…

As with each year for the FFConf web site, I have a distinct idea of the visual style I want. It has zero to do with the content we're presenting each year, but I do love how FFConf's site can be creative. It was like that from the very first web site - the logo was designed in early 2009 in 12 variations (which you can see from years 2009, 2010 and 2011 before they were really redesigned). Before I (inevitably) forget, it made sense for me to write up some of the things I learnt along the way…

When you look for art history coffee table books, people generally look for home library books that offer museum-quality reproductions alongside clear introductions to major art movements. Actually, the market for printed art books remains remarkably durable, and it continues to play an important role in museum retail and art publishing. For example, the book market reached a record €24.9 billion in turnover in 2024, according to the Federation of European Publishers. Despite the growth of…

This is the weekly visible open thread. Post about anything you want, ask random questions, whatever. ACX has an unofficial subreddit, Discord, and bulletin board, and in-person meetups around the world. Most content is free, some is subscriber only; you can subscribe here. Also:1: The Future of Life Foundation, which unconvincingly denies being part of our conspiracy, asks me to signal-boost their Epistemic Case Study Competition. Prizes up to $50K for finding “the best workflows and…

On blockchains like Ethereum, a strategy known as "MEV" (short for "maximal extractable value") allows intermediaries to profit from manipulating the structure of blocks added to the chain — often reordering or "sandwiching" transactions in ways that extract profits. Automated software known as MEV bots make a business out of this strategy, and one of the most active is a bot called jaredfromsubway.eth — likely so named after one-time Subway spokesman and convicted sex offender Jared Fogle…

Here is a thing about me that I have made peace with: when you give me enough pain medication, I sing show tunes. Not quietly. Not to myself. I perform. This is not a choice I make. This is a thing that happens to me, the way weather happens to a town. I learned this about myself in 1997, in an emergency room in Minnesota, at the age of seventeen, while still wearing clown makeup. Let me back up. There was a clown camp. I know how that sounds. It was called MOOSECAMP, it was in Maple Lake,…

From Eat This Newsletter 305: Hot:It has been a funny week, with temperatures up in brain-scrambling territory. If this issue is late, which it may well be, that’s because I spent yesterday morning in the cool of a cinema enjoying a glorious restoration of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. If you can, I highly recommend it.Jeremy’s newsletter, focusing on food and where it comes from, is always a good read. This issue is a particularly good one: mushrooms, coffee, hot sauce—it has it all.

James of the Coffee blog fame made a fun quiz, and I expected to know the result. It surprised me with a second one 😀 You are a Author You love writing and have a growing backlog of posts on your website! Words are your best friend and you're always thinking about what to write next. You are also a Explorer To you, the web feels like a library that's open all hours and has everything you could ever imagine! You love reading others blogs, and know how important readers are to the whole of the…

While waiting for the supermarket to fail-to-open-for-mysterious-emergency-reasons on Saturday, I stopped by 20th and Irving in #SanFrancisco to check for new Kal Zakzouk sidewalk chalk art and was not disappointed: some sort of demon-hunter magician contemplated a couple of imps.

Bonus picdump! Here are 99 pics, comics, and memes about the current algae-infested state of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Share and enjoy! Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot Screenshot The post A picdump of Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool memes appeared first on The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

The bridge between the Cosmos-based Secret network and Axelar network was exploited via an infinite mint bug that went unnoticed for a week. An attacker exploited a smart contract in order to mint a large quantity of wrapped Axelar tokens on the Secret network, which they then redeeemed for around $4.67 million.The exploit, which occurred on June 10, went unnoticed until June 17, when a transaction failed with a message suggesting that more tokens had been bridged out of the Secret network than…

Merry Stove-mas! Woodstove is being installed today. As much as I believe in DIY, the risk of burning the house down convinced me to let the experts handle it.

Who even knows, you know? An opening line like that portends an existential rambling, or perhaps a commentary on the certitude of this culture, where everyone is yelling over their own insecurities to make sure you know one thing and one thing only: They know. But the fact that we don't know has some varying impacts. Some people double down on what they think they know, clinging to it like a life raft on a stormy ocean. Others double down on the reality that we can't know, and so why bother…

My discontent with Second Life has been growing for a long time, and this is definitely something I’ve probably spoken about recently, but, you know how it is: In Second Life it used to be about creating, meeting, being social, hanging out, and all that. But now? It’s about the latest shopping event, rent-seekers looking to score as much profit off of as many people as possible, at all costs. To add insult to injury, Linden Labs has only created more ways to extract money from its users. As if…

The first step on my homelab improvement journey is setting up a reverse proxy. What’s a reverse-proxy? A reverse proxy is a server that sits in front of your other servers. Instead of sending requests directly to the server where the application is running, you send them to the proxy and it proxies your request to the real server. It’s called a reverse proxy because a “normal” (or forward) proxy sits in front of client machines to proxy outbound requests to the internet, while a reverse proxy…

Like many avid record collectors my first awareness of Michael Tilson Thomas were the Deutsche Grammophon recordings which arrived in the wake of his appointment as assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the age of just 24. As recipient of the Koussevitsky Prize in 1969 it was almost a foregone conclusion. The word ‘auspicious’ didn’t even begin to cover it. One of those DG discs – a sensational pairing of Ives, Ruggles, and Piston (start as you mean to go on) – was tantamount…

Justin Jackson on how connecting with people face-to-face can be so much more powerful than anything text-based: I’m convinced that many of society’s problems come from how we communicate online. Social media is a big part of this, but so are the text-based chat tools we use with friends, family, and coworkers. We have a Communication Problem A simmering series of arguments were getting bad, but then: We flew to Mexico. On the first day, we went to a cafe, sat across from each other, and…