What a joke of an editorial page. Makes the WSJ look like a forum of principle.

Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done? Tens of thousands of publications from 2025 might include invalid references generated by AI, a Nature analysis suggests.

That's tens of thousands of authors whose submissions can be desk-rejected from here on out, leaving some more room for the rest of us.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Websites break California privacy law at ‘industrial scale,’ survey finds Researchers found “industrial-scale non-compliance” among tech companies with a California law mandating online privacy controls.

“They don’t make any substantive effort to comply"

i confess it can be challenging to teach students that better (tech) things are possible when this is the outcome of tracking regulation 😬

calmatters.org/economy/tech...

I can never talk to an AI anonymously again AI only needs 150 words to identify me. What does that mean for you?

“I think the amount of public text that is needed for this kind of deanonymization to work is likely to eventually decrease.”
www.theargumentmag.com/p/i-can-neve...

“Progress is replaced by sluggishness and then by stagnation…Eventually, the discrete, immediate crises of the shorter cycle give way to a diffuse, generalized crisis for which society no longer has the materials to generate even ad-hoc solutions.”
www.commonwealmagazine.org/heaps-jonath...

Opinion | You Can’t Game Your Way to a Real Education

“Mistaken ideas about the nature of learning have combined with a hefty dose of Big Tech propaganda to distort our picture of what school is for. Technology must return to its proper place in the classroom—as a supplemental tool, rather than the source of education.”
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/o...

Meta Is Warned That Facial Recognition Glasses Will Arm Sexual Predators More than 70 organizations, including the ACLU, EPIC, and Fight for the Future, say the AI smart glasses feature would endanger abuse victims, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ people.

Face recognition on smart glasses “would hand stalkers, abusers, and federal agents the ability to silently identify strangers in public.”
www.wired.com/story/meta-r...

A.I. ‘Hallucinations’ Created Errors in Court Filing, Top Law Firm Says

"The firm provided a ledger of the errors, which spanned three pages and totaled around three dozen. A number of them involved the citation of seemingly imagined passages from real cases."

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/n...

“The Los Angeles Unified School District’s board voted Tuesday to restrict students’ use of laptops and tablets in class and encourage pen-and-paper assignments instead, making it the first major American school system to do so.”

Vote was 6-0. The vibes they are a shiftin’.

What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters.

“There is a circuit of idea festivals. Many tech billionaires host one, and if you find yourself on the right list, you can spend much of the year traveling the world, eating Wagyu, and discussing how to make the world a better place with a famous talk-show host”
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

‘Uber for nurses’: gig-work apps lobby to deregulate healthcare, report finds Growing use of AI tech comes at expense of workers’ rights, protections and pay, report warns

“Since 2022 lawmakers in at least 17 states have introduced bills designed to make gig nursing platforms exempt from the regulations applied to other healthcare staffing agencies.”
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

The state of the state Recent economic, democratic and geopolitical events have raised the question of ‘the state' anew, as problems of territory, sovereignty, protectionism, borders, authoritarianism and surveillance ha...

A timely and critical collective essay on 'the state of the state', written by five members of our Editorial Board @will-davies.bsky.social @andrew-barry.bsky.social @iliasalami.bsky.social Linsey McGoey and Samantha Ashenden
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Reading is magic What will happen in our second peasanthood

Many all-day “streamers repeat themselves. They are incapable of saying anything once; they have to rhythmically fixate over the exact same phrase six or seven times before moving on.”
samkriss.substack.com/p/reading-is...

"When publication systems make stable reasoning architectures legible, extractable and cheaply deployable, the public record of intellectual labor becomes raw material for its own functional replacement."
arxiv.org/html/2604.16...
Perhaps for pure theory, but observation/evaluation remain human(e).

What will be scarce? The economics of structural change and the post-commodity future of work

AI “will trigger the emergence of…a post-commodity economy, where a growing share of expenditure goes toward goods and services whose value is inseparable from the human who provided them.”
aleximas.substack.com/p/what-will-...

Opinion | Prescribing in a 'Black Box' of Prior Auth Decisions An excerpt from 'Coverage Denied'

Thanks to @medpagetoday.com for highlighting an excerpt of my book Coverage Denied: How Health Insurers Drive Inequality, which hits shelves this Thursday! www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/seco...

The Last Human Job A timely and urgent argument for preserving the work that connects us in the age of automation"A compelling case for valuing care as a societal good and as skilled labor."—The Nation

Next was "The Last Human Job" by @allisonpugh.bsky.social. This book is an incredible exploration of the nature and meaning of work that centers on human connection - care work, but also education and health care. Highly recommend

Full review: bookwyrm.social/user/bwaber/... (3/4)

Impact of Iran war will hurt US even after conflict ends, economists warn Wave of inflation will persist as higher fuel prices feed through into businesses

“Everything already feels more expensive. ‘We used to buy three to four cases of water and now we buy one to two for twice the price. We’re buying cheaper things instead of from regular brands.’”
www.ft.com/content/8043...

The Forces of Scarcity Hitting Asia May Soon Spread Across the World

Vietnam farmers facing impossible fertilizer costs for rice. Factories in Bangladesh can’t churn out fast fashion due to polyester shortages. Cancelled air flights and steep declines in tourism. All due to dependence on fossil fuels and current skyrocketing costs www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/w...

He Warned About the Dangers of A.I. If Only His Father Had Listened.

Joe Riley died of leukemia after relying on AI for medical advice and refusing treatment. The story of how it unfolded is also a window into how tech is reshaping our most fundamental relationships: including between father and son, and doctor and patient. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/w...

“These ‘chains of thought’ are essentially LLMs writing fanfic about themselves. Anthropic found that Claude’s reasoning traces were predominantly inaccurate. As Walden put it, ‘reasoning models will blatantly lie about their reasoning.’”
aphyr.com/data/posts/4...

A.I. Has a Message Problem of Its Own Making A.I. companies are facing hostility and mistrust—and much of the heightened, sometimes histrionic rhetoric about the powers of the technology has come from within the industry.

“Social media has gone largely unregulated for two decades, owing to government negligence and industry lobbying. Does anyone still believe that billionaire tech executives can be trusted as unelected stewards of the social good?”
www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

The Secret History of Canvas LMS, Corporate Raiders, & The Chatbot Bubble (Vandal Live at UVU) Listen now (112 mins) | with Christa Albrecht-Crane, Angie McKinnon Carter, and Chiler Moore

Absolutely required listening. What an account of institutional capture by @mattseybold.bsky.social

Houthis 1, Washington 0 Open access // by Seth Harp (Le Monde diplomatique - English edition, November 2025)

“In one month, the US had used up almost all of its stockpile of guided missiles but failed to establish air superiority over a country with a per capita GDP far smaller than Haiti’s.”
mondediplo.com/2025/11/05ho...

The Financial Product That Blew Up the Global Economy Is Back As if the economy isn’t already in enough chaos, the banks are reviving credit default swaps. Hold on to your butts!

“The $2 trillion private credit market is a black box, grown in the regulatory shadows to facilitate high-risk corporate loans that traditional banks were forced to abandon after the passage of Dodd-Frank.”
newrepublic.com/article/2091...

Can we make robots that eat other robots? For one group of dogged roboticists, artificial life that can reproduce itself is the future. The fact it doesn’t yet work only adds to the excitement

“If their machines can eat, they can grow. If they grow they can reproduce, if they reproduce they can mutate, if they mutate they can evolve.”
www.ft.com/content/9193...

A Republican dark money group blankets Virginia with deceptive mailers ahead of redistricting vote Ads targeting Black voters compare Virginia's redistricting referendum to Jim Crow.

Virginia voters, particularly members of the Black community, began receiving mailers that compared a proposal by Democrats to redraw the state’s congressional districts to the Jim Crow era.

The group behind it received $9 million in donations from the pro-Trump tech billionaire Peter Thiel.

Why higher pay hasn’t made young adults feel richer The aspiration gap has turned everyone into losers, especially graduates

“Price spirals are uniquely psychologically and societally destabilising, with research showing they reliably result in social strife even if earnings keep pace with prices.”
www.ft.com/content/b61f...

How To Future-Proof Your Career In The Age Of AI | NOEMA The most prized workers will be those who can decode a sea of outputs, spot the meaningful signal and translate it into action that others understand and trust.

“Historical training instills the instinct to understand that every system exists due to complex, multicausal factors — that to improve a system, one must understand its context.”
www.noemamag.com/why-a-libera...

Annotated Edition: Yale Trust Report (2026) Critical analysis of the Committee on Trust in Higher Education report. Annotated by Chad M. Topaz.

@yale.edu released a report on why the public (allegedly) doesn't trust higher education. The @nytimes.com covered it uncritically. So... I'm "pleased" to unveil my next debunking: an interactive annotated doc that points out factual, logical, and rhetorical errors. Enjoy! #AcademicSky