3/3. It is easy to imagine that AI can help with the huge mass of film and other data here. Like in many fields, there will still be a role for professional judgment, too. But I have to imagine eventually every #nfl team is going to want AI to look at all available data on all available prospects.
2/3. When I was in college (and injured), I helped cut game and practice film on vhs tapes, and saw the transformation to digital film. There was always a lot of data, but using it was hard.
I have little doubt that AI can help a lot with this process. Lots of laughing at them here — but it is likely adapt or die. 1/3
You can also donate used books to Fables & Fancies: selling them will help the bookstore stay in business. I keep books! I have lots! But even I have to clean out shelf space sometimes, and this is a great place to take books you don’t need.
“Mine the data!”
Next they will start an AI company called “Moria’s Gate.”
Slowly making my way through Jill Lepore’s excellent We the People about constitutional amendment, and my main takeaway so far is that the process of amendment is punctuated equilibrium and I hope smart folks are working on amendments now for the next opportunity
Reminds me of the time Andy Serkis read Trump’s tweets in his Gollum voice from Lord of the Rings. “That wasn’t nice, was it, my precious?” www.theguardian.com/global/video...
I often find myself wishing I could find more political theory work about specific topics---I wish we were publishing a lot more about "what would be good?"
Journalists live for details. Nailing that the FBI Director allegedly ties one on at a club called "The Poodle Room" is the stuff of dream reporting.
Horizontal bar chart comparing agentic coding reliability across three groups. Frontier models (Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini Pro 3.1, GPT 4.1) score 80-100% correct. Four-months-ago's local models (Qwen 3 14B, GPT OSS 20B, Mistral 3.1 24B) all score 0%. Today's local models (Gemma 4 26B-A4B, Qwen 3.5 35B-A3B) both score 90%.
A few months ago, any LLM that I could run on my Macbook scored 0% on an agentic coding eval I put together. This month's Qwen 3.5 and Gemma 4 releases both scored 90%.
On my blog: simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-04...
Good news for New Yorkers, bad news for rats: all trash will be in rat-proof bins by the end of 2031.
No more black bags on the sidewalks — it’s time to put a lid on it.
A great choice.
Starbucks + chat gpt
Do I need AI to buy a coffee?
All who are NOT at the conference: You can scan this QR code and order Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship with the 40% conference discount putting the book's cost at $17.99. Go to that page and then search for my book by title.
A 12-player political, economic, and military simulation (photo shows the board, with countries named after CMC dorms).
PPE Politics Simulation #3 is off and running! #cmc
A terrain board with a village in murky marshes. Metal Shivershield miniatures are along the edges of the board, and various stat cards can be seen around all sides of the board.
Shivershield, a new game from Oakbound Studios at #Salute. The setting is described as fantasy folklore and the miniatures are handsculpted metals with a nice 80s Citadel (and similar companies) feel.
#nerdlings
Out today!
Woohoo, here's my essay with my fav co-author on 30,000 fellowship wins across the Guggenheim, Stanford CASBS, NAEd, National Humanities Center, RSF visiting scholar, and Harvard Radcliffe.
Spoiler: it's the people working at prestigious universities
www.publicbooks.org/who-gets-gug...
I would like senior government officials—elected and appointed—to be admirable, serious people. I want them to care about the way their choices impact other human beings, and I want them to act like it matters. And I think we should all insist on getting at least this much.
Eric Swalwell suspends his governor's campaign, as he faces horrendous allegations of sexual assault: www.nytimes.com/2026/04/12/u...
Swalwell was one of the frontrunners in polling, so this significantly shakes up the June (all-party) primary, including really reduce the odds of a Dem shutout.
Cumulative area burnt by wildfire curves for the US showing 2026 starting off massively worse than any prior year
This seems suboptimal
(1/3) We concluded the Przemysl convention with three games. First of all, classical Friedrich - what a great session it was with a lot of maneuvering, suspense, great moments and finally Prussian victory!
and neither can the private sector & private foundations
For social science: *63 percent* of all social and behavioral science research in the United States is funded by the NSF through the social, behavioral, and economic sciences directorate.
If you want to think about #Steyer for governor, I think it helps to place him in the tradition of uniquely Californian politics, for better and worse and just different. He strikes me as very Californian, in the sense of Kevin Starr’s view of the state’s history. www.goodreads.com/en/book/show...
My soul is prepared. (Republic of Rome!)
An mRNA treatment for PANCREATIC CANCER was in trials, among many other uses. Choosing to end this research is choosing to sentence millions to an early, painful death
