Tufekci's keynote here remains the best framing for how to think about AI, IMO. The key changes will be in what things become cheap/easy and what things remain expensive/hard. AI will remove a lot of friction. Some of that friction is load bearing.
bsky.app/profile/zey....
“A whole civilization will die tonight,” Trump declares.
I reviewed @mollycrabapple.bsky.social 's terrific new history of the Bund — a great read but more importantly, a book that could not have arrived at a more urgent moment. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/06/b...
The AP is reporting that Sharif University in Tehran has been bombed.
This is Maryam Mirzakhani’s alma mater — the first woman to win a Fields Medal in math, and only one of two so far.
The university is also a leading center of opposition to the government.
apnews.com/video/ict-bu...
Some science cuts in Trump's proposed FY27 budget
❌ NIH: -$5B, including all of NIEHS, NIMHD, FIC & NCCIH.
❌ EPA: -4.6B
❌ NSF: -3.8B
❌ NASA Science: -3.4 Billion
❌ NOAA: -1.8B, including the entire Oceanic and Atmospheric Research budget ($605M)
❌ AHRQ: All of it. -$296M, 100%
And there's more.
The article makes this fairly explicit, but it's worth emphasizing that Grammarly doesn't have any clear option to request a specific reviewer (hence you can't easily check if you're included) and even a cursory attempt gets it to produce a bunch of random scholars from my or adjacent fields.
Well, there it is.
"This firm’s special treatment is a stark example of the way that the second Trump administration has used taxpayer money to benefit people close to the president or his top officials." www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/u...
Trump's DOJ this month quietly backed Alexander Smirnov's bid to withdraw his guilty plea & wipe out his sentence.
Smirnov had admitted lying to the @FBI about Burisma's owner arranging to pay $5m in bribes to both Joe & Hunter Biden.
👀 @davidcorn.bsky.social catch:
The State Department is considering withholding lifesaving assistance to people with HIV in Zambia as a negotiating tactic to force the government of the southern African country to sign a deal giving the United States more access to the country’s critical minerals.
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/h...
I was impersonated by Grammarly as well.
Besides the lack of consent, a big problem is that the LLMs do a highly plausible impersonation of my views for anything not specific to me but miss exactly where my views differ from many AI experts or critics.
So worse than useless. Actively misleading.
PSA: One consequence of AI language models is that you should check your spam folder regularly.
LLMs can generate targeted/tailored outputs at scale, resulting in a growing overlap between spam and email meant for you.
Filters are failing: more spam in your inbox AND more of your mail in spam.
When a federal judge (finally) put ICE officers under oath, they admitted that they are given daily detention quotas and rely heavily on a Palantir-supplied AI tool to select targets, without warrants and without enough evidence to obtain one. They simply go into neighborhoods and round people up.
Even after all this, I think many people are underestimating the irreversible, fundamental changes to this country and the world order that’s been unleashed in the past year and a half. (Yes, since the win).
What a mystery.
❌”Military analysts” who never looked at a map or read a line about perhaps one of the most intensely studied naval choke points in history?
✅Somebody attempting to talk down the markets (was asked to) and fill air while perhaps buying some options?
Five-byline alert: 🚨
“.. An ongoing military investigation has determined that the United States is responsible for a deadly Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the preliminary findings.”
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/u...
Whistleblower complaint says the DOGE engineer "told another colleague, who refused to help him upload the data because of legal concerns, that he expected to receive a presidential pardon if his actions were deemed to be illegal."
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...
Speaking of the public sentiment on AI — look at that complete lack of trust in both parties (and the industry) on the topic… What else polls like this? www.nbcnews.com/politics/202...
From the NY AI chatbot liability bill’s author, on X. Couldn’t find her here.
The AI/tech industry mostly stayed on X, and partly as a result of that and partly due to their money raising method plus their wealth, they are in a very insular, distorted mindset on public sentiment on AI.
NYT reports pardons going to the wealthy and politically connected who can pay $$ for insider lobbyists.
www.nytimes.com/2026/03/06/u...
I think this is not false, hence complexity. Many professions gatekeep in a mixed manner: to protect their own self-interest but also to regulate/limit liability from malpractice and/or negligence amongst their own field.
So what happens if the latter is all gone?
bsky.app/profile/beth...
They seem to want to switch between speech rights, product protections and Section 230 immunity as it fits the moment, but I don’t see how that will fly in the medium to long-term given the public sentiment.
Can they get some broad legal immunity now using their standard techniques? Maybe, for now.
But given their broad detachment from public sentiment (AI industry mostly stayed on X, dismisses regular media), they may well have a bigger bubble problem than the one about the capex/stock valuation.
If you read the bill, it attaches liability to the chatbot answer ONLY IF the same answer would attach liability to the person making the same statement.
Complicated new issue but seems AI companies want Section 230 type immunity. I don’t think that’s where the public (and juries) are, at all.
Thank you!
Some of the most beautiful hand-drawn diagrams i've ever seen. Turkish "Justice Gazette", 1920, artist: Cerîde-i Adliyye.
Source [substack] casualarchivist.substack.com/p/poetic-jus...
#türkiye #infographics #stunning
As in cryptographic methods being integrated into our systems to preserve verification while being privacy preserving. I know crypto currently means “coins” but think Diffie-Hellmann, zero-knowledge proofs, federated machine learning etc.
They think they’re going to vibe code Mastercard? Doordash? They think the ability to wave a small plastic rectangle almost anywhere in the world and be loaned a car is just about some code?
Come on. Fraud, compliance, infrastructure, etc. etc.
bsky.app/profile/rupe...