Contra Benn Jordan, data center (and all) sub-audible infrasound issues are fake One of the most popular videos made about data centers ever is a complete moment-by-moment disaster

Folks, infrasound issues are fake. This was truly an insane experience to write and I hope you enjoy blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-ben...

JRR Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings as a side project while brainstorming a list of cool names for defense contractors

The FBI tried to drive MLK to suicide by sending him threatening letters along with illegally recorded tapes of his extramarital affairs.Though that’s sort of cheating b/c it’s not really a “theory,” just a well-documented historical fact that sounds like a conspiracy theory when you first hear it.

The art and politics of Swedish laundry. I have been waiting for this to happen since I arrived in Sweden. It took three months, but it happened: I messed up my laundry reservation. This requires a bit of explaining. The Swedish laundry s…

coffeecardamom.wordpress.com/2017/09/19/t...

Contra Benn Jordan, data center (and all) sub-audible infrasound issues are fake One of the most popular videos made about data centers ever is a complete moment-by-moment disaster

Well Benn Jordan called me a shill and blocked me without defending a single study he completely mischaracterized in his video. I have a full summary of the interaction in a new section of the post here. blog.andymasley.com/i/194372054/...

Seems difficult to set this up with non-human animals. A key part of the setup is that Monty doesn't have agency and must always reveal... I guess they try to get close to that through lots of training? But then that confounds knowing the rules with reward-based learning

The Strange Origin of AI’s ‘Reasoning’ Abilities It involves 4chan, of all places.

Neat article that traces sources of “reasoning” discovery to… #4chan!

Whatever advantage OpenAI may have had, it would’ve been limited

www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

All federal wind power R&D at the Department of Energy is $0.137 billion. So the government is paying 7x the amount it spends on all wind power R&D just for a fee to kill one wind project. Seems bad.

But that gets at that perhaps the enjoyment from sitting around in airport can decline if you do it often... Consistent with frequent flyers likely being more likely to cut it closer

Pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine shows lasting results in an early trial Scientists caution that more research is needed, but nearly all of the patients who responded to the personalized vaccine are still alive six years later.

Reminder: The Trump regime cancelled nearly $500 million in federal contracts for mRNA vaccine development last year.

So, no, it does not surprise me that adoption was fast, or that many people feel troubled by this.

We have have correctly perceived that these systems replicate a wide range of human behavior, making the social stakes an order of magnitude higher than for other technologies.

The trials that quietly changed our lives Testing claims matters more than ever in an age of misinformation, overconfident assertions and unsubstantiated opinions

My article in the Financial Times about my book. It includes a wonderful randomised trial of beer glasses (which you might unknowingly have been part of if you bought a pint in some British pubs c.1998)

“Testing claims matters more than ever in an age of misinformation”
as.ft.com/r/f5a2f313-a...

Top 20 Movies of the 1980s One of my kids told me I should do the top 20 movies of the '20s, the top 30 movies of the '30s, the top 40 movies of the '40s, etc. The problem with this plan becomes clear when you ask yourself, "Ar...

Take a break from trying to figure out whether the Strait of Hormuz is open & check out my list of the top 20 movies of the 1980s.

Meta threw a party for a right-wing influencer who wants to “save the West” The celebration offers a cocktail-fueled look at the tech behemoth's rightward pivot.

"The decorations included an archway that read 'Seeking Truth to Save The West,' underneath the words 'Presented by Meta' and the company’s logo." www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Every train, a note. A jazz combo played in real time by every active NYC subway train.

From the other place (not the Bad Place): New York trains as a jazz combo -- each train has a note, each line has an instrument. Click on the line numbers for more info

trainjazz.com

Our paper (below) showed that AI auto-complete writing assistants can shift your attitude about the topics you write about. But @advaitmb.bsky.social was wondering: what in the writing process triggers this shift? He set out to investigate in our 🥁new #chi2026 paper🥁. Spoiler: mental hijacking. 1/

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette announces it has found a buyer to keep the newspaper open Owners of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said they have found a buyer who had agreed to keep the newspaper open, less than a month before it was due to shut down.

The nonprofit that runs the successful, Pulitzer-winning Baltimore Banner is going to take over the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Of all the possible outcomes here, this is likely the best we could have hoped for.

apnews.com/article/pitt...

Brief fun survey from Jessica, Andrew & myself:

If you are a faculty member, research scientist, postdoc, or senior Ph.D. student in any area of science, please take five minutes and fill it out. We’ll share the results widely along with some reflections.

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

The claim "the fact that the incumbent party was successfully defeated in an election shows that there was never anything to worry about and democracy was fine all along" in the Hungarian case— with explicit or implicit analogy to the US— is maddening to begin with, bc it's a well-known fact
1/

I'd say a big factor is the ranking/matching part...

What do you think of as the canonical version of this age & cohort decomposition?

First pass at a website that keeps track of the data availability status of various published papers:

paulgp.com/replication-...

Very much in Alpha mode, so data will be updated soon.

The arc of history is long and has extremely poor convergence bounds

Suppose you were to pick the optimization target for your own algorithmic feed, and once that target was set, it would relentlessly tune toward that goal with every model, signal, and trick available. What target would you pick? What measurable action do you want your feed to make you do the most?

Their mental load was “reduced” by having a computer electrically stimulate their arm instead.

Bodily autonomy wise, it might feel a bit freaky, because you have the proprioception of your arm moving, but without the mental load of you moving it.

I wish more research was poured in this area.

I’ve been absolutely part of the nerds mocking the “it’s too powerful to release” mantra. That feels like the 4 hour erection warning for software. This morning I actually sat down to read details about Mythos. 😳 Um. We’ve got a systemic problem. It’s finding zero days by the dozen. 1/n

Work in Progress: How we're tackling Sidewalk Sheds (with John Wilson) YouTube video by NYC Mayor's Office

No one likes unnecessary scaffolding. Thankfully, we have a plan — and John Wilson is here to help break it down.

What are the theological implications of running distillation on closed source Jesus?

Massachusetts House advances unconstitutional social media ban bill that will harm LGBTQ youth and human rights The Massachusetts House has advanced H. 5349, a draconian and laughably unconstitutional bill that would ban minors from social media, force social media platforms to enable parental surveillance of t...

When you walk into a bar, they check your ID and hand it back to you. But if this bill becomes law as written, when you visit a website with user-generated content, Big Tech could require you to provide your ID and then they will hold on to it indefinitely. www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2026-04...

The next administration must take the lesson of this one; every single immigration judge hired under Trump 2.0 must be fired on day one.