The do-operator is odd, but useful.

nothing-so-practical.com/post/do-the-...

#CausalSky #CausalInference #DAG

Sacrifice your job for the glorious AI future How tech CEOs use the threat of job loss to distract from how AI is really used against workers

Perplexity’s CEO is just the latest tech leader to tell the public their jobs will be sacrificed on the altar of the glorious AI future.

It’s a compelling narrative, but it distracts us from the real impact of AI: not to take the human out of the loop, but to take away their power and cut their pay

Sexual violence and forcible transfer in the West Bank This report documents gender-based and sexualised violence perpetrated by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in Area C of the West Bank in contexts w...

Sexual assault, forcing citizens to strip naked, Israeli men exposing themselves to children.
The latest human report on Israel's actions against people in the West Bank is shocking.
When will western leaders stand up for international law and denounce the terror state?
www.nrc.no/resources/re...

Carney Government Wants To ‘Provide’ the Fossil Fuels for Trump’s AI Strategy The Liberals once talked tough about distancing Canada from the U.S. Now they seem eager to profit from the president’s agenda.

Carney is saying "Canada's economic ties with U.S. are a weakness that must be corrected."

So why is his Energy Minister promising to send fossil gas to fuel Trump's AI strategy?

www.desmog.com/2026/04/08/c...

The Strokes use Coachella set to denounce US foreign intervention Band shows montage of leaders whose death or ousting the CIA has been proven or suspected to have been part of

while not comprehensive, the Strokes' Coachella performance apparently did a good job of summarizing the US's violent and anti-democratic foreign policy during the last ~80 years, up to involvement in Israel's on-going genocide: www.theguardian.com/music/2026/a...

I'm not joking when I say mRNA technology is more important than "AI" and it's a tragedy we're throwing billions into one while our government is aggressively defunding the other.

I would really like to see folks in neuroscience and ML choosing to boycott the US. I have decided to not travel there for conferences anymore myself, but I have not seen any collective initiatives in the community---at least not yet

What Israel is doing to Lebanon is obscene, carpet bombing civilians, massacring people in their hundreds, total disregard for human life. Truly plumbing the depths of evil. The single greatest source of violence and instability in the region and it's not even close.

Analysis Finds That Google's AI Overviews Are Providing Misinformation at a Scale Possibly Unprecedented in the History of Human Civilization A new analysis commissioned by The New York Times suggests that Google's AI Overviews are wrong an astonishing percentage of the time.

Google’s AI Overviews are providing “tens of millions of wrong answers … every hour — and hundreds of thousands every minute.”

wow, i love the AI future!

Atlantic opinion piece on LLMs worth reading: archive.is/IXGlH. It argues "speech without enforceable consequence undermines the social contract". I feel the idea might be more general than the punitive angle of the author. Zoom out from "words without consequence", to 'words without relationships'

that would be amazing! What should I do to facilitate this?

2/2: Early this year I volunteered a bit on the @avilewis.ca leadership campaign for Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP). It was a success! If you're also interested in making change, check out this new movement in the NDP. I believe it's the most exciting domestic political event so far in my life.

a man in a red jacket stands beside the glass front door of a large stone building, at the top of a stairway flanked by statues

1/2: Two updates to share! I have started a research position in London (UK)! I’m excited to pursue new science, and a new city. With the horrors that our economic system and those currently in power inflict upon the world, I am increasingly looking for ways to make change---enter my second update…

You guys in the USA need to go in GLOBAL STRYKE. JUST STOP WORKING. Do this for days. Stop the country. Stop the fool, my goodness. You have massive power. Use it !

Some reports say over 500 schools, 55 libraries, & 25 universities hit.
You can debate the numbers, but hitting Sharif University & Beheshti is like hitting MIT & Stanford. I keep wondering: How would the scientific community respond differently if it was those universities? What’s the difference?

hahaha, thanks for the sage advice Alex

It just happened, for the first time, that reviewer 2 (in the metaphorical and literal sense) bashed my recent anonymous submission and told me to cite work that I have co-authored 🫠 What is the correct emotional response to this? My default is imposter syndrome but not sure that it applies

Avi Lewis waving as supporters gather behind him beneath a slogan: "The NDP comeback starts now."

To every volunteer, donor, organizer and NDP member who helped power this history-making movement: thank you.

We are building a new foundation for our party, and we are ready to come roaring back on the Canadian political stage. Let’s get to work!

How ‘The Charles Koch of Canada’ Created a $9.5 Million Influence Machine Former fracking magnate Gwyn Morgan has funnelled millions to right-wing media and think tanks, a DeSmog analysis reveals.

SCOOP: Former fracking CEO Gwyn Morgan has been funnelling millions into a network of right-wing think tanks, organizations, and far right-media in Canada.

Check out our analysis and map of Morgan's network:

@geoffdembicki.bsky.social

www.desmog.com?p=94865&prev...

@avilewis.ca elected new NDP leader!!! ABSOLUTELY STOKED. This a big day for Canada

This is so insane:
www.newsweek.com/nyc-spends-a...
It's also insane that nobody in this article mentions the possibility of converting the money into a very generous UBI and probably those people would be better off.

A personal update.

yeah no shit, leo saw what happened to the guy before him

the thing that always blows my mind about all of this is that people do not usually put two and two together, and recognize that a fundamental feature of capitalism--organizing an economy around capital accumulation--is anti-democratic. The fight for democracy is a fight for economic reform.

PhD opportunities The School of Convergence Science at Imperial College London is inviting applications for fully funded PhD studentships on research projects that sup...

PhD opportunity in "The role of neural development in multimodal intelligence" with me, @marcusghosh.bsky.social and @flor-iacaruso.bsky.social. Read details below 👇.

Note there's a very short window for applying (deadline Feb 27).

🤖🧠🧪

www.imperial.ac.uk/school-of-co...

This is another one of the reasons I’m so deeply troubled by the fabulous new plan to just pivot to private philanthropy.

Billionaires will not save science

Not despondent to share our new work arxiv.org/abs/2601.17427 with Santiago Acevedo and Cristopher Erazo from SISSA, where we show that Binary Intrisic Dimension (BID) [ nature.com/articles/s42... ] is able to detect phase transitions in the Hopfield model. 1/N

Really hard to look at this and all the other examples of bravery and kindness from ordinary people in this moment not think also of the tremendous cowardice exhibited over the past year by some of the richest, most well-protected people in business, media and politics

Danielle Smith Working With Trump Official Who Wants to Annex Greenland The Alberta premier belongs to a U.S. group called the Governors Coalition for Energy Security that’s led by Jeff Landry, Trump’s envoy to Greenland.

Wonder why Danielle Smith isn't speaking out about Trump threatening Greenland?

I'm sure it has nothing to do with her cultivating connections to the Trump official tasked with annexing the territory.

Read more from @marylouisestuart.bsky.social in @desmog.com

www.desmog.com/2026/01/14/d...

when doing neuroscience projects I often advocate for computational modelling, followed by data analysis to test model's predictions.

however a few times now I have had pushback from collaborators/reivewers suggesting it would be better to do the data analysis first, then the modelling.

thoughts?