Jonathan Stephens (@jonathanstephens.us.web.brid.gy) Bsky

Two More Giant Ls for Trump > For more than twenty years, the Office of Personnel Management has fielded an annual, legally mandated survey of federal workers. Its results are used to measure organizational performance across government departments and agencies via questions about morale, merit, training, sense of mission, etc. > > Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Trump administration canceled the 2025 survey. But a version of it ran anyway, fielded by the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit focused on improving the civil service. The results, collected from 11,000 workers across the government, are pretty abysmal. The numbers reveal a “layer cake of trauma,” as Max Stier, the nonprofit’s CEO, put it.

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Why It's Good to Jack Off Frequently, According to Science > To sum up, to ensure high sperm quality, avoid keeping too much spunk in your junk and regularly evacuate the ejaculate.

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Top climate scientist Kate Marvel just resigned from NASA. Here's why > “I thought I’d spend my entire career working at this wonderful place,” her letter stated. But she “never expected that science itself would come under attack, simply because it—like journalism, history, and even the best kind of art—is a way of seeking the truth. I’m leaving because I want to tell the truth.” > I was a research scientist at NASA. It was my job to learn things about Earth, and that is the greatest job description I can think of, because this is the best planet and there’s so much interesting stuff going on here. > Recently I had become interested in what we call carbon cycle feedback: When you disturb the Earth system, how much of the carbon dioxide that human beings put in the atmosphere stays up there? That is a story about how living things on the planet are changing, because, right now, about half of the CO2 that human beings put in the atmosphere gets taken out by things that grow, by things that photosynthesize. And we don't know if that’s going to continue. > I know that that is a violation of what some people might consider scientific neutrality. But I have a conflict of interest: I live on Earth, and so I don’t want to see this particular future. And so, without stepping into policy, which is very much getting over my skis, I think doing the applied science that helps inform those important decisions is something that I’m really excited about.

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We Have Learned Nothing > Of course, no science of entrepreneurship can be a science in the sense most people think of the term. There are no fixed and universal recipes, no ultimate truth. This may be unsatisfying to the aspiring founder, but any science that guaranteed success would bring us right back to the perpetual money machine. The best we can hope for is a science that makes startups meaningfully more likely to succeed and that is honest about the limits of its own prescriptions. And then, when those prescriptions harden into orthodoxy, we try something different. A true science of entrepreneurship embraces the Red Queen dynamic so completely that it rejects any attempt to permanently systematize it. > > Including, eventually, this.

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Senior European journalist suspended over AI-generated quotes > The errors were highlighted by an investigation by one of Mediahuis’s own titles, NRC, where Vandermeersch had been editor-in-chief in the 2010s. NRC alleged Vandermeersch had published “dozens” of quotes that were false and that seven quoted individuals in his posts said they had not made the statements attributed to them. > Vandermeersch said he made a second mistake by failing to correct false quotes immediately, instead leaving that work to a title he had overseen for nearly a decade. He said he was enthusiastic about the possibilities of AI and had wanted to experiment with them extensively. > > “Journalism is human work,” he wrote. “I remain convinced that AI can be a powerful tool – one that can help journalism become better, dig deeper, and be more precise. But not by using AI in the way I did in the early months of this blog.” > > Vandermeersch declined to comment.

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Waterloo researchers turning plastic waste into vinegar > “This method allows abundant and free solar energy to break down plastic pollution without adding extra carbon dioxide to the atmosphere,” Wu said. > > The findings also point to new possibilities for addressing microplastics directly. Because the process degrades plastics at the chemical level, it could help prevent the accumulation of microplastics in water systems. > > The research aligns with the University of Waterloo’s Global Futures initiative, which supports work aimed at advancing sustainable, circular solutions to global environmental challenges. > > While still at the laboratory stage, the team envisions that this approach could be adapted for scalable, solar-driven recycling and environmental cleanup and the photocatalytic upcycling system can be further enhanced through strategic engineering of the materials and manufacturing processes.

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Pricing for Email Marketing Tool Nifty tool. Ryan from the CDO School uses this for his email newsletter.

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Reformed > To put this another way: a reform maintains the old world, often under cover. While a non-reformist reform demands that we build a new world, one in which all humans and the more-than-human world can thrive. > > We must take small steps towards the future we want; there is no other way. But each step must point the way toward that future, a drop of water that heralds the wave.

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Worker Mobilizations around AI in Arts, Culture, and Media > Around the world, cultural workers are striking, protesting, running campaigns and mobilizing in relation to the use of AI in the workplace, such as Hollywood writers, game performers in the US and voice actors in Brazil. This tracker aims to document strikes, protests, campaigns and mobilizations by cultural workers — broadly understood as the arts, culture and media sectors — in relation to AI around the world. > > This tracker is part of the Worker-led AI Governance research under the Creative Labour and Critical Futures cluster, and aims to inform workers around the world about the state of mobilizations and negotiations around AI in the cultural sector.

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Aphantasia and visual working memory: No direct evidence of impaired visual working memory in aphantasics, either in behavioral performance or the accuracy of a multivoxel pattern classifier > Visual mental imagery and visual working memory are often thought to be closely related. After all, both have been argued to involve the temporary maintenance of visual representations in conscious awareness. We might expect, therefore, that individuals with aphantasia would show impairments in visual working memory performance. However, demonstrating this has proven surprisingly difficult. Most studies have failed to find evidence that aphantasia impacts visual working memory, possibly due to methodological designs that have allowed aphantasics to compensate for any impairments. To test this, we conducted three studies: two behavioral studies with tasks intended to prevent compensation and one that utilized multivoxel pattern analysis of fMRI data. Unexpectedly, we found no significant differences between aphantasics and typical imagers, either in behavioral performance or in the multivariate analysis. This may suggest that aphantasia is a variation in conscious awareness, rather than an inability to generate or maintain visual representations.

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Neurodivergent Design as a Discipline > Neurodivergent design is the study and practice of shaping environments around the diversity of human minds. > > Regulation and participation are ecological achievements, not individual responsibilities.

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A lot of journalism folks are offering editing advice as Grammarly’s AI “experts” > “Instead of producing what looks like a generic critique from a nameless LLM,” Wired reported last week, Expert Review “lists a number of real academics and authors available to weigh in on your text. To be clear: Those people have nothing to do with this process.” > I’ll stress again that none of these people gave their permission to have their names used by this feature. In fact, that’s something Grammarly itself, in the style of noted legal scholar and digital copyright expert Pamela Samuelson, flagged when I ran an early draft of this story through it.

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What will the AI Boom leave behind? > We can still make it through, still avoid the desolation from this economic dystopia taking over the world. It will take pressure from real people on the billionaires and trillionaires to stop strip mining the world for money they can’t ever possibly spend. Technology can still serve us. But we’re going to have to fight to keep from serving technology.

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Baskerville Punches > In March 1953, eight oak boxes containing over 3,000 individual typographic punches, were presented to the University of Cambridge by the French typefoundry Deberny & Peignot. These were the surviving punches used to make the type of the Birmingham printer John Baskerville (1707-75). The punches belong to Cambridge University Press & Assessment and are housed at the University Library alongside its extensive collections of both printed and archival material, as well as objects of typographical interest.

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A Company Plans 4,000 Orbiting 'Sky Mirrors' to Shine Sunlight on Earth After Dark, Worrying Astronomers A Company Plans 4,000 Orbiting 'Sky Mirrors' to Shine Sunlight on Earth After Dark, Worrying Astronomers

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Psychology says people who don’t maintain many close friends often learned independence too early > Psychology has a name for this pattern: hyperindependence. It often forms when someone has to self-manage too early, whether emotionally, practically, or both. Independence becomes a strength — but also a shield. > > And when independence gets built too early, it can quietly cost you the thing that depends on mutual reliance the most: close friendship. > Studies on early self-management patterns show that people who were expected to regulate themselves prematurely often develop strong internal coping systems but weaker habits around co-regulation. In other words, they’re excellent at self-soothing — and less practiced at letting someone soothe them. > > If you rarely reach out, people eventually stop trying to get close. > When someone learned independence too early, they often carried more than they were supposed to. They were the helper, the steady one, the low-drama presence. And while they handled it, it was still weight. > > So in adulthood, the idea of being someone’s emotional anchor again can feel heavier than it should. Being a “go-to” person isn’t just about loyalty — it implies responsibility. It implies someone might lean. Might call first. Might need. > Not because they don’t care. > > But because they’re tired of being the sturdy one. > They learned early how to manage themselves. How to steady themselves. How to move forward without waiting for anyone to catch up. > > That strength doesn’t disappear. It just sometimes overshadows another skill — the quiet willingness to lean, to ask, to let someone in.

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Posts by Jonathan Stephens