This is what happens when a preventative is successful. We are only the third generation where infectious disease has not been the main cause of death, and our memories are short.
Scientist, husband, parent, possibly a little too into Dungeons and Dragons. @essayWells on Twitter (Ex-Twitter?)
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This is what happens when a preventative is successful. We are only the third generation where infectious disease has not been the main cause of death, and our memories are short.
I'm going to die mad that California Dreamin' is about dreaming about California and not about California dreaming
In its house at R'l'yeh great California lies dreaming.
if the Biden Irrelevancy had one clear lesson it's that you can't retake democracy from those who would destroy it and then spend years slow-rolling the arrests of those responsible while failing to explicitly change the rules to keep them from power
No living man may kill me! (Gets stabbed by a hobbit and a princess).
Amazing
"trees are dying, crops are barely growing" - I dunno, could it be climate change? Oh, that's a myth, you say? But chemtrails are definitely really very real?
A lesson for us all on why you should not promise the impossible to the terminally insane
And I would never want to get between Ted and a trip to Cancun when there’s an emergency in Texas
I should point out that Mr Altman can shut me up by sending me three million quid. The moment the cheque clears, OpenAI will become the most important company in human history, you betcha.
another thing I think a lot of otherwise smart people didn’t seem to anticipate was “tech oligarchs gloating all the time in public about how they’re going to use AI tools to crush everyone else.”
It’s honestly pretty helpful in that they’re way over their skis with this shit as far as adoption and utility goes. So they’re just poisoning the public perception even more, which isn’t gonna keep the bubble inflated.
Things seem to be set up such that the people who wrote about technology criticism that very much foresaw this were never read or listened to by the vast majority of the people making the tools.
The thing about living in a human society is you either decide that everyone (except those for whom it would be medically dangerous) has to take VACCINES into their bodies or everyone (with no exceptions at all) has to take VIRULENT PATHOGENS in from those around them and, look, the first is better.
it’s very telling how many of the people involved with AI research in the 20th century - most of whom seemed to have largely meant well - simply never seem to have thought about our current “ultra-rich sociopaths try to use AI tools to crush everyone else forever” scenario
The problem is built into the very root of the technology - the transformer architecture generates *text* without regard to meaning, and no amount of attempted cleanup can guarantee to fix that.
It will not be a key augmentation to lots of us. Nothing I've ever done or intend to do would have been in any way improved by letting a transformer model spit text on it.
it turns out that fact-checking is really, really hard, which is why it’s very good and sensible that most of the fact-checkers at various organizations have been laid off over the last decade
This is polite judge-speak for "yo Neil get over yourself"
The district court's grant of summary judgment to Harvard and the AAUP against HHS mirrors what we've been arguing all along. More to come. www.thefire.org/news/fire-st...
It seems like federal district courts are in full revolt against SCOTUS. I've never seen such direct scathing criticism of SCOTUS like this from the bench over their shadow docket rulings quietly overturning precedent without explanation. From the Harvard decision today.
MAGA: biological sex yada yada Ants: yeah we just cloning members of another species here so we can fuck them
Gotta say, pretty surreal to sit here waiting for your city to be invaded by your own stupid fucking country.
We won!! “Defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities … Their actions have jeopardized decades of research and the welfare of all those who could stand to benefit from that research.”
Both Farage and Trump look and act like a very crude and obvious joke version of a person you should absolutely not trust. I will never understand what some people apparently see in them :(
so the key here is red states hate blue metros and want to punish them for not voting like the rest of the state they view NG occupation as a means to do so
I honestly thought that "how 2 bild boat" was more of a solved problem in this century, but apparently no :)
"Slavery is when you tell me I can't shit in the well", Florida Man says.
We encourage our supporters to write to the BBC to complain about the use of a slur against trans women in this article www.bbc.com/news/article... This is directly written in text and is not a quotation.
Among other things this should mean that no other country can now admit US visitors without proof of vaccinations.
Does anyone need a reminder that Alex Acosta, who gave Jeffrey Epstein the notorious "sweetheart deal" the first time his crimes were exposed became Trump's first labor secretary (until he was forced to resign when Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald exposed the whole thing in 2018).
It's so weird how Greenwald and Nate Silver and the like—who aren't even here—keep insisting that Bluesky is pro-DNC, when I've yet to see anyone here ever say anything nice about the DNC at all. Also, evaporating? Lol. Bluesky now sends WAY more traffic to @techdirt.com than Twitter *ever* did.
Cali., Oregon & Washington said today they'll form a “health alliance” to coordinate vax recommendations for their states. "The alliance is intended to provide residents with scientific data about vaccine safety and efficacy, and to issue guidance on vaccines... www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/u...
I'm aware that the President likes to go on television and beg me to call him to ask for troops. I find it strange, as Chicago doesn't want troops. I also have experience asking him for assistance – just to have the rug pulled up from underneath me when execution meets reality.
Your occasional reminder that the positive effects of UBI have been tested and validated hundreds of times more often than the murderous Musk robotaxis or LLM’s we’re rushing to put into our schools and streets.
Holy hell, more like this:
I’ve thought for a while that one of the problems with the Democrats is that it’s hard to wrap one’s head around your coworkers literally wanting to kill you and hurt you and destroy your workplace This is what it looks like when you do
Every time I hear about the “male loneliness epidemic” or “crisis of masculinity” or whatever I feel the feminine scientific urge to drop the words “this is sexual selection” into the chat
an immensely frustrating part of Biden's grotesque approach to Gaza was that it gravely discredited an otherwise a fairly solid foreign policy approach. arming Ukraine, ending the Afghan war, stopping a coup in Brazil, patching things up with the EU, etc, and then he impaled that for Bibi
Sparta: come and take it Persia: you bet Persia: ok now what
One of my favorite stories about Sparta, mostly because I find it funny that most people cut out what happens after the "If".
Jesus fucking christ i am exhausted of people who refuse to take even 1 class that would introduce them to ideas like the social construction of rules, laws, tech, & definitions of "crime," & who continually learn the wrong lessons from every science fiction story they ever meet. I mean holy shit.
Fascinated that In Our Time is one of the BBC’s most popular podcasts among under 35s. The young people demand three academics and a peer discussing Demosthenes, apparently. And they’re right to do so.
When I was announced as the lead in a Doctor Who spinoff in 2023 Graham Linehan tweeted about me for TWO DAYS, tagging the BBC and others to say that I am pro-child abuse and they shouldn't work with me.
Yeah it’s sort of funny but I’m a 100% unironic believer in that “good times create weak men” shit now, it’s totally accurate, it’s just that the kind of guys who posted it the last few years were the weak men in question.
Seems like one of the cases where if the intervention were used effectively we might have to use the intervention, can't risk that.
This is reporting progress from promising anecdata to more rigorous trials.
A nasal spray reduced the risk of Covid infections in a double blind, placebo controlled randomized trial jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
The building will include photovoltaic roof panels, a green wall, rainwater harvesting, cycle parking, and a minimum of 10% Biodiversity Net Gain. We wrote about the Oxford Trust and their incredible founders, Sir Martin & Lady Audrey Wood, in a long read in May. 👇
The Oxford Trust has begun construction on its new Aspen Building at the Wood Centre for Innovation in Headington. The new facility will provide laboratory and office space and will also feature a STEM resources room for its STEM engagement programme, Science Oxford.
The numbers are artificially low due to not testing (e.g. in hospitals they explicitly just... don't) and due to ignoring the rolling disaster of long covid.
Most lawyers are like “Yeah due process doesn’t matter now and the administration has just decided the judiciary is superfluous. It is fucking horrible and I am having a professional existential crisis. I still have to help this person with their custody complaint, though.”
Because he is. No mystery.
Transphobe arrested: "we need to look at the laws, clearly something's not right" 80 year old vicars and disabled people carried off parliament square because they said genocide is bad: "these laws need to be tightened if anything"
The load-bearing myth at the heart of UK politics is that the politicians and media are tolerant and decent and working people are knuckle-dragging bigots, but it's actually completely the other way around.
This is actually an excellent example of how an instruction to “show me your reasoning” doesn’t induce an LLM to produce the reasoning, just a plausible impression of reasoning.
Kennedy must be removed from office. He has already caused a catastrophe at HHS and the CDC. I strongly suspect that he is about to use data manipulated by unscrupulous and unqualified individuals to attempt to falsely show that vaccines are in some way a net harm. He simply must be stopped.
His arse. So I blocked :) anyone who leads with "prove me wrong" isn't worth engaging with.
What an incredible surprise :)
Labour's strategy since the election seems designed to appeal to right-conservative voters. This strategy hasn't worked on its own terms because they have lost the (very few) right-wing voters that they had, while also losing (much) larger numbers of left-wing voters.
Labour's next biggest losses are to left-liberal parties (Liberal Democrats and Greens). Reform's growth in support has mostly come from the Conservatives and non-voting (much less from Labour). These reflect patterns of party-bloc voting that we saw in the 2024 UK GE: tinyurl.com/y5pv7thw
Oh look, Labour has spent months targeting the wrong voters.
Also, even the idea of a single national identity for most European countries is relatively new, despite the claim of these "ancient nations." As of 1794, only 11% of people in France spoke French as a first language, and nearly half didn't speak French or spoke it poorly.
Your view is wrong and you should get information before forming opinions.
Have you read your constitution.
"bluesky is dying" that's cool man. i go on here to make funny posts with my friends
Very much the dynamic, yes. Also we had a long conversation in German about when he'd been stationed in East Germany with the Red Army, which was extra interesting because neither he nor I really spoke German.
And yet instead of fixing the problems they are choosing to be xenophobic and transphobic. What a waste.
I come back again to how Megabrain Masterlord Morgan McSweeney doesn't seem to have spent even a minute thinking how his literal wife will hold her seat at the next general election. Just mesmerising.
Labourites seem to have gone from "ha ha hypnotits" to "oh fuck Polanski will make Farage PM, is that what you want???" very quickly. But lads, if you want people's votes, win them. You're the government ffs.
We have a couple of handmade rugs like that from Bukhara and they cost a few hundred dollars + having tea with the vendor's family :)
💉 RFK Jr vs vaccine science A Danish study of 1.2M children found no link between aluminium in vaccines and disease. US health secretary RFK Jr called for its retraction, but the journal refused, saying no errors or misconduct occurred. 🔗 doi.org/10.1038/d415... #SciComm 🧪 #Vaccines
Just last week I was hearing from someone about a friend of theirs, a short-haired, white, cis woman who was visiting the US, who was accosted several times in women's bathrooms from people who decided that 1) she was trans, and 2) that she therefore shouldn't be in there.
one of my charming traits is how I'll say shit like "prepare to have your mind...BOGGLED" before jumping into a 90 minute infodump about bronze age hittite legal codes
Oh, I know this. Juche is built on 4 pillars: ● Economic self-reliance (let's not even go WTO) ● National and individual self-reliance (they need us more than we need them) ● Non alignment (taking back control) ● Military independence So the answer is Brexit. 1/2
I am up very early because a small black kitten decided now is a great time to try to (adorably) chew off my entire right earlobe. He was not successful in this endeavor but now I am awake, thank you
I would like the government to talk less about stopping the small boats and more about building the big trains.
'This country needs migrants' Zack Polanski, the new leader of the Green Party in England and Wales, speaks to #BBCBreakfast about his views on immigration
Actually you don’t have to be empathetic, not at all
Every Monday am, we publish an updated list of every UK plc that's failed to file its accounts on time. Sometimes a company is on the list because of Companies House delay/error. Often, the companies are troubled, bust, or incompetent. But sometimes it's just fraud:
You know your audience. Also when will that thread happen it sounds fascinating.
Trees pretty and have shade and birds :)
I mean we could do with a whole bunch more trees in lots of places, but the CO2 uptake is not the reason.
wow is it possible for seven people to all be wrong about something? www.axios.com/2025/09/02/a...
Look at this response from Polanski to Sophie Ridge's attempted gotcha on flags To *finally* have a mainstream political voice standing up for racialised & minoritised communities being intimidated by the violent fash on our streets It's really not that hard, is it?
This reads as China being very happy for Russia to exhaust itself if it wants to.
Letters in The Times that sum up Labour’s deeply inadequate response to the perceived immigration ‘crisis’. Cruelty as policy and performative patriotism to try to pacify (rather than challenge) the frothing right wing press and the baying racist mob. It’s all just so gutless and wrong.
Me: Can I pay by cats? Shop owner: Cats? Me: Card! Sorry card. My brain. Shop owner (laughing): No worries. To be fair I'd take cats too.
This seems very practical and will definitely happen for real.
L'extrême droite en un meme.
FINALLY SOME BASIC JOURNALISM HOLY SHIT
A Victorian solicitor has been stripped of his ability to practise as a principal lawyer after being caught using AI-generated false citations in court case - he has acknowledged he did not verify the case list www.theguardian.com/law/2025/sep...
It’s not just that the President of the United States posted a video of eleven people being murdered in international waters it’s that the President of the United States ordered the murder of eleven people in international waters so he could post a video of it.
Good idea, but also just block me now if that's the criterion :)
Paying $1.1bn in Not Money :)
Which to be fair is a modest and reasonable ambition :)
you'd think the governor of illinois basically going "we're being invaded by an authoritarian" would be something you'd see real easy on the front page of most everything an hour later
The obvious joke is that apparently he's *really really good at it*. Look into my eyes, you will make me leader of the Green party :)