matpolu.bsky.social

Incredible words from Zelenskyy, a leader who uses honesty as a weapon. What a stark contrast to an American president who treats it as an obstacle. History will remember the difference. Slava Ukraini!

Staff at all of the Big Five US publishing companies claim that executives are pushing them to use AI tools, even as Macmillan and others are suing some of the leading AI companies for copyright infringement. Read the full story: www.wired.com/story/macmil...

Astonishing! During this morning's king tide, Miami crossed the threshold for "Major" flooding without a hurricane for the first time. This was the city's highest water level in 11 years, and 3rd-highest since 1994. Yellow highlights: 8 of 14 top spots are from king tides during the past 2 years.

In theory, there's a way to avoid all of this: you could just use the "Kill Sticky" bookmarklet or an adblock filter to block or dismiss the dickover without ever clicking "continue": pluralistic.net/2026/07/21/d...

Los Angeles and San Diego had their highest coastal water levels in over a century of records during high tide today. (San Diego's record was a tie, but there was a glitch that prevented the peak from being recorded). Top-10 marks from 2026 highlighted are in yellow. @edwardsanthonyb.bsky.social

Breaking News: Walter Koenig, who played Pavel Chekov, the baby-faced Russian navigator in the “Star Trek” franchise, has died at 90. nyti.ms/4zLGtYg

NEW: US lawmakers say the Trump administration is breaking the law by withholding a secret court opinion about the surveillance of Americans, even as it presses Congress to renew America’s most sweeping surveillance program.

My heart is heavy. Walter Koenig, our Ensign Pavel Chekov, passed away early today. Walter and I met on the bridge of the Enterprise in the 1960s, and we stayed friends for nearly six decades. When Brad and I married in 2008, Walter stood beside us as our best man.

😢

Your monthly reminder that if you're using ChatGPT to do your science, you're failing your colleagues, community, and all of us. Here, ChatGPT makes up data and presents it as the real thing — then apologizes when confronted.

Also for what it is worth, it DIDN'T actually label them as illustrative — and the deception was only apparent because I know the data well. That's scary, because if you use AI for everything, you wouldn't know the data well enough to catch its deceptions.

The great Oleksandra Matviichuk is absolutely right to draw attention to the horrible humanitarian crisis in Oleshky. All Putin, Witkoff, and Kushner can do is invert and traduce the meaning of “humanitarianism,” in the best traditions of Russian propaganda.

Noah Adams, a longtime host of NPR’s “All Things Considered” whose quiet baritone and empathetic ear brought listeners stories not often heard on U.S. airwaves, has died. He was 84. nyti.ms/4ieS8b1

This guy and his weird dick need to be taxed out of existence.

Of all the architectural destruction Trump is doing to DC, this is the one I feel is the most abhorrent. (cartoon from 2025)

We take y'all to church on this episode. We presents three artists backed by choirs behind the Desk. Look for Tiny Desk Radio on your local NPR station. n.pr/4BkmZM9

Musk’s influence in the midterms is unparalleled, and there’s a lot that could happen in the waning days of this election.

Comic ✍️: No deal by David Horsey Get more comics in your inbox 👉️: signup.dailykos.com

The LLM model I arguably use the most, the one doing autocompletion in VS Code, seems to have gotten a lot worse. Like, giving the wrong field name for a struct defined 200 lines above. Is there a way to plug in a better model? VS Code claims it can only be GPT-4.1 (!) Codex.

In Venezuela last September, I found people hoping for change, but shocked and surprised by US policy, especially opaque oil deals with former regime cronies. The system looks, one economist told me, like “a coalition of two kleptocracies" www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Facebook is now throttling how many posts I can make that include a link. I'd have to pay for a Meta membership to post more than two links a month. I'm ambivalent enough about posting on Zuckerberg's platforms, I'm sure as hell not paying to do so.🖕

I've spent the last few weeks attempting to figure out what the hell is going on in WV, where a tiny grove of American chestnut trees is facing off against an AI data center. it's a complex and fascinating situation: www.404media.co/west-virgini...

When people tell me they “don’t do politics,” I get it. It’s not pretty and it can be totally exhausting. But here’s the thing: billionaires and giant corporations are certainly doing politics — and they’re going to keep doing it regardless of how you feel.

"A full assessment of the record in the East Potomac case sure seems to suggest that the problematic behavior has come from the government, and not from Judge Reyes. The real-world stakes may be modest. But the institutional stakes are substantial—and they’re growing by the day." Me in "One First":

No matter where you shop, you're getting screwed by Amazon. Amazon has found a way to make everything you buy - at Target, at a mom-and-pop shop, even direct from the manufacturer - more expensive. And they're not the only one: Expedia's done the same thing, but for hotel rooms.

The Execution Will Not Be Televised The Donald may be more Shane Gillis than Gil Scott-Heron, but if shelving the shooting show helps him with the election, he and Elon may put whitey on the moon again. by Maureen Dowd

Uline CEO Richard Uihlein put close to $67 million more into his Restoration of America PAC, which distributed the money to multiple other SuperPACs

Planet Database xkcd.com/3311/

I'm becoming more and more convinced that antitrust is BY FAR the most important issue of our time. One might think it's fascism, but why do you think the most powerful corporate players threw all their weight behind Trump 2024? The FTC was finally doing real antitrust work again under Biden.

Today's threads (a thread) Inside: Expedia amazoned hotel rooms; and more! Archived at: pluralistic.net/2026/10/15/e... #Pluralistic

"The amount of fuel Russia could export is too small, the impact on pricing too slight, the narrative too late to shape electoral outcomes: This looks, instead, like something very different: an abrupt, Hail Mary attempt to force Ukraine to surrender" www.theatlantic.com/idea/2026/10...

If you need to cut back your skeleton budget this year:

I really need to make it clear to folks that AI-generated code closely resembles AI-generated text, by which I mean it is syntactically correct, easy to produce, and can approach what a human can make, but very clearly lacks the forethought and holistic nature of when a skilled human makes it.

Spectrum Allocation xkcd.com/3307/

“We are in the second quantum revolution,” said Riccardo Comin, an experimental physicist at MIT. “Now, we have the tools to really explore the wave function of quantum particles.” https://www.quantamagazine.org/first-map-made-of-a-solids-secret-quantum-geometry-20250606/

After months of trying to find a new buyer, farmers in Pennsylvania and New York are preparing to let their grapes fall to the ground. The crisis threatens to reshape local economies as grape farmers come to terms with shifting consumer behavior.

Russians tried hauling a helicopter across a field on a limousine and, unsurprisingly, it didn’t go to plan. Wonderland.

What guides a bat’s internal compass? It’s not the stars in the sky, or the Earth’s magnetic field. https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-animals-build-a-sense-of-direction-20260121/

Since President Trump took over the Kennedy Center, the institution has borrowed everything its bank would lend it, dipped into money donors had given on the condition it never be spent and written off pledges from supporters who stopped paying. By @federicacocco.bsky.social & @naemas.bsky.social:

NEW: As Trump’s White House and influencers keep touting the unproven benefits of raw milk, hundreds across the country are falling ill from outbreaks. Some people get severe indigestion. And some nearly die. Here's the story of one toddler who drank it. 🧵👇 www.propublica.org/article/cali...

The best birthday present imaginable. #DollyDay 💖

Good article by mother jones. This one hits home as I had a niece and friends living here during this massacre. AI needs to be heavily regulated.

Tensors are instrumental in physics, machine learning and even biology. Einstein once begged a friend to help him understand them, fearing he was going mad. https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-geometric-tool-that-solved-einsteins-relativity-problem-20240812/

Internal emails and documents obtained by The New York Times demonstrate President Trump’s political capture of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, including how officials once pursued a plan to unload much of the art collection. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/20/u...

Thousands of people joined outside the Kennedy Center on Friday to protest President Donald Trump's plans for the facility, lending their voices to a chorus of organizations and individuals who have been horrified that he might close and tear down the storied institution. https://to.pbs.org/4y44oln

Just as not all communities are rolling over for data centers, not all newsrooms are sitting back and letting AI steal our content. Some of us are fighting back.

So great that Uber (especially) lured people into fares that undercut cabs, and now that the few cabs that used to exist in SF are no more, an Uber fee when you really need it is like $50 bucks for anywhere.

I'd post it, but I have no idea if anybody under 60 would even get it. Among other things, you have to have seen Gone With the Wind, which may have -- for Reasons -- gone out of fashion.