James Pitt

Next: sleep architecture! When it’s time to sleep, Portia settles upside-down on a silken hammock, cleans all her legs, then adopts a characteristic resting posture and becomes quiescent. These long quiet phases are repeatedly interrupted by REM-like bouts, just as we saw in Evarcha. 🧵4/9

The pettiest hill that I will die on is that if your cool character in a historical novel is rolling their eyes at social conventions, no they're not, eye-rolling didn't become a widely described gesture in English literature until the *1980s* books.google.com/ngrams/graph...

Insane WFH perks

A 2025 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Omar Yaghi is the son of Palestinian refugees who grew up in Jordan. He just left the US to move to China after raising concerns about rising anti-immigrant sentiment, like the kind shown here. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/china-than...

An Arab chemist won the Nobel Prize literally last year. RFK is not only a bigot, he's a stupid ignorant one. (Remember, this is the dude who claimed COVID was engineered to spare Jews and Asians.)

This report is genuinely overwhelming, in terms of the evidence both against Trump and of a ham-fisted cover-up. Including one instance in which Ghislaine Maxwell was actually about to mention one of Trump's young accusers and Todd Blanche told her to stop talking. The media response is "yawn."

FANTASY VERSIONS OF ROMAN ARMOR, WITH HORSES WEARING MODERN TACK, AND GODDAMN STIRRUPS, SEVERAL THOUSAND YEARS EARLY. THIS IS LESS HISTORICALLY ACCURATE THAN HAVING JULIUS CEASAR USE ABRAMS TANKS.

I will also note that there used to be a LOT of money being directed at purely civilian drone use cases and companies until a couple years ago. Trump 2.0 has had a hugely destructive impact here, especially in the U.S.

New @nberpubsb "The Value of (Sub) Specialization: Evidence from Oncology" www.nber.org/papers/w3594... "Access to a relevant subspecialist reduces three-year mortality by 4.5 percentage points (10 percent)"

I didn't realize there was a sharp downturn in Youtube influencer ad and sponsorship revenue. May be an underrated contribution to both the "why are economic vibes are terrible" conversation and the "why did Gen Z turn on Trump" conversation youtu.be/vCMfltmszHY?...

Wait wait! In addition to all this: Real Clear isn’t some spontaneous thing, it’s a rightwing site funded by the same far-right billionaires - Koch, Uihlein, Bradley, etc - that want to tear down the govt, incl to destroy US cancer research. Real Clear is part of the Project 2025 effort.

Oh. No.

It turns out, yes

Phew.

www.nytimes.com/2026/10/06/m...

Is it that easy? Just tick tick tickticktick and you've formally greeted your new whale friend? youtu.be/Wu-aMClCsNc?...

I’ve read that one of the few evolutionary changes in domesticated dogs from their wolf ancestors was specialized eyebrow muscles and I’ve never been so happy about it until this photo.

Is "peptides" one of those words where expertise causes you to not understand what people mean when they're using it?

ABBOTT: Bloodborne was made in collaboration with Japan Studio COSTELLO: The Japanese Studio ABBOTT: They're both Japanese COSTELLO: Who is? ABOTT: FromSoftware and Japan Studio COSTELLO: Right the software is From a Japanese studio, what are they called? ABBOTT: [Seething] bsky.app/profile/jame...

“dumb and lying are not mutually exclusive” seems like the best theory of You Can See Everything

skimmed the piece and it's ALL like this, too just, like, "I'm a piece of shit and i feel so bad about it and let me tell you how anxious and world-shattering it felt when someone found out I was a piece of shit" yeah man, that's what happens in a healthy society, Doing Bad Things has Consequences

“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” from other languages… 1. The son of a duck is a floater (Arabic) 2. A snake’s offspring will always be a long thing (Igbo) 3. A frog’s child is a frog (Japanese) 4. Like pig, like oink (Slovak) 5. Where will the sauce be poured if not on the rice? (Malay)

To the guy behind me at the stoplight frantically waving his copy of Vineland for me to see in my rear view mirror, the sighting of which caused me to manically laugh and put me in a good-ass mood for the entire day: HELL YEAH BRO

Right, like. You can lie a lot and also be really stupid. In fact being incredibly stupid was like the main personality trait of everyone I’ve ever met who lied a lot

This is not some sort of insane emergent AI native behavior that humans couldn't come up with, it's a type of exploit that cyber professionals are taught and almost certainly is something all frontier models are aware of. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre...

like prisoners tapping on the wall between them

The recent recall includes bacon, chicken, sliced turkey breast and other meat products that may have been stored unsafely. - @nbcselected.bsky.social

Okay, first, this is good advice. The risk of botulinum poisoning nothing to dismiss. But if you read this warning statement, it's also will remind you of how thing our food safety net is at the moment. The FDA asked the company to recall the risky product and they refused. 1/2

every time I'm back in Montréal, switching languages every twenty-five seconds, I think of "c'est vraiment top notch"

with the strong caveat that I was a Spelke student, my strong prior on this is "studying newborns is absurdly hard" and thus a mess of results in studies where infant age is measured in hours or days is, well, just that

I grew up as a Developmental Psychologist in a era of almost unbridled Nativism. To see so many of its foundations crumble and being exposed for lack of rigour is fascinating to witness

To play devil's advocate, people also can't get away with anywhere near the amount of bad shit that they used to. Tyranny of the state supplanted tyranny of the tribe and there's a reason people preferred the former.

It used to be basically impossible to prove where someone was born, where they lived or for how long. The amount of paperwork involved was just not cost effective. The only things recognizable as borders pre-20th century involved enormous amounts of expensive, arbitrary manpower to enforce

this happened to me, and it saddled me with tens of thousands of dollars in additional medical debt.

The plain fact of it is thus: the Trump administration wants to re-segregate higher education. It is a racist project straight-up-no-chaser. Accommodating any of this puts you on the wrong side of history, makes you a collaborator in this project. ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics...

while every generation thinks they're better than the previous one, parenting has advanced in leaps and bounds by numerous objective metrics for example, it is far less common today for parents to hit their kids than it was when I was a kid. this is unequivocally a good development

Charlottesville is the key inflection point that stopped fascist consolidation in the US. Anti fascists stopped the consolidation of brown shirts which was the domino which didn't fall allowing Trump appointees to defect without fear and dooming J6 to farce.

trying to help a Hinge match understand that a digital copy of their brain being uploaded doesn't mean they're immortal now because they don't "get" to be the copy and their meat body will still die someday and really understanding why Catherine just gave up trying to explain that to Simon in SOMA

GWOT brain makes Americans think "will take heavy casualties" means "obsolete." Not how big boy war works!

What we learned is that former petrochemical lobbyists now inside the EPA are meeting with former clients and then moving to force career staff at the EPA to rollback public health protections. We found the actual documents detailing these moves. Smoking guns. (Redlines striking protections)

I think this kind of story will be one of THE defining characteristics of the Trump era. They are starting to find that conservative views are correlated to lower life expectancy, and I think longer term they'll be able to find causation. www.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasua...