Globe99

There's a lot to dislike in mainstream university R&D. It's gotten so self-absorbed and self-referential. It’s been so long since a university engineering department has invented anything useful in hard tech that at this point most people hardly believe in "translational research". But I don’t think the cold fusion story has such a straightforward lesson about the usefulness of academia.

Source: www.orcasciences.com

For Callisto, though, the mainstream stigma was a major headwind to getting to the truth of things[6]. It made hiring hard, it made error-checking hard, it made people do a lot of stuff in-house that probably could have been more easily done by others. Greed is a great reason to keep a project secret. Embarrassment is not. It’s a testament to the good intentions of the team that this work ever got published at all.

Source: www.orcasciences.com

It’s a little like the effective altruism stuff where (tiny probability) x (momentous outcome) creates extremes of opinion about what’s important, and people start having heated arguments about extinction risk or shrimp welfare or the urgency of colonizing the galaxy.

Source: www.orcasciences.com

Ten months before Coxon resigned, in December 2025, nearly five hundred people gathered in a Berkeley music hall for a ceremony about the possible end of humanity. There was a live band and a twenty-eight-person choir. There were liturgical readings.

Source: iankduncan.com

When my dad was 71-years old, he totaled his first car. At the time, he lived on a farm in the commuter exurbs of Owings Maryland. To the grocery store it was fifteen minutes to drive, two hour and twenty minute to walk, or go fuck yourself on transit.

Source: inpractice.yimbyaction.org

“Peanut butter floor still raises questions like, is this art? Am I allowed to like this?”

Source: www.theguardian.com

A society committed to equal liberty must enforce the norms that allow millions of strangers to coexist in dense urban environments. When homeless encampments colonize public parks, or the mentally ill take over public bathrooms, or addicts shoot up and drop needles in school zones, a small number of disruptive actors are effectively allowed to privatize public space. Everyone else loses the freedom to use it.

Source: www.ryanpuzycki.com

This conflation leads us away from solutions and toward the sad conclusion that urban disorder is the inevitable price of American liberty. But it’s actually the opposite that’s true.Disorder is not a consequence of political individualism. It’s a failure to enforce it.

Source: www.ryanpuzycki.com

As John Quiggin writes, the pre-2020 Musk was the Musk of Tesla, batteries and Starlink. The post-2020 Musk is the Musk of Starship, robotaxis, Cybertrucks and Twitter – a string of commercial flops and assets that literally exploded. I would add that post-2020 Musk created the world's hungriest money-furnace, an automated child-porn production tool called "XAI": https://crookedtimber.org/2026/06/15/one-big-grift/

Source: pluralistic.net

An unbanked teenager in Tunisia can dance their heart out on TikTok -- they'll never see the same revenue, if any at all, as if they were dancing in Toledo. Nostr + lightning levels this playing field, and finally offers the true promise of the global democratization of content creation.

Because tribalism is how you lose. Every closed platform plays the same game, wall off the users, hold the network hostage, and dare them to leave. The open web only works if we refuse to play that game with each other. Soapbox has been building bridges since the Mostr Bridge launched back in 2023 connecting Nostr and the Fediverse. Today that bridge has over 56,000 users connected across networks. With Bluesky in the mix through Bridgy Fed, you can follow people no matter which open protocol they’re on. The goal isn’t ‘everybody come to Nostr.’ The goal is the open web wins, the corporate web loses, and you don’t lose your audience because you picked a different app.

Source: nerds.xyz

MODERATOR: Tell me why you supported the Empire in the first place.BRENN: Lesser of two evils. The Senate was ineffective, and the liberal Jedi were out of touch. The Emperor said he’d cut through all that. And he did—sometimes literally. You have to give him that. Things moved. Maybe a little too much moving right now, with the Death Star repositioning every few minutes to maintain a firing solution on our planet, but still.

Source: substack.com

This is a part of the politics that I worry about a lot because I do think that for a lot of Americans, a combination of NIMBYism and “never get out of the car” is their de facto solution to crime. Conservatives seem remarkably indifferent to the objectively high level of violent crime in most of the Sun Belt because they feel personally insulated from it in a way they are not when they visit a place like New York or San Francisco where the per capita crime rates are lower.

Source: substack.com

Besides, Mossad’s intelligence indicated that street protests inside Iran would begin again and — with the impetus of the Israeli spy agency helping to foment riots and rebellion — an intense bombing campaign could foster the conditions for the Iranian opposition to overthrow the regime.

Source: www.nytimes.com

In the Situation Room on Feb. 11, Mr. Netanyahu made a hard sell, suggesting that Iran was ripe for regime change and expressing the belief that a joint U.S.-Israeli mission could finally bring an end to the Islamic Republic.

Source: www.nytimes.com

Frank Herbert (yeah, I know I'm a nerd), in God Emperor of Dune, has a character observe: "What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking; there's the real danger." Herbert was writing science fiction. I'm writing about my office. The distance between those two things has gotten uncomfortably small.

Source: ergosphere.blog

Unlike medicine, where a cure for Alzheimer's would be invaluable regardless of whether a human or an AI discovered it, astrophysics has no clinical output. The results, in a strict practical sense, don't matter. What matters is the process of getting them: the development and application of methods, the training of minds, the creation of people who know how to think about hard problems. If you hand that process to a machine, you haven't accelerated science. You've removed the only part of it that anyone actually needed.

Source: ergosphere.blog

Which means that, from the institution's perspective, the question of whether Alice or Bob becomes a better scientist is largely someone else's problem. The department needs papers, because papers justify funding, and funding justifies the department. The student is the means of production. Whether that student walks out the door five years later as an independent thinker or a competent prompt engineer is, institutionally speaking, irrelevant.

Source: ergosphere.blog

A factory manager is interviewing for a new accountant. He asks only one question: ‘What is two plus two?’ Candidate after candidate gives the wrong answer. Finally, the right man walks in. ‘What answer do you need?”’ asks the applicant. Old Soviet Joke

Source: www.worksinprogress.news

"If you build it, they will come" is a trap. Technologists and their users who don't understand the pernicious nature of the collective active problem trap themselves.

Source: pluralistic.net

People stay on bad platforms because the value they provide to one another is greater than the costs the platform extracts from them. That means that when you see people stuck on a very bad platform – like Twitter, Instagram or Facebook – you should infer that what they get there from the people that matter to them is really important to them.

Source: pluralistic.net

Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine.

Source: www.nature.com

She parked where the chatbot instructed and walked to the spot it described, by the lifeguard stand. As sunset neared, the temperature dropped. She kept checking in with the chatbot, and it told her to be patient, she said.

Source: www.npr.org

Perhaps most striking, a Jan. 24 YouGov poll — conducted after the Pretti shooting on Saturday — found that 46 percent of Americans now support abolishing ICE, compared with 41 percent who oppose it. The partisan breakdown reveals how significantly the ground has shifted; 76 percent of Democrats support abolition, but so do 47 percent of independents.

Source: www.nytimes.com

One person familiar with the production estimated that some two-thirds of the crew members who worked on the film in New York had requested not to have their names formally credited on the documentary.

Source: www.rollingstone.com

Illich uses the example of the automobile, which at its "optimal" scale simply gave people the ability to travel farther, in less time. But as infrastructure was built up around the car, we arrived at the "tolerable" scale - a point at which people came to be obligated to travel in order to reach the same kind of destination they once could achieve on foot or at home. As society crystallized around this scale, people ended up spending more time spent traveling, at a greater cost. Worst of all, we cannot now return to localism

Source: coracle.social

The Department of Homeland Security also suspended Bovino’s access to his social media accounts effective immediately, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Source: www.cnn.com

This White House has a playbook for scandal: Always double down, never apologize, and above all attack, attack, attack. So it was nothing less than shocking yesterday when the administration—after two days of utterly shameless lies about the killing of Alex Pretti—slammed on the brakes in an attempt to pivot to a more normie-palatable narrative.

Source: www.thebulwark.com

But tools are not simply a blank canvas for human intention; rather, tools are designed for a particular purpose, and do not exist in isolation. When a new tool is created, certain values are embedded into its shape, which in turn interact with the pre-existing technological millieu. This complex combination of different tools and the people using them creates an environment in which the use of a given tool is mediated by another.

Source: coracle.social

I also want to give a brief summary of Marshall McLuhan's "media ecology" to frame my argument. It's common to think of tools as moral to the extent that they are used for a particular purpose. But tools are not simply a blank canvas for human intention; rather, tools are designed for a particular purpose, and do not exist in isolation. When a new tool is created, certain values are embedded into its shape, which in turn interact with the pre-existing technological millieu. This complex combination of different tools and the people using them creates an environment in which the use of a given tool is mediated by another.

Right now the United States is facing two major foreign-policy crises:1. Greenland.2. Where King Charles III will go to the bathroom.I will take these crises one at a time.

Source: davebarry.substack.com

Take a close look at the post, though. Trump never specifies who should go to jail. He never articulates the supposed crime that was committed. He’s just shouting into the void known as Truth Social. He’s pitiful. A dangerous man, for sure, but each new post seems like an admission of inadequacy.

Source: gizmodo.com