Graduate student descent will find a solution, just difficult to guarantee a priori that you will be that graduate student!

🧵On @thenewsagents.co.uk yesterday, school closures and the lab leak theory were offered as two examples of legitimate questions that were hard to ask. Both have in fact been asked constantly since 2020. But here's a thread on why I think they were wrong and dangerous on school closures 1/12

My wife had long covid and, although she's happily fully recovered, she was essentially bedbound for two years. Seeing journalists say stuff like this makes me viscerally, profoundly angry in a way that few other things manage.

Lewis Goodall@lewisgoodall.com · 4d ago

Long covid is a disputed subject, at best.

Replies have been turned off, but one more point to add - if we don't address those sacrifices, I don't think we can expect younger generations to make them again in the next pandemic

Arun Niranjan@arun-niranjan.bsky.social · 4d ago

My somewhat naive take is that younger people sacrificed their mental health, careers, social lives for two years (with compounding effects) to preserve QUALYs for pensioners. This was probably the right move, but we have to shift resource allocation _now_ to make up for those sacrifices

I read this and immediately thought "we literally have data intensive applications by kleppman, what more do you want??"

Andy Matuschak@andymatuschak.org · 2w ago

I think this is a big gap in software design culture. There's lots of commentary on visual design and micro-interaction, but remarkably little explicating conceptual and structural design. This section from Magic Ink is lodged in my mind. buff.ly/Bl9JwTv

From a friend who joined a fast-growth, later-stage startup: "I was wondering why no one is doing PRDs here. Then I realized that the Head of Product and most PMs are 25-year-olds who don't have the attention span to *read* even a 1-page doc. You lose them after 3 bullet points."

I have a possibly controversial take on this - as groups we're much worse at classifying dicks than we think we are. If it's purely group verdict / gossip on who is a dick, I guarantee you ethnic minorities and women are getting shorter shrift than others.

Sam Freedman@samfr.bsky.social · 3w ago

I always had this rule when hiring. However smart or impressive someone seems, if they seem like a bit of a dick it's not worth hiring them. I had deliberate tests, like how they treated admin staff.

"To chart a safe path between the Scylla of missed windows and the Charybdis of systems melting into slop, we need eyes on both threats as we coordinate, synchronize, and pull together." YES EXACTLY!

Charity Majors@charity.wtf · 2mo ago

i wrote a post about the growing divide between AI skeptics and AI enthusiasts. wins and costs are both real, but too often fall on different groups of people. when you're only experiencing half the story, it's too easy to write each other off. charitydotwtf.substack.com/p/ai-enthusi...

And yet: - wages have stayed flat for most people since 2008 - housing costs have exploded in that time I would love someone more qualified than me to untangle how much of this thread applies to income alone rather than combined income and wealth taxation

Dan Neidle@danneidle.bsky.social · 2mo ago

UK tax has gone up significantly over the last 25 years But the tax paid by the average UK worker has not This apparent miracle was achieved by taxing “other people”: higher earners, capital, property, banks, etc The strategy has run out of road A 🧵 on what happens next.

If you build on brownfield, people complain. If you build on greenfield, people complain. If you don't build, people complain. I honestly don't know why anyone would want to be a leader in this country, it would be soul destroying

George Monbiot@georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 2mo ago

This is exactly what we have been warning about. But oh no, anyone who objects to the changes is a selfish, privileged nimby, a zealot, a blocker, an elitist. Let's trash the lives of England's poorest communities, and smear anyone who complains. Thanks Keir. 🧵 www.theguardian.com/environment/...

This is a harrowing and important read

The Londoner@londonermag.bsky.social · 2mo ago

In November 2023, police discovered the decayed corpse of Tracey Turnell in Walthamstow Market. She had no phone, job, passport, friends or lovers. There wasn’t a single photo of her. It was as if, in her far too public death, she entered the public record for the first time. Who was she?

A little service announcement - there are plenty of search engine alternatives to Google! Use them 😄

My hot take is that the academic paper is fundamentally meaningless in this day and age as a research output. It's doing too many things at once, and reproducibility is just too low down the priority list

Peter Tennant@pwgtennant.bsky.social · 2mo ago

The methods section is the most important section of a paper. Without knowing the methods, the results are literally meaningless. So it's not OK to relegate the methods to the end. Because this suggests they are an optional afterthought rather than the essential core of the entire paper.

symbolic integration is the first arrow, numerical integration is N_ITERATIONS more arrows

Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛@rmcelreath.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Thinking about how this might go Listener: My chains aren't converging Andrew: Your model is bad Aki: Your parameterization is bad Richard: The Buddha teaches us that numerical integration is suffering

Blair putting on full display what is in many ways his special ability - to lay out a political argument grounded in his own view of global trends (globalisation in the 2000s, tech in the 2020s). But… institute.global/insights/pol...

The Labour Party Is Playing With Fire Over Its Future and the Future of the Country

In this essay, Tony Blair sets out the need for a new agenda for Britain.

institute.global

I suspect this is highly related to loss aversion - easy come easy go

Aveek Bhattacharya@aveek18.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Second, as a Robert Frank could have told me: people *really* don't like acknowledging the role of luck in their achievements. Yet contingency is everywhere and denying it reaffirms inequality that those on top deserve to be better off than everybody else.

Registered my first academic abstract for a conference since I was a PhD student in 2016 - it's good to be back! 🙌🏾

You may have seen this graph in the FT, which claims to show birth rates plunging since the introduction to smartphone. Except it doesn't. Read my short piece with @debscohen.bsky.social on some of the problems with this graph of juicy cherries! unherd.com/newsroom/are...

The good taxpayers of New York have given me a pair of Meta glasses because I am low vision disabled, and I seem to have used them more than a lot of people on here, so let me say a little about my experiences:

Katie Martin@katie0martin.ft.com · 3mo ago

BAN THE PERVERT GLASSES

My theory is that Reform run councils won't be disasters that kill their national chances simply because every council is already operating at its absolute minimum essential statutory level and they can't change anything, and council staff will just get on with the same as before.

It's an interesting question to consider - even if the past was pragmatically worse, was it less uncertain, and is that what drives nostalgia?

Peter Tennant@pwgtennant.bsky.social · 3mo ago

That doesn't mean life was better in times past. Again it is easy to be nostalgic about the seemingly "good" parts of the past, while ignoring the harsh realities. Edwardian England seems nice if you're a wealthy middle class gentleman. Until you realise you probably lose half your children.

Not sure this is the gotcha the OP thinks this is. "Green Party suggests a policy that rations the use of jet fuel in a shortage" seems like a reasonable interpretation to me 🤷🏾‍♂️

Matthew Holehouse@matthewholehouse.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The Green Party’s pivot from environmentalism to class politics in action: a demand to “prevent British holiday makers from being hit by jet fuel shortages”

The critical thing that's missing is that doctors have an explicit causal model for *why* they have made a diagnosis. An LLM just predicts tokens. Any "explanation" you get from it simply isn't real. Pattern recognition isn't enough when it comes to human health - it's only the first step.

Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social · 3mo ago

A Harvard study comparing OpenAI’s reasoning model to human doctors found that the AI identified the exact or very close diagnosis in 67% of cases, beating the human doctors, who were right only 50%-55% of the time. This is essentially a pattern recognition problem which is where LLMs excel.

🤦🏾‍♂️🤦🏾‍♂️🤦🏾‍♂️🤦🏾‍♂️🤦🏾‍♂️🤦🏾‍♂️🤦🏾‍♂️🤦🏾‍♂️🤦🏾‍♂️🤦🏾‍♂️

Terence Eden@edent.tel · 3mo ago

New blog post: NHS Goes To War Against Open Source https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/nhs-goes-to-war-against-open-source/ The NHS is preparing to close nearly all of its Open Source repositories. Throughout my time working for the UK Government - in GDS, NHSX, i.AI, and others - I championed …

An interesting distinction to make. I'm not sure any aspect of being a good historian would make you a worse citizen?

Yuan Yi Zhu@yuanyiz.bsky.social · 3mo ago

We don't teach history in schools because we want them to become historians. We teach history because it makes good citizens.

100% agree, I would add that the loss of designers and UX research across the tech industry is coming home to roost

Simon Willison@simonwillison.net · 3mo ago

OK this piece by @reckless.bsky.social about why AI is unpopular among most people (anyone who's not inflicted with "software brain") is just solid gold from start to finish

I have a slightly different model for this. 1. There are many more lower paid workers than higher paid. So cheap automation (i.e. traditional software) scales better (and was our only option pre-LLM anyway)

Dare Obasanjo@carnage4life.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The Financial Times found 60% of highly paid workers use AI daily versus 16% of lowly paid workers. While part of the reason is that LLMs have found product market fit in writing code or legal briefs, it’s also true that businesses are incentivized to automate the most expensive workers.

I couldn’t wait to get back to my wild rogue rampage of hitching rides on bot-piloted transports and watching my serials.