This is a key finding. This is exactly the age— the first year of high school in many US school districts— when kids are both shoved to the bottom of the hierarchy and told they're being prepared for adulthood. In the current environment, the queerer kids are terrified.

Christopher Julian@chrisajulian.bsky.social · yesterday

Among 9th graders, bisexual identification fell from 11.0% to 6.9% between 2023 and 2025. That is where it was in 2019 (7.0%). No other grade had a significant change.

We're going to keep learning this lesson until we die

Manisha Krishnan@manishakrishnan.bsky.social · 21h ago

NEW: Staff at HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette told @adamm0rgan.bsky.social AI is infiltrating their workplaces, from generating cover art and back cover copy, to publicity materials, to rejection emails, as execs tell junior staff to "champion" the tech. www.wired.com/story/book-p...

In @edzitron.com's premium post from a week ago where alleges our best economic statistics overstate the returns to the economy in improved productivity from the tech industry, I have a question: is this mismeasurement enough to account for the decade-plus of malaise since the GFC?

I am DONE with the elections for this year. Yay!

2/ IOW...this is a back door path to the ultimate goal: banning vaccination in the use. Kids are already dying who could so easily have lived. It's going to get worse. RFK Jr., Trump, and the Republicans: Making Microbes Great Again.

Still trying to wrap my head around @edzitron.com's claim that our federal statistics agencies think that when software companies dump loads of shit we don't want into the products we are forced to subscribe to (by network effect) and then jack up the price, that means software is getting *cheaper*.

It's a good thing I don't have the guts (or disposable wealth) to be a short seller, because oh man are there juicy targets out there.

This is a result I’ve dreamt about for many years: *unpaired translation between images and text* I thought it might be only slightly possible, the kind of thing you have to really squint at. But Dominik proved this wrong. You don’t have to squint. Worth looking for yourself:

Dominik Schnaus@schnaus.bsky.social · yesterday

DINOv2 has never seen a caption, and Qwen3 has never seen an image. We still aligned their embedding spaces without a single image-caption pair. It even works when the images and the captions come from different datasets. Project page: dominik-schnaus.github.io/unpaired-rosetta ⬇️

Living in a city provides daily evidence that other people are, in fact, in real. This is why we city dwellers threaten the authoritarian project, because we have strong internal defenses against dehumanization because the targets are always our neighbors.

AI doomsday scenarios as modern-day slave revolt stories, discuss.

Tfw you put dirty dishes into the dishwasher without realizing that it's clean and then can't remember which were the dirty ones you just added.

Seems like a lot of new students don't understand that "Professor" is an honorific like "Doctor" or "Senator", not like "Sir" or "Lady" or "Father": it takes a family name (for those who have family names) as its complement.

Oh, yay, guess what, it's WORSE than I predicted. The people in the "overconfident & incompetent" quadrant use AI to drive themselves into even higher levels of overconfidence while degrading what few skills they have:

Sycophantic AI increases attitude extremity and overconfidence

AI chatbots have been shown to be successful tools for persuasion. However, people may prefer to use chatbots that validate, rather than challenge, their pre-existing beliefs. This preference for “syc...

osf.io

Elf M. Sternberg@elfsternberg.bsky.social · 2d ago

Realization: Widespread AI use will not reduce the incidence of Dunning-Kruger. People who are sufficiently incompetent to be unable to grasp how incompetent they are do not have the vocabulary needed to ask the AI the questions needed to determine if they're incompetent at a task.

Vancouver, WA did the biggest upzone / deregulation possibly in the entire nation and not enough people are talking about it. And this all came from City staff - they didn’t have community advocates demanding this for years!

Elon's "do ketamine with me," Epstein's list, the entire point of this is to bind the wealthy class together with portfolios of mutually assured destruction. They keeping working for each other because the floor underneath their feet is above a pit, and every one of them is holding a saw.

Professa Murray@kalimurray.bsky.social · yesterday

Second, the whole point of the lynching spectacle was to indict and implicate the white community involved the lynching. It tied them together; it implicated them; it bound them to each other in guilt and shame.

Finally developed a theory of mind but only for special little birthday robot boy

Kat Tenbarge@kattenbarge.bsky.social · 2d ago

Anthropic banning “abusive or cruel behavior” toward Claude in its new usage policies is proof to me that tech companies are going to moderate violence against AI before they ever moderate violence against women and minorities

Opening narrative of the 1909 futurist manifesto is about driving around in a car harassing a couple cyclists - ultimately crashing (while trying to scare them). Explicitly glorifying the inherent power and violence of this “machine.” It’s also considered a founding document of Italian fascism.

Gravel Influencer@gravelinfluencer.bsky.social · 2d ago

I have had people On Here call it an overreaction to use the term "traffic violence." As someone who has been hit by a driver, I can tell you it's sure as hell violent. As someone who has been threatened by a driver, it's sure as hell violent. The entire system of car dependency is violent.

Had some *very* belated thoughts on the 2020 Hugo winner for Best Novella and had to look up the full tabulation to confirm what I recalled about how popular it was *among Hugo voters specifically*.

I think I have come up with an even better summation of how I feel about tea than when Sussman tried to give me some when I was in his office for some reason a decade ago.

I'm actively enraged that everyone allows them to just go around saying this shit like they shouldn't go directly to jail for unthinkable crimes if any of it is true and also go directly to jail for unthinkable fraud if it's not.

I think one of the many problems with the people who really believe* the "AI" thing AND the people just grifting is that their ethics are so corrupted that they don't think anything they do matters/is wrong. They're, -at best- convinced the apocalypse is nigh so fuck it, do whatever!

Ghostly Bree@mostlybree.kitrocha.com · 2d ago

I don't believe they are conscious but I also don't believe you should get to do interviews where you say "idk man our business model might be built on enslaving sentient creatures" and still get to be a business.

I am quite certain that there is music being made today that is every bit as good as the music that I like (mostly) from 1975-2015. But I am now over 50, and don't watch films or TV drama or listen to music radio any more (except when forced to while visiting my parents for Thanksgiving).

Is the modern economy a bit... samey? timharford.com/2026/10/is-t...

If I were calculating food miles, my chocolate would be super expensive. Well, it's already super expensive in dollars, but it would be super expensive in miles, too. But since cacao is a relatively high value commodity, not much of the market cost is transportation specifically.

Funny how little I want to go out for a ride when it's nice outside if I'm chilly and shivering in my home office. Once they turn the heat on this will turn around (but then it will be too cold and dark for me to ride comfortably).

Today I learned (or probably was unwillingly reminded) that Tina Weymouth is older than my mother.

There's a closely related phenomenon — I proposed a Readercon panel on this! — about what happens when the near future becomes alternate history. (Not just politics, this can happen with science too! Lots of things that people believed to be true in the 1980s were shown not to be in the 2000s.)

Shepherd@neolithicsheep.bsky.social · 5d ago

You ever have that thing where you're reading a book and you can do the lift for suspension of disbelief for the entire fantastical premise of the thing but then you hit one detail and your brain is like "absolutely not"?

But we're in a place now where some people want "they" to be a *third* gender (specific to their identity), and different people want "they" to also be a third gender (derogatory othering). And this really sucks because it seems like there's no way to get the phase change I want outside of fiction.

For a long time now one of the major American identities has been 'consumer'. Sucks to admit but you can't deny. One of the ways you create your identity is by buying stuff & identity signaling. It's not "citizen" but it's *something*.

Read: "To enable white men to engage in racial discrimination without fear of sanction."

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2d ago

FCC Chair Andrew Ferguson touts the administration's work to "protect white American men from discrimination"