I indeed think every marginal charitable and government aid dollar should go to preventing deaths from malaria over funding the arts until there are 0 children dying from malaria

Andrew Hungerford@luxtheatrum.bsky.social · 5d ago

I think a problem with EA, even with what it said it purported to be at the beginning, is the process of turning all human endeavors into a spreadsheet. Once that happens, no local charity or small arts organization stands a chance at justifying their existence, no individual human matters.

Very cool new paper from researchers at @csail.mit.edu : "As artificial intelligence’s capabilities improve, it is increasingly viewed as a general scientific method. But how true are these claims?"

It is unironically a good thing when animal-derived products rise in price

Matt Darling@besttrousers.bsky.social · 2w ago

Beef is $6.92/pound.

When writing a paper on safety-performance tradeoffs in tech races in 2022-2023, my coauthors and I were careful to show that the economic forces existed in prior races (e.g. nuclear) and *might possibly* apply to future AI races to ensure that audiences didn't deem our work wild speculation.

Pekka Lund@pekka.bsky.social · 2w ago

It must be hard for those who are still in denial about how powerful and significant AI is to hear it even from people like Obama. Oh well.

me, Sept 2025: AI is cool and useful, though we've probably gotten a lot of the low-hanging fruit wins already and are still a ways off from a takeoff. progress might slow down for awhile! me, Sept 2026: buckle up, buckaroos!!

-Is it ethical to use open weight LLMs (not paying rents to firms training on pirated data)? -Is it ethical to use TimeCapsuleLLM (all training data in public domain)?

Seems like surprisingly long AGI timelines for someone at OAI!

Sam@samd.bsky.social · last mo.

The “head of strategic futures” at OpenAI just went on an unhinged rant against social security sometimes I feel like these tech companies are actively trying to alienate as many normal people as possible

I want to write a blog so bad but I know it’s not a good use of my time with the job market looming😞

There’s some empirical evidence of this “do more but poorly” in coding, at least according to this convenience sample: www.swe-chat.com

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 2mo ago

13. Hence our dismal conclusion: rather than finding that LLMs free us to do a better job of what we were doing before they came along, they shift scientific incentives (and the playing field of academic competition) in ways that compel us to do more and more, faster and faster, less and less well.

The fact that Tesla went out of their way to use vegan leather in all of their cars is strong evidence that Musk once cared about something good

Kylie Eleison@gonebabygone.bsky.social · 2mo ago

There’s a kind of guy on social media who acts like you’re a moron for believing in gradations. You say we’re teetering on fascism, they go “umm we were founded on genocide” You say Musk is having a racist breakdown they go “umm he was always racist” Truthers for the concept of things getting worse.

ban animal agriculture in developed countries

📢📢 Research Policy 12th online conference for Early Career Researchers! Fri 25th September 2026, 2-4pm (UK time) Submit a 3 page abstract by Sun 23rd August Link for submitting: forms.gle/Xu7oXsSV2zYX... Link to RP page: www.sciencedirect.com/journal/rese... #EconSky

arXiv📈🤖 AI Adoption in S&P 500 Firms By Yu, Fleming, Hampton et al

This is so very very cool, and an example of the ITN (importance, tractability, neglectedness) framework at its best!

Katharine Collins@kat-a-collins.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I've spent my career working on vaccines, and until I joined Coefficient Giving, I'd never heard Strep A mentioned as a global health priority. The more I looked, the harder it was to understand why a disease killing 630,000+ people a year was so neglected.

It's quite coincidental that both Steven Pinker and Benedict Anderson consider a major feature of the international system (nationalism and the decline of war, resp.) a causal effect of the invention of the modern novel.

I know it's hard to keep a sense of proportion, but between his wars, decimating USAID, rolling back pollution restrictions, repealing climate policies, & suppressing vaccine programs, Trump is reaching genocide-level body counts. It's almost too much horror to take in.

This is perhaps the most impressive #medical study I have seen in years: www.nature.com/articles/s41... It will save a lot of lives.

An ECG biomarker for sudden cardiac death discovered with deep learning - Nature

A deep-learning model trained on electrocardiogram (ECG) waveforms identifies an easily visible biomarker that predicts sudden cardiac death more accurately than the current clinical state of the art.

nature.com

PEPFAR rates of undocumented expenses are between 0 and 2% of funding: pepfarreport.org/pepfar-repor...

Julian Sanchez@normative.bsky.social · 3mo ago

I think 3 things are probably true: (1) There actually is a bunch of graft in developing world aid programs (2) High end projections of deaths are based on models with sanguine assumptions, not empirically observed excess deaths (3) Even if those models are off by a factor of 10x, that’s monstrous.

I'm really disappointed that folks are still on X.

Surprisingly Angelenos seem better about this: the median is probably 4 stars, so the scale is effectively over the [4.0,4.1,…,5.0] interval

The Fig Economy@figgityfigs.bsky.social · 3mo ago

It’s bad news that every consumer five star scale is actually a one star scale, but it’s true. I was not aware of this and my wife and I accidentally nearly ruined our wedding photographer’s business with one (1) somewhat critical review.

Politicians who support health aid cuts deserve to lose elections

Politicians who cut foreign aid deserve to lose power

Keir Starmer cuts aid to fund increase in defence spending

The PM will head to Washington a day after announcing military budgets would rise to 2.5% of national income by 2027.

bbc.com

Reuters@reuters.com · 3mo ago

BREAKING: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced he will resign reut.rs/4xPaQx5

Doubt Elon would have destroyed USAID without his own site and YouTube/Joe Rogan feeding him conspiracy theories

Thorne 🌸@ens0.me · 3mo ago

Social media has done far more to harm society than AI, and it's not even close

Wild to see AI x-risk enter mainstream political economy research: "The results show that AGI risk depends not only on technical considerations, but also on market structure, resource constraints, and institutions that shape the equilibrium allocation between speed and safety."

The AGI Race and Existential Risk

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

nber.org

While his mountain of horrible personal conduct could fill multiple books, one fact in particular stands out: A year ago, Musk’s actions directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He did it knowingly. And, worse — gleefully. Read more: www.theverge.com/tech/949259/...

I'm leading a non-profit team building a pathogen-agnostic early-warning system. We're running the world's largest metagenomic biosurveillance network and we're looking for people who know how to build and scale processing systems and infra. No bio background needed!

SecureBio Detection is Hiring Software Engineers

I'm leading a non-profit team building a pathogen-agnostic early-warning system. As AI systems become increasingly capable substitutes for expert human biologist expertise, the risk that someone coul...

jefftk.com

I had a great time presenting my work on cloud computing adoption at the Applied IO workshop at the #bsebarcelona Summer Forum! Glad to get and share feedback with a great group of scholars. #bseforum

Some random cloud computing stylized facts: -From 2016-2019, 98% of firms used a datacenter in the same region (US vs EU) in which they had their headquarters (Demirer et al. 2025), and firms rarely switch within region, even when a new datacenter opens nearby

Monthly check-in: I am still on the hunt for the right climate policy and regulatory role. I’m a Ph.D. microbial ecologist specializing in biogenic methane, agricultural climate policy, and complex systems mapping.

One of the most terrifying facts is that these two, uh, stable, level-headed men control ~90% of the world’s nuclear weapons