Read it here if you haven't yet. Today is the very best day of all days to read it for the first time. short-stories.co/@raybradbury...

There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury

The voice-clock sang, breakfast was ejected, but no doors slammed. The garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car. The house sat alone in a city of rubble and…

short-stories.co

Adam Rawnsley@arawnsley.bsky.social · yesterday

Today, August 4, 2026, is the setting of Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” about a fully automated house continuing on after the family who lived there and the world around it died in a nuclear blast.

Suresh reports on his experience talking with hundreds of executives (and, more importantly, their subordinates) about what (if anything) AI is doing for business in an essay entitled "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking": hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mani... 11/

AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking

The reality of how much damage AI mania is doing to our ability to run institutions effectively.

hermit-tech.com

I have found a great new #stats teaching hack to find new open datasets for teaching. I've been going to the Collabra: Psychology journal website, and typing in an analysis type (e.g., logistic regression) into the search bar. Both quick and high-quality data! online.ucpress.edu/collabra

I cannot rest from discourse. I will see that film again tomorrow. I will drink life to the lees. Again I will enjoy greatly, will suffer greatly, both with those that love me, and in Pleasantville NY. I am become a meme. Film showing: burnsfilmcenter.org/booking/the-...

The Odyssey : Jacob Burns Film Center

The Odyssey, Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Christopher Nolan, Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Odysseus, Greek, Classic, Antiquity

burnsfilmcenter.org

It feels many only know my work pushing back against AI, which is very fair — but I have a broader research interest, which also forms a protective belt against such forces, as well as being what I have been thinking about since discovering "cognitive science" in ~2006: 🍃 metatheory.space 1/

metatheory.space

Hello! 🍃 metatheory.space is a group that works at the foundations of cognitive science. We are interested in the intersections of psychological and computational neurocognitive theorising with critic...

metatheory.space

The issue in that piece isn’t how open science and science reform initiatives are funded worldwide, the issue is that *in United States* these topics have been co-opted by a donor class that has a vested interest in discrediting science. Reading comprehension is your friend

Bordeaux, France, has now recorded more days above 40°C in 2026 alone than during the entire 105-year period from 1920 (when observations began) to 2025. This is deeply shocking.

The State Department said ​it takes "full responsibility" for "hastily" altering and then presenting a map of Africa at a global AIDS conference that mislabeled every single country it highlighted. An analysis by Reuters found a watermark in the map image that suggests it was made with OpenAI.

I am reposting my photo of the ferocious baby gator sitting on his mother's head, with a snail on the nose, because I know I am not the only one needing to see something like this today. I took this photo a few years ago in Brazos Bend State Park, Texas. #Herps #Photography #NaturePhotography 📷🐊

Checking if an event happened before someone was 11 with lubridate. So EVENT_DATE > DOB + years(11), right? No, surprisingly. If someone was born on Feb 29, DOB + years(11) returns NA (not March 1 of that year)!

It’s really starting to grind me down

"As Japanese financial newspaper Nikkei Asia found in a recent investigation, just five US tech giants — Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle — are hiding an estimated $1.65 trillion in debt that doesn’t appear on balance sheets. futurism.com/artificial-i...

AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt

AI companies are pouring tens of billions of dollars into enormous data centers. They're being built on top of a mountain of hidden debt.

futurism.com

This includes people who came here legally on a visa, applied for another form of status, and are just waiting for the US government to decide their case. People who haven’t done a single thing wrong.

Hamed Aleaziz@haleaziz.bsky.social · last wk.

NEW: The Trump administration has begun arresting foreign citizens with expired visas as they travel through airports, according to documents obtained by The Times and interviews with lawyers — a tactic that opens up a vast new pool of people for deportation. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/u...

I worked at Disney a while ago. Do you know why theme parks are so safe? Because OOSHA reps can walk the track on any ride at any time and any safety violation they see is a $10,000 fine. Each. Theme parks are not safe because the company cares. They're safe because it's cheaper to comply.

Jon of The North@krauza.bsky.social · last wk.

Turns out that food companies were only checking their food because the government told them to, which is exactly why we need government regulations.

Since I'm seeing this paper popping up in my feed: This doesn't mean what people seem to think it means. H1 Connect is a post-pub recommendation service. Low paper variance is exactly what you'd expect if peer review is *very good* at translating expert consensus into publication decisions

Alejandro Montenegro@aemonten.bsky.social · 2w ago

"Here we show, in a large post-publication peer review database, that research assessment is driven more by differences between evaluators than by difference in the evaluated research. " arxiv.org/abs/2607.09783

The Cognition Group in the Psychology dept at Exeter are at risk of redundancy because "basic cognitive psychology research does not align with the current priorities of funding bodies" If you think this is overtly wrong and misguided, please sign this open letter docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Open Letter in Support of the Cognition Group, University of Exeter

To Executive members of the University of Exeter, including Vice Chancellor Prof. Lisa Roberts, Senior Vice-President and Provost Prof. Dan Charman, Pro Vice Chancellor and Executive Dean Prof. Sallie...

docs.google.com

"Shabana Mahmood staying as Home Secretary to presumably continue her appalling record of performative cruelty towards migrants and refugees is a warning sign that Burnham has not learnt the lessons from Starmer's failure," says Zack Polanski

Ok this one is kind of embarrassing for mathematicians, 100+ year old open problem refuted via elementary counterexample that fits in a tweet

Zach Weinersmith@zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 2w ago

Another absolutely bonkers math result from a frontier LLM (announced in a tweet, no less): www.reddit.com/r/math/comme...

AI advice made people three times less accurate but twice as confident: "Some participants who would have answered correctly on their own asked the AI and became wrong." Superpersuasion by dull tone has punch. I still suspect this is the same psych mechanism that reduces belief in conspiracies.

there’s a joke about statistical significance in here somewhere

thicc husband and father@lukeisamazing.bsky.social · 2w ago

once again thinking about the best Lord of the Rings meme

arXiv📈🤖 Multiverse analysis, abdication of responsibility and manufacturing of doubt By Modr\'ak

Random question again: If perceptual experience is based on the optimisation of an internal model (or controlled hallucination), why the optimisation process can't solve myopia, for e.g.? Myopia is a relatively simple optical issue that an optimised internal model (w/ priors) could solve. Why not?

in retrospect, just quite a weird politician www.economist.com/britain/2026...

really thinking about this tweet as i’ve been struggling to breathe through nausea for the last 5 hours

Luke LeBrun@lukelebrun.ca · 3w ago

These images of First Nations community members evacuating Collins, Ontario on motorboats are absolutely surreal www.facebook.com/reel/1548244...

SPSS still lives! 🧟‍♀️ "SPSS comments were strongly aligned with perceived ease of use, whereas R comments were strongly aligned with what the software allowed them to do... Researchers’ reasons for using SPSS appeared to be more of a function of its simplicity and integration in formal training."

It's berry season and you have the tiniest friends. These critically endangered babies are Egyptian tortoises that hatched on July 4 and 6, 2026. Currently, our Egyptian tortoises are living behind the scenes in a warm and cozy habitat with lots of attention from their dedicated animal keepers.

LOL just reading through comments from the copy-editor and, well, let's just say I'm not convinced that the copy-editor has really been doing much actual reading of my text here with these queries.. Screenshot of my paragraph for context here... Snort.

To be a historian is to speak ill of the dead and the rest of you should take more history classes and join us.