I wrote about Minneapolis.
nymag.com/intelligence...
23.01.2026 12:32
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The Claude Constitution shows where Anthropic thinks this is all going. It is a massive document covering many philosophical issues. I think it is worth serious attention beyond the usual AI-adjacent commentators. Other labs should be similarly explicit. www.anthropic.com/constitution
One very familiar pattern in AI and science right now is going from a lot of false starts on hard tasks (there have been near-misses where AI appears to solve an Erdos problem but just finds an old solution no one knew about) to actually doing the thing soon after.
Three Erdos problems in 3 days.
Credit to Soglin for clocking the political mood.
But if you think candidates hand-picked by a 79yo, 5+ term mayor, who’s been *the* political establishment in Madison for 50+ years are “INDEPENDENT, NON-MACHINE” options…
I mean come on
I think American urban planners should aspire to something greater than administering zoning regulations to micromanage building design and enforce parking requirements.
This trend seems to be growing here.
False comfort that AI doesn’t work or that it isn’t getting better is pervasive on Blue Sky. As a result, people who could add important points of view to current discussions on the meaning & use of AI instead try to believe they don’t have to think about it.
Our Madison Common Council endorsements are out. Make sure to vote by April 1st!
There’s a lot of great stuff coming out about “abundance” and meanwhile the titans of the tech industry have embraced bizarro world degrowtherism, blocking housing in their backyards, destroying basic science research, and fearmongering about vaccines. Sad!
We will never know— we will never have the faintest idea— how much money is getting made in insider trading windfalls from people in Trump's and Musk's circles who have an hour of notice about the daily swings in tariff policy or the occasional announced *expectations* of such swings.
Chart showing a decline in the GDP real growth estimate downward to -2.8%
I'm not an economist but this looks bad!
www.atlantafed.org/cqer/researc...
Being able to procure parts for broken weather radar equipment seems important..
A first-ever analysis of fire death rates in modern four-to-six-story buildings with only one stairway shows that residents are not at greater risk, and such buildings could provide much-needed housing. @pewtrusts.org
www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-...
Is this about the free markets or the personal liberties? It's all so confusing.
We went through this with zoning, and now we're going through it with building code: trillion dollar industries depend on these things, yet a bunch of precocious bloggers can swoop in and expose these institutions as full of pseudoscience. Does nobody do their job? @aarmlovi.bsky.social
YIMBYism is wild because you start to ask questions like “why was single family zoning created?” and “are our regulations for building safety based on any actual safety data?” and soon realize that ~85% of the rules governing our cities are based on nothing but tradition and vibes.
I miss this guy on the other site.
I’m not really surprised by anything the admin has done, but I expected the vibes to be closer to “private equity stripping a company down for parts” rather than “meth head stripping the walls for scrap metal”
We're just starting to understand how AI "think" during inference.
Current large models often abandon promising lines of reasoning too quickly, "underthinking". When they get math problems wrong, it's often because they jumped away from correct approaches too early. Lots of room to improve this.
"Claude, here is a screenshot of all the various model names for ChatGPT. What do you think they stand for? Assume the worst about their naming conventions"
Claude is the model that pulls off humor the best.
Meaty, thoughtful discussion that feels incredibly important and timely right now.
Super excited that this dude is running Congress.
That's saying something!
An amazing assembly of modern-day luddites in the comments and the replies. Really something to behold
Posted this at the old place, but thought folks on @bsky.app might like to know I finally met my "mother".
Text reads "Maybe Madison should stop building apartment buildings until they all become affordable."
That'll fix housing costs!
One of my boring media hobbyhorses: People have tuned out of the modern Sunday show format (one host, multiple guests, panel) and whoever brings back the classic format (three reporters and one guest for 60 minutes) will get a big W.
I appreciate how this highlights the import of policing -- in my class on inequality and public policy, I ask students many opinion-based questions, but when I ask if hiring more police reduces crime, 95% say no. There's tradeoffs of course! But important we get these basic facts right.
USDA should have implemented this more than a year ago, when the human health experts first started to call for it.
“USDA Announces New Federal Order, Begins National Milk Testing Strategy to Address H5N1 in Dairy Herds”
I have an op-ed in the NYT today about how to reduce crime.
The key idea, based on decades of strong research evidence: focus on increasing the probability of getting caught, not the punishment.
www.nytimes.com/2024/12/07/o...
Gonna start a school for politicians to learn how to go on podcasts and I'm going to charge so much money and also the entire thing is going to be rephrasing the sentence, "Now, for this next part, you're going to want to pretend like you're currently a human person."